Expressive Iteration And More Banned In Legacy
Wizards made their Banned and Restricted announcement yesterday - While it is said they are all under WOTC's watchful eye, most formats remained untouched. However, one did not. Legacy has had two cards banned. So, let's take a look at what got banned, why, and what it means for the format.
Visit our banned card page here.
Bannings
Expressive Iteration
Iteration was part of the ever-popular UR Delver lists in Legacy. It offered the deck amazing card advantage/selection and that's ultimately what got it banned. Well, first and foremost, it is the top-played deck in the meta at the moment and it has a very good win rate. So, that's why a card was being banned from the deck - To make the meta a bit more diverse.
The reason Iteration was the card that was chosen for banning is because of the card selection/advantage that I mentioned above. The official announcement said it "allows Izzet Delver to easily adapt to stay on top of any changes in the metagame.", which is valid. They then went on to say this on why Iteration specifically was chosen:
Overall, the banning makes sense in my opinion. Having played with Iteration at length in formats like Modern, I think it's a healthy card to ban while certainly leaving the deck intact.
White Plume Adventurer
The mono-White initiative deck has been gaining popularity since the Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate was released in June of last year. The deck is/was currently the second most played deck in the format by a non-small margin. These decks use fast mana to get out an initiative creature as early as turn one and gain enough of an advantage to essentially win the game.
Having access to such fast starts made many decks in the format that couldn't interact very quickly unable to be played well, which Wizards viewed as a problem for Legacy. One deck that was holding its own against these mono-White builds was of course the UR deck mentioned above. There's a reason they were the top one and two most played decks. Here's a quote from the official announcement on the matter of how the decks lined up:
Again, I feel like Wizards is making sense here, when you consider the effects of both bannings together. They also said, they will continue to monitor the meta moving forward and see how things shake out. So, that's what we'll do too.
Conclusion
There you have it, ladies and gentlemen, your March 6th banned and restricted announcement. If you'd like to read the whole announcement it can be found here. Overall, I think both bannings are reasonable. However, I'm eager to hear what you think of them. So, if you play legacy, comment down below and let me hear your thoughts.
