With the ban and restricted announcement, we bid farewell to Sorin, Imperious Bloodlord and Amalia Benavides Aguirre and their associated decks in Rakdos Vampires and Abzan Amalia combo. With these two bans, the format is due for a shake up, so what decks gained the most from these bans and what should you be expecting heading into the Pioneer leagues this week?

Welcome back – Rakdos Midrange / Greasefang

Let’s start with the most obvious winner from these bans – Rakdos Midrange. A one-time staple of the format that quickly evaporated after Rakdos Vampires cleaned up the Pro Tour and eventually became the stock build of Rakdos in Pioneer. The pivot to the vampire package gave the deck reach and a way to close out the game much quicker than traditional Rakdos, making many challenging matchups much better. With Sorin gone, it is likely that many Rakdos players will simply revert to previous versions of the deck along with any small upgrades from Bloomburrow. This will be a starting point and much like before Vampires, there will be many small tweaks and iterations in this deck to find the ideal numbers and cards to attack the metagame.

Rakdos also has historically done well into Izzet Phoenix, especially with access to Leyline of the Void to center the matchup around creatures that Rakdos can easily answer. However, expect that this version will be a much more balanced deck as opposed to Vampires. Before the switch, the deck was certainly successful but had noted weaknesses into decks like Niv to Light and Lotus Field – two decks that will see some resurgence thanks to these bans.

Next up, we have Abzan Greasefang. This may seem unrelated to the bans, but I fully expect that players that enjoyed Amalia will simply keep their Blooming Marshes sleeved up and transition to the Rat Pilot that was the format’s previous turn three creature combo threat. Given an expected rise in decks like Lotus Field, Rakdos Midrange, and Phoenix, Greasefang is a deck that can apply a similar pressure early with a solid midrange plan that midrange has a hard time answering. The deck had already started seeing some fringe success even before the bans and I expect it will be a good option early before players have time to adjust.

In an open metagame, Greasefang gets the benefit of being a hard to answer deck for anyone who isn’t prepared. However, the main concern remains that the deck has a worse fair plan than Amalia did, and it is also susceptible to graveyard hate, which can be troubling in a world where the average player expects Arclight Phoenix to be the day one best deck post bans.

Decks Unbanned

Third on our list of winners is one that seems to keep swinging wildly from unplayable to overpowered – Green Devotion. It feels like every few weeks, people remember that Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx is a strong card and try out devotion again. It had disappeared entirely after the Karn, the Great Creator ban, but thanks to the printing of Outcaster Trailblazer in Outlaws of Thunder Junction, the deck saw a massive resurgence. The only problem? It had an abysmal matchup into Amalia. With Amalia banned, we can say that green was unbanned.

Now the question becomes, how will green look in the new metagame? Green has always been a deck that thrives when it can go over the top of midrange decks like Rakdos, but if we see a return to more linear aggro like Heroic, Gruul, Humans, or Spirits, there can be some real issues for this deck. While the deck is certainly unbanned as of Monday, I wouldn’t be shocked if it underperforms in the early weeks as people know to expect it and there are still plenty of decks that can keep green in check. That being said, it is never wise to assume Nykthos won’t show up to the party – especially with its worst matchup off the table.

Next up we have another long-time Pioneer staple in Lotus Field. In a world where we expect Phoenix and Rakdos Midrange to be the basis of the format and many other decks to come in around those decks, at least to start, then Lotus Field looks like an incredible choice. It dominates both Phoenix and Rakdos and has great matchups against all midrange and control decks. The big caveat with Lotus Field was and remains the aggro decks of the format. Much like with Green, if we see the return of a midrange heavy metagame, the Lotus Field will feast, but if the likes of Heroic, Mono Red, Gruul, Humans, and Spirits arrive at the party, then Lotus Field is a real liability.

If you are qualified for the Regional Championship in D.C., I would invest some time into learning this deck quite well. Even if the metagame starts to look hostile, there is an incredibly good chance that if Rakdos and Phoenix end up being top tier staples again, Lotus will have a strong presence as it often does at high level events.

Aggro

The last set of winners from these bans aren’t a single deck, but a set of decks – Aggro decks. We already started to see Gruul Aggro finding some success in the past few weeks thanks to some upgrades in Bloomburrow and with Amalia and Vampires each eating a ban, aggro feels like it should finally be unbanned. Having a deck that inherently wants to gain infinite life as early as turn three made it challenging for aggro decks to tap out and keep up tempo without slowly falling behind. In addition, they didn’t have many good ways to handle a turn-three Vein Ripper that wasn’t tantamount to a four-for-one and that would just end the game. We can already see aggro posting some results already like this Boros Convoke list who won yesterday’s Challenge.

While most aggro decks won’t love playing against Rakdos Midrange and Izzet Phoenix, when we look at many of the other decks that look poised to gain ground such as Lotus Field, Green Devotion, and various midrange decks, aggro can easily target those decks. In addition, we have seen aggro decks be able to handle Rakdos and Phoenix to a degree such as at the first Regional Championship where Mono White Humans leveraged Wedding Announcement and other sideboard options to attack those decks. While I suspect Aggro will need to continue making considerations for these top decks, they will be able to find a good place in the metagame similar to post Outlaws of Thunder Junction wherein Gruul and Mono Red were consistent top tier decks contesting top 8s every week.

All that being said, we certainly have some long-time favorite decks that will continue to show up after these bans and some others that are now unbanned. Will these changes drastically shake-up the metagame heading into Duskmourn and the Regional Championships or will we spend the next few months bemoaning no Treasure Cruise ban? I think we will see a healthier metagame and that there will be a diversity of top decks, but it will take some adjustments from other decks to dethrone our assumptive king in Izzet Phoenix and I’m looking forward to it!