New Banned Cards

Yesterday, WOTC announced the banning of 1 rare, 2 uncommon and 1 common cards from Standard format tournament play. The rationale for the banning is that the 2 decks running combinations of these 4 cards dominated the Standard environment, getting played in about 40% of games tracked by WOTC at the Pro level of play. Rampaging Ferocidon has already dropped in price from an average of $4 to as low as 75 cents from one online retailer

WOTC gave the following three reasons for the banning:

1. The length of time for which these decks have been dominant—as long as five months or more depending on how one categorizes different energy variants.
2. The Standard rotation did not meaningfully weaken these decks or result in new decks that are competitive with them.
3. Despite the metagame having many months to adapt to these decks, counterplay options have proven insufficient.

Aettherworks Marvel Banned

WOTC announced today that Aetherworks Marvel is banned in Standard play. You can read the full column here but the gist is that, while the card is not fundamentally broken, and the prime deck running it, Temur Aetherworks, is not dominant in terms of wins, but in tournament play, 10% of the time its user has a Turn 4 win. Since the deck also factors into a large number of unbeatable draws, WOTC decided it needed to go.

New Banned List

WOTC dropped the the new banned list yesterday. It goes into effect on January 20th for physical cards. So far Gitaxian Probe has dropped from about $6 per card to $2 and the value of Golgari Grave-Troll has dropped by $5.  Remember, these are all still usable in casual play, just not in sanctioned tournaments. Here is the list of cards:

Standard

Emrakul, the Promised End is banned.

Smuggler's Copter is banned.

Reflector Mage is banned.

Modern:

Gitaxian Probe is banned.

Golgari Grave-Troll is banned.