It’s never a fun day when Wizards of the Coast has to ban cards from a format in Magic. Today we saw the news that in Legacy, Expressive Iteration and White Plume Adventurer were both banned. Now, both of these cards were omnipresent in matches of Legacy, but they’re very different.
Expressive Iteration
Expressive Iteration was the backbone of blue and red decks in Legacy, like Izzet Delver. In their metagame breakdown in the announcement of the bans, Wizards stated that the two decks that were hit by this ban were nearing 30% of the total metagame in competitive play circles. Recently, the Izzet deck has gotten some new toys in cards like Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Murktide Regent, and Expressive Iteration. It’s also been a deck that has seen plenty of bans throughout the years.
Expressive Iteration is the easiest ban for many reasons, including card cost, and efficiency. Cards like this allow decks to recoup value after trading resources and find answers to problematic permanents easier.
White Plume Adventurer
For someone who doesn’t play a lot of Legacy, this might be a strange-looking card to ban. It’s just a three-mana 3/3 that lets you venture into the dungeon, basically. Well, in the world of Legacy when you can play cards like Chrome Mox and City of Traitors to put this into play on turn 1, you get issues. Combining that with the overall power level of white midrange cards in Legacy, you get a pretty lethal deck with a way to pressure people on turn 1.
Looking At The Future Of Legacy
It’s nice to see that Wizards of the Coast is actually checking in on the format. People across the world have had to take matters into their own hands for a while now when it comes to Legacy. Stores don’t get as rewarded for hosting tournaments for Magic’s oldest format as much as they do for Modern, Pioneer, or Standard. This shows that even if it’ll never be a supported format outright, it will still have some oversight.
As for other formats, they mentioned how they’re all pretty healthy and diverse. Even Standard has some fans after being horrific for so long (Thanks MTG Arena!).
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