Today was an exciting day for Magic: The Gathering Modern players with Wizards of the Coast releasing their new Banned and Restricted Announcement. In short, Modern saw one big change: Bridge from Below is banned. This has sparked a fair bit of controversy because Faithless Looting has survived yet another ban. More than that, Wizards of the Coast seems to have addressed the community’s concern about Faithless Looting and the graveyard archetype it pushes.
Wizards of the Coast defends Faithless Looting
In the announcement, Wizards had a lot to say about why they banned Bridge from Below. In addition to that conversation, however, they also said the following:
Our goal is not to eliminate graveyard strategies from the Modern metagame, but rather to weaken this version of the graveyard combo archetype that has proven too powerful for other decks to reasonably adapt to. In fact, we believe that targeting Bridge from Below specifically will still allow for other strategies in this style to continue to be a part of the metagame, like the Bridge-less Dredge decks that did well earlier this year at Mythic Championship II in London.
Here, they don’t explicitly mention Faithless Looting. However, they do mention Dredge, which is the poster child for unfair Faithless Looting decks. Wizards of the Coast seems to be informing the Modern player base that Faithless Looting is here to stay! It seems they are willing to ban the broken interactions it enables as they arise.
What does this mean for Modern?
Dredge and Phoenix will continue to be tier 1, which means Tron will be around to fight Phoenix. However, it will be exciting to see where Modern Horizons cards fit in now that Hogaak isn’t killing people on turn 2. As far as Looting goes, the graveyard-aggro archetype it pushes is in WotC’s favor. Though I don’t recommend “investing” in anything, Phoenix and Dredge are probably safe tier 1 decks to get into from this point.
