Wizards of the Coast has invited fans to test out a new Magic: The Gathering card combo, to see if it needs to be banned. According to a video by senior designer Gavin Verhey, Wizards staff have until tomorrow, Friday 26 June, to lock in their ban decisions for the B&R announcement on Monday. And for Pauper in particular, there’s a card combo enabled by the new Marvel Superheroes set which could cause a lot of problems.
Before the deadline arrives, Verhey wants to poll the community, to see which half of the new two card combo should get the chop, or if WotC should let it ride and wait till the next B&R announcement, which comes on August 10, to make a decision.
We covered this questionable combo a few weeks ago – it involves the innocuous new equipment Hawkeye’s Bow and an old card Seeker of Skybreak. Essentially, Seeker of Skybreak can tap to untap itself, and Hawkeye’s Bow deals one damage whenever its wielder is tapped. With the two together in your deck you can easily achieve infinite damage by turn three – without jumping through loads of hoops.
There’s good reasons for and against each of the three options. Hawkeye’s Bow is the new card, so you could argue it’s the offender here, enabling the combo. On the other hand, Seeker of Skybreak’s ability to freely untap itself and do the ‘crab rave’ is problematic – a relic of outdated design principles. If not banned now, the Pauper format panel could easily find itself in a similar situation in a year or two, with another card that gains value from tapping.
It might be prudent to wait, to gather more than just a couple of days of Magic Online data to see how dastardly the Seeker/Bow decks really are. On the other hand, between the June 29 B&R update and August 10 there are two major Pauper tournaments – Paupergeddon and Paupergenesis – so it would be a shame to spoil the format for these big events.
Verhey wants to poll the community in his video’s comments section – though he warns that it won’t be a straightforward “popularity contest” – Wizards will be taking stock of fan opinion before making their own opinion.
It’ll be interesting to see which way WotC decides to go on June 29, but I’m more excited about possible changes to Standard. Please, please, please can we lose Stormchaser’s Talent at the absolute minimum? And maybe that bloody Badgermole?
You can share your thoughts with us over at the Wargamer Discord. Which won’t be as helpful as letting WotC know, but we’re interested to hear them.
Source: Wargamer
