Unpacking the Bridge from Below Ban

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To quote Caleb Durward's Twitch title from Monday, ding dong the Bridge is dead. For many other Modern players, July 8's announcement could not have arrived soon enough: Bridge from Below is banned in Modern. This has significant implications for the metagame going into a July and August tournament stretch, but today I'm not here to focus on new decks or all the sideboard slots you can free up (let's be honest: maybe one?). Instead, I want to analyze the decision itself. I'm going to walk us through a detailed, line-by-line analysis of Ian Duke's banlist update article. This will help us understand Wizards of the Coast's banning process for Bridge, and give us unique insights into how Wizards makes ban decisions generally. At the risk of stealing my own thunder, feel free to jump to the "Most Important Takeaways" section at the bottom if you need the TL;DR.

Hogaak Bridgevine Background

In case you haven't been following the format since late May, or in case Bridge scared you away, the Future Sight enchantment was a cornerstone in a breakout and totally busted new Modern strategy: Hogaak Bridgevine. The newest villain of 2019 Modern took its name from synergies between Modern Horizons newcomer Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis and longtime format rogues Bridge and Vengevine. Modern Horizons entrants Altar of Dementia and Carrion Feeder joined the roster with Bridgevine regulars Stitcher's Supplier and Gravecrawler, alongside format icon red Brainstorm Faithless Looting to create a true monster.

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The new Bridgevine strategy looked disgusting on paper. It could power out armies of 4/3s, 8/8s, and 2/2 Zombies as early as Turn 2, entrench for a grindy game of Gravecrawler and Vengevine recursion, or just topdeck an Altar/Hogaak mill kill at any point in the game. By the time Piotr 'Kanister' Glogowski was creating 100 power on turn three in early June, it was clear the gameplan was just as good in practice as in theory. The results were format redefining.

Modern veterans will remember Bridgevine enjoying scattered 2018 success due to new printings like Stitcher's Supplier. The old 2018 Bridgevine never rose to problematic levels. Its successor did. Hogaak Bridgevine tyrannized online and paper lists throughout June 2019. In addition to soundbites like Kanister's Tweet, some of its more offensive achievements included: a 32% Top 32 share in an June 8 2019 online Challenge, a 28% Top 64 share at Grand Prix Dallas-Fort Worth, and a 25% Top 32 share at a late June 2019 Mythic Challenge Qualifier. GP DFW also saw Hogaak more than doubling the Day 2 share of the next highest decks (poor Humans and Izzet Phoenix), and it still strong-armed two pilots into the Top 8 despite the graveyard-hate crosshairs on its back.

By July 8, the question was not whether or not Hogaak Bridgevine was bannable. Rather, it was whether or not Wizards would drop the hammer before the upcoming Mythic Championship or wait until August. I know I speak for many Moderners, including banlist voters on Reddit and MTGNexus, when I thank for Wizards axing Bridge today.

The Value of Close Readings

I don't want to focus too heavily on the deck's performance record. I also don't want to audit Wizards' decision too heavily; I have historically condemned ban mania in Modern, and even I admitted the Hogaak abomination was on borrowed time. Instead, I want to focus on the text in the banlist announcement itself. When Wizards and its Research and Development team announce banlist changes, it is easy to get caught up in the decisions themselves (Bridge is banned) and miss the underlying rationale (the other 650+ words). This is a disservice both to the R&D writers who carefully select their words to justify significant decisions, and a disservice to our own collective Modern understanding. R&D is notoriously tight-lipped about its banning process, which forces Modern stakeholders to scrounge Twitter and other mediums for information scraps about how that process works. I enjoy trawling Aaron Forsythe's Twitter account as much as the next Moderner, but I'll take official Wizards statements over contextless Tweets any day of the week.

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It's been a while since I published a close reading/deep dive of a banlist update. The last time was in April 2016 when I unpacked the Eye of Ugin ban decision line by line on my old site, Modern Nexus. Some of those findings remain relevant today, especially Wizards' focus on tournament and performance data from Magic: The Gathering Online and Grand Prix as opposed to "gut instinct" and philosophical evaluations. The Eye ban also reinforced the precedent of surgical ban strikes on the most offensive card in a given deck, and limiting a ban's collateral damage. These are all recurring ban concepts which have proven valuable in subsequent predictions and risk assessments.

There are three assumptions at the core of any banlist decision close reading:

  1. Ban announcements are largely consistent; we can often use precedents from previous bans to predict future ones.
  2. Ban announcements are largely transparent; we can mostly cite Wizards' rationale at face value.
  3. Ban announcements are largely comprehensive; we can assume almost everything we need to know about a ban is in the article.

Longtime Moderners or readers of my articles will note that these assumptions don't always hold. For example, I maintain Splinter Twin's ban had unspoken, ulterior motives, but I only reached that conclusion after significant research into competing evidence. Similarly, the Golgari Grave-Troll and Gitaxian Probe bans were a little too short to draw too many conclusions from. These cases should not deter us from line-by-line banlist announcement analysis, and even R&D skeptics will find that most (not all) banlist announcements follow those assumptions. Overall, these close readings are potent tools for understanding Modern and the R&D process.

Line by Line Banlist Announcement Analysis

Again, here's the Bridge banning announcement in full before we get started.

Over the past month, a new Modern deck has emerged—"Hogaak Bridgevine," centered around the combination of Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis; Altar Of Dementia; and Bridge from Below.
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Wizards could have highlighted many other Bridgevine staples in this sentence, most notably Faithless Looting, the engine that makes Hogaak and other graveyard decks tick. Instead, they frame Modern's boogieman as being "centered around" the three cards they will later highlight as ban candidates. This is the first place of many where Wizards deliberately does not mention Looting. To me, this suggests Wizards never framed the Hogaak Bridgevine banning question as a Looting issue, an impression Duke reinforces later in the article. This needs to inform our future conversations about Looting's bannability.

From our data gathered through Magic Online, this deck has shown to have a high overall win rate, fast wins, and few unfavorable matches. It's warped the metagame around itself, forcing other decks to adopt especially high numbers of anti-graveyard cards to keep pace.

Here's the thesis of the entire announcement where Wizards summarizes the biggest factors playing into Bridge's ban. We've seen many of these factors in bans before, and we will see many of them again in bans to come. Factors include the following, all of which Duke circles back to later in the article:

 

  1. "High overall win rate": Win rates matter. Wizards also used match win percentage (MWP) as a factor in banning Krark-Clan Ironworks Wizards' attention to win rates makes projects like Tobi Henke's Channel Fireball analyses and my own 2018 win percentage analysis particularly valuable as indicators of format health.
  2. "Fast wins": This is a callback to Modern's "turn four rule", but not an explicit citation. Wizards offered a more specific reference in the 2017 Probe banning (Probe "increased the number of third-turn kills in a few ways"). It's hard to tell if Wizards indicts Bridgevine as a proper turn four rule violator, but I'm comfortable concluding speed is at least an orange flag for potentially offensive decks.
  3. "Few unfavorable matchups": Wizards has increasingly cited matchup-specific MWPs in bans, especially Standard bans: Duke included an entire MWP table to justify the Temur Energy bans in early 2018 . Wizards wants top decks to have a even ratio of favorable to unfavorable matchups. This shows that Sam Stoddard's old but valuable "Using Real World Data" article is still relevant today. As Stoddard said back in 2016, "When your worst matchup is the mirror, chances are you are going to get banned."
  4. "Warped the metagame around itself..." forcing adoption of "...especially high numbers of anti-graveyard cards": Community members use terms like "format-warping" all the time to describe allegedly offensive decks. Here, Wizards operationalizes that concept around the measurable number of anti-graveyard cards. Look familiar? It's the classic Grave-Troll "battle of sideboards" ban rationale revisited, or the even older Dread Return precedent from summer 2011: "the larger game of deciding whether to dedicate enough sideboard slots to defeat (Dredge) or ignore it completely and hope not to play against it is one that is not very satisfying." Future analysis opportunity: how many anti-graveyard cards were decks using at Bridgevine's zenith? This could be a valuable benchmark in the future.

Finally, Wizards makes a definitive statement about MTGO data in this passage, never once mentioning other tournaments in the thesis or article at large. This doesn't mean Wizards ignored GP DFW or the StarCityGames events, which I am confident they considered. It does mean Wizards is paying close attention to MTGO, and MTGO results alone can be sufficient to get something banned. Keep this in mind for future predictions.

When a new deck posts a high win rate in the early period of its emergence, we monitor the environment to see if the metagame can adapt. Often, as opponents come to better understand how the new deck works and adapt their own decks and sideboards to beat it, we see the overall win rate of the new deck come down to normal levels.
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Translation: don't panic every time a new deck breaks out in the metagame! Between Reddit, Twitter, forums, and the endless Modern content mill, it is tempting to have extreme reactions to breakout strategies. These platforms reward loud, controversial, and strong opinions. It's also relatively easy to call for a ban or call something broken with a single ironic/sarcastic Tweet, image, or meme. It is much harder to type hundreds of words to complicate the picture or assess a deck's true strenghts and weaknesses. In this quote, Wizards reassures us they know new decks can explode and then level out. We need to remember this wait-and-see perspective when assessing breakout strategies in the future.

In the case of the Hogaak Bridgevine deck, its initial overall win rate on Magic Online was over 60%. Despite the metagame's best efforts to adapt, the deck's win rate remains higher than is healthy for long-term metagame diversity.

Wizards doesn't provide a time frame for the "initial" period of Magic Online performance, but given Hogaak Bridgevine's relatively short existence, I'm comfortable assuming this is in the one to two week period. This is significant because the overall 60% win rate does not match some of the more alarming win rate calculations made by grinders and Redditors. For instance, Redditor u/MarcoVito reported a staggering 79% win rate on MTGO in early June 2019. The deck's true win rate, however, was 17% points lower in the MTGO dataset. This does not mean Marco was lying or falsifying data. It just means the real performance standard was lower, and Marco was just representing his own performance. This is a warning for Modern analysts to not take small sample size MWP calculations at face value. Include limitations and include margins of error; true deck MWPs are often much lower than we think.

In recent weeks, Hogaak Bridgevine has been the most played Modern deck on Magic Online and has earned over three times as many 5-0 League trophies as the deck with the next most. It has only two unfavorable matchups among the other ten most played decks and a high win rate against lesser played "rogue" decks. Especially telling is its Game 1 win rate of roughly 66%, requiring most decks to sideboard heavily against it.

Wizards drops the mic here with some MTGO data gems. As a statistics guy, I know these factoids don't represent the entire picture. As a professor once put it to a friend of mine, if you torture the numbers enough, they will tell you anything you want. Disclaimers and Mark Twain adages aside, these are some disgusting facts with important implications for future ban decisions:

  1. Most-played MTGO deck: Prevalence matters. Bridgevine wasn't just winning events; it was also the most-played deck overall. Unfortunately, Wizards does not give us a metagame share, but we can still safely assume prevalence remains a key ban factor.
  2. Most 5-0 League trophies: Performance matters. It's not enough for a deck to be merely prevalent. Bannable decks also need to be winning. This means we need to look at Top 8s more than just Day 1, Day 2, or even T32 shares. Same with 5-0 Leagues. Statistical side note: it's unclear if this 5-0 performance is proportionate to the deck's overall MTGO share or not. I suspect it outpaces the overall MTGO prevalence, given the deck's win rate.
  3. Two unfavorable mathups against top 10 decks: Matchups matter. Or, stated differently, top decks need to have unfavorable matchups. I know there are many Spikes and grinders who want to play formats with a top deck enjoying overwhelmingly 50/50 or 51/49+ matchups, but Wizards is again emphasizing top decks need to have bad matchups. If they don't, that's a red flag.
  4. High win rate against rogue decks: Diversity matters. Forsythe's old "Where Modern Goes From Here" imperatives are still at play today, especially the requirement that Modern "Have a diverse top-tier metagame featuring over a dozen archetypes." If a top deck is harming lower-tier diversity, that's an additional warning sign.
  5. High game 1 win rate: Counterplay matters. This is the battle of sideboards issue all over again, but aggravated by a particularly high 66% (!) game 1 win rate. We should separate this G1 win rate in future win rate analyses to see if a Bridge scenario is happening again.

Before my hobbyist statisticians in the audience break out Excel to find the next Bridge, a word of caution. The public at large can't easily detect these metrics. Wizards is infamously stingy with its MTGO data, deliberately throttling public access to the numbers to prevent metagames from being solved. This means Modern analysts need to carefully assess available sources to dig for these indicators in the future. Incidentally, the whole Hogaak Bridgevine fiasco undermines Wizards' belief that data restrictions lead to unsolved metagames. Despite all the MTGO data restrictions in place, everyone knew about this deck and still piloted it to obscene numbers. Hopefully in the future, Wizards reconsiders its decision to restrict data; players will solve broken metagames with or without full MTGO data. That problem needs to be fixed on the design end. At least with more data, players might be able to tailor answers and strategies to evolving threats.

With several high-profile Modern events coming soon and Hogaak Bridgevine continuing to be problematic for the health of the metagame, we've determined now is the right time to take action in order to allow players enough advance notice to prepare for those events.

One of the most challenging tasks in predicting a ban is predicting its timing. Historically, Wizards handled emerging Modern issues on many different timelines. Bridge, Eye, and Treasure Cruise/Dig Through Time are all examples of single-cycle ban responses, where a broken card emerged after a banlist update and before the scheduled announcement.

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In single-cycle bans, there's so much incriminating data in between those updates that Wizards can take action without waiting. The Eye, TC, and DTT cycles were longer than Bridge's because Wizards was still on a 3-4 month banlist update schedule at those times, as opposed to the 49 days between the May and July 2019 updates. Nonetheless, these are still all single-cycle decisions. Contrast with multi-cycle decisions such as Birthing Pod (legal for years, gradully more problematic over late 2014), Summer Bloom (breaking out at the Pro Tour in early 2015, banned in early 2016), Gitaxian Probe (synergizing with fast decks for most of 2016, banned in early 2017), and KCI most recently (Matt Nass in early-2018, mid-2018, late-2018...)

With Hogaak Bridgevine, Wizards signals two criteria prompt single-cycle ban decisions. First, there are impending "high-profile Modern events" and Wizards doesn't want those events to suck. The next scheduled banlist update is August 26. What events are happening in the next one and a half months which forced Wizards to swing the banhammer on July 8 instead of waiting until August 26? Five jump out: Mythic Championship IV (July 26), and a whopping four Grand Prix: Barcelona (also July 26), Minneapolis (August 9), Birmingham (August 16), Las Vegas (August 22). I struggle to remember a previous forty-nine day stretch of Modern with five major Modern events (March-April 2019 had four), and I respect this forces Wizards' hand. This is not simply a shakeup ban to engineer an interesting Mythic Championship. This is Wizards identifying a legitimately broken deck the metagame is not adapting to for the sake of thousands of players' enjoyments. As for the second criterion, Wizards summarized it already: based on egregious MTGO datapoints, the deck was simply "problematic for the health of the metagame."

Going forward, we should not predict single-cycle ban decisions unless there are both a) a string of high-profile events before the next update and b) the deck is glaringly unhealthy through measures already discussed (e.g. win-rates, prevalence, overly favorable matchups, etc.).

We discussed several possible bans that would weaken this deck while having minimal impact on the rest of the metagame: Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis; Altar Of Dementia; and Bridge from Below.

This quote signals a shift in Duke's article. Before now, he was justifying why Hogaak Bridgevine needed a nerf. Here, Duke identifies specific cards in the deck which could accomplish that desired nerf. It's tempting to view this as a throwaway transition sentence, but there are actually three significant policy signals in this sentence.

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First, Wizards doubles down on its policy of targeted, surgical bans. Wizards goes after broken decks by banning cards that have a "minimal impact" on "the rest of the metagame." Wizards took a similar approach with KCI in early 2019, hitting KCI and not a multi-deck staple like Mox Opal. This emphasizes Wizards' preference towards surgical strikes that target a single offender, not orbital strikes that nuke multiple strategies. Second, R&D does not want to destroy Hogaak entirely; they want to "weaken" the deck. This is a specific word choice, and community members need to be very careful suggesting bans which destroy decks entirely. It happens (KCI in 2019, Twin in 2016), but it's comparatively rare in contemporary Modern. Even the horrific Eldrazi Winter scenario of 2016 only produced a single ban. Wizards' rationale? "If Eye of Ugin is banned and Eldrazi Temple is legal, the mana supports a more diverse set of builds." If Wizards wanted to support other "builds" in the wasteland of Eldrazi Winter, you can bet they will continue that practice in less awful periods. Bloom, Probe, and Grave-Troll are other example of bans that weaken, not destroy.

Finally, Duke excludes a significant card from his list of ban candidates: Faithless Looting. Players, pros, and pundits have discussed this card for months, and I can't emphasize enough that Wizards doesn't mention the card once in this article. Might it be on a "watchlist"? Potentially. As we learned in the KCI ban decision, R&D does have a watchlist, and "card selection" spells like Ancient Stirrings can be on it. But in that same article, Wizards had this to say about Stirrings: "In the current state of the metagame, the build-around nature of Ancient Stirrings supports decks that look very different from a simple collection of the strongest rate cards, and that otherwise may not exist." This absolutely applies to Looting, and Wizards' glaring omission of Looting from the Bridge decision reinforces that stance. Looting may become a problem in the future in the same way that Stirrings is on the watchlist, but Wizards has not signaled it is a problem currently.

While cases can be made for each, we identified Bridge from Below as the card most likely to cause metagame imbalance again in the future. Because Bridge from Below doesn't cost mana or other resources to use and isn't reliant on being drawn naturally from the library, its power level is highly sensitive to the cards that synergize with it. As new card designs that have synergy with the graveyard are released over time, Bridge from Below is the most likely key card in the deck to become problematic again.

Two of the most consistent Modern banlist themes are fast mana and cards that cheat on mana. This includes Modern's original banlist (Chrome Mox, Mental Misstep), early banlist revisions (Blazing Shoal, Rite of Flame, Cloudpost), later additions (Bloodbraid Elf and Seething Song at the time), and contemporary decisions (Eye, Bloom, Probe, KCI). This is one of the reasons we see calls for Mox Opal and Simian Spirit Guide bans, whether or not the metagame context justifies it.

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Bridge doesn't create mana like KCI or Eye, but it absolutely cheats the curve or, as Wizards says, "doesn't cost mana or other resources to use." Wizards also notes a synergy and graveyard design space issue here, but I'm hesitant to emphasize it because I don't want readers to think Wizards is banning Bridge because of future graveyard design space. That's a gross misreading of a carefully written decision. Wizards is banning Bridge because the deck that uses Bridge is outrageously broken and Bridge just happens to be the biggest mana-cheating offender in that broken deck. Design space didn't get Bridge banned. Hogaak Bridgevine's obscene performance record got Bridge banned.

Without Bridge from Below to continually produce Zombie tokens with which to convoke, the interaction between Hogaak and Altar Of Dementia should become more about stocking the graveyard for value over multiple turns rather than completing a one-turn win combo.

I love when Wizards walks us through different hypothetical bans. Duke doesn't do this as thoroughly here as in previous articles, but he still gives insight into how Wizards selects a card to be banned. For thorough examples of these thought experiments, see the discussions of Amulet vs. Bloom, Eye vs. Temple, and KCI vs. Stirrings vs. Opal in their respective ban articles. Wizards summarized this approach succinctly in the Eye article: "We made our choice by examining how one would build a deck, and how it would play, with the land that remains legal." In the Bridge case, Duke doesn't unpack the hypotheticals as deeply as in past articles, but we still see the logic at work in considering how a Hogaak/Altar deck would work sans Bridge. Ban predictors should explore similar hypotheticals in the future.

Final note on this passage: Wizards again signals displeasure for one-turn win combos. Overall card and deck context matters, but if a card or deck is winning in one turn, that seems like at least an orange flag.

This should open additional avenues for other decks to interact via creature combat, creature removal, or graveyard removal, and may also force graveyard decks to include more interactive cards, further slowing themselves down.
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This returns to Wizards' earlier concern about Hogaak Bridgevine warping competing decks towards excessive anti-graveyard cards. They feared banning Altar or Hogaak would not fully swing that pendulum, as explosive Bridge synergies still demand a focused, anti-graveyard response. But banning Bridge itself opens up cards like Path to Exile and traditional removal as viable counterplay. Sweepers too; there's no reason a turn four Supreme Verdict should leave an opponent with eight 2/2 Zombies.

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.

Wizards doesn't mention Looting in this sentence, but this passage is the clearest signal for their stance on graveyard decks generally and the graveyard enabler specifically. R&D wants graveyard strategies in Modern. They simply want to "weaken" (again, weaken, not invalidate) a specific "version of the graveyard combo archetype" that other decks weren't adapting to. This is an extremely limited and narrow scope which precludes a Looting ban. Again, it's very possible Looting is on a watchlist with Stirrings, and might eventually become an issue. Stirrings was acceptable in January 2019 because it supported a diverse range of decks that otherwise might not exist. A similar case can be made for Looting. A significant metagame/diversity shift could change that calculus, but it is up to ban proponents to argue for that shift, not assume the status quo is broken.

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.

It's always interesting when Wizards cites a specific deck, and better yet, a specific tournament, as an example of something healthy. We know exactly how Bridge-less Dredge decks performed at MCII in basically every performance metric. We can use that as a barometer for Wizards' vision of a healthy graveyard deck, or at least a healthy Dredge. Per Frank Karsten, Dredge was 6.2% of Day 1 and 6.6% of Day 2 and MCII. Karsten also calculated Dredge's overall win rate at 53.6% with 32 pilots, the third-highest win rate of any MCII deck with more than 20 pilots (Hardened Scales was first at 56% with 25 players, Humans was second at 54% with 53 players). Finally, Mox Insights published their own MCII analysis on SCG breaking down Dredge's specific matchups. If you want to know Wizards' vision of a healthy Dredge/graveyard deck, these numbers are your starting point. Going forward, assume any other deck meeting these Mythic Championship benchmarks is probably acceptable for Wizards. This does not mean decks exceeding these metrics are unacceptable! It's just a safe baseline for future analysis.

While we don't intend on setting a precedent for quickly taking B&R action whenever a successful new deck breaks out, in this case, the situation clearly needed to be addressed. We're looking forward to watching the metagame continue to evolve as we approach Mythic Championship IV in Barcelona on July 26–28, and we hope you'll join us for full coverage of that event.

Reading the announcement for the first time, I was nervous about the precedent Wizards could be setting. Hogaak Bridgevine emerged in late May 2019 and the Bridge banhammer fell just over a month later. That is a worrisome timeline for players who invest in a new deck. No one wants their new investment banned after a month, and there is a justifiable fear the Bridge ban could set precedent for snap-bans in the future.

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Wizards largely eased my fears with this passage. They acknowledge this ban could set a dangerous standard. They are speaking directly to anyone who invests in a "successful new deck" that "breaks out," and they are encouraging people not to worry. Duke already set expectations earlier in the article. New decks emerge, and new decks can have high initial win rates. But as Duke clarifies, "Often, as opponents come to better understand how the new deck works and adapt their own decks and sideboards to beat it, we see the overall win rate of the new deck come down to normal levels."

This quote remains the baseline assumption, and it takes truly outrageous performance metrics to raise R&D alarm. Or, as Duke says here, "the situation clearly needed to be addressed." I would not expect similarly reactive bans unless there was another Hogaak situation. Ban predictors would do well to bookmark the Bridge ban decision and test future ban predictions against Hogaak's indicators.

As always, we'll continue to listen to community feedback on the state of our play environments. The next B&R announcement will be August 26, 2019.

I've written articles and posted on forums/discussion boards for years. I know there are many out there who have similar community involvement, and I know you've seen the embittered cynic who says something like "Wizards isn't even reading this" or "Nothing we talk about here will affect Wizards." This might have been true in the younger Internet days, and might have remained true in the 2000s while Magic was still finding its digital footing. It is absolutely untrue today and Wizards has emphasized this in not one, not two, but three recent banlist updates. Wizards noted this in the KCI ban ("We're sensitive to community feedback...") and Wizards noted it in the Pauper blue purge ("And as always, we'll continue to listen to community feedback.") This is not just lip service or public relations doublespeak. Wizards is listening. Wizards is reading. Between their Twitter presence, Reddit presence, quotes like these, or the sheer volume of different content sites shared on their homepage, this should be obvious to all but the most entrenched skeptics. Keep giving well-reasoned and engaged feedback because Wizards is paying attention.

Most Important Takeaways

If you skipped here from the top, I don't blame you, but I also encourage you to read the line-by-line breakdown for more context on these key takeaways. If you got here after the close reading, congratulations on passing your reading Test of Endurance for the day. Here are the big conclusions we need to remember for future banlist predictions and ban policy assessments:

  1. MTGO data drives ban decisions: Wizards exclusively cites MTGO data in this article. I'm sure they considered other sources, but this emphasizes the importance of MTGO. It also emphasizes the next takeaway...
  2. Bans are data-driven: "Data-driven" can be a meaningless buzzword these days, but recent banlist updates show a concerted Wizards effort to base bans on real-world data. Our own ban predictions must also be data-driven. Cite your numbers!
  3. Win rates and matchups matter: Recent ban decisions focus heavily on win rates and matchups. Older ones focused on prevalence. Prevalence is clearly at play with Bridge's ban, but performance was a more visible factor. We must pay attention to MWP metrics in future ban predictions.
  4. Bans should surgically weaken a broken deck: Wizards prefers to "weaken" even the most broken decks, not cripple or destroy them. Even Hogaak Bridgevine. Even Eye of Ugin Eldrazi! This isn't always possible (RIP KCI), but we should always prioritize ban suggestions which match this precedent.
  5. Mana-cheating cards get banned: When it's time to drop the hammer, Wizards seems to go after cards that accelerate or otherwise break mana curves. Future ban predictions should also focus on these cards, if the decks using them are demonstrably broken.
  6. Wizards trusts metagames to adapt: Hogaak Bridgevine was an exception to an otherwise established pattern, and Wizards noted it in the article. Don't panic when decks break out, unless they break out at Hogaak levels.
  7. Graveyard strategies are part of Modern: This article is centered on Hogaak Bridgevine specifically, a graveyard combo deck with offensive performance metrics. It speaks favorably about overall Modern graveyard strategies, highlights Dredge as an acceptable deck, and doesn't mention Looting once. Take this as a precedent for future ban speculation.

If anyone notes other significant takeaways or has questions about how I drew these conclusions, feel free to chat in the comments, on Reddit, or the MTGNexus Modern forums at large. I'm always excited to participate in this kind of intense Modern analysis, and I hope you enjoyed our close reading of this significant banlist decision. I look forward to talking about the B&R process more and seeing you on the MTGNexus Modern forums for format discussion.

PS. Unban Stoneforge Mystic.