Greetings everyone ,
the Archon Council decided to put several changes to the vote. You can vote on the following changes:
- Unbanning Arahbo, Roar of the World
- Unbanning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
- Unbanning Gifts Ungiven
- Banning Keleth, Sunmane Familiar as a partner
You can had over to our Discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 15-Sep-2022 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasonings for the proposed changes:
Unbanning Arahbo, Roar of the World
While Eminence is a fundamentally broken mechanic in 1v1 formats, we believe that Ahrabo is the weakest of the commanders that have it. On top of that, the downsides of his colour identity and having to play mostly cat creatures are most likely big enough to keep this commander in check in the current Archon meta.
For these reasons, we propose that Arahbo, Roar of the World be unbanned in Archon.
Unbanning Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn was banned in 2017 for being „most of the time the end of any strategic approach of a game“ and its high synergy with Polymorph style cards. (Sidenote: Polymorph was banned at the same time!) The unbanning of Polymorph and the printing of Transmogrify did not breath new life into the Polymorph archetype in Archon.
We beliefe that a deck using cards like Sneak Attack or Polymorph could be powerful, which would be good as it would increase the diversity of the format. Since the banning of Emrakul, the Aeons Torn a lot of new, efficient and commonly played removal was printed that can kill her. In addition you are able to interact with the cards that put Emrakul, the Aeons Torn into play.
Polymorph style decks can be stopped for example by killing the creatures that is about to be polymorphed. Those decks also suffer from the heavy restriction that is put on them, namely that they are not allowed to run cheap creatures – a pillar of modern magic design. Decks that aim to put Emrakul into play via cards like Sneak Attack or Show and Tell have to run a critical mass of creatures that are powerful enough. In those decks Emrakul, the Aeons Torn becomes even less problematic since her impact is limited of only a part of the games played.
For these reasons we propose to unban Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in Archon.
Unbanning Gifts Ungiven
Gifts Ungiven is a card that entered the banlist of commander in the year 2009. It landed there because of its high synergy with Unburial Rites and any big creatures that you can reanimate with it. Although Gifts Ungiven states that you search for four different cards, you are allowed to search of any number between zero and four cards. This way you are able to send two cards straight to the graveyard without involving a choice of your opponent. Nowadays you are also able to search for other combos, that are still dependent on your graveyard.
Archon is a format where you are expected to interact with your opponents graveyard because this resource is in modern magic design more and more relevant regardless if you use it for value or combo plays. This modern design also brought as a wide variety of cards that deny powerful graveyard interaction while also have other meaningful impact on the game. The combos that Gifts Ungiven can search are already part of Archon and can be beaten with the tools that are already in use.
From testing Gifts Ungiven in modern Archon we could derive that the card only had meaningful impact in slow games and that most of the time four mana are simply to slow for a setup play that does not have an immediate impact on the game. It is also very telling for the opposing player to pass the turn with four mana up. This way the opposing player can prepare for Gifts Ungiven beforehand. In a lot of ways Gift Ungiven feels like a slower Intuition which is already legal in Archon and proofed to be unproblematic in the format.
For these reason we believe that Gifts Ungiven should be legal in Archon and we propose to unban it.
Banning Keleth, Sunmane Familiar as a partner
Esior, Wardwing Familiar & Keleth, Sunmane Familiar has been a controversial deck since the release of Commander Legends. After carefully considering it, we have decided that Esior doesn’t do much on her own and that Keleth is by far the more problematic of the two commanders, as she enables very linear and consistent play patterns that are really hard to play around. The same problems arise when Keleth is played alongside Yoshimaru, ever Faithful and Rograkh, Son of Rograkh, which leads to very stale, repetitive games and points once again to Keleth being the problem.
On top of that, Keleth’s mana value of 2 enables any deck playing him to develop a very strong position with as little as two lands, which results in yet another advantage when it comes to mulliganing. However, we still think that a deck with only Keleth at the helm could be an interesting mono-White option, an archetype that hasn’t been very present in the format lately.
For these reasons, we proposed that Keleth, Sunmare Familiar be banned as a partner in Archon.