Hi everyone,
the Archon Council decided to put a change to the vote.
You can vote on the following change:
Unban Natural Order
You can had over to Discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 14-Jan-2024 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasonings for the proposed change:
Natural Order is a banlist relic from Duel Commander where it was primarily used to fetch up early Primeval Titans.
Natural Order nowadays is a rather restrictive card. Requiring both the creature sacrificed as well as the target to be green is a hefty drawback and limits its applications dramatically. As for green creatures to sacrifice, the most common choice are mana elves. For targets, among the heaviest hitters are Progenitus, Atraxa, Grand Unifier and (still) Primeval Titan.
Committing a four mana spell and a green creature from your field into the spell is a rather big cost in modern Archon. We believe that the color restriction on Natural Order (especially on Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Progenitus, which force you into specific commander choices due to their color identity) are limiting the application of the card, as you are not able to abuse it in decks with only one or two colors in their identity, where they would need to fall back to fewer-colored choices (as the already mentioned Primeval Titan). In testing, we also found that the impact that an early Natural Order had is on par with the powerlevel of other four mana cards in the format, maybe surpassing them slightly at the cost of deck building restrictions. This is especially true with the high interaction count nowadays which makes interacting with green creatures by the time Natural Order resolves a manageable task.
With green being on the weaker side of the color pie in Archon, we believe that adding a strong but restrictive card to greens pool is a good way to bump up its powerlevel without adding an overpowered line. Therefore, we propose the unbanning of Natural Order in Archon.