Hi everyone,
The Archon Council decided to put a change up for vote. You can vote on the following change:
Ban Yoshimaru, Ever Faithful and Rograkh, Son of Rohgahh as a Partner Pairing in Archon.
You can head over to our discord to cast your vote! You have time to do so until 15-11-2024 12:00 CET.
Here are the reasoning for the proposed change:
Yoshi/Rograkh has been at the top of the Archon meta since the release of LTR, providing the deck with many superior choices in lands and spells. Since then, every new set only improved the deck with 1-2 playable new legendaries or new removal options. It provides a consistent, aggressive start where Yoshimaru hits you for 4 at turn 2 regularly, but also has a long breath with Boros staples in its 2-4 mana slots filled to the brim with powerful cards. In its inception, running legendaries to support Yoshimaru was a deck building restriction, but nowadays, 90% of the good permanents in Boros are legends anyhow, so that the deck gets synergy for free. Moreover, the deck has access to some blowout openers like Flowering of the White Tree or Noble Heritage on turn 2, further abusing the fact that you can slam two commanders early. Also, handling Yoshimaru early isn’t guaranteeing a close game, as Rograkh can be enabled rather easily to be a potent asset regardless via cards such as Merry, Gut or Sword of the Chosen. All of this combined means that Yoshi/Rograkh is a hyper consistent, super aggressive deck that can easily afford mulligans while the opponent is forced to adapt to the speed that the deck threatens.
With a lot of time since its initial discussion, increasing frustration among the playerbase and regular top finishes for the deck at large tournaments, we have been looking for ways to handle the situation. Under the ruleset up to now, our options were to ban Yoshimaru or to ban Rograkh as a Partner, both hitting other decks in the format that we feel are not in need of getting gutted. Therefore, we needed a minimally invasive solution that didn’t impact other Yoshimaru or Rograkh lists, while still offering the possibility to handle further problematic Partner combinations in the future. While it might seem obvious to just ban the combination of Yoshimaru and Rograkh specifically, for us it means that we need to think about the long term implications of a new category on the ban list. Therefore we wanted to make sure that we are fine with the added complexity, as well as clear guidelines on how we will handle partners and their banning moving forward. We apologize that this decision has taken longer than you have hoped for, but getting a ruleset that we liked and stood behind has taken us some time to get to the right spot.
Introducing a Partner Pairing Banning implies the following rules:
- A new category “Banned as Partner Pairing” will be added to the Archon banlist.
- Banned as Partner Pairing will contain only combinations of two cards X and Y that can occupy the command zone at the same time, meaning combinations of partners X+Y, Commander X + Background Y or variations of this mechanic.
- If a combination X+Y is Banned as Partner Pairing, a deck can not register X+Y as it’s designated commanders nor can it at any point swap to X+Y in the command zone (i.e. in Games 2 and 3, you can not switch to X+Y in your Command Zone).
- If X+Y is banned as a partner pairing, you can still register X or Y with any other non-banned accompanying card in the Command Zone. If Yoshi + Rograkh is banned as Partner Pairing, you can still register Yoshi + Esior or Rograkh + Tevesh.
- You can also still run X+Y in the same deck, i.E. if Yoshi+Rograkh is banned as pairing, you can still register Yoshi+Akiri and run Rograkh in your 98.
- Banned as Partner will continue to stay a relevant category for our banlist. If X is banned as Partner, it translates to Banned as Pairing X+Y for every possible partner Y.
For our current banlist, this does not cause any functional changes. However, we wanted to make sure that this particular banning is not a corner case, but a new way forward on how Partners can be treated on the banlist. Therefore, these new rules will apply to new (un)ban proposals:
- Next to proposing a card to be banned as Partner, new votes can also be proposed as “Banned as Partner Pairing”.
- A card can have multiple entries in “Banned as Partner Pairing”. Meaning, we can potentially have Yoshimaru + Esior as well as Yoshimuar + Rograkh banned as a pairing if deemed necessary.
- To keep the list manageable, we introduce the following rule: Once a card has its third “Banned as Partner Pairing” added to the list, it will be “Banned as Partner” instead.
- Creating a vote to unban a certain “Banned as Partner Pairing” is straightforward and is handled as unbanning a regular Commander
- Creating a vote to unban a certain card from the “Banned as a Partner” category requires more effort: Here one has to suggest a card to be removed from the “Banned with Partner” Category and one has the option to list up to two new “Banned as Partner Pairing Rules”. We would then have a combined vote on the unban and the new “Ban as Partner Pairing” rules.
For example, to remove Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder from the “Banned as Partner” category the following three examples would all be valid requests to vote on:- Remove Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder from the Banned as Partner category
- Remove Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder from the Banned as Partner category and add Bruse Tarl and Yoshimaru to the Banned as Partner Pairing category.
- Remove Bruse Tarl, Boorish Herder from the Banned as Partner category and add Bruse Tarl and Yoshimaru to the Banned as Partner Pairing category. and add Bruse Tarl and Esior to the Banned as Partner Pairing category
All the above options would imply that all other Partner combinations with Bruse Tarl are allowed.
We think this granularity is worthwhile, as banning a specific pairing is – in the end – much more specific than banning a partner altogether. If Yoshi+Rograkh is the problematic deck, we don’t need to collaterally kill all other decks containing either Yoshimaru or Rograkh, and we can target this specific deck with its specific command zone.