Magic: The Gathering Bans a Card Before It's Released

Magic: The Gathering has banned a card from Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths before the set's release. Wizards of the Coast is banning Lutri, the Spellchaser from the Brawl format when Ikoria goes live on Thursday. Lutri, the Spellchaser uses Ikoria's new Companion mechanic. Companion allows a player to cast a spell from outside of the game so long as their starting deck meets certain restrictions. In Lutri, the Spellchaser's case, that restriction is "Each nonland card in your starting deck has a different name." This forces any player using Lutri, the Spellchaser as a companion to play a "Singleton" style deck. In a Singleton format like Brawl, there's no drawback.

"In the case of the companion card Lutri, the Spellchaser, the deck-building restriction is to play 'singleton,' with no more than one copy of each nonland card in your deck," writes senior game designer Ian Duke in Monday's banned and restricted announcement. "The idea is to reward a player for choosing a diversity of different cards rather than multiple copies of the most efficient card for the job. This makes a lot of sense in most formats, where it often dramatically alters the way a player would choose to build their deck in exchange for starting the game with an extra powerful card.

"In Brawl, however, the Singleton deck-building restriction is already built into the format rules. This means that there is no trade-off against how one would normally build a deck. Any deck including both blue and red would benefit from including Lutri at no deck-building cost. This isn't in line with the design intent of the companion mechanic, and we believe it would create a large imbalance between decks capable of including Lutri and those that can't. Therefore, we've decided to begin Ikoria's release with Lutri, the Spellchaser banned in Brawl."

Duke also says that this was not an oversight on the part of the Magic design team. They knew Lutri, the Spellchaser would be ill-suited for Brawl and other Singleton formats. They decided the card was interesting and fun enough in non-Singelton formats to print anyway. "This isn't an oversight or a case where we underestimated a card that was too powerful," he says. "In fact, discussions surrounding the legality of this card in Singleton formats began early in the design process. As we playtested with Lutri, we decided that the fun deck-building challenge and opportunity for self-expression it presents in other Magic formats clearly made the design worth printing, even if it didn't make sense in Brawl."

Here's the full Brawl Banned Cards list as of Lutri, the Spellchaser's banning:

• Golos, Tireless Pilgrim
• Lutri, the Spellchaser
• Sorcerous Spyglass
• Oko, Thief of Crowns

What do you think of Wizards of the Coast banning Lutri, the Spellchaser from Brawl? Let us know in the comments. Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths goes live in Magic: The Gathering Arena on Thursday, along with the new updated to drafting.