Modern Banned And Restricted Updates

The long and anticipated banned and restricted updates are finally here and they bring a lot of welcomed change into the modern format. First and foremost let's get the elephant out of the room. They banned Eye of Ugin, one of the the card that has made the Eldrazi deck such a dominant force in the recent months. There has been some controversy over which of the lands had to go in the Eldrazi deck and I think they made the right choice. It was between Eye of Ugin and Eldrazi Temple and a lot of people feel like banning Eye of Ugin is the wrong choice because of how much it also effects Tron. However, I think that banning the Eye was fine, when they first said they were going to ban something from the Eldrazi Deck, they said they didn't want to completely destroy it. Now I am not sure how real it will be with only 4 of the very powerful "sol lands" but I know that if we only left them with Eye of Ugin it would kill the deck. One of the most powerful things about this deck is that it can turn 2 Though-Knot Seer. But with just Eye of Ugin you need a lot more in order to get this combo out because Eye of Ugin fails to produce the colorless mana needed.

Now on to the even more excited part of this announcements, the unbannings. Both Ancestral Visions and Sword of Meek are unbanned. Visions is a card that people have been begging to have unbanned to try and once again make a blue control deck viable again. With Splinter Twin leaving the format in a previous B&R announcement it killed one of the only blue control deck because without the combo they had a lot of trouble in the late game. Visions once again gives blue decks the reach they have been lacking, drawing three cards late in the game is often enough to pull ahead for a lot of decks. I think the place we are going to see visions fit into is a Blue/White control shell that finishes using a planes walker like Elspeth, Sun's Champion.

The next unbanning I think it not going to have a huge impact on modern, but nonetheless a positive impact. The unbanning of Sword of the Meek seems long overdue as the card has been banned since the inception of the format. Originally, the combo was Sword of the Meek and Thopter Foundry, each turn you would activate Thopter Foundry to sacrifice Sword of the Meek and get a 1/1 Thopter token and 1 life. But because Sword of the meek was in the graveyard when a 1/1 creature entered the battlefield, you could return it to play attached to that creature. This let you activate Thopter Foundry as many times are you could pay the activation cost of 1. This was one of the best decks in Extended but I do not think it will have the same success in modern for a number of reasons. There are a lot more ways to to kill artifacts the did not exist during Extended, Kolaghan's Command, Abrupt Decay, Scavenging Ooze are all main deck ways that disrupt the combo in the format. I would wager that this deck will see some fringe play but not really make the huge splash people are expecting. I think Wizards really did a great job with this set of bannings and unbannings

This is all for this week, what decks will you be testing out with the new unbannings? Do you think Wizards got these B&R changes right?