Banned List Updates – December 2024

If you’re just here for a quick glance and don’t care beyond that, tl;dr: No new bans or unbans, but please sound off openly with your feedback.

If you care to stick around for our reasonings though: When we last spoke back in July, we were discussing the impact of sticker cards on the format.

How we’d like to foster the unique environment that Oathbreaker has allowed us, excising cards we believed would be detrimental to that philosophy. This topic has remained our mainstay throughout the year, beyond just the scope of silver borders and unsets, and onto what cards we feel may be problem children.

As such, we’d like to be open and communicative with what cards we’re currently looking at on either side, how we feel about them currently, and how that may change in the future, and we’d like to welcome you to give us your opinions on them openly and freely.

Evaluated Currently:

Jeska’s Will: Now, speaking as the resident red mage on the RC, this card sits near and dear to my heart, but it’s also a card that we’ve received a lot of feedback about, and one that our own internal playgroup has come to respect and play around in nearly every testing game since it’s release. The committee still lays heavily on the side of leaving it unbanned, as the current discussions tends to be around it’s ability to win games from seemingly nowhere, but only when it’s not telegraphed in your command zone. We think that for the time being it’s probably healthy to keep it around, so long as red storm doesn’t receive another critical mass of easy signature spell damage (looking at you Boltwave.)

Heritage Druid: Elfball is ever-present in any format with more than one mana producing elf, it’s a plain fact of eternal magic formats, that being said, Heritage Druid is very easily the best in class when it comes to snowballing a games momentum. While the council is still heavily on the side of leaving it unbanned, we’re keeping a very keen eye on the power level of elf ball, and this is a likely target should it spiral out of control.

Emrakul, the Aeons Torn: This card is a banlist holdover from our founding, and one we’re evaluating for unbanning as it’s a much less threatening prospect given the current landscape of the format. Without being sat in your command zone it lacks the ease of casting access that makes it dominant in formats like Commander, and would more often than not be a threat in polymorph style decks that wouldn’t get its Mindslaver effect. That being said, we’re still weighted more towards keeping it banned, as the biggest concern is that there’s little reason for any deck to not run it, free graveyard shuffling, a powerful colorless threat in later turns.

Painter’s Servant: Painter’s is a card that at one point was the boogeyman for eternal play, a powerful and colorless infinite combo. Times have changed however, and current discussion is trending towards what does the format gain from having this card available now. The sudden possible relevance of otherwise cheesy cards like Burnout, Pyroblast, Guttural Response, Deathgrip, Stromgald Cabal, Seedtime, Gloom, etc… We have no concrete decision yet, but it’s certainly a card to watch and discuss.

With that out of the way, above all else we’d like to invite the community to actively reach out and tell us about your playgroups, let us know if certain cards are proving to be menaces outside of metas not our own, what cards do you think should be unbanned, why? How do you feel about these four cards in particular, we’d love to know, this is your format just as much as it ours.

As always, we’re reachable through multiple channels; whether that be on the subreddit, the discord, or if you want to just @ me on twitter to talk about why Mana Geyser should be unbanned (for legal reasons this is a joke.)

Written by Nikki, on behalf of the Oathbreaker Rules Committee.