The next Hooglandia Open Series event will take place on Saturday, October 3rd and it will be a modified Historic format. You can join the event on MTGMelee here.
This event will use the normal Historic card pool and banlist with the following additions:
Justifications for Bannings
Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath – I could write a lot of things about Uro, but I think the most straightforward reasoning for getting rid of this card is that it just does too much for too little. In a healthy metagame, aggressive decks tend to be the natural predator of ramp decks but with Uro, ramp decks can stay alive against aggro fairly easily without having to dedicate many slots to interaction.
It is my hope that removing Uro from the format will force ramp decks to either become more interactive or cause them to lose more often to aggro. This power level increase to aggro should in turn cause midrange decks to become better as well since they are the natural predator to aggressive strategies.
Muxus, Goblin Grandee – While I think it is generally a good thing when an archetype can do a few different things well, I do not think it is healthy when a deck is capable of fast combo, fair aggro, and late game card advantage. The addition of Muxus to the Goblins archetype means it gets to do all of these things, killing as early as the third turn of the game thanks to Skirk Prospector and Irencrag Feat.
It is my hope that removing Muxus from the format will remove the frequency of low player agency blowouts like Muxus generates on turns 3 and 4, while leaving Goblins still a competitive deck based around the power of Krenko, Mob Boss and three mana haste lords.
Claim the Firstborn – This will probably be the most contentious banning for this event, but I think it is one that will hopefully be healthy for the format. The Rakdos and Jund Sacrifice decks in the format are interesting and intricate, but I feel their current iterations do too much to oppress other small creature decks. While they have a few other cards that are powerful in the creature match ups, such as Mayhem Devil and Priest of the Forgotten Gods, Claim the Firstborn is the least interactable of all of these and this is the one I am choosing to remove.
Much like the removal of Uro from ramp, the primary goal of banning Claim is to increase the strength of small creature aggro. Aggro being better should hopefully make midrange strategies more viable as well.
Overall, I think the key part of all three of these bannings is that while they all weaken top archetypes in Historic, none of them make any deck they were previously in outright unplayable. My hope is that these changes allow people to continue to play established decks they love, while players who are interested in brewing feel more rewarded for doing so.
