Hi! This is an update from the Standard Balance Team to let you know of future developments.
The meta is very fluid and rapidly evolving right now, with a lot of strategies being developed and a fiery competitive season that’s about to get even fiercer. A lot of people have been wondering whether a banlist will come out, and when. We have been giving some thought to how to structure our work, and wanted to keep the community up to date.
Banlist timing
So far, there have been no particular rules regarding when a banlist comes out: our team has met whenever we felt it was necessary to have a discussion about the meta. We would then potentially do some testing and publish a banlist.
This has worked fine so far, but has also sometimes conflicted with the timing of competitive events in unwelcome ways. A specific competitive season being broken up by a banlist creates all sorts of distortions that most players and tournaments organizers don’t like: players may feel like a tournament could be more or less worth preparing for depending on which banlist will be in effect for it; sometimes TOs will postpone a tournament to try and synchronize it with a potential set of bans; sometimes there is a lack of clarity over whether an event is using an old or a recently-released banlist, with informal decisions by Tournament Organizers not being properly communicated to the attendees in advance.
We are seeking to regularize the way that banlists work, and to do that, we are cooperating with Organized Play to set specific dates for them. From now on, we expect there to be three kinds of Standard Ban Lists:
- Release Banlists. Banlists that are published close to a new set being released (usually during preview season). These are intended to adapt the meta to the new cards and to rotation, and will be legal in all events that use the new set.
- Season Banlists. Banlists that are not tied to a specific set, but are meant to address problems with the current Standard meta. These will be published close to when a competitive season ends (e.g. when Megacity season ends, or when Continentals season ends) and will become legal at the start of the following season or a little before that. Each of these banlists will include a prospective date for the next one, which we will publish even in the event that it contains no changes.
- Urgent Banlists An unusual format for extreme cases – see below for further details.
With these adjustments, players will be able to prepare properly for events without being blindsided by a surprise banlist, save in extreme cases.
We can tell you now that the next banlist will be active on August 1st, 2025, in time for the start of Continental Championships. We expect to publish it on or around July 18th, 2025.
Panic Button
A banlist takes a lot of work and significant lead time for us. Having banlists work on a stricter schedule will make things easier for players but also for ourselves. However, major problems that need to be addressed promptly may still occasionally arise. In cases where we think immediate action is required, we may release an Urgent Banlist with little notice.
We expect this to happen very rarely, and only for cases that are so obviously problematic that we don’t think we need to do any internal testing. An example would be the emergence of fast and unstoppable combo decks, such as old decks based around Salvaged Vanadis Armory.