Banlist Update August 2 2024

 Hello Tiny Players! Today we have an update to our banlist.


  • Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned as Commander

  • Mana Drain is unbanned


  • Nadu, Winged Wisdom is watchlisted

  • Forth Eorlingas! Is watchlisted



Nadu:
We’ve decided to only ban Nadu as Commander for now.
The power level of Nadu is well documented in Tiny and beyond, and it clearly justifies having action taken against it.
A single turn with Nadu’s combo generates enough value to bury an opponent for the rest of the game. Even with reasonable answers the Bird usually is able to pay for his own commander tax and continue generating advantage.
The decks putting Nadu in the zone boast unbelievable winrates in our community tournaments and beyond

While still a powerful combo enabler once assembled, we don’t believe Nadu will be the unbeatable powerhouse he is now once you’re limited to just one copy, and unable to access him on-demand. 


Nadu is Watchlisted:

We’re not letting the bird out of our sights just yet though. We’re going to keep an eye on it and if the commander ban proves ineffective we’ll revisit banning it in the future.



Forth Eorlingas! Is Watchlisted:


We’ve decided not to ban Forth for now. I’m sure to some of our community members this might be controversial so let's talk about how we came to this decision.
Forth Eorlingas is a very powerful card. Capable of ending games single handedly, and stealing back victory from the maw of defeat. Forth is also a fairly unpopular card in the community.
The TLC doesn’t just ban cards because people don’t like them, but we also don’t ignore that. We take community input and feedback seriously. We looked into the card to see if we could build a case against it and here’s what we found:


Anecdotally we can see Forth is very strong. I’ve seen this card win games by itself dozens of times. Its game-ending nature can result in a lot of feel-bads as players can have their win snatched at the last second by a well-timed Forth Eorlingas.
Forth is kind of hard to beat because its power is spread out, evasive, and hasty, making it hard to answer with anything beyond a counterspell.
As a result the card is considered an auto-include in its colours. Looking at every RW deck in the last 4 months, we see that all but 2 of them have a copy of Forth.


That being said, Forth does not actually have a particularly large share of the metagame.
Looking at every tournament result over the last 4 months, there were about 100 decks which had a notable finish. Among those 100 decks, only 13 of them had a Forth.


Decks with the card also have a pretty normal winrate. Yes we’ve had some very notable tournament finishes such as Gitrog’s flawless record at SCT spring, and Skooma’s Marath deck. We’ve also had an equal number of decks with Forth in them do poorly!


So on one hand, the card is strong and people don’t like it. But on the other hand, the card is not representing an unreasonable share of metagame, and it’s not winning an unreasonable amount of tournaments.


Tiny is a high powered format with lots of very strong cards, and lots of staples! We’re allowed to have auto-includes and haymakers.


For this reason: Forth remains unbanned, but watchlisted.

We are however taking one piece of action,


Mana Drain is unbanned:

We’re testing the waters on a (small) number of unbans starting with Mana Drain. We feel this is reasonable for a number of reasons.
- As it is right now, people are barely even running Counterspell. A better counterspell might help shift the meta away from the dominantly red aggro decks. And at the very least won’t hurt it.
- Mana Drain is also capped in its usefulness by the restrictions of the format. Though mana costs higher than 3 are not uncommon, Mana Drain will most often be capped at just 3 mana.
- It’s one more answer to Forth Eorlingas. We hope by legalizing this card, we can give players more ability to interact with potentially troublesome cards


We’re excited to see what players do with new toys in their toybox.


Teferi Time Raveler is next in being considered for unban, after the current changes shake out.

We’re going to move slowly on unbans. After kicking up dust we need to wait a while and see whats happening before we kick up any more.
Our next update will be in October with the release of Duskmourn.