All B/R update speculation.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Go suggest banning Ancestral Recall in the format it's legal in then? Not sure what you're getting at

That your argument makes no sense. “You can’t ban a card from Legacy if it’s been banned elsewhere” is just nonsense. Cards can and should be banned from multiple formats.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

Anyway yeah these are good bans, although I would also have liked to see either Planar Nexus or The One Ring get axed

[Alex_UNLIMITED]

Formats without Entomb already existed. Not sure why this format had to be those as well.

When I started playing Legacy, Entomb was banned.

[TheInfamousBearAssassin]

When I started playing Legacy, Entomb was banned.

Yeah we didn’t even have it for the aughts. It was very briefly maybe a top deck before they then banned Mystical, and then it spent ten years being a terrifying but niche glass cannon. It wasn’t until the past few years people figured out how to make it work in the Xerox shell that it actually became a consistent pillar of the format. Really tired of being gaslit about this.

[FTW]

Yeah we didn’t even have it for the aughts. It was very briefly maybe a top deck before they then banned Mystical, and then it spent ten years being a terrifying but niche glass cannon. It wasn’t until the past few years people figured out how to make it work in the Xerox shell that it actually became a consistent pillar of the format. Really tired of being gaslit about this.

UB Xerox Reanimator was discovered immediately after the Entomb unban. It was a top deck until the Mystical Tutor ban. Mystical was mainly banned for Ad Nauseam, but UB Reanimator was the second reason given by Wizards.

After the Mystical ban, Xerox Reanimator still existed but dropped down to Tier 2.5 due to lack of consistency. I still played it post-ban. Hands without Entomb were slow. Your backup engine was Careful Study. An opening hand with Careful Study or cantrips into Careful Study was a lot worse (Turn 5-6 clock, getting raced by aggro, and you couldn't tutor for your anti-aggro silver bullet if you never found Entomb). Variance kept UB Reanimator out of Tier 1, though it was always just 1-2 enablers away from being Tier 1 again.

Careful Study also meant the deck had to run a redundant number of threats (i.e. dead cards) to have one to dump. While Mystical Tutor was in the format, with 4x Entomb 4x Mystical (could get Entomb or Reanimate), you didn't need as many threats or as many Reanimate effects. This left room for good Xerox spells and interaction. Post-ban, Reanimator often went up to ~8-10 threats and ~8-10 reanimate effects to be consistent. This created awkward deck-building tension. You needed enough blue cards for FoW, enough Reanimate effects, enough threats, and enough mana sources. Deck construction became a squeeze. Players opted for some numbers of suboptimal blue threats like Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Jin-Gitaxias, Core Augur or Inkwell Leviathan just to keep blue count for FoW.

Around the same time, because Reanimator had been oppressive before, WOTC design team overreacted. A lot of color-flexible graveyard hate was printed close together: Faerie Macabre, Wheel of Sun and Moon (later replaced by Rest in Peace), Relic of the Progenitus, then Surgical Extraction. Meanwhile they intentionally designed the biggest creatures in the game to be Reanimate-proof: Progenitus, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, Blightsteel Colossus, Worldspine Wurm. Most Xerox fatty-combo players shifted from UB Reanimate into UGx Natural Order+Progenitus, then Show and Tell/Sneak Attack. Those threats were just better than what Reanimator could make and dodged the new wave of grave hate, so they became a better way to play Xerox creature combo. Those decks took over UB Reanimator's meta share.

Reanimator stayed down until Griselbrand gave it a creature worth Reanimating and Chancellor of the Annex gave it a threat that overlapped with a protection slot (not dead, reducing deck-building tension). Reanimator players also realized if they switched to black-based instead of blue-based, you didn't have to worry about blue count for FoW. It was much easier to keep black count for Unmask than blue count for Force of Will. Thoughtseize also doubled as a self-discard enabler. Around the same time, Faithless Looting was printed as a Careful Study-upgrade, so Br Reanimator became the dominant build. Explosive speed + discard also gave it a way to compete and stand out from Xerox SneakShow. UB Reanimator still existed, but it was slower and generally worse than what SneakShow did at the same speed.

With Grief printed, BR Reanimator was already abusing it doing stupid things like Turn 1 4x Unmask, 2 creatures, go. (Grief/Unmask protecting T1 Griselbrand, then draw 7-14 into more Grief/Unmask/Thoughtseize, then Reanimate Grief). You lost the game on turn 0 unless you had Leyline or 2x protection. I'm honestly surprised that didn't get Grief banned much earlier. BR Reanimator just wasn't taken seriously, since it was flimsy and couldn't recover from disruption or bad mulligans. But the game should never have allowed the T1 4x Unmask even in BR Reanimator, those are just non-games decided by the die roll.

Anyway, players had already figured out how to make Xerox Reanimator work. It just needed another enabler to let it cut Careful Study. Troll of Khazad-dûm is the card that broke the dam. It looks innocuous but perfectly filled that one missing role. UB could drop Careful Study, go down on threats/dead cards, have enough slots for a good Xerox plan, and use Troll as the back-up plan when you don't find Entomb. I pointed this out a few times early on, but WOTC and most players neglected Troll as a problem until later. Sure Grief and Psychic Frog were the more obvious unfair cards, but Troll was the glue that let UB run such a strong fair plan.

[AnwarA101]

Grief is Unmask. I mean if you look at Grief the only thing that makes it better than Unmask is that it can be Reanimated which is true of every creature that hits the graveyard or every creature that has Evoke. When you Grief someone, you are down a card. If you Reanimate Grief on the Turn 1, you have traded 3 cards for two of your opponents cards and you aren't down a card because you have 3/2 Menace creature. You still have card parity. It is hard to describe this as an advantage except you have taken the best two cards from your opponent's hands, but at the cost of playing Grief, Reanimate, and having another black card in your hand.

So why is Grief banned? Because Wizards didn't want to ban Entomb and so they thought that Grief would make the deck worse which it probably did, but that doesn't mean Grief was the problem. This is the sort of recency bias because Grief was the new cards that people could latch onto as the problem. It was red herring since it made people feel bad when they lost their two best cards, but having a 3/2 Menace creature isn't that great. If you top deck any removal or a better creature your opponent doesn't have much of anything. Even combo decks have 6 turns to draw out of this situation.

[FTW]

Entomb was perfectly fine in the format for years, as long as there wasn't another enabler.

UB Reanimator was broken exactly when a second 1-mana enabler existed: either Mystical Tutor or Troll (Entombs 5-8). In the period between, UB Reanimator wasn't even a tier deck. Entomb is very powerful but with just 4 copies there are major variance issues. See above wall of text. UB Reanimator hit critical mass with Entombs 5-8.

Edit: The increased quality of threats did it too. Atraxa and Archon are much harder to come back from than Griselbrand or even Iona.

[AnwarA101]

Entomb was perfectly fine in the format for years, as long as there wasn't another enabler.

UB Reanimator was broken exactly when a second 1-mana enabler existed: either Mystical Tutor or Troll (Entombs 5-8). In the period between, UB Reanimator wasn't even a tier deck. Entomb is very powerful but with just 4 copies there are major variance issues. See above wall of text. UB Reanimator hit critical mass with Entombs 5-8.

Edit: The increased quality of threats did it too. Atraxa and Archon are much harder to come back from than Griselbrand or even Iona.

I don't really disagree with anything that you are saying except that you seem to think that Mystical Tutor or Troll are what broke Entomb. That is one way to view the problem, but it isn't the way I would view it. Another way to say this is that Entomb when drawn and played is a huge problem for format, but it isn't draw often enough which makes the deck inconsistent but very powerful. Its best draws often are very difficult to beat except in cases of enough answers or hate to prevent it from winning immediately. The fact that the deck wasn't consistent made it manageable in the aggregate, but in specific cases of Entomb it was highly unmanageable.

While Mystical Tutor or Troll fixed the consistency problems with Renanimator and thus vaulting back into the best deck, it is hard to imagine the deck being anything serious without Entomb. Imagine a world where Mystical Tutor is unbanned, but Entomb is banned. In fact we don't have to imagine, the 5 years that Legacy existed with Mystical Tutor and without Entomb, Mystical Tutor barely saw any play. You'll also notice that none of the unbanned top-deck tutors see play in Legacy (Worldly, Enlightened).

Cards like Grief, Psychic Frog, Atraxa, and Archon all exacerbated the problem, but Entomb was made the card that made all those things worth doing because it cost so little and did so much. In short, Entomb is really close to Demonic Consultation except you don't have to remove the cards and the card goes into the exact zone (the graveyard) where you can Reanimate it. Mystical Tutor doesn't do that and neither do any of the other cards we've talked about it.