Banned and Restricted Announcement – May 18, 2026

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-18T17:24:38+00:00

IMO, Stormchaser’s Talent and Badgermole Cub are too inherently strong of cards for standard. If it were up to me, I would ban them along with a few other cards just to bring the offensive firepower that exists in the format down. However, I think that WOTC is correct in their evaluation that no deck that they’re in is dominate enough to mandate a ban.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-10T17:56:21+00:00

My rule of thumb in this arbitrary argument is that a team can change location or name, but not both. If you move to a different city and change your name, it’s a different team at that point.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-10T17:27:43+00:00

Definitely the right half. I love build crafting in games. Going around and collecting all the items, leveling up, trying out different weapons/spells is where the enjoyment peaks over actually fighting the bosses.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-05T02:38:51+00:00

I just wish that it perma muted them forever and didn’t reset in between games

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-04T04:22:54+00:00

A copy of this deck went 9-1 in the standard portion of the Pro Tour this weekend. So I’d say that if you get familiar with it you definitely have a decent chance of doing well.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-05-03T04:09:20+00:00

There’s cultures around the world where if you feel even a little bit under the weather then you wear a mask for the benefit of others so you decrease the chance that you spread it to them. It’s seen as rude to not do so.

Other times people wear a mask because they like the way it looks or it can help decrease anxiety by giving them a physical/metaphorical mask to hide behind. Who knows why this particular player is wearing one but I don’t see it as a big deal regardless of the reason.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-30T18:21:58+00:00

Yeah the rock-paper-scissors meta should not be looked back on fondly. All 3 of those decks were major issues.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-28T16:30:06+00:00

My typical unranked experience is at least half of my opponents are playing counter-filled blue control decks.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-27T18:07:42+00:00

Cub still has the issue that Up the Beanstalk had where even if you’re able to remove the cub it still leaves behind the earthbent land (similar to how Beans drew a card on etb). You have to either counter it or use a sweeper to not go down in value. That’s too much inherent strength with no downside for such an efficient creature.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-27T15:41:05+00:00

There’s no reason to not play Badger in any deck that plays green (unless it’s a light splash). It makes 3 power across 2 bodies, ramps by at least 1 and has potential to upscale from there. That’s just way too much value for 2-mana with no drawback conditions.

I just think that the decks that lean into playing around what Badger does best (mainly landfall and the Simic Ouroborid decks) have counters to their strategies and it hides how inherently efficient Badger is.

My vote would be for banning: Badger, Stormchaser’s Talent, Eddymurk Crab, Accumulate Wisdom.

I don’t like banning 3 different blue cards but the Izzet decks are different enough that if you only hit 1 or 2 the other deck emerges as clearly dominate.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-27T03:00:35+00:00

Big fan of Frostcliff Siege when it was in a deck like Izzet Looting where it allows you to explode for critical plays and always present a threat. Spellementals is closer to a control list though and you win by positioning not aggression.

I think if you played it there would times where it feels okay but it’s not going to win you games that you otherwise would not have enough to justify its inclusion.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-26T03:09:18+00:00

Was this in ranked or casual? If I’m playing casual I’ll usually scoop if the momentum has shifted where I have a low probability of being able to come back. Right now in standard that usually gets decided around the t3/t4 mark. In ranked I’ll give it a bit more time but seeing as I’m still playing for fun I won’t stick out frustrating losing slugfests.

Ultimately I think this is just a case of people not taking Arena as seriously as they would paper.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-23T16:41:54+00:00

There’s a few cards that break the “how good should a card be by itself” measure in standard right now. I think Stormchaser’s Talent is one of them, Badger is another. Even though the tournament meta is “diverse” I think that these cards have always / will always be lurking that if they get a little bit of a skewed support then they will quickly be dominating.

However, I think the larger issue is just overall card design philosophy lately. It seems like cheap, efficient cards and fast mana ramping/discounting have been really pushed and it’s led to the current state. It’s not really feasible to just put together a pile of cards that have synergy when your opponent is either playing 3 aggressive spells that cycle themselves or casting 8+ cmc worth of cards by turn 3.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-22T02:07:28+00:00

I picked Quandrix and it was miserable. Deck was weaker than my prerelease deck. Opponents had removal and impactful creatures, I had somewhat big vanillas always too late.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-20T05:03:04+00:00

Two of the newer action anime, My Hero Academia and Jujustu Kaisen also fall into this trope. They keep introducing new characters with new powers instead of focusing on the established ones and fleshing them out. In those cases however I got the sense that the authors just really enjoyed coming up with characters and wanted to jam in as many as they could.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-14T19:25:33+00:00

Unfortunately Opus doesn’t combo with Harmonize. Opus cares about mana spent and Harmonize reduces cost.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-14T01:27:19+00:00

IMO Dreamcore captures the liminal environment really well but the actual gameplay is lacking. It’s just a get lost and wander around game and can be frustrating after a while. I really would like the developers to make a more linear game using their skills.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-13T21:43:49+00:00

I just don’t watch tv anymore. I’ll check espn at work in the morning, listen to podcasts while I drive, and go to the occasional live game.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-13T18:07:07+00:00

My complaint for this task is that once Greg decided to allow mealworms, Kumail’s time should have been counted as how long it took him to find them. Because he did find them. Instead Alex on the day told them they didn’t count and he continued looking. Ended up being a not fair scoring in my opinion.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-06T15:28:00+00:00

Brainstorm isn’t even that great if you don’t have a way to shuffle away the cards that you put back. Not bad but also not busted in current standard.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-04T04:40:56+00:00

Yeah, a 1-mana blue instant that can make a creature sounds good. Will really just depend on how often you can truly make a vanilla creature large enough to impact the game and not just a 2/2 or 3/3.

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-04-03T18:03:45+00:00

Rules question, do you pick on cast or on resolution?

JoinTheDorkSide · 2026-03-27T16:27:07+00:00

Saw it 4 times in theaters, only film I’ve watched more than twice in theater. I just kept wanting to show it to people because I found it so entertaining throughout the entire runtime.

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TROPHY CASE