More specifically, Wizards has announced that the following four cards will be “suspended” in Historic as of tomorrow, December 12: Once Upon a Time, Field of the Dead, Veil of Summer, and Oko, Thief of Crowns. While many Magic: The Gathering players are familiar with the concept of bans, as they relate to MTG’s constructed formats, “suspension” is a new concept that requires a bit of explanation.
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From a gameplay perspective, suspensions function identically to bans, which means that the four aforementioned cards will not be playable in Magic: The Gathering Arena’s Historic format starting tomorrow. However, while bans are typically considered definitive, though cards are removed from the ban list on occasion, suspensions are temporary actions, and all four of these cards will be removed from the suspension list by March 2020.
Upon their removal from the suspension list, there are two options for these cards: they can either reenter the pool of playable cards or receive a permanent ban. Indeed, WotC states that it does expect at least some of these cards to be reintroduced into Historic, and players may thus find themselves facing them down again by the time that Historic Anthology 2 is released.
With respect to the cards targeted by these suspensions, none of them are likely to surprise players that have been following bans over the last several months, as all four are currently banned in MTG’s Standard format. Furthermore, three of the four are now banned in Pioneer, which really speaks to the power level of these cards. While Wizards suggests that “appropriate answers or countermeasures” to some of these powerful cards will eventually be available in Historic, it is hard to imagine exactly what those answers would be.
Magic: The Gathering Arena is available on PC.
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Source: Wizards of the Coast
