Watch/Ban List Updates 9/12/17

This announcement is earlier than our normally scheduled announcements, I’ll get into why in more detail shortly, but for now let’s cover the big piece that you’re all here for:

As of Monday, September 18th Pacific, Lazgar’s Vengeance will be banned in Standard.

Lazgar’s Vengeance has proven to be too much. We’ve been watching it closely this past month, and we believe it has been a primary factor in limiting the metagame by preventing innovation and churn. Outside of Mono Blood and Sapphire Diamond, very few other decks can compete with what Lazgar’s Vengeance has been able to put out in terms pressure, thereby making it too difficult for decks with two to four cost troops to compete. This prices a complete archetype out of the metagame. As we mentioned when we first put Lazgar’s Vengeance on our watchlist, midrange is an important part of a healthy TCG ecosystem. We want to see decks of all varieties flourish, and when aggro decks have access to a card that destroys the majority of troops most archetypes can play, it’s unhealthy.

We’ve given people time to adapt to Lazgar’s Vengeance in Standard, and while some have experimented with newer strategies to fight the card, in the end Vengeance decks continued to perform too well. As such, we’ve determined that the best thing to do for format diversity is to remove the card for the time being. This will give everyone a new fresh format to explore and play with before the release of our next set.

We’ve moved this announcement up from its regularly scheduled time for two reasons. First, we’re launching on Playstation 4 soon. We didn’t want to wait weeks for this announcement and hit players just learning the game and starting to collect for the first time with a ban on cards they just bought. We want everyone to have an enjoyable and stable experience with HEX.

The second reason is that we’re going to start making Ban/Watch list announcements every month. We want to be able to take action on cards more quickly and, more importantly, give you some more of our thoughts on the metagame. While we believe it is very important for the community to find its own way and develop a natural meta, at our hearts we’re also HEX players. We have tons to passionately talk about, and this gives us a way to do so which we hope will also be helpful and interesting for the community. We want to be engaged with the wonderful deckbuilding you guys do on a regular basis, and this gives us another avenue to highlight new decks, emerging deckbuilders, and awesome strategies along the way. Thus, going forward, the first Monday of every month (starting with November), we’ll post up a Ban/Watch list announcement and keep you up to date with all of the latest constructed action.

See you in the battlegrounds!

~Corey Burkhart

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