Addendum Announcement Date: April 26, 2017

Standard:

Felidar Guardian is banned.

Effective Date: April 28, 2017

Magic Online Effective Date: April 27, 2017

For more information on how and when Magic Online will be implementing this change, see this post here.

The list of all banned and restricted cards, by format, is here.

Next B&R Announcement: June 14, 2017 (Effective date for that announcement will be June 19, after Grand Prix Las Vegas)

Felidar Guardian is being banned effective Friday, April 28.

Why are we making this call now and why didn't we make it in our regular B&R announcement on Monday? The answer is data. We knew going into Monday that the Saheeli-Felidar combo was a significant issue for Standard and were watching it closely. Our rationale for waiting was to make sure we only needed to take one and only one action to correct the Standard environment. Our plan was to monitor early play behavior and pro competition and make a call following Pro Tour Amonkhet.

Since the initial announcement, for the first time ever, we pre-released a new card set on Magic Online before the formal release date. This happened on Monday. What we expected to take a few weeks to understand has ended up taking two days to form a clear picture of a metagame unbalanced by the Copy Cat combo, as even its natural predator, Mardu Vehicles, fell behind. Couple this with consensus among a wide sampling of pros and feedback (and pizza) from our community and we decided to take action.

Saheeli-Felidar's win-loss ratio and metagame share has actually increased since the release of Amonkhet. In Magic Online Standard Leagues since Monday, Saheeli combo has made up approximately 40% of 5-0 and 4-1 decklists—up from prior to Amonkhet's release. While we never take decisions like this lightly and recognize this is a change from the norm, when a plurality of the data points in a clear direction, we will take action.

We also understand we shouldn't let combos like Saheeli-Felidar get out the door in the first place. For that we take ownership and are making changes to try to prevent this from happening again. But our highest priority is keeping Magic fun and enjoyable for our players. We believe this banning coupled with a number of internal testing process improvements will be significant steps toward making Standard the fun, dynamic format we all want it to be in perpetuity.

As always, we are looking for feedback. You can tweet @Wizards_Magic or me personally @mtgaaron, contact us on Tumblr, or contact customer support.