Announcement Date: July 20, 2017

Effective Date: August 18, 2017

Standard format:

No new cards are banned in the Standard format.

Expanded format:

Forest of Giant Plants (XY—Ancient Origins, 74/98) is now banned in the Expanded format.

Archeops (Black & White—Noble Victories, 67/101; Black & White—Dark Explorers, 110/108) is now banned in the Expanded format.

Shiftry (Black & White—Next Destinies, 72/99) is no longer banned in the Expanded format.

The list of banned cards for the Standard and Expanded formats can be found here.

Rule Changes:

No new rule changes have been made.

Next Announcement Date: October 20, 2017

Details of Changes

No cards were banned from the Standard format. It will be an extremely rare occurrence for cards to be banned from the Standard format.

Three changes were made to the banned list for the Expanded format in order to maintain a fun and healthy play environment. The reasoning for each of these changes is below:

Forest of Giant Plants: The Forest of Giant Plants Stadium card enables many dangerous strategies with Grass-type Pokémon in the Expanded format. These strategies can range from locking down the opponent's options to winning the game on the first turn, and all of them can happen before the opponent ever gets a chance to play. No single strategy was powerful enough to ban this Stadium card, but so many of them existing at the same time gave sufficient cause to ban it.

Archeops: The existence of Archeops's Ancient Power Ability has a very negative effect on decks that rely on evolved Pokémon. There are ways to combat it—Hex Maniac, Evosoda, or Wobbuffet are a few examples—but decks that focus on evolved Pokémon are forced to use these cards just to evolve their Pokémon. The combination of Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick with Archeops can stop Evolution before the opponent ever gets a chance to evolve their Pokémon, which limits the number of viable strategies. Removing a different part of the combo (Maxie's Hidden Ball Trick or Battle Compressor was also considered, but banning Archeops impacted existing strategies the least, so that was the route that made the most sense.

Shiftry: Shiftry was banned from the Expanded format because of an unhealthy combo with Forest of Giant Plants. Since that card is now banned, Shiftry has been reinstated into the Expanded format.

Tournament results will continue to be analyzed. In particular, the Expanded format will be aggressively monitored because there are so many cards and potential combinations available to players.