With the new Ban Ban and Restricted announcement, we have seen another missed opportunity to improve Magic and address its problems.

Magic: The Gathering is one of the most brilliant and complex games ever designed, and MTG Arena has made it more accessible than ever. However, I am increasingly frustrated by what feels like a lack of attention to the health of the formats and, more broadly, an inability to identify and address the root causes of the problems that are driving players away. I hope this feedback can be useful.

Unfortunately, even with the ban of Scholar of the Lost Trove, the problem persists — and in fact, the problem IS Persist. Instead of reducing the dominance of reanimator strategies, the ban has unleashed a wave of similar decks that are now extremely common, especially in Bo1. Moreover, they no longer rely on a single key card to assemble their combo: they run a long series of redundant pieces, making disruption much harder. That is why Persist in particular is so deeply problematic, as are Life // Death, Necromancy, and similar cards: they enable consistent turn-2 wins, which makes for an unhealthy and frustrating gameplay experience.

But the problems with the current Historic format go beyond Persist. There are now many other deeply problematic decks that consistently close games on turn 2, leaving me with no meaningful interaction unless I completely warp my deckbuilding around hate cards. On top of this, fast mana has ruined the format. Mono Red Storm plays essentially as a solitaire game, and the same is true for Balaustrade Spy and similar strategies. These decks do not play Magic — they execute a script, and the opponent is simply a spectator.

It is a shame, because the format is otherwise healthy and interesting. However, this issue risks ruining it, and more importantly, it severely limits deckbuilding creativity: in Bo1, every deck is effectively forced to dedicate 4 slots to Surgical Extraction just to have a chance against these strategies, and even Force of Negation barely makes a difference. This kind of constraint stifles diversity and punishes players who want to explore other archetypes. To make things worse, neither Surgical Extraction nor Force of Negation is a reliable answer for the same reason outlined above: no single piece of disruption is enough when the opponent can always find another way to close the game.

What makes this even more frustrating is a pattern I find impossible to ignore: to close on turn 2, these decks need two or three specific cards in their opening hand — and they consistently have them, far more often than probability would ever allow. I do not believe the shuffler is rigged, but it does appear to have an algorithmic issue. It was likely designed to ensure that any deck has a playable opening hand — a reasonable number of lands, creatures, and spells. The same logic appears to apply to matchmaking, which seems to systematically favour these strategies in order to keep games playable. The problem is that this now actively works against the health of the format: it effectively gifts combo decks their ideal setup, making their already unfair strategies even more consistent.

The result is that the majority of games are not games at all — they are long, tedious solitaires. There is no gathering, no interaction, no Magic. The format has lost its identity entirely. When I queue into a match, my only thought is to get out of the application as quickly as possible. This directly damages the platform itself: it kills the desire to play, and I find myself logging off rather than queuing for another game. This is not what Magic is supposed to be, and it is driving players like me away from the format.

My suggestions are twofold. First, ban more aggressively and more frequently than in paper Magic: Historic is a digital format and can afford faster intervention. The banlist should be reviewed at least every two weeks. Nerfs and buffs would also be welcome in this regard: they were an interesting and promising way to manage the format's balance without resorting to outright bans, but they seem to have been completely abandoned. It may also be worth considering whether Historic needs access to Daze: a free counterspell of this kind could provide a meaningful tool to interact with these strategies without requiring players to dedicate excessive deckbuilding resources to hate cards. Second, fix the shuffler and draw algorithm: as long as combo decks are gifted their ideal opening hands at an implausible frequency, no amount of banning will fully solve the problem.

A further sign of this general neglect is the deteriorating social environment within the application itself. Emotes, which were presumably designed to make games more enjoyable and interactive, are now used almost exclusively to mock and taunt opponents. Similarly, it has become extremely common for players to abandon games they are about to lose without conceding, forcing their opponents to sit through the entire time rope just to claim a victory they have already earned. These are not minor issues: they speak to a broader failure to moderate and maintain a respectful playing environment, and they make the experience increasingly unpleasant even when the gameplay itself is not the problem.
I believe that many of the format's issues could be significantly alleviated by a more responsive approach to balance: more frequent ban announcements, the reintroduction of nerfs and buffs, and a willingness to act quickly when certain strategies prove too dominant. Historic is a digital format, and that is precisely its strength — it can be updated and adjusted far faster than paper Magic. I hope that advantage will be used more actively going forward.