As you may or may not have recently heard Jace the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic have been banned effective July 1, 2011 in paper magic and June 29, 2011 on MTGO (Magic Online) . So what does this mean to the meta game? I can assure you that it will be interesting.
To start with it means no Caw-Blade, no Boros, no Blue Black control and no BUG. Doesn’t this mean a return to Valakut?
Do you remember Standard before Caw-Blade? The only deck that was winning was Valakut. Even Valakut vs. Vampires posts winnings of 59%+ and Valakut beats aggro decks at least 55% of the time. The only deck that was in Valakuts way was Caw-Blade with a 29% win. So, will the new burn/infect decks be enough? I doubt it.
As for the market, you can bet the prices are plummeting on Jace, The Mind Sculptors and Stoneforge Mystics, along with the price of the event deck “War of Attrition”, and last but not least a drop in the price of Batterskull.
So what has gone up while everything is going down? Well, on Magic Online the price of Primeval Titan went from 11 tix to 25 tix in the matter of hours after Wizards posted the banned cards. Just imagine when more people start to hear the news or, better yet, when the banning goes into effect.
Link to the ban list: http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/148a
*June 20, 2011: 11:51 AM Update: Primeval Titan goes from 25 to 31 on MTGO.
MTGOessentials 