Why is cranial plating banned

Illustrated by Christopher Rush. Illustrated by Kev Walker. When Sundering Titan enters or leaves the battlefield, choose a land of each basic land type, then destroy those lands. Illustrated by Grzegorz Rutkowski. The mizzium-sphere array drove her mind deep into the thought field, where only the rarest motes of genius may be plucked.

Illustrated by Willian Murai. He watches from below. He watches from within. Illustrated by Martina Pilcerova. Then exile it. Illustrated by Gabor Szikszai. Illustrated by Adam Rex. Whenever enchanted player casts a noncreature spell, roll a d6. Maddening Hex deals damage to that player equal to the result. Then attach Maddening Hex to another one of your opponents chosen at random. Illustrated by Bryan Sola. Until end of turn, any time you could activate a mana ability, you may pay 1 life.

Illustrated by Rebecca Guay. Flashback—Sacrifice three creatures. You may cast this card from your graveyard for its flashback cost.

Skip to main content Skip to footer. Scryfall Search for Magic cards Find Cards. Safety Zone. Previous View Next Find Cards All prints Unique art. Sort direction Auto Asc Desc. Search with these options. Add to Deck. While most formats are arguably in a somewhat reasonable spot - especially after the last announcement that saw both Modern and Vintage heavily impacted - Pauper is in a bit of a tougher spot.

You see, Jeskai has been putting up quite a bit of a strong showing lately. It's not winning too many events necessarily although it did win the Magic Online Pauper Challenge this past weekend but it's showing up a lot nonetheless. It's become very common for the deck to take up half of the Top 8 and even the Top 16 of events.

This has become concerning for a number of players, although some say it's still fine. Aggro decks can beat it, as seen by decks like Bogles, Stompy, and Elves coming out on top over Jeskai in a number of events, but the overall numbers still lend to concerns of format health. There are those who would like to see certain cards banned from the deck to take it down a notch or else get it out of the format completely. These days, the ban discussions revolve around two cards: Arcum's Astrolabe and Ephemerate.

It's hard to say anything with regards to Arcum's Astrolabe that hasn't been said at this point. In July I wrote a piece talking about the issues with the card in the context of the Pauper metagame and I still stand by everything in the article.

Since then, numerous other writers and content creators have given their thoughts on the card. Some want it to stay, some want it gone, others are on the fence or else wouldn't mind either way. The discussions about the issues with the card extend even past Pauper, with talks of it being too good in Modern and Legacy.

Even renowned hall of famer Luis Scott-Vargas tweeted about how the card is a mistake. So as not to repeat myself too much at this point, I'm instead going to mention Ephemerate. What's causing the issue with this card and why is it such a big deal?

When people first saw the card, most thought it was neat that we were basically getting Cloudshift with rebound, but most players didn't think it would see much play. Cloudshift saw and still sees zero play after all, and if you really want to be flickering then you should probably be playing Ghostly Flicker.

As it turns out, one mana is much better than three, even if it's slower to play out. You can use this extra mana to hold up countermagic, removal, and more, allowing you to play a much longer, controlling game.

All of these plays lead to some really intense card advantage that makes it hard for players to battle back. The reasons aggro decks have been having some success against these decks are two-fold.

The biggest is that they go under Jeskai before it goes off and locks down the game. The other thing that has helped is the new tools that these decks got. Goblins put up some numbers for a hot second and it's no surprise given that the deck had Goblin Grenade added to its repertoire. Stompy got the arguably bigger addition with Savage Swipe - both a pump spell and removal all in one!

So what should happen? Ultimately I do believe something should be banned. Nothing good can come from having one deck repeatedly perform in such high numbers week after week. While I personally feel both should go, I think there's a reasonable claim that it might be fine to just hit Ephemerate first and see where things land - even if the homogenizing effects of the Astrolabe aren't great on the format.

Either one is fine by me, but I think at the very least it's time Jeskai got knocked down a peg. That having been said, there is also a pretty sizeable portion of the community that wants to see cards unbanned in Pauper instead of banning cards.

The argument here is that giving the format access to old powerhouses might take down the big decks a peg or two while still being somewhat manageable to battle back against. As such, I'm going to take a look at every single card currently on the Pauper ban list and explain whether or not I think it's safe to unban. Let's have a look! The reasons for this one having been banned should be pretty obvious to anyone who has seen Affinity in action not only in Pauper but in Modern, Legacy, and its original Standard forms.

Giving such a dramatic buff to your creatures for very little investment can be backbreaking, especially for a deck like Affinity that already throws out one heavy hitter after another. It wouldn't be hard to swing in once with a creature that has Cranial Plating on it and connect for lethal.

It even makes Fling better since you can throw any creature and unlike with Atog you don't need to lose your whole board and risk it getting hit with a counterspell, damage prevention, or similar.

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Magic: the Gathering Competitive. Losing to Temporal Fissure was the worst. It's like losing to Capsize , except your opponent can set it up to bounce every permament you control to your hand all in one turn. I'm glad this card isn't in the format. I'm glad Cloudpost is gone. Call me salty, but these were just not fun cards. Moral of the story: Give a control player access to infinite mana and they will find a miserable way for you to lose.

Round 4 March :. Like all eternal formats, Pauper suffers from a color imbalance. The reality is that best draw and filtering spells are all in blue. While Modern severely limits which cantrip spells one can play by drawing the line at Serum Visions , Legacy opens the door with cards like Brainstorm , Ponder and Preordain.

Pauper players get access to all three of these plus one more recently banned Modern card in Gitaxian Probe. And these four cards, even in absence of true fetchlands are the reason why a card like Treasure Cruise can't be in Pauper. With it in the format, blue is just too good. Blue Delver can run Treasure Cruise. Any blue deck is better with Treasure Cruise.

Round 5 January :. Cloud of Faeries. The most important turn in Pauper is turn 2. Thanks to its Faerie buddy Spellstutter Sprite , the turn two Cloud of Faeries with two island untapped was about the equivalent of having a Chalice of the Void in play or better yet a Trinisphere on just your opponent that until you had multiple answers in hand, you couldn't safely play a spell that cost 1 or 2 mana!

And that was only the fair deck applications of Cloud of Faeries. But the combo deck applications of the card are really what pushed it over the edge. Like we saw with Frantic Search , the free spell mechanic on proactive cards is broken.