WotC is disgustingly incompetent...and MtG won't be healthy until this company dies or is sold. Anyone with a drop of integrity is gone...or has become part of the problem.

The WOTC team having to ban Soul Cauldron because they can't ban any of the Final Fantasy cards

Wait....is that a known or simply a strongly suspected?

Suspected, since it took so long for them to ban The One Ring anywhere despite being known to be hugely oppressive

IZZZZEEETTT!!! (shakes fist)

Well, I might need to consider a different deck than Loot soup if cauldron gets banned.

If Vivi gets banned, it's hurts the deck a teeny bit, but not by a lot and honestly makes me have more fun tinkering with my three drop slot.

Personally bias being noted, I think Vivi needs to go unless Cauldron will be problematic with future Magic standard cards.

you're not wrong, tho. Vivi is the problem (huge color-pie break too imo)

Vivi is casually 62% of the meta

Vivi needed banned almost immediately. It's such a bonkers card it truly just boggles my mind why it is still running around.

I think the meta for this particular tournament is pretty inbred. I’ve been playing a ton of standard on both the ladder and in events and my experience, while anecdotal, is not even close to what is represented here.

Cauldron about to die for Vivi's sins.

Which sucks, because cauldron is awesome and interesting, where vivi is just nadu. Pretty broken in the context of standard and pioneer.

My nightmare scenario is that Proft’s Eidetic Memory gets banned to force the deck to rely on the combo and make it easier to hate out.

I know I will get hate for this but this is why I will never be a real standard player. They really optimize the fun out of it. Commander has so much random chance even with tutors and land fixing, it's much harder to get a consistent win since the variance is so wildly huge.

Well, one is a competitive format, and one is a casual format. It makes sense that the former is optimised, since it's a 1v1 format where your objective, above all else, is to win.

Double, double, Standard’s trouble, Cutter burn’d yet Cauldron bubble

WHO APPROVED THIS GRAPHIC?!! HDHDHDHDHDNDND

Standard is *MISERABLE* right now. I would love to see win rates on who is on the play vs. who is on the draw. I feel like the pace is so amplified that whoever goes first is winning about 60-65% of games. I'm getting a *LOT* of 'Did you have fun?' questions. They know something is broken.

Yeah I feel like just being on the draw is such a massive disadvantage it's crazy. So many games come down to the coin flip

Imma guess Cauldron gets Emergency banned ASAP

✨ F L O U R I S H I N G ✨

I really hope they ban Vivi over Soul Cauldron as I find playing against the later so much more interesting. At the same time, I can see many reasons why WOTC would want to keep Vivi around 😔

Vivi right now

Cauldron will be banned first.

Man, they're gonna ban my boy next aren't they...

Cauldron will take the hit first, I'm sure

is this the first tier 0 format standard has had? I know in the past we had aetherwork marvel but even then I don't think it was 100%

It's a really small sample size, its only 37 players, and you can't really take much from this small a sample. However, cauldron decks have been winning and putting up lots of numbers in top8 on MTGO challenges. More than likely, Vivi needs to go since that is the outlier card here.

I would wait until a spotlight series or a pro tour to actually make real predictions on standard right now. A 37 person tournament with a very tuned meta against itself isn't very useful in predicting it.

Said it the other day and I'll repeat it with my whole chest: Cauldron gotta go

I just heard @levdev.bsky.social crying somewhere...

Also...going from point this combo out when Vivi was originally revealed to now this....there is an element of amusement from that I will not lie.

Sigh ...I am still more of the Vivi train personally but cauldron is a silly card.

That being said....bias is within that previous statement.

Ban the enabler! There's an emergency ban window with the release of Spiderman, right?

Looks they missed a card lol

oop

Many Magic the Gathering players ask the question: Was it wrong to have a three-year rotation for Standard AND include every Universes Beyond release at the same time just all haphazardly?

i would expect a greater spread

guys i think this vivi card may have been a mistake

This is why I only play Commander and Limited. In my opinion, WotC doesn't plan around their constructed formats the way they should be. Power creep is a gross oversimplification of the negligence they show towards their own game. Profits over players, right @magic.wizards.com?

Standard being several years longer, rather then regular rotations, gives rise to new combos or interactions that need pruning or fixing. Forcing them to ban cards more often. I'd prefer no UB sets and faster rotation for standard myself. Easier for WOTC to catch problematic cards also.

Standard is still working out the growing pains of being a 3 year rotation instead of 2. It's easy to hate on a format that you don't play. This is a small event with 250k on the line, and the format only rotated a couple days ago. The format has yet to truly shake out. Lots of nuance here.

If this was a PT metagame, or a spotlight series with hundreds of people, then yes, it's an absurd graphic with these numbers. Its 37 people, it's smaller than a recent modern 1k that my lgs hosted. Its disingenuous to point to a small event and comment on a format without nuance.

I hear you, but this is the same story as MagicCon Vegas. Vivi was new so I stayed optimistic. This is not the direction I would hope it would go however

Magic con vegas was a much different story, and a much bigger and solved meta. I took a sabatacle from the format because of cutter. Steel cutter was the main culprit for that event, and had been the best deck for 3 months before vivi showed up.

Both cauldron and vivi were never designed to be legal at the same time, since sets are designed about 2 years out, and standard only went to a 3 year rotation last year. My guess is they ban something if the big events are dominated by vivi and cauldron are over.

I think this explanation is getting kinda old? Standard extension was announced in summer 2023, FIN (/Vivi) was released in Summer 2025, >2yrs later. Even if FIN design had been started, it probably would not haven been at the level of individual cards yet?

Sorry, i didn't see this somehow? I wanted to follow up with this point a bit. I don't think FF was designed for standard, since the previous sets were designed to go into modern, not standard. That only changed late last year. Vivi was for sure not designed for standard in mind. More commander.

I don't think the meta is quite as solved, and the format is only really 9 days old. Dimir midrange last year had something similar for an arena championship and it turned out to be fine. The format isn't as warped, there is counterplay here where there wasn't with cutter.

Bloody character limits...

If I've learned anything from the past few years of Magic, is that the one thing WotC doesn't understand is Magic.

We did it, we fixed standard!

This seems...bad. I hope this data doesn't continue in the coming events, and I don't even play Standard.