06/01/2023 Banned and restricted announcement

Announcement Date:05/01/2023
Effective Date:06/01/2023

About this banned and restricted announcement

In the previous notice, we reported that there are “regular banned and restricted announcement that are given once every four months and +α that are given when they must be implemented urgently,” and this time it falls under the latter category.

First, Huge Leaders is currently banning the following cards.

  • Cards that “can be played for (generally) 7 mana or less and gain an extra turn instantly and reliably.”
  • Cards that have a bad reputation among the user community

Both of the two cards to be banned this time fall into the latter category. We recognize that the latter category does not necessarily require a high level of urgency, but it was also difficult to choose to leave these cards until August 1, the next scheduled ban announcement date.
Therefore, we decided to announce the banned restrictions as soon as possible and allow a grace period until the effective date of the ban. The purpose of this was to allow time to play with the banned cards and at the same time to gain insight into the environment after these cards were banned.

《Slicer, Hired Muscle》

In the previous announcement of the ban restriction, we were told that the commander was not yet at the stage where it should be banned, as there are plenty of ways to counteract it.

This commander is unique in all environments in the shallow history of Huge Leaders. It is clear that it distorts the environment, partly because it is necessary to include a card to counteract this leader as long as there is a possibility of his presence.
On the other hand, banning it easily is synonymous with depriving players of time for trial and error, so we basically try to observe the reputation of players to some extent before considering it.

There are two main reasons why we decided that slicers must be banned: their reproducibility and kill turn speed, which is far too high, and the quality of the play experience in an unprotected environment.

《Etali, Primal Conqueror》

It is a commander that, like Slicer, is essential to counteract, yet difficult to counteract on the other hand.

When this card was first announced, it was all too obvious that it would run rampant in Huge Leaders. However, when I compared the stable kill turns derived from research of players playing Huge Leaders competitively to the time it takes to play Etari out of the Leader realm, I was a bit optimistic because of the grace of counters and such. However, now that it has been a month since the release of March of the Machine, we recognize that we are in a situation where we must revise this prediction.

As mentioned above, the main difference with slicers lies in the difficulty of countermeasures. Once the resources were in place to cast Etari, there was no way to stop someone else from doing anything to stop it.
Possible countermeasures are counteracting or making it impossible to cast Etari in the first place. This is almost the equivalent of saying, “Commander that don’t include blue have little to no way to counter this card.

Around a month after the card’s pre-release, we investigated its reputation. As a result, we have come to the conclusion that this card must be removed as soon as possible.