Summary

Effective Date: August 5th, 2024
Next B&R: September 2nd, 2024

Creative Shock is removed from the watch list. Corhazi Outlook moves to Category 2. Stonescale Band receives an errata in Proxia's Vault and is put into Category 1. The prior version of Stonescale Band will not be allowed in tournament play.

The Watchlist only contains cards that were either previously legal in the Standard format or are currently legal for Standard.

See the entire list of banned cards here.

First, we'll go over changes to Stonescale Band. We initially sought to design this regalia to compesate for Tera's weak presence among the other advanced elements. However, after evaluating the evolving meta and observing the presence of various decks, we realized we’d overcompensated this lack in the design of Stonescale Band. We want Proxia's Vault to serve deck flexibility rather than to definitively push certain strategies. As a result, we are making an errata to Stonescale Band, increasing the cost by 1 for both the card and its activated ability, and making the ability only apply to the next ally activated instead of all allies for the turn. Official printings of Stonescale Band will contain the "new" text.

About Proxia's Vault

As a reminder, Proxia's Vault is a new way we're addressing specific meta issues by releasing cards that players are allowed to proxy, even for use in competitive events. Read about the Proxia's Vault policy here:

Watchlist

Category 3

This category will contain all cards that are banned and restricted, proving to be too powerful or too impactful and limiting tournament deck diversity and meta health. Currently, Sword of Avarice, Reckless Conversion, and Crystal of Empowerment are banned. There are no changes to this category at this time.

Category 2

This category contains cards that we consider very problematic and are heavily watched for potential future legality changes and category shifts. Corhazi Outlook is upgraded to Category 2 as of this B&R.

During the last B&R, we cited concerns about the accessibility of preventing interaction through Corhazi Outlook from the perspective of game design. Now that the competitive meta has evolved and we have more perspective, we are moving Outlook to Category 2 to parallel our concerns regarding limitations of design space and the interactive components of Grand Archive. As we've mentioned in the past, we want to encourage healthy strategic diversity in decks across the meta and as it evolves through the future. While we do feel that there is a place for preemptive protection effects, Outlook might set a poor precedent for our objective with these kinds of effects.

Category 1

This category consists of cards that we don’t consider problematic in the current environment, but are unhealthy for future balance and game design space. This category currently has four cards with movement of Corhazi Outlook, the removal of Creative Shock, and the addition of Stonescale Band.

Creative Shock is a card that we have had concerns over since the launch of Grand Archive with Dawn of Ashes. Initially, we were concerned about its presence in Fire decks and its ability to churn through decks with far higher efficiency compared to other/similar options available in the other basic elements. The card pool has significantly expanded since then and our design goals for greater balance and presence among the other basic elements have also been largely met. We no longer feel that Creative Shock has the possibility to warp metas as we initially thought it might and, for that reason, it is being removed from the Watchlist.

As previously mentioned above, Stonescale Band was meant to be a regalia that would improve deck flexibility and variety among Tera tamer decks. It is clear that we overshot the design goal from this aspect. As the card is in Proxia's Vault, it is not too much of an issue to "fix" the design, however, we do want to acknowledge the design of Stonescale Band as potentially problematic in terms of what we wanted to accomplish with the design. As such, we will continue to monitor this card in meta and have placed it in Category 1 to reflect this.

That's all for this B&R update! The next update will be on September 2nd, 2024 leading up to Ascent Singapore!