Seeker of Skybreak is banned pretty quickly from Pauper thanks to a few Marvel Super Heroes cards
On June 29th, Wizards of the Coast announced the latest updates to the Magic: The Gathering ban list, removing many cards that broke individual formats or otherwise hurt them.
According to Wizards, the newest banned cards are these in the following formats:
Legacy
Candelabra of Tawnos is banned.
Pauper
Seeker of Skybreak is banned.
Brawl
Force of Will is banned.
Subtlety is banned.
Wash Away is banned.
Ugin's Labyrinth is banned.
Time Warp is banned.
Temporal Manipulation is banned.
While many fans had speculated that dozens of cards could make the most recent banlist, only a handful were announced. Yet there were still a few surprises. for one, Candelabra of Tawnos saw it being rebanned after 27 years. In 1996, the card had actually been one of the original banned cards in the format, but had been unbanned three years later in 1999 because of a rules change. But, thanks in part to Tme Spiral being unbanned, Candelbra had to go.
But perhaps most surprising was the Seeker of Skybreak ban in Pauper. This was such an event this time around that Gavin Verhey himself wrote an entire article about it on the Magic site. When it comes down to it though, Verhey said it best - "Today, we are banning Seeker of Skybreak. This is because of a new combo that involves Seeker of Skybreak and Hawkeye's Bow that can kill extremely quickly. After reviewing the initial results, we thought it was better to take action on this combo now rather than let it play out throughout July and impact some upcoming large Pauper tournaments."
Basically, new Marvel cards, when combined with Seeker, does a lot of damage very fast. And the ban comes after only a few days of seeing people interact with it in pauper tournaments.
"In just a few days, this combo has already made a huge impact on the format," added Verhey. "The Naya Gates deck has won all three Magic Online challenges at the time of writing this article, and sideboards are full of cards to help fight against this deck. While it's far from unstoppable, as Lava Dart, a commonly played card, is extremely powerful against this combination (though the deck does run Prismatic Strands to fight that), and it's worth acknowledging that the play rate may be inflated right now and the metagame is far from settled, this combo does exert pressure on the format in a way we aren't the most happy with."
Normally Magic allows a card to marinate a bit longer, but because of Paupergeddon in Italy and Paupergenesis in the US, two of the largest Pauper tournaments, happening before the next scheduled ban date of August 10th, Magic took the nearly unprecedented move of a quick ban. It also didn't help that the price of the card spiked on the secondhand market as a result. Hence why Verhy needed to give a whole special announcement.
The next ban list update is expected to come on August 10th, less than a week before the release of The Hobbit set.
