Pioneer seems to be the most overlooked competitive format right now. Modern Horizons 3 didn’t go into Pioneer, Assassin’s Creed didn’t go into Pioneer. Now Bloomburrow has released and it seems to have had very minimal impact on the format.

While the format is a part of the high-level format trifecta, the other two being Modern and Standard, it sees very little attention. On top of that, players are frustrated with it for a myriad of reasons. Today, I want to delve into the gripes players, like myself, have with Pioneer and whether we can do anything about it.

The complaints about Pioneer | Magic: The Gathering

Let’s dig deeper into the issues players are expressing.

Pioneer's stale metagame

When thinking about Pioneer, one immediately thinks of Rakdos, Phoenix, Lotus, and UW. Am I talking about the metagame now? Well, yes. But also the metagame half a year ago, a year ago, two years ago …

The flavours do change - for instance now we have Rakdos Vampires, while in the past it was Rakdos Midrange. But it doesn’t change the fact that you have to play against Fatal Push, Thoughtseize, and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker every tournament.

On the one hand, you can reach true mastery with a deck as you could have played Rakdos, Phoenix, or Lotus so much. You can also have well-ironed-out plans, since you play against the same decks. On the other hand though, playing the same matchups over and over again, regardless of the time of the year or sets legal, gets boring fast.

It looks like the same format every time you look at it and the novelty has worn off a long time ago.

Pioneer's snowbally gameplay

One of the things players dislike is when games are decided very early with seemingly no control over what’s happening. You were on the draw? Too bad. Such criticism is typically associated with Legacy and Modern, as you can actually win on turn one or two. However, the key difference is that there is interaction to make it impossible and 'going for it' has a risk of walking into relevant interaction, swinging the game.

In Pioneer now, there are so many ways to actually win or essentially win on turn three with very few ways of stopping it, including the fact that there are very few risks associated with just going for it - and it’s becoming more and more so.

You had to mulligan on the draw? Well, the game might just be over for you on turn three.

• Lotus field is already set up
• Rakdos has Vein Ripper in play
• Phoenix is attacking you with a 2/4 Ledger and an Arclight
• Mono Green is generating 10 mana
• Amalia has board-wiped and is attacking for 20

So many things can go wrong so fast. While 'technically' there could be interaction to make it harder for the opponent, if you dare play your own two drop, you might just never participate in that game.

You’re coming back to Pioneer or maybe want to win an RCQ but you 'happen' to run into a couple of nut draws or lose a couple of dice rolls and I bet you’re not playing the format anymore. If two of such decks go against each other, games come down to who does their thing first. Two ships unhappily pass each other at night.

You can’t do anything in Pioneer

This point is very closely tied with the one above. However, it might manifest in other areas. The overall issue though is that even when the game is at parity, it’s just a step away from slipping away. If you play an interactive deck and your opponent lands Old-Growth Troll, you’re in trouble. You’re happy to kill the first three creatures that Amalia presents, you get Return to the Ranks-ed. Lotus Field is setting up but you can’t interact with lands but also can’t present a literal turn three kill (unless you can, then gg the other way round).

There are games that are interesting and engaging, but the very top of the metagame seems to consist only of linear strategies that want the opponent to be able to do as little as possible to it. I’ve already mentioned a couple of decks, but there is more - Quintorious literally doing nothing until it wins, Waste Not that rids you of resources completely, Convoke presenting four to six creatures on turn two, or creatureless UW control that wants to do nothing until 30 minutes later it starts attacking with a 2/2 Samurai.

Pioneer's problems: What could we change? | Magic: The Gathering

There are a couple of ideas of what to do. New sets clearly don’t affect the format much outside of single cards that slot into existing decks like Proft’s Eidetic Memory into Phoenix. The classic two approaches are bans and unbans.

When it comes to bans, it seems like you’d have to ban something from every single top deck. If you just ban Vein Ripper, Phoenix and Amalia will always reign supreme. Just Amalia? The reverse is true. But then how would players react if every single deck got a card banned out of it? Might severely affect customer confidence.

Back when Pioneer was new and fresh, Wizards had the approach of banning cards very quickly the moment they became problematic. They curated the list very sharply and it both kept the format fresh and under control. At some point there was a clear direction of banning all the combo decks - then we lost Kethis, Underworld Breach, Walking Ballista, Inverted. However, clearly that’s not the case now with so many combos present, which leads me to …

Unbans? We should make the banlist consistent whichever way. Ban out all the combos and make the format very fair or bring back cards that had been banned because of the then-true philosophy. This would shake the format up and give players a new start. However, bringing combo cards back might degenerate the metagame further.

So if unbans might degenerate the format further and bans would require like 10 cards to go, is there even a *good* solution? Well, it’s possible that we’ve gone so far now that we need to make drastic choices that are not that good so that we ensure better future.

I sleeve up Slogurk whenever I want to have fun in the format and it works out for me pretty well.

And as always please remember to hold my hand and pass the turn together!

Cheers!