r/planarMTG • u/PlanarOfficial • Aug 27 '26
News Results of the first Planar Standard Official Vote
Hi there Planar players!
Between the 12th and the 19th of July a vote was held on the Planar Standard Discord to decide the fate of two cards, Jeskai Revelation and Tablet of Discovery. Both ban proposals had been submitted following the Planar Standard Voting process, and thus the requests of enough active players had to be gathered to mark the cards as eligible for the vote.
The final results read as such:
- Tablet of Discovery : 62% against the ban, 38% pro ban
- Jeskai Revelation : 49% against the ban, 51% pro ban
Which once again, according to the official voting process, meant that while Tablet dodged the ban entirely, Jeskai Rev had to pass through a 1-month-long testing and analysis period, to determine whether it posed a threat to the health of the format. Well, today we publish the results of that month long period, in the form of a ban assessment document compiled by our top analysts Crypehead and Quadrangle.
For a quick TL;DR: we didn't find compelling evidence that the power level of Jeskai Revelation currently poses a threat to the balance of Planar Standard, at least when looking at the currently available data.
It's important to note that since the vote for JR was incredibly close, i decided early on to base the decision mostly on easy to acquire data, such as win rate against the field and meta share of decks using the card, instead of other important, but ultimately hard to acquire metrics, like the impact on the viability of fringe decks and on general deck and archetype variety.
Thus, we've decided that both Tablet of Discovery and Jeskai Revelation will NOT be banned as a result of this vote.
Thank you for reading,
EdoardoBeffardo
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u/Miguel_NorthMan Aug 27 '26
It's both great and sad to see that you guys have more sense and a seemingly more criterious approach to bannings that WotC has... Keep up the good work!
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u/WerdaVisla Aug 27 '26
I was gonna say, you can't just... give us a clear, well written and community supported reason for a ban! You're supposed to just ban and unban things out of the blue with no warning! :P
I love how well this community is run.
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u/Ossigen Aug 27 '26
WOTC can’t just go and publish their internal data like this, they have competitors and these competitors are ready to leverage anything to get ahead of them.
They’re also trying to protect their own interests to a certain extent: the planar standard team does not lose anything by banning a card, WOTC does lose potential sales if they ban a card too soon (especially since they plan sets 2 years ahead, and banning something now might make a next set mythic useless). They still have to run a business, they’re sadly not a charity.
WOTC might be doing these and even more things internally, you just would never know.7
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u/Miguel_NorthMan Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
Of course I understand that. But it's not about publishing their internal data. I don't care about seeing all the minute statistics and details. But I do care about them taking months to finally get to the same conclusion that the players were warning them for months, or to print problematic cards that you can see they're problematic as soon as they preview them. Of course I also understand that if they make an open poll to see if they should ban a card, it's going to be a sh*tshow, but they could make a smaller focus group with pro players, high volume players in Arena and/or the top ranked players at the moment, since they can provide invaluable information about the meta and the state of the game in a way that maybe their employees are not as qualified or aware. My point was, in a very purposely reductive and tong and cheek way, to applaud the way that the Planar team handles this and to say that maybe WotC isn't doing their best when it comes to balance standard. Which is the point of Planar's existence: standard isn't doing well, in a lot of points.
Edit: adding to the point of losing money for banning a card to soon, I think you're giving another reason to why they're bad at planning and handling these situations. There are 2 possible scenarios here: they either know that something like Cub or Vivi is broken right off the bat and still release it because they want to make money, or they don't know, which means they did poor testing and have poor decision making processes and filtering during the creation of a set. Take your pick, whatever it is, it's bad and it's their own fault.
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u/Ossigen Aug 28 '26
I don’t think that making a strong card on purpose to sell sets is bad.
If they release a set with no good (i.e. better than the current meta) cards in it, people will simply not buy it and WOTC will lose money. They HAVE to add very strong cards (the chases) in every set, that’s their whole business.
Additionally, I don’t really see your point: you say that the planarMTG guys have “more sense and [… a] more criterious approach to bannings that WOTC has” but it seems to me that they reached the same conclusion as WOTC in this case (i.e. not ban the two cards)?
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u/Komali92 Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
There should be good cards, not broken cards. Chase cards should be special treatments and special guest reprints, not problematic designs that most people can recognise as very potentially problematic at first read even before testing.
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u/Miguel_NorthMan Aug 28 '26 edited Aug 28 '26
But I didn't say releasing a set with good or strong cards is bad. I said releasing a set with obviously broken cards is bad. Broken doesn't mean good or strong, as much as a lot of players like to throw around that term lightly whenever they see a great card. Broken means 2 mana creature animates a land, make mana dorks tap for 2 mana and warp an entire format around it. Broken means 3 mana, put a counter and ping your opponent every time you cast a non creature spell and tap for a ridiculous amount of mana. This sure makes people spend their money savings on a playset or packs, but it sure doesn't make a format healthy.
If you don't see my point, then you didn't read the entire comment, because I had a whole sentence starting with "My point was"...
Here it is again: My point was, in a very purposely reductive and tong and cheek way, to applaud the way that the Planar team handles this and to say that maybe WotC isn't doing their best when it comes to balance standard. Which is the point of Planar's existence: standard isn't doing well, in a lot of points.
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
That wasn’t a Tap for mana- that was free generation of mana on Vivi. Tap would have made it a little bit more manageable even under cauldron. The thing that made Vivi so broken was the 0: instead of a tap. You could play 10 spells and still attack with everything you had if that didn’t quite get you there.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Aug 28 '26
What internal data? They haven’t even published how many people voted. Just the rate.
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u/Edoardo_Beffardo Aug 28 '26
52/85 for Tablet, 96/92 for Jeskai Rev.
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u/InanimateCarbonRodAu Aug 28 '26
lol. Really got your fingers on the pulse of the magic player base.
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u/Edoardo_Beffardo Aug 28 '26
I'm sorry, are you out here posting in a subreddit for a format you apparently don't even play or are interested in? Sounds like there would be more productive uses of your time.
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
We don’t need to have our pulse on the magic player base just the people that play our format. We were not polling for banning this in big standard.
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u/Crimson_Raven Aug 27 '26
I approve of the process.
A vote gives people a voice, and then a testing phase validates the results
It's interesting to note, this bears out in the metagame results of Standard.
Landfall is quickly rising while these two cards have been exactly whelming: they have a meta share that's present but healthy.
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u/killian1208 Aug 28 '26
To be fair, what makes landfall so powerful in regular standard is a significant amount of UB cards, notably Avatar, Final Fantasy and even a little Marvel and now Hobbit.
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
Landfall in Planar is pretty much just Mightform Harmonizer combo which is still pretty strong.
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u/GhostGuin Aug 27 '26
Very interesting thanks for the transparency.
I think Jeskai Rev is a very polarizing card which is unfun to play against with janky creature builds.
I think it loses out in a straight vote due to people voting cause they dislike it personally rather than actually being a format outlier.
I therefore really appreciate the data used to make that decision
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u/United-Passage7864 Aug 27 '26
Revelation being able to bounce any permanent or spell really hurts. When they pass with Revelation mana open you're kind of cooked: put anything consequential on the stack and it's getting remanded, but if you don't they can just bounce one of your lands on endstep.
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u/BABOOWIE Aug 27 '26
I havent participated in planar, but I really enjoy JR in my standard jeskai control deck on arena. Would be sad to see it go. I really do like that kind of playstyle. I understand why people feel blown out by that card though lmao
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u/GhostGuin Aug 27 '26
I need to build a jeskai control deck - I either play jank creature decks that get hosed by it or my UB Faeries Control deck in reg Standard that is a lot of fun just to deny people.
I know why people hate against it buy counter spell stock up removal counter spell opponent concedes is genuinely one of my favourite play patterns
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u/MixPuzzleheaded3298 Aug 27 '26
Wow a player vote AND a data driven decision!? Holy cow!
Jokes aside, I'm surprised to see JR hit a higher vote than Tablet. Is JR still that good without Gran to reduce the casting cost by a ton?
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
Planar is still a slower format. There are few T4 wins here. Tablet makes Rev possible on T5 which is right when mid range starts coming into its own. The data showed that people who played it T5 typically won but also that a T5 play was fairly rare. This seems consistent with what you would expect from a Planar aggro deck winning on T4. It happens but not oppressively often.
If Rev could be cast any faster than that it would be a real problem because then a T5 cast would become more consistent and problematic In teh same way that an Aggro deck (like Cub) having a possible win on T3 makes T4 win more consistent in big standard.
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u/DirteMcGirte Aug 27 '26
I havent played standard planar or otherwise in awhile. What does tablet do that would make it ban worthy?
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u/PlanarOfficial Aug 27 '26
The short version is that it's an exceptionally good accelerant, thanks to entering untapped and tapping for 2 mana, and hard to interact 1:1 with thanks to the impulse draw.
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u/United-Passage7864 Aug 27 '26
Tablet is a really powerful mana acceleration piece that's hard to get ahead of.
While it costs 2R to get down, it enters untapped and can produce RR for instants & sorceries, so the player isn't fully tapping out to ramp: with Sear or similar they can absolutely still have removal up.
It also gives access to another card for a turn, so it's frequently played on 4 to maybe "draw" a land, or if you hit a useful spell, play a land from hand and cast the spell if time permits. Even if you can't use the spell right away, milling the card is often beneficial.
When one has a finisher as strong as Jeskai Revelation in the deck, getting to it two turns sooner is really really good.
It has a bit of the Up the Beanstalk problem at times: if you're playing against it, you can both see that it's valuable to its controller and yet it's probably not worth spending a card or time removing, particularly if Tablet's controller got a card out of it. If you're the aggro deck trying to close before Revelation slams the door in your face, casting an Abrade to get rid of Tablet's also probably not helping you get there. It's not as egregious as Beans was but there's similarities for sure.
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u/Necrocrawler72 Aug 27 '26
The ramp it produces helps control a lot.
I don't play planar standard, but i can imagine that 4c control is a force there by going tablet t3 and [[together as one]] t4 for a possible 4 - 5 card draw, while enabling JR at the next turn.
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u/maddiecolon3 Aug 28 '26
I feel that more people voting to ban Jeskai Revalation than Tablet of Discovery says a lot of concerning things about the average player's ability to judge this sort of thing
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
I think people recognize that Tablet has the potential to be broken but so far Rev was the closest thing there was to making it so in Planar. At the time the vote was taken there were not many decks even running it that had made Tier 1 meta. Now there are at least 2 and these decks aren’t winning until T5 or 6 at the earliest.
The format is full of brewer’s and Tablet enables a lot of decks that pepole want to play with. It would make sense that they would vote against banning a card they are considering or playing in their brews.
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u/maddiecolon3 Aug 28 '26
My thing is just that rev is a completely fair card they requires you to be in 3 colors to fast and can't do so until you have 7 mana. 7 mana cards are supposed to be good. Because of the way it interacts with its opponents board I think it draws a lot of salt and is therefore dubbed "overpowered" by less competitively experienced players.
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u/rasone77 Aug 28 '26
I was on the testing team and 100% agree with you. But even with Tablet the number of times I personally cast it on T5 was small. Like maybe 3 out 15 games. (I don’t remember the exact data), the ramp helps for sure but it’s not like it turbocharged the deck.
Because the deck is also pip heavy and mana cost heavy the number of times I milled a card to tablet that I couldn’t play was higher than the number of times I milled a card I could.
Overall- I think Tablet will prove to be troublesome long term but right now it doesn’t work well in the deck that needs it the most.
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u/ButterscotchLow7330 Aug 28 '26
This is true. Jeskai Revalation is fine if you don't cast it on turn 5. Tablet is a huge issue.
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u/Bigboysama Aug 27 '26
I'm happy at least it's in the ban window. Even though I personally think they should be ban, I truly believe that banning cards with that few sets is going to hurt the format a lot.
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u/Rederth Aug 27 '26
Good call