In case anyone didn’t see them in the Arena announcements. Coming in the October 10th patch.
From the announcements:
Orcish Bowmasters and The One Ring have been some of the strongest and most played cards in Alchemy and Historic since The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth™ was released. After letting the formats adjust to this release, we are rebalancing Orcish Bowmasters and The One Ring.
Orcish Bowmasters had no opportunity cost to be included in every black deck, and as a result, its enter-the-battlefield ability was pushing one-toughness creatures out of Alchemy and Historic. We want to maintain the card’s role as a counter to card drawing, so we are removing enter-the-battlefield effect to reduce its warping impact on the metagame.
The One Ring was too efficient at effectively winning the game with its sheer amount of card advantage. We are adding a mana to the activated ability to give players more time to execute their own strategy or interact with The One Ring before it takes over the game.
Interesting, this soft unbans mono white humans now and mono green devotion gets even better in historic. This is also a nerf to Yawg and the fact that Thalia is now playable again makes Kethis need to consider that card again.
Oh yeah, forgot that Mono-Green can run 12+ 1-mana dorks now. Wonder if anything’s gonna catch a nerf/ban or if that doesn’t change it enough given they already had Halfling/Utopia.
The Bowmasters change seems like it brings the card in line with what it should have been in the first place. It still hates on card-drawing, but it’s not a combat trick or instant-speed removal anymore.
Honestly though, they could have taken away the Amass ability too and I think it would still be playable, at least in sideboards.
Agreed, definitely still a viable sideboard card and would have also been good in Commander. The etb really just pushes it over the edge
Yea I agree. I played this in Dimir Control and now I just moved it to the sideboard. I think it will still be good against the control mirror, like Narset, at punishing card draw but what is crazy to me is that it seems like card draw is just gone from the format now. Most cards let you look at the top X and put them in your hand to avoid the insane card draw punishment they’ve been printing lately.
As much as I like drawing extra cards, I don’t like it when formats get to a point where you have to draw extra cards to compete. There needs to be space for decks that just draw one efficient creature every turn or so and attack with it. So I approve of there being some amount of draw hate. On the other hand, if you’re doing contortions to “put cards into your hand” instead of “drawing” them because of all the hate, that’s probably too much.
