If you’ve spent any time in SWU circles the past few weeks, you’ve watched meta balance become a frequent topic all over again, and of course Cad Bane / Blue 30 are the reason why. The showing has been strong enough that suspension is getting floated as a real possibility, not just internet chatter.
But suspension isn’t the only tool on the table, and I want to talk about the other one making the rounds. Several creators lately have been talking about restriction as an alternative, going that route instead of straight to suspension for everything. And it’s not just Cad Bane in the conversation either. Chimaera, Pre Vizsla, Marrok, even the Imperial Armored Commando have all entered the discussion at various points. And there is a case for using restriction to break up some of the other strong cards in the format too.
Here’s the version getting the most airtime from some of the other shows I’ve checked out: a single restricted card per deck. So if Chimaera and Pre Vizsla both landed on a list, you could still play one of each.
Let’s be real here though, I think that’s a bad way to balance the metagame, and the reason is simple. It increases RNG. This isn’t just a hunch. Design writers have mapped it out as a frequency-and-impact grid, and the ugliest square on that grid is low-frequency, high-impact randomness, which is exactly what a rules-mandated 1-of restricted card creates. That’s the square where blowouts and sore losers live. It doesn’t eliminate the overpowered combinations or play lines, it only makes them more rare. That’s just putting a bandaid on a problem instead of fixing it. The thing still exists. It can still come up in games. And then you get players frustrated at random draws when they can’t find the piece they needed, or opponents having a negative play experience when you do get the Chimaera or what have you, followed by the inevitable “Ugh, I had this game if you hadn’t drawn that Pre Vizsla.” Sure, players can already say that today. But the vitriol and the NPE goes up as the impact of random play goes up right alongside it.
And that’s just the casual read on it. It bears repeating for the competitive integrity side too — in a tournament between two very good players, do you actually want games coming down to whether someone happened to draw their one copy? I’d argue there’s a real difference between a single copy that’s a calculated tech choice on a player’s part and a single copy that’s rules mandated. One’s a decision. The other’s a coin flip somebody else built into the format for you.
Mark Rosewater has made basically this same case from the deckbuilding side of things. His stated design philosophy for Magic is blunt about it, lower variance for tournament play because skill needs to stay the deciding factor, raise it for casual play because that’s where randomness is fun. Commander’s built as a singleton format for exactly that reason and we have Twin Suns to mimic that. Competitive Premiere isn’t Commander, and I don’t think it should start borrowing Commander/Twin Sun’s math.
Ok, so where does that leave restriction as an idea? It’s not dead, in my opinion, just poorly shaped in the form I’ve been hearing about. I come from an FFG card gaming background, mostly A Game of Thrones, and that game ran a different flavor of restriction for many years that I think handled this a lot better. It restricted combinations, not cards. Anything on the Restricted List couldn’t be played alongside another card also on that list. You’d select the one you wanted for your deck, and from there you could play however many copies of it you wanted, up to a full playset.
That model slightly alters deckbuilding, but it preserves gameplay, and I think that’s the superior tradeoff. The card stays as strong as it was in a vacuum and you can still preserve deckbuilding choice. What changes is just what you’re allowed to build around it.
The one knock on that system back in the AGOT days was list bloat, the worry that the Restricted List gets too long and unwieldy for players to track over time. SWU has a built-in fix for that one already, conveniently enough. The bulk of competitive play lives in Premiere, and rotation offers an easy solution here, trimming the list down on a regular schedule instead of letting it sprawl for years the way AGOT’s eventually did.
None of this settles the Cad Bane question on its own. That’s a separate conversation, and a fair one to keep having. But if restriction is going to keep coming up as the alternative to suspension, I’d rather see the format borrow the combination-based version than the copy-capped one. It solves the actual problem instead of just making it rarer.
