Why Was The One Ring Banned In MTG’s Modern Format?

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home December 18, 2024 2 Views 7 Min Read
Why Was The One Ring Banned In MTG's Modern Format?

Bannings are nothing new in Magic: The Gathering, but rarely are they as hotly debated as when it came to the banning of one special artifact, The One Ring.

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This incredibly powerful card has been on the watch list since its release, being both a bane to anyone playing against it, and a boon to those with it. But just why was this card banned, and what does it mean for the game is what we’re here to explore.

What Is The One Ring?

Hailing from the Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth expansion from June 2023, The One Ring was immediately identified as the most powerful card from the set, and it’s easy to see why.

This four-mana artifact has an enter the battlefield trigger that, so long as you cast it, gains you protection from everything until end of turn. That doesn’t stop all things from happening to you like a Teferi’s Protection might (and even then, there are ways around that too), but it does stop you from being targeted directly by everything from cards to attacks to Planeswalker abilities.

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As if that wasn’t enough, The One Ring also has another ability that catapults you ahead of your opponent very quickly. You can tap The One Ring to put a very thematic burden counter on it and then draw a card for each burden counter on it. Each turn you choose to do this nets you one more card each turn.

Of course, there’s a downside. Being the ring and power of an ancient malevolent Ainur, you do lose one point of life at the start of your turn for each burden counter on it.

Why Was The One Ring Banned?

The One Ring into every deck, and there’s literally no downside. For slower decks, it can offer some early-game protection against more aggressive decks, giving you a turn to gather your resources, or cast a spell that doesn’t have a direct impact on the board. Then, you can use it to draw into even more cards to help catch back up.

For other decks, it can give you a ton of extra draw each turn to keep your hand full so you never run out of gas. While not every deck is going to want to play The One Ring, it was enough that it was slowly and steadily overtaking plenty of other cards in the format.

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With a card like The One Ring, it very easily pushes out other cards out of the Modern format that players would otherwise be running. This reduces the variance in decks and across the meta as a whole. For instance, with The One Ring legal, there is very little reason to run cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, since you can do everything just a little bit better with Isildur’s Bane.

What Deck Was Using The One Ring?

With the release of Modern Horizons 3 however, the power of The One Ring took a bit of a shift. A little deck popped it’s head up around the time called Boros Energy. This deck has everything you need to counteract any downsides you might be suffering from The One Ring.

While The One Ring can technically slot into any deck thanks to its pure generic mana cost, and plenty of people have done just that, there are few viable decks that can deal with a constant stream of life loss from those burden counters.

Boros Energy has several ways to gain life, between Ocolot Pride pumping out tokens and Guide of Souls providing both energy and life gain, you have a pretty consistent way to counteract and even get ahead of the life loss from the Ring.

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Then, if the burden counters become too heavy to bear, all you have to do is drop another copy of the legendary artifact to sacrifice the original and reset those counters back to zero. Since you’ve probably drawn quite a few cards off the first, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to draw into that second or third copy of The One Ring. Not to mention, you get another turn of protection when you drop the additional Rings.

Will The One Ring Ever Be Unbanned?

The Magic The Gathering card The One Ring 1 by Veli Nystrom.

While it is impossible to know what Wizards of the Coast will decide in the future, it seems highly unlikely that Wizards will unban The One Ring. You can still play with the powerful artifact in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and the Magic: The Gathering Arena exclusive format, Timeless.

The sheer overwhelming power of the card twists just a little too much of the format to ever be released back into the wilds. Much like its literary counterpart, you cannot wield it, The One Ring answers to Sauron alone.

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