Why Was Jegantha, The Wellspring Banned In Modern And Pioneer?

Bannings in Magic: The Gathering are nothing new, with plenty of cards being printed that are just a little too powerful to be allowed in competitive formats. That brings us to a series of bans that have been enacted to help make a few formats, like Modern and Pioneer, a little more balanced for players to enjoy.

Among the cards banned in this wave is yet another with the companion keyword, Jegantha, the Wellspring. This curious card is a bit restrictive when it comes to deck design and has led to an unhealthy meta. Let’s take a look at why this card was banned in multiple formats, including Explorer, Modern, and Pioneer.

What Is Jegantha, The Wellspring?

Released back in 2020’s controversial set Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, Jegantha, the Wellspring is a fascinating card when it comes to game design and abilities. Jegantha has a special ability that allows it to be a part of your deck, but it exists outside the game, generally in the sideboard, thanks to its companion ability. If you decide to use Jegantha this way, you have to build your deck with certain conditions.

Specifically, with Jegantha, you cannot have any cards in your deck that have more than one of the same mana symbol in its mana cost.

So if you have a card that has two red mana in its casting cost, for example, you cannot play it in your Jegantha deck.

You can pay three generic mana as long as Jegantha is hanging outside the game to put it into your hand where it acts just like any other card. You can only do this at sorcery speed, so it does take up a turn, at least early on in the game.

Once in your hand, it costs five mana to play and can tap to produce one mana of each color, though the mana can’t be used to pay for generic mana costs, so at most you might only get a few uses of the mana.

Why Was Jegantha Banned In Pioneer?

Jegantha, the Wellspring might seem fairly innocuous, but it turns out that the little Elemental Elk was choking out a lot of the format. There are a few things that led to this inevitable ban. They are:

• It’s a “free” card accessible to any deck
• It reduced variance in deck design
• Cutting out fun or different cards from many decks for the sake of having Jegantha

The first issue with Jegantha is that it is, for all intents and purposes, a free card in your deck. It does not count towards your 60 cards, and exists outside the game to start, so your deck is still only going to be 60 cards total, with a bonus 61st card you have access to at all times in your sideboard.

The second issue that Jegantha presents is that, since it has the companion stipulation of only letting you use cards that don’t have more than one of the same color of mana in their casting cost, it vastly reduces the number of cards players are able to use.

The last major issue that Jeganthan brings to the game is the reduction in fun cards you can play. For every card you can play with the Elk, there are dozens of interesting ones that have multiple of the same colors in the casting cost.

Why Was Jegantha Banned In Modern?

Many of the same problems that Jegantha, the Wellspring displayed in Pioneer apply to Modern as well. In Modern, Jegantha made the format just a little more boring by cutting down the amount of variance in deck designs across multiple archetypes.

Part of the fun with Modern is that you have a huge catalog of cards to pull from, with interesting mechanics and abilities to explore. With Jegantha forcing deck designs to follow, it’s very easy to achieve deck restriction, it cuts out literally thousands of cards from being considered in deck building, making for a less-diverse format.

In Modern, Jegantha was being played in a significant amount of the meta, with around 40 percent of all decks running the Elk as a companion. It was most prominent in the Boros Energy and Zoo decks and definitely helped those decks remain consistent later in a match.

Will Jegantha, The Wellspring Ever Be Unbanned?

While we don’t ever want to say never, it seems highly unlikely that Jegantha, the Wellspring will be back in Moder or Pioneer anytime soon. Seeing how Wizards of the Coast has been looking to keep all its formats as healthy as possible, reintroducing Jegantha would only work against that.

Of the ten companions that were released in Ikora, five of them have been banned for just being too darn good, so its not a real surprise that Jegantha was on the chopping block. Companions has been often called one of the biggest design mistakes in the game’s history, though through bannings like these it is quickly being eliminated.