As is tradition, this B&R announcement begins by saying that they will be changing the frequency of B&R announcements.

And then there's this:

It is worth noting that we don't plan on changing the current Standard B&R philosophy, meaning we still only want one window per year, barring an emergency, where we consider taking action in Standard.

I'm not sure I get the concept of non-emergency bans. If a card needs to be banned, ban it immediately; if it doesn't, don't ban it at all. This once-a-year interval makes even less sense for Standard than for other formats, since a year is proportionally longer for Standard.

I understand that they want people to feel confident that their chosen deck won't disappear at a moment's notice, I just don't think that's worth the trade-off of making everyone put up with an unbalanced format for months.

Pioneer player here. Thank GOD Sorin and Amalia are gone.

Definitely agree that banning Sorin is a better move than removing Vein Ripper. Sorin existing basically means that they can't print any powerful/high cost vampires ever, and so removing him gives more creative freedom for the future.

And removing Amalia is great because of how the counterplay to the combo was sometimes just pushing for a draw. Not fun for anyone, and the draws just end up pushing the match into turns every dang time.

I feel like I would have been fine with them banning Treasure Cruise and Fable, but I guess they didn't want to just shatter the format, just shake it up gently.

Great updates all around, kudos to Wizards for doing what needed to be done. Good changes to timing too.

I'm shocked they banned Nadu instead of some bad half-measure like Shuko though.

Not gonna miss any of these cards

As a quick question, is this the single largest B&R announcement in Magic history? Bans/restrictions in 4 of the 5 major formats (Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage), each hitting serious meta decks? I'm a relatively newer player, so I don't know if they've ever shaken up so many formats at once.

All good bans here, I think they're still 3-6 months behind on Legacy tho.

The Vintage bans really surprised me, both of those are much needed imo and I'm glad they did something about them. Vexing Bauble kind of nerfs the entirety of why anyone plays Vintage, and Urza's Saga is just ridiculous with that many cheap powerful artifacts.

@MysticKetchup Good news for all formats