In an announcement earlier today, Wizards announced that Oko, Thief of Crowns, has been banned from the Brawl format in MTG Arena.
- The ban is only for the Brawl format.
- If you have this card in your collection, you will not receive wildcards as compensation for the ban.
- Restart your client before the Wednesday Brawl starts to prevent an "invalid deck" error message for decks containing Oko.
Quote From MTG Arena Admin MTG Arena Effective Date: November 5, 2019
Brawl:
- Oko, Thief of Crowns is banned.
This includes using Oko, Thief of Crowns as your commander or as part of your deck. As a general reminder, Direct Challenge outside of Tournament Mode does not enforce card bans.
REGARDING PLAYER COLLECTIONS:
Players who have Oko, Thief of Crowns as part of their in-game collection on MTG Arena prior to this announcement will not be receiving Wildcards as part of this update. Oko, Thief of Crowns is still playable in all other formats and events.
A NOTE ON WEDNESDAY BRAWL:
Players will need to restart their client at any point before the start of Wednesday Brawl on November 6, 2019 at 8 a.m. PT for Brawl decks containing Oko, Thief of Crowns to appear unplayable. Otherwise, players will not see that their deck is invalid until they hit “Play” (which will cause an “Invalid Deck” error message to appear).
Comments
He was the face of the expansion that is the main reason. They will ban him soon enough or face some serious backlash. Right now you cant play artifacts efficiently.
This ban makes sense. I made a Oko brawl deck and whenever I kinda felt like winning I would just play with that deck and BAM! 4 minutes later I would win.
I'm disappointed that WOTC doesn't give Wildcards for bans, even if they are specific for a game mode. Some people might have crafted them just for that game mode.
Generally I feel like WOTC is extremely greedy when it comes to their virtual games.
November 18th can't come soon enough.
What happens on that day?
Edit: ok its the next ban. Dont understand why they didnt ban oko from everything else. Meta wise the whole community says its the worse since MtG Arena came out
The general consensus is that WotC considers this to be a flagship card for the expansion, wants it to feel impactful/meaningful, and is extremely reluctant to diminish its value so soon. I kinda get it: they want customers to be really excited for and value their new products, and the more you nerf a card that's barely a month old the more you're going to counteract that effort. I think they would do things differently if they had to do over again--e.g., limit his token ability to only cards with low CMCs, or make it -2 instead of +1, etc--and I think they are going to ban it eventually after they move onto other expansions, but for the foreseeable future I think they're going to try to just ride this out for as long as they can.
Oko right now is one of the cards pushing the most packs of Eldraine right now, but even if they were to ban him in standard, the card is still dominant in pretty much every other format he is legal in. The card is still going to be desirable to pretty much everybody aside from standard players. The fact he is still unbanned is limiting others from entering standard and so WotC is incentivized to ban him since then others are more likely to buy into the format and thus, packs.
As for why they didn't ban Oko when Field of the dead got hit, this was before everybody realized "oh wait Oko is actually just the best card printed in the last several years" and threw him into every style of deck. It also looks bad to ban a card that was just released as well, but with the effect, Oko has on the format I think 1 month is a fairly good amount of time before he gets hit.