Hey Reddit!
I just find out [[Healer's Hawk]] is banned in FNM at Home: Artisan event. What is going on? This is not a rant or a complain. I am just surprised! Since I have been playing so much brawl lately, I am wondering if there is a game breaking combo I did not know about it. Does anyone have any idea why this cute one white mana flying creature has been banned in artisan? Anything in the new Ikoria set which makes this tiny bird so powerful it deserve a ban?
External link →Last time we ran an Artisan event, Hawk had a very high win rate and play rate. We were pretty surprised to see it, so we dug in a bit more, and it turns out it was a meaningful component of multiple top-performing decks: lifegain, enchantments, and flyers. The numbers were extreme enough that we thought it warranted action.
Why there's nothing from the Cycling deck getting banned? Cycle deck will easily dominate this event after being showcased by SaffronOlive.
We don't love doing preemptive bans, and this was locked in well before Ikoria even came out, let alone any specific piece of content. If this deck is as prevalent as the general expectation, there will be some action for next time.
Just ban Paradise Druid, then people can play spot removal for Pridemates and Empyrean Eagles...
Which is the problem, a 1/1 for 1? Or the Hexproof creature, pumped up to be a 10/10 or whatever, that is literally impossible to interact with?
Hawk is non-interactive in its own ways. A large Paradise Druid can be answered in ways a large Hawk can't - say, with a Foulmire Knight to block or a bunch of tokens to attack around it and race.
To be clear, all three of the decks I named were at levels that could justify some kind of action. We would prefer to hit a single enabler that crossed many problematic archetypes than do individual cards for each. This was an opportunity to do some good in a lot of places with (relatively) minimal upheaval.
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