Updates to the Ancients Format
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Introduction
Hello everyone, I’m AJ Foster (@DeadlyPenguin9K in the Warlord Discord) and I’ve been guarding the Storm since 2018. Due to a job shuffle at the Guardians of the Storm I’ve been given the awful task of communicating changes to the Ancients Format. I didn’t choose this job, so don’t kill the messenger!
It’s that time of the year again. The leaves here in the Ohio River Valley are brilliant hues of orange and red, the air is cool with a hint of frost, and we’ve just brought to a close another Warlord Online World Championship. Just like the leaves changing and blowing away on the Autumn winds, it’s time to reevaluate where Ancients is today and send some beloved (or despised) cards off into the sunset. The Guardians have had our annual “Let’s Talk About Ancients” meeting, before and after which we did our very best keyboard kung fu to sway the hearts and minds of those attending to vote for our personal takes. I have to say this year got a little spicier than usual and there were some split decisions, so I expect the community at large may have a similar reaction. But now that the dust has settled, let’s get to these new Ancients changes.
I think it is appropriate to remind everyone of the Ancients Format Identity article from last year where Woodrow did an excellent writeup of what the main goals are for Ancients. I think what most of us in the Guardians were focused on during this round of changes and discussion was Goal 5: Broken Cards – “Cards not involving die rolls with game winning impact should be monitored.” Part of the challenge with this goal is that many people have different ideas of where the line is when it comes to a broken card. I look to blue decks in Magic when I think about dealing with broken cards and trying to find the right balance. There are players of that game that hate blue cards because they think they’re broken but at the same time blue is the favorite color of many players. What we tried to do this year is strike that balance for Ancients by addressing some of the biggest problem decks and cards while also trying not to kill a good time. With this preface, let’s dive right in!
Ancients Errata Section
Sometimes it’s okay to admit you done goofed. Dipping our toes into the format-specific errata arena was a bad idea. As if the Ancients Format list with three categories and different targeting rules from the base game wasn’t unwieldy enough, the last thing we needed to do was add more categories.
Effective immediately we are removing the “Ancients Errata” category in its entirety. As a result, Arcane Qor-Teth is now banned in Ancients. You can find some discussion on the section and Arcane Q-Tip here. We get that a portion of the playerbase would actually enjoy us running a slider tool across the entirety of the card pool, but that is not the goal of the Ancients format. Ancients is merely a curated pool of cards, a what’s in and what’s out format, not something that we’re willing to tinker with on the errata level. Whether or not that should be the case is debatable, but opening that door without a clear path forward was the wrong thing to do.
Cerebrul is still the goodest boy without being broken as a 2004 ruling was uncovered specifying that the falling character must already be stunned in order for Cerebrul’s static text to wound them. So Etra and Fasolt can keep their puppers while the rest of the Accordlands swipes left.
Ignored MRP Section
A lot of players would have this section expanded rather than removed, but Spring Cleaning came in October this year. Another category bites the dust as we put a lid on the can of worms that was the 10th Anniversary Open & Ancients Reprint Set. Instead of picking and choosing which MRP is in and which MRP is out, we’ve decided to just completely ignore the set as MRP. This decision was unanimously agreed upon due to two main factors.
One, the creators of the 10AORS have stated that their intention with the set was to Most Recent Printing errata exactly zero Warlord cards. They just wanted to clean and update the wording on the cards and any mechanical changes were unintentional. Unfortunately, as mentioned here or pictured above in the Spend Order version of Seize Life, a lot of mechanical changes were made.
Two, Potion of Blurring was the only card that was really positively affected by the MRP’s. Its new wording reflected a ruling that was made in Warlords past regarding the character targeting themselves. But since Potion of Blurring has been that way for a decade or more anyway, we can trade an entire category on the Ancients list for a card ruling.
Medusan Lord’s Might & Medusan Lord’s Guile
Context is important in understanding these two cards and how they came into existence. Gen Con 2007 was the debut of Light & Shadow and the debut of Kar’rak Urartu. Kar’rak is an excellent Dragon Lord and a funny thing happened at that convention where some players absolutely brutalized him in challenges using pre-nerf Serolia Calix and basically took the entire print run that AEG had on hand. We DL runners were broken. We were on the ropes. We were afraid. To help us, AEG printed these cards. Hard for a warlord to play, easily usable in any OL/DL deck. “What could go wrong?”, we thought in our hubris and greed as we RFG’d Evoke Crisis out of every Serolia deck that sat across from us. And then King Xod came marching in…
Medusan Lord’s Might has become a brutalizer for King Xod (and Jodin Drac to a lesser extent) and could clear out threats to his victory before they even made it to a player’s hand. He could pick apart combos and RFG meta, win conditions, cards he might just not like that day, whatever suites his fancy. And the answers to stop MLM are too minimal. Ghed Morak and Premonition just aren’t in every deck it turns out. MLM was a clear open and shut case of a card with game winning impact where no dice needed to be rolled.
Medusan Lord’s Guile is just the nicer cousin of MLM who was brought into the business of shenanigans, especially with Arcane Qor-Teth being able to fetch whatever you need from control cards to combo win conditions the card appeared on everyone’s radar. More game winning impact with no dice rolls necessary. Both cards have found a new home on the banned list moving forward. Just like other MLM’s in our lives, we aren’t sorry to see them taken down.
Incentives
Incentives is such a fun and fair bomb action card. It’s probably one of the best cards from Fourth Edition and has application in a lot of different Cleric and Rogue decks with a plethora of backup casters for it. The cost is seemingly appropriate to deal a wound to two of your characters to really take a bite out of an opposing army. Unfortunately for this card, it’s around in a format with Fo’ttr’ak’ka. Like an out-of-control semi-truck trying to deliver a package in Trucking Simulator, The Trucker has crushed everything in her Ancients path. Besides smashing this year’s Online World Championship, the meta discussion for Ancients before and after was almost solely driven by Trucker and his royal Highness King Xod, and it’s all in part to how consistent he is. Last year we made the decision to restrict Suicidal Charge to slow the game down so High Priest Nassiral didn’t effectively have 6 copies of Bull Rush and to slow down mercenaries using Amoudasi’s Blaze. Our reasoning then echoes our reasoning now: Incentives is a fine and fair card, but Trucker makes it an exceptionally great card and having it on turn one usually means the game is flat over. Two +13 melee spell strikes (occasionally for 2 wounds) from Gunda as your opening action targeting your opponent’s second rank followed up by multiple attacks into that same second rank where the opposing Warlord now lies sideways should not be an average opener in Ancients. Couple that explosiveness with an almost complete lack of downside as Incentives is always a live bomb from any reasonable board state, and it’s not hard to imagine why we’re adding Incentives to the restricted list. The other option available to us is to ban Fo’ttr’ak’ka, but banning Warlords is not a path we want to walk.
Yeg-Igryll’s Altar
Yeg’Igryll’s Altar really did become the great green hope for NoThRoG in Ancients. Yeah, it’s got purple on its border too, whatever, but the Nothrog have concluded that this table is their one and only level 2 starter after its uptick in popularity over the course of the last two years. This card drove the most discussion last week for the Guardians and during that time no one was wrong when they argued for or against taking action on this innocuous-seeming Table. It’s always hard to get it right when multiple parties disagree and nobody is wrong. On one side, people wanted it Reserved, while others thought it should go untouched. If we reserve it, we greatly anger the players who enjoy the card in all its power and glory, but if we leave it alone we greatly anger the players who are suffering at its legs. So we decided to make both camps unhappy, but less intensely than if we pulled Altar from the starting army or took no action at all.
Double Altar starts did quite a bit of work over the past few years. They singlelegedly invalidated multiple starting armies like high AC and healers, enabled a 3-for-1 action in the deck in From Dust to Dust finding Carg’rag, cleared your clogged ranks for profit, stifled healing cards almost into non-existence, and came in huge in the late game against high AC strategies when you pop two charges for +8 to each strike. It’s a tough nut to crack because there really isn’t anything else quite like it in the game. And thusly, the Head of the Table finds itself taken down a notch alongside those who came before it on the restricted list.
Locked Ring
Now let’s talk about the king-sized elephant in the room: King Xod. I want to really stress the point here that we do not want to ban a warlord. Xod is the Dwarf icon. He is the King for a reason. He is someone’s favorite warlord. Much of the faction’s identity can be traced back to the King himself. But I’ll be damned if he isn’t an absolute pain to try and bring down a peg. One can make the argument that he’s already been hurt by losing Medusan Lord’s Might, but Xod’s ability to respond to meta against him by fetching what he needs when he needs it still gives him an edge in almost every matchup.
Let’s all be honest with ourselves and admit up front that Locked Ring only sees play with Xod in order to protect his item investments from being nabbed and discarded. Is it broken? No. Is it too good when Xod can make sure you cannot get rid of the Staff of Secrets / Amulet of Waking / etc. that he has used to shutdown your deck even though you have an answer to that item? This level of resiliency creeps dangerously close to the line.
We’re adding Locked Ring to the banned list. Your meta should mean something when you pack it and Xod can’t tell you your meta for his meta is no good anymore. (Not a Metaverse ad)
Cocoran
And finally, it’s not really an Ancients update if we don’t do something to the Elves. In the name of tradition we’re adding Cocoran to the reserved list. This is a direct result of the pesky Josh King’s persistent Cocoran shenanigans and Tomfoolery. Whether it’s using the Coco Mix to make spells beefy as all heck in his Tepheroth deck at GenCon this year or powering up Mental Assault or Out of Step in Bronwen Tansiq. You now need to draw your Spicy Hot Coco Mix in order to prepare your recipe instead of having it on the table for you to starting cooking first action of the game.
Nepheline Gargoyle
Don’t get too excited by this image. We’ve only decided to grant Nepheline Gargoyle a small taste of freedom by putting it on the restricted list. With its partner in crime Arcane Qor-Teth exiting the format, Nepheline Gargoyle gets parole and is free to study all the tomes it wants. We would love to jump right into putting three in your deck, but the collateral bans would be hefty. With only a single Nepheline in the 50, combo decks can’t chain them and now run the risk of some dead or worse additional copies of Summon Gargoyle if they decide to run the search package.
Limited Wish & Phoenix Feather
We’re in the homestretch now. Many of you will have noticed that Limited Wish and Phoenix Feathers have not been playable in online events for some time now and more recently live events have followed suit. This is for simplicity’s sake to help organizers not have to keep track of who has ripped how many wishes and/or paid the $5 to charity. If you do the trust system, you have some people in a room spend $15 for their set of Wishes and others pay $0. If you require screenshot receipts of digital donations, you’re just adding to the chaos of the event you’re running. And if you require that players rip their out of print cards up, well. Both Limited Wish and Phoenix Feather are joining the banned list so we don’t have to clarify that they are disallowed for every live and online Guardians run tournament.
With that said, it is up to a local TO to specify if they want to allow these cards in their specific events. We recommend that they are still available for use in challenges if the runner is game, but contact whoever you’re challenging ahead of schedule or read their advertisements clearly to find out their stance.
You’re the Real MVP
And here we are. At the end of another wonderful Ancients format changes article. We’ve shared some laughs, cried over some drinks, and I have undoubtedly been cursed with words that would make a New Jersey player blush. Jokes aside, this is quite a lot of changes that we thought would help freshen up the format going into 2023. If you’ve read this much you’re the real MVP and I hope it’s because you love the game as much as we all do and that you’ll continue to keep rolling dice in the Ancients Format with us for years to come.