Images courtesy of Bandai
This past weekend Bandai announced a massive addition to the Digimon Banned and Restricted list. It isn’t often that Digimon adds cards to the list, instead opting to let new sets try to impact the meta and sort things out themselves. Only when something particularly egregious, such as Numemon Aggro, dominates competitive play for too long do they step in and hit something.
The prevalence of Purple Hybrid and Fenriloogamon was most likely the catalyst for the announcement, but that didn’t stop them from making some changes that were, frankly, needed for quite some time.
The Outright Bans in Digimon
It takes a lot for something to get banned in this game, and generally Bandai will opt to restrict broken cards rather than remove them entirely. Prior to this announcement, Mega Digimon Fusion! held the title for the only card to be actually banned, but that all changed with the hit to Matt Ishida BT2.
This card is the cornerstone for what makes Purple Hybrid such a menace as it can grab any Purple Digimon or Option from your trash. While that sounds perfectly fair to do once, Purple Hybrid can sacrifice and recur Matt every turn. This makes it an extremely powerful value engine over the course of the game. Restricting this card wouldn’t hurt the deck at all given how quickly it can mill itself to find and subsequently recur Matt and get the loop going, so the logic to ban the card is sound. Now Purple Hybrid will most likely have to rely on Koichi Kimura BT18 for its Digimon recursion, which definitely slows it down to a more reasonable degree.
Digimon also has a unique way of banning broken interactions by banning pairs of cards rather than outright a single card. We saw this with Sayo & Koh paired with Matt Ishida ST16, Zubamon P-097, and Keenan Crier BT13 to shut down an infinite turn loop, and it was a compromise to keep the Galaxy decks, Legend-Arms decks, and discard-heavy decks from being utterly devastated. With this new announcement we can now add Mother D-Reaper and Shoto Kazama EX7 to the list.
When used together you can assemble an untouchable blocker with 15oooDP. This is a massive hurdle for most decks and essentially a one-card combo since the Mother D-Reaper starts in your egg deck. All you need to do is find the Shoto and you can lock down combat on the board, and the decks that use the combo were adept at searching for the Shoto to get it down as early as possible. Banning or restricting either card would cripple the D-Reaper and Vortex archetypes, so by banning the pairing you can keep those decks viable while forcing control decks that relied on that brick wall to look into other options.
The Long, Long, Long Overdue
MirageGaogamon BT11 has had a reputation for dodging restrictions rivaled only by Neo’s bullet time in The Matrix. With one MirageGaogamon in play, adding a card by any means would often mean a loss of one to two memory, but with multiple in play playing a single searcher would cost you your entire turn.
We’ve seen in the past that, with the various memory gain effects and digivolution-aiding options the deck would run, it was trivial to assemble multiple MirageGaogamon as early as the second turn. With this restriction the deck now has to dig much harder to find their namesake, and while more recently the archetype has shifted to using the Galaxy engine for its acceleration and expanding its top end to include more Red threats like Dinomon, it’s far more reasonable to interact with than the pure MirageGaogamon version.
In addition to MirageGaogamon, two more restrictions to egregious memory gainers were included in this announcement. I’ve talked about how important memory manipulation is in this game in the past, and it looks like Bandai took my words to heart as they’ve restricted both Jack Raid and Blinding Ray. Jack Raid is easily the biggest payoff for Purple Hybrid as it’s often a net gain of two to three memory for zero investment, and sandbagging a couple copies in the mid to late game can rocket you up to a full memory gauge with ease.
While three memory for zero is still an amazing rate, having access to only the one copy as well as removing Matt Ishida, one of the only ways to recur it from the trash, makes it much more fair.
Blinding Ray, while still a passable rate of two memory at the cost of a security card, has seen an uptick in popularity due to Yellow Vaccine variants including Magnamon X. These decks are full of effects that trigger when security is trashed, so netting memory on top of something like Revelation of Light can be very powerful. The Yellow base Magnamon X decks are able to abuse this even further since Magnamon X can trigger its digivolving effect to unsuspend, gain 3000DP, and become immune to the opponent’s effects when a security card it trashed. There’s a finite window where you can interact with Magnamon X after the first turn’s digivolving effect wears off, but they can simply Blinding Ray to trash a security and become immune all over again, leading to a nigh-unkillable threat.
Yellow decks generally lack the card draw to dig for restricted cards, so it makes sense to restrict Blinding Ray so they can only really do the Magnamon X trick the one time should they manage to draw it.
The restriction of Stingmon ST9 has been regarded as the black sheep of the restricted announcement. It came out of left field and made little sense until viewed with the proper context. The inherited effect of Stingmon isn’t limited to once per turn, so Imperialdramon decks can DNA digivolve into any of the Paildramon that unsuspend themselves on attack and draw multiple cards each attack cycle. This adds to the consistency of the deck since it becomes trivial to find all your necessary pieces, and Stingmon’s low play cost allows this engine to get started very early in the game.
As a “main character” Digimon, Imperialdramon isn’t going to stop getting support as an archetype, so dialing back its draw power only stands to balance out a very straightforward deck.
Hitting Combo Where It Hurts
The restriction to Fenriloogamon BT17 and Kuzuhamon were done to mitigate some of the more powerful looping decks in the game, Fenriloogamon: Takemikazuchi and Taomon Loop. Fenriloogamon is notorious for being able to combo off as early as turn two due to the Bowmon BT14 egg, with Takemikazuchi resetting the opponent to three memory to offset whatever you spent to build up the stack. With Fenriloogamon’s inherited effect, the opponent’s turn condition becomes three memory, so Takemikazuchi’s reset lets you keep turn to continue the combo.
I was surprised that they went after the Fenriloogamon, given how powerful the Bowmon is, but I can see the logic of making you have to work to find the one card that actually alters the turn condition. The new Fenriloogamon in BT20 can’t put a Kazuchimon directly into play so it’s harder to actually go into the Takemikazuchi in the same turn, instead forcing you to work with Blast DNA digivolving with the new Fenriloogamon: Takemikazuchi ACE. This is easier to interact with and can be more punishing to go all in on the Bowmon chain.
Granted, the raw draw power of the deck means you can still dig into the one Fenriloogamon, but it becomes much harder to combo, so the deck slows to a more reasonable pace.
Taomon Loop is a deck centred around using Taomon ACE‘s [On Play] to play Digivolution Plug-In S for free, digivolving into Kuzuhamon, playing Taomon ACE from its sources, and using the Plug-In to digivolve into another Kuzuhamon and repeating the process until you run out of Kuzuhamon or Plug-Ins. From there you lock down the board by digivolving into ShineGreymon: Ruin Mode and winning the following turn.
By restricting the Kuzuhamon, it becomes much harder to spit out multiple level 6s and 7s. Now Taomon ACE decks will have to diversify their level 6s, which should slow down the deck and make board states more palatable.
Ancient Pains in the Neck
Red Hybrid and Blue Hybrid saw a huge burst in popularity with the printing of new Ancient level 6 Hybrid Digimon, and with them an increase in popularity for Agunimon P-029 and Lobomon P-030.
These level 4s could warp directly into their Ancient counterparts at the cost of deleting themselves at the end of the turn. Red Hybrid was able to use this to build into AncientGreymon BT4 as early as turn two and get three checks into security, while Blue Hybrid would build into AncientGarurumon BT17, which could remove a threat, force their top security card into their hand, and attack all in one turn. Couple that with new methods of recurring Hybrids like Ancient Guardian Deity and you have an aggressive engine that’s difficult to interact with.
These promos were designed to empower Hybrid decks in an era when most Hybrids were vanilla do-nothing level 4s, so it makes sense that their power would increase exponentially as Hybrid decks get more tools to work with. While newer, shinier decks have curbed the popularity of these strategies, the speed is still there, so hitting the promo cards that enable that early aggression is a must.
What’s Next After the Digimon Bans?
Every Restriction List announcement has its naysayers, and there will always be cards that players think should have been restricted as well. MirageGaogamon was one such card for so long it became an international meme. Given recent tournament results, it would make sense to watch for more egregious cards in new decks like Royal Knights, both Blue/Green and Purple/Red Imperialdramon, and Gallantmon. If these decks start becoming so dominant they take over the format, something like Omekamon BT20, Paildramon BT16, Dinobeemon BT16, or Gallantmon X might be next on the chopping block.
As well, generic cards like Analog Youth or even a brand new all-star like MedievalGallantmon could get restricted if they oversaturate the format. For the time being, these changes are a breath of fresh air that should help diversify the metagame.
Want to learn more about Digimon? Check out our guide to making the most of the memory gauge.
