Oko, Thief of Crowns – We wanted to give Oko a chance in Historic, but the data is showing similar, though less severe, issues to what we saw in Standard.Suspending this card should bring more diversity to the answers and decks performing well in Historic. Veil of Summer – Much as we saw in Standard and Pioneer, Veil of Summer's high efficiency is proving stifling to the overall metagame by neutralizing too many counter-play options.Suspending this should allow a wider variety of deck archetypes to be viable in Historic. Field of the Dead – Similar to Once Upon a Time, Field of the Dead is constraining Historic in much the same way it affected Pioneer: it's having too large of a damping effect on controlling and reactive deck options.Suspending it (more on what suspending means below) should help bring greater deck diversity. Once Upon a Time – We're seeing much the same thing in Historic that we saw in Standard and Pioneer: Once Upon a Time is very prevalent in any top decks playing green, and it is leading to green in general being overrepresented in the meta.None of the cards we're acting on here will come as a surprise: Getting back to those outliers in win rate and diversity, there are a few cards we've identified as being problematic in the Historic meta, and we'll be taking action to address those. With this in mind, we're looking at expanding the importance of Best-of-One play in future Ranked Historic periods. And this holds even in the Historic format, which we expected to attract more competitive-minded players. This suggests that while Best-of-Three is the most competitive way to play, the majority of our players still prefer Best-of-One. Somewhat surprisingly, we saw about three times the rate of games played in the Historic launch event (Best-of-One) than we do in the Historic Ranked Queue (Best-of-Three). Overall play in Historic is tracking slightly lower than we'd like to see, which largely seems to be coming from players preferring to play Best-of-One over Best-of-Three. The Soul Sisters archetype has also proven popular, using Soul Warden and Serra Ascendant to complement a mono-white life gain package. Burning-Tree Emissary has proved the most popular of the new cards, showing up in both Gruul and Jund shells. We're seeing the new cards appearing in over 20% of the decks used in high-level Historic play, which is a good sign we've landed about where we wanted to be: good, useful options, but not something that has warped the format around it. We're happy with how the cards in Historic Anthology 1 have been adopted, where several have found roles in key decks, and the additions have enabled some fun new archetypes. There are a couple outliers here, though, that we will be addressing (more info on that below). Only a couple decks are more than 5% of the meta, and, for the most part, win rates are showing a good, healthy spread. We're generally happy with what we're seeing there, with good play rates and a fairly healthy-looking metagame balance. This Historic Ranked period is around a month old, and we've been eagerly looking over the feedback and data we're gathering on the new format.
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