3 July 2026

Winry Owen

With Nationals underway, players are primarily focused on competitive play for their respective regions, but testing and data collection for Golden Age has persisted. Much of what we expected to find was confirmed, in that Runeblades are in need of some adjustment to bring the ceiling of their power levels down a bit. As hero text power has come down in recent years, older heroes absorb cards designed to carry more of the weight of the gameplay loop, resulting in clearly unintended and unreasonably powerful interactions. So, let’s get right to it.

The following cards are banned in Golden Age effective immediately:

• Channel Lightning Valley
• Electromagnetic Somersault
• Mordred Tide
• Skyward Serenade
• Volzar, the Lightning Rod

The following heroes are banned in Golden Age effective immediately:

• Briar, Warden of Thorns

For those who have been playing the format until now, this will not come as any particular surprise. Official format banlists included the Rosetta Lightning cards for good reason, and with the aim of Golden Age’s power level to be similar to Classic Constructed; our data mirrored that these cards were not reasonable to let free in a post-Omens of the Third Age environment. This unfortunately includes Volzar, the Lightning Rod. The good news is that it appears Oscilio, Constella Intelligence is getting by just fine without it.

Viserai, Rune Blood was in need of a minor adjustment to his power level, and through careful consideration, found Mordred Tide to be a card that created unreasonable power scaling with minimal impact to other runeblades in the format. Following our core principle of banning the problem cards instead of the support cards, Mordred Tide could be interpreted as either in the scenario, but that is reason enough for it to be targeted for balancing.

Skyward Serenade, Similar to Mordred Tide, was targeted to balance Aurora, Shooting Star’s exceptionally high damage output Arc Lightning turns. The longer the card lived, the more apparent it was that the inherent go again that the card had was too much offensive overlap with being allowed to select two other modes on it. With that in mind, it was added to the banlist.

Now, the reason you’ve read this far. The big one. Briar, Warden of Thorns. Omens of the Third age solidified the role the Lightning talent plays in the Runeblade class, which is creating a payoff scenario for go again. Briar’s hero ability makes this quite literally trivial, a design space not intended for newer lightning runeblade cards in Omens of the Third Age. Paired with the Earth talent’s disruptive and “go tall” nature, exceptionally powerful non-interactive scenarios would be created. It is not reasonable to expect an opponent to be able to keep up in a match where Tempestuous Kiss with go again into Felling of the Crown could exist, all while also threatening an Embodiment of Earth. This is a textbook case of a hero ability simply not aging well over time, and the source of the issue lies not in deck cards, but the hero herself. With this in mind, we bid a sorrowful goodbye to Briar in Golden Age. We anticipate Aurora to fill her role, so Briar players can find new joy in the Rosetta hero, and Florian, Rotwood Harbinger to provide an avenue for those “go tall” games as well.

The Watchlist remains unchanged with no new additions or subtractions other than the cards moved to the banlist. Data collection remains ongoing, and Tome of Aetherwind has had promising initial results for Kano, Dracai of Aether to play a more pitch-stack focused gameplan over the later stages of his lifespan in Classic Constructed with Kindle slot-machine style gameplay.

Next Scheduled Banned and Watchlisted Announcement

Matching our current cadence of updates following a set release by four weeks; our next Scheduled Banned and Watchlisted Announcement will be October 23rd, four weeks following Usurp the Shadow Throne.

Last updated 3 July 2026