BAN AND ERRATA UPDATE 11/04/2025
UVS Games Game Design Team
There are a few changes to our Standard Ban and Errata list this month. We have been monitoring the regional season and have seen some things we liked and some we didn’t. On the positive side of things, we have seen fairly healthy diversity in both character selection and deck archetypes. Additionally, no one deck or archetype emerged as an overly dominant force. This is something we strive for, as our 3 pillars for action are popularity, performance, and play experience. This month's action is focused on the pillar of play experience.
We have always maintained a policy of being vigilant about any decks winning on turn 2 consistently. As soon as a deck starts being able to pull off these early wins consistently in competitive play, it's on our radar. Towards the end of the regional season, specifically at the Atlanta Regional, extremely fast aggro started to emerge from the competitive pack. That is something that we knew we wanted to act on. There was a small problem in just going after 1 or 2 outliers in the aggro space. We continued to have a diverse and evolving meta in Atlanta. Any action needed to be carefully considered because we wanted to attempt to preserve the diversity of our meta but curb some of the more negative play experiences at the highest levels of play.
After much consideration, we decided on taking action against many of the play experience outliers in the metagame. We wanted to try and curb some of the low-interaction playstyles. With all that in mind, these are this month's actions.
The following cards will receive errata:
Pony Tsunotori
The following cards are now banned from Standard Format:
Sweeping Daggers
Teaming With The Attack Titan
The Nine Titans From Throughout The Ages
Titan Cliff
Pony Tsunotori - Errata
OLD: Enhance Remove 3 Horn counters: Clear 1 card from your card pool.
NEW: Enhance Remove 3 Horn counters [Once per turn]: Clear 1 card from your card pool.
Pony has been a staple of competitive play since the release of Attack on Titan: Battle for Humanity. With the tools made available to her in that set, she became a very fast and very consistent aggro deck. After some internal testing, we feel that there is no one specific card propelling her to success. The character herself is doing the heavy lifting in most cases. This action should slow down Pony’s devastating offense. But still leave the interesting amount of card movement and Horn counter management she has always had.
Sweeping Daggers - Banned
Sweeping Dagger's power kind of speaks for itself. The discussion around this card internally and by our players has thoroughly examined many of the pros and cons of the card. The “fun” part of the card of becoming a Frankenstein of itself and another attack is something we really enjoyed. The problem is the impact it has on the game in the big picture. Currently it is severely limiting the viability of higher difficulty attacks, while still being an incredibly efficient tool all on its own. The way it has forced many interesting high difficulty attacks completely out of the meta is not something we want and certainly not something we want to contend with long term while designing.
Teaming With The Attack Titan - Banned
Teaming is a very interesting card to analyze. Within the scope of a typical aggro shell, the card performs well but isn’t problematic. Once a deck can find ways to leverage through card pool stuffing and looping, the card becomes very problematic. The only time this card seems to find homes in competitive play is when it is creating play patterns we as a design team would like to avoid. Banning this card will slow down several powerful strategies in a way that should benefit the overall metagame.
The Nine Titans From Throughout The Ages - Banned
This was one of the more difficult decisions we made while considering action for this month. This card's individual power is generally within our metrics of the bounds of acceptable. The problem lies with how incredibly strong it is as a synergy piece with Hange Zoe and Beast Titan Rock Barrage. The Hange Zoe deck that has seen a lot of competitive success was one we particularly felt concerned about. Its ability to win early with massive Titanpile’s was a negative play pattern we wanted to curb. During this discussion we wanted to try and preserve competitive viability for the backup deck archetype. We considered multiple cards in this archetype for action here. At the end of the conversation and internal testing, Nine Titans was the card that we felt would fix the most play experience issues with the backup deck archetype.
Titan Cliff - Banned
Titan Cliff has had an interesting lifespan as a competitive card. Over the course of its time it's gone from being a splashed card in some decks that could run it to the centerpiece of entire deck archetypes. We know this card was on its way out for rotation, but we decided to get it out a little early. The consistency boost for the 5/6 handsize aggro deck archetype this card provides is off the charts. It has swung that entire archetype to being built and played around it. We want decks to work a little harder for that sort of consistency boost.
In the discussions for this month's actions, we discussed many cards. There will likely be community discussions about “Why not card X?”. When looking at the metagame after the release of the GUILTY GEAR -STRIVE- Blitz Box, we think the tools available and the adjustments to the meta should help create pathways to combating some of the strong decks. We will be closely monitoring the results following these actions and the release of the Solo Leveling Experience Bundles along with GGST. We understand this is a big shake-up, and we want to make sure that shake-up is a positive one in the long term.
Our Card Errata and Legality Document is here.
Want to share your thoughts? Join in on the conversations happening at our socials and discord. Find all of our links here.
Keep an eye on our site https://www.uvsgames.com/ for official news and next month's Ban and Errata update!