Retro Banlist Update 9/25/2023

Hello UniVersus fans! Today we’re going to talk about a play format you may or may not be familiar with, Retro. We’ll cover what the format is, what restrictions it has, and sharing the ban list while highlighting a few interesting features.

First off, what is the Retro Format?

Retro, of course, refers to ‘olden times’. The name was inspired by the video game industry. When you think of retro video games, you think of a way different, older era. In UniVersus, Retro format consists of all cards printed beginning with a change in design philosophy. Beginning with Red Horizon (RH01), Retro covers all cards printed since about 2010. Here’s a link to our format legality lists, where you can find information on all the cards legal in the format, as well as the list of banned cards: https://uvsgames.com/all-news/formats-and-ban-lists.

What’s really great about Retro is that many amazing combos or possibilities that have been played in the past eras of the game are kept intact, with a growing number of new decks to discover. It’s a higher power format, where you can let loose your wildest ideas, with very few exceptions. There are a number of banned cards, but we aim to keep those bans limited to true outliers that break interactive play. 

That said, with the return to holding more Retro events, we plan on keeping our eyes on the format so that we can curate it even more. This means pulling cards off the ban list if possible, to allow for more opportunities to play your favorite cards. I’ll turn this article over to my friend and teammate Jeremy Ray to go over some of the changes to the ban list that we’ve decided to make, and the reasons we’ve done so.

Jeremy Ray, Designer

I’m here to talk a little bit about the approach we currently are taking to the format, the actions we are taking now, and how that approach will guide our decisions in the future. I’d like to start by talking about what we think makes the Retro format exciting. Retro is a high powered format with an incredible amount of options. We don’t want to strip that power out of the format, we want players innovating and executing powerful strategies. That being said, we want to make sure the format stays fun and diverse. Moving forward as strategies appear, if they create strong negative experiences or narrow the field too significantly, those will be the places we will look to take action like Ban/Errata. The current banlist supports this idea, but at the first step, we want to try and open things up as much as we feel comfortable with. So today’s actions are steps in that direction. We will be unbanning a few cards from the Retro format, and I'm going to explain why.

UNBANNED IN RETRO

- Bang!
- Goro
- Sheeva
- Forbidden Knowledge
- Aircraft Carrier Trautman

I’d like to spend some time talking about the removal of “Bang!” from the ban list. This card is a high powered tool on both offense and defense, shutting down your rival’s character for an entire turn. In a format where we want to let powerful characters run free, sometimes you need a powerful tool to exist to help keep them in check. Unbanning “Bang!” is our attempt to see if it can exist in the format without dominating/controlling it, because if “Bang!” can exist without causing a significant negative impact, we can in the future look towards unbanning even more of the powerful characters currently on the Retro banlist, knowing there is a strong option in the format for fighting those characters.

Now onto Goro and Sheeva from Mortal Kombat. While both are powerful 4 armed, 4 handed menaces, both were also buoyed by powerful interactions with specific cards that are currently banned/errata’d in Retro(Diamond Crusher and Shokan Prince respectively). They certainly still have some powerful interactions left available to them, but we want to embrace the power and freedom of the format and give them a chance in the format. If they prove problematic, we will take the necessary action to rewind this change, but we think these characters have a chance to be fun and interesting in the Retro format.

Lastly, a little bit about Aircraft Carrier Trautman and Forbidden Knowledge. These cards were originally banned for creating some combo-centric play loops that were worrisome at the time. Currently, we have a lot more tools available in the format than when these cards first landed on the ban list and in the spirit of opening this format up to as much deck building expression as possible, we want to let these cards loose and see if they can find homes.

We are so excited to see what our players have come up with in our upcoming Retro side events at Pro Hero Nationals all around the globe! The plethora of options in deck building features some of our most powerful options in the history of the game. The potential for high impact and exciting gameplay that you can only get in the Retro format. Myself and the rest of the team cannot wait to see what kind of crazy decks our players come up with in the format.