[Update #2]: MTG Arena's Innistrad: Crimson Vow expansion is set to launch on November 11th.

[Update]: As an additional bonus, Wizards of the Coast has also added a Standard-focused and half-price Jumpstart event aimed at beginners.

Between the various Standard sets, Historic Anthologies, Jumpstarts and Strixhaven's Mystical Archives, MTG Arena's Historic format has received a massive amount of powerful new cards over the course of this year. While this influx of new cards has given rise to a whole assortment of fun new deck archetypes, it has unsurprisingly also resulted in a couple of balance problems.

There is no better example of this than Tibalt's Trickery, a card that is almost completely unusable in the Standard format, yet oppressive in Historic thanks to a particularly strong synergy with Throes of Chaos that allows it to cheat out powerful threats turn after turn. While the combo itself is vulnerable to tax-based effects, it very often leads to extremely linear and extremely boring games where so little happens you might as well flip a coin to see who wins.

So in order to sort this problem out, as well as some of the other balance issues that have popped up, Wizards of the Coast have now issued new bans and suspensions for Historic. Here's what's being changed:

• Tibalt's Trickery is banned in Historic.

• Memory Lapse is suspended in Historic.

• Brainstorm is banned in Historic (from suspended).

• Five digital-only cards are being rebalanced:

- Davriel's Withering and Davriel, Soul Broker's third ability now only affect "target creature an opponent controls."
- Faceless Agent is now 2/2 (from 2/1).
- Sarkhan, Wanderer to Shiv's second ability is now +1 (from +0).
- Subversive Acolyte now costs 1B (from BB), is 2/3 (from 2/2), and had the toughness increases from becoming Human or Phyrexian reduced by 1

If you own copies of any of the banned cards, once the update goes live you will be granted appropriate wildcards. Unfortunately, the same has not applied to suspended cards in previous cases, so I would advise against crafting four copies of Memory Lapse lest you end up with some very expensive digital paperweights.

As for the bans and changes themselves, I surprisingly have absolutely no complaints. All of the banned and suspended cards were clearly too good for the format, while the digital-only balance changes won't really make new decks appear out of nowhere, but might just make niche ones a tiny bit stronger. Combine that with the end of the two-card Vesperlark combo that often caused draws, and the end result is one of MTG Arena's finer updates.

Once Wizards of the Coast releases the next batch of changes, most likely after the upcoming Standard set, I'll make sure to let you know. Until then, start preparing for a bit of a Historic shakeup!