[Update]: MTG Arena's digital-only Alchemy format has now arrived, and with it a the Historic Brawl bans alongside an assortment of new and rebalanced cards.

Out of all the formats in MTG Arena, I find Historic Brawl to be the most enjoyable one. With a casual atmosphere and strength-based matchmaking to keep things fair, it's a format where you can take janky, nearly unplayable cards and then make entire decks around maximizing their potential. The end result will likely still be a mess, but it'll at least be a glorious mess!

Unfortunately, there are some cards that are simply so powerful that just about everyone includes them, which can often result in somewhat repetitive matches. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Field of the Dead, a humble land that can act as your win condition without requiring any serious deckbuilding constraints.

So in order to refocus Historic Brawl on unique and interesting strategies, and remove some of these generically useful cards, Wizards of the Coast has just announced some spicy new bans! As such, once the December 9th update goes live Field of the Dead, Agent of Treachery and Ugin, The Spirit Dragon will be banned from Historic Brawl!

Tomorrow's update will even further shake up Historic Brawl by adding Alchemy - a Standard adjacent format that will feature new and rebalanced cards. These new cards will be fully legal in Historic Brawl, while Alchemy-rebalanced versions of Standard cards will also become the default versions used in Historic, Historic Brawl and Alchemy formats. So regardless if you have any interest in Standard or Standard-like formats, the next update should still shake things up quite a bit for Historic Brawl.

Whether the shakeup will be for the better or for the worse, that still remains to be seen. Whatever the case may be, I'll make sure to let you know once the update goes live.

Until then, you can read a little bit more about the ban announcement, as well as the upcoming changes, over at the MTG website.