Hello Rulers!
Because we have a new format in our hands, Paradox, we, the development team, are adjusting the format with all the information we’ve gathered from tournaments around the world.
Therefore, during the first few months of Paradox, we'll update the Paradox banlist periodically, adjusting the format until it meets their original intention and achieves the level of playability with which it was conceived.
We designed Paradox's initial banlist with the intention that this format would be a format of resonator-based decks, whose interaction would happen on the field, unlike Wanderer, whose interaction always happens when cards are in the chase. Therefore, we limited the amount of mass removal, including key cards like Replicant: Shiva, whose mere presence limits the number of aggressive and/or midrange strategies available when playing Force of Will.
Additionally, we limited the number of reduced-cost cards, alternative cost card, and/or free cards, thus rewarding and incentivizing the construction of decks whose Willpower costs increase beyond playing one-cost cards, another important difference from Wanderer.
We've been monitoring online events and many physical events played around the world. Thank you for playing Force of Will so much!
The Paradox decks you're showing us differ greatly from Wanderer decks. While aggressive archetypes like Lyka Aggro or Lumia & Lunya Frenemies maintain a similar structure than in Wanderer, using low-cost resonators for blazing speed to overwhelm the opponent, the other archetypes we've seen represented (control and midrange; the first combo decks haven't appeared yet) have increased the total cost of their cards, including many more two-cost cards and three-cost cards. Decks like Giotto & Gill Conquerors or Zero Midrange employ strategies never before seen in Wanderer, using a similar ratio of old and new cards, making the most of the resources available in Paradox.
The gameplay experience in terms of match length has also increased, going from the four or five turns we saw in WGP 2025 matches to rounds that reach the seventh or eighth turn, giving rise to another differentiation from Wanderer, whose games are frenetic and explosive. Paradox is what we expected it to be: a format in which decks must have a short-term game plan and complement it with cards that represent a second, long-term game plan, as the match length has increased. This also rewards deck builds that have plans against the mirror, including cards that would normally be sideboarded in the main (such as Fates Reunited! or Three-Eyed Black Goat of R'lyeh) but that allow popular decks to be defeated in the first game. And builds whose attribute diversity has been reduced from four or five to two or three attributes, due to the difference in quality of the special stones available in Paradox. All of these techniques are something the 2025 WGP winner already employed to defeat his opponents throughout the tournament, winning the title in a deserved manner.
After this detailed prelude, let's now look at the new update to the banned list and combination banned list, this time, only for Paradox.
Effective date: 04/04/2025
· Paradox
Banned
o Angelic Battle Barrier (NWE-001)
o Falchion, Shooting Star of Water (CST-035)
o The Fishing Spot of Jiang Ziya (TEU-026)
o Zero's Secret Garden (MP02-004)
Combination Banned
o Ray Aznable, Reunion's Navigator (CMB-039) + Glorius, Masked Crusader (MP02-070)
o Broken Mask of the Crusader (TSR-087) + Aquafeather Phoenix (MP02-072)
Angelic Battle Barrier, Falchion, Shooting Star of Water, The Fishing Spot of Jiang Ziya, Zero's Secret Garden
The quality of certain cards from recent years has improved significantly compared to previous years. This has a specific term within TCGs called "Powercreep." Since the beginning of Trinity Cluster, when it was decided to create the Paradox format, the design of the cards in its sets has had three strands: some, focused on Wanderer, others, focused on Paradox, avoiding this powercreep as much as possible, and most of these with special terminology aimed at improving the number of playable cards in Arcana Battle Colosseum.
With this design style, cards focused on Paradox and Wanderer are easily identifiable: the power level of Falchion, Shooting Star of Water, is not the same as that of Ki Lua, Shooting Star of Wind, both MR rarity cards from the same set.
We have a list of cards we designed with Wanderer in mind, such as Hugh, Queen's Left Hand, Metal Lifeform: Dragon, and Cecilia, Fire Punisher of the Solaris Order. These cards are part of the group we call "Watchlist." We've been monitoring them since before Paradox launches to see their impact on real-world play. With the feedback from the coming months, we'll be able to fine-tune Paradox for its most important tournament of 2025: the World Championship.
There are many more cards on the Watchlist, including Angelic Battle Barrier (NWE-001), Falchion, Shooting Star of Water (CST-035), The Fishing Spot of Jiang Ziya (TEU-026), and Zero's Secret Garden (MP02-004). These cards accelerate Paradox in a way that impedes the flow of games until late turns, completely contradicting our intentions for this format.
- Angelic Battle Barrier allows a player to prevent their opponent from playing spells for a full turn, eliminating the interaction, but even more concerning, preventing them from developing the game by playing resonators. It's a card that requires decks to increase the number of cards with [Quickcast], orienting the game, once again, to the design of Wanderer, whose main interaction is the cards in chase.
- Falchion, Shooting Star of Water, once proved powerful enough to earn a Wanderer GP as part of a two-card combo between itself and Spirit of Calmness. When we decided to apply the Reworking Protocol to one of these two cards, we chose Spirit of Calmness, since Falchion, Shooting Star of Water's design is very dynamic and allows for a wide variety of strategies, including strategies based on [+100/+100] counters or based on rapidly refilling and emptying cards in hand. This speed is what makes it a fabulous card for Wanderer, but not for Paradox, where games and decks are designed for longer development. When we included Charlotte's Protector in MP02, we knew we were giving Falchion, Shooting Star of Water, the option of finding a perfect partner to speed up the pace of the game. We wanted to see if this was the case, and if it was feasible to keep both cards in Paradox. It has proven not to be the feasible, so we decided to find a solution.
- The Fishing Spot of Jiang Ziya is one of those cards that teetered on the edge of being perfect for Paradox, thanks to its [Inheritance] [B][Y], which meant developing the game to the point of being able to take advantage of the [Y] with high costs, but at the same time being imperfect for Paradox due to its named ability <Sunken Treasures>, which with cards that tidy the bottom of the deck, such as Moonglow Jellyfish, Lenneth, Lonely Asteras or Helen, Witch of the Ruins, would allow this card to end up on the field moderately easily in the first turns, giving a crushing advantage to its controller. Since we know that by banning cards from the most popular decks, the next ones in the popularity scale are those that occupy the Tier 1 slot, after careful consideration, we have decided that the power of this card, although only due to <Sunken Treasures>, exceeds the one initially established for Paradox. It is possible that when we add more cards in the future we will reverse this decision, because, as we have already said, it is a card that is on the edge of what we consider an acceptable level of power and what is not.
- Zero's Secret Garden is also among the cards we've decided to ban, based on the premise that by removing cards from the most popular decks, the next decks on the popularity ladder would be the next to rise to Tier 1. In this particular case, the ability to put this card onto the field on turn one as the first player thanks to White Sparkling Crystal Apple's God's Art accelerates Zero Midrange games to the point where they can play many more cards per turn than their opponent. We appreciate the fact that players wanted to keep White Sparkling Crystal Apple's God's Art to heal Zero's Astral condition, but they didn't, risking the Zero J-ruler being destroyed mid-game and unable to resolve it. Therefore, we're going to continue allowing this play in Wanderer, as it's on the same speed level as the plays we're used to seeing in that format, but not in Paradox.
So, with that in mind, we have decided that Angelic Battle Barrier (NWE-001), Falchion, Shooting Star of Water (CST-035), The Fishing Spot of Jiang Ziya (TEU-026) and Zero's Secret Garden (MP02-004) are banned in Paradox.
