Ending a six year streak of a ban-free Standard, Wizards has decided to ban both Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic in Standard. The changes will go into effect starting July 1st, 2011 (and June 29th, 2011 for Magic Online.)

Full announcement.

To discuss the action, Director of R&D Aaron Forsythe says the following:

The Standard metagame is stagnant and unhealthy at the moment, and has been for months. Jace, the Mind Sculptor is appearing in winning deck lists an alarming percentage of the time, with Stoneforge Mystic appearing almost as often. For reference, 88% of the decks in Day 2 of Grand Prix Singapore contained multiple copies of Jace, and almost 70% of the Day 2 decks contained Stoneforge Mystic. The numbers from Pro Tour Qualifiers and independent large events like the StarCityGames.com Open Series look very similar.

We haven't seen cards dominate the field like this, possibly ever. Even in the heyday of Affinity (the last deck to require such drastic measures in Standard), we weren't seeing anything like this level of homogeneity. When you realize that both cards, besides being dominant in Standard, are top tier in Constructed formats of all sizes up to and including Legacy (and even Vintage for Jace), it becomes harder and harder to argue that the cards are anything but flat-out too powerful.

On the question concerning how these two cards were allowed to make it through R&D, Aaron Forsythe cites a quote from his predecessor Randy Buehler.

We could make Magic permanently safe from the threat of having to ban cards if we always played it safe. [...] Magic is more fun when there are powerful cards floating around so it's a mistake to constantly weaken cards just to avoid the threat of sometimes having to ban one. In addition, Magic is also more fun when R&D thinks up brand new effects and abilities. When we do that, we aren't necessarily going to understand how powerful they are (or how much [mana] to charge for them). In fact, the more innovative a new mechanic is, the more likely we are to misunderstand exactly how to take best advantage of it and thus the more likely we are to miscost cards. [...] Anyway, everyone agrees that innovation is a Very Good Thing and thus we should be constantly pushing the envelope. Well, if we're constantly pushing the envelope and striving to come up with cool new weird and wacky cards, then occasionally we're going to make a mistake and that might mean we need to ban a card.

What do you think of the bannings? Let us know in the comments!