Welcome to my Pioneer deck analysis! Pioneer is the newest competitive format for Magic: The Gathering. It includes cards from the Return to Ravnica block (released in Oct 2012) up to the current standard set. Like Modern, Pioneer is an eternal format, meaning that the cards will never rotate, unlike Standard. It serves as a midway point between the Modern and Standard formats. Within the first few months, Wizards banned quite a few cards in the format and will likely have to keep expanding the ban list as the format evolves. Don’t be surprised if staple cards included in the decks below get banned at some point. In some cases substitutions can be made, but one of the reasons for posting these deck analyses in the first place is to show how these decks function, which can inspire new ideas, sometimes in other formats. As the format expands, newer cards will be added to older decks so some deck analyses may become outdated as time goes on.