Guys if you look at the last two PvP reports then it correlates very well with the new restriction list. What they’re doing is pretty simple… they’re restricting the monsters that were most used over the last two seasons (i.e. shifting the meta).
Some of the restricted monsters over the last two seasons were STILL being most used, so they’re restricted again. To me that shows three things:
- People can still play with these monsters if they want to. It’s restricting, not banning.
- A restriction list like this is absolutely necessary to have any hope of pushing down the use of certain monsters (e.g. Padrinorca and Novadrake).
- The list should perhaps be a bit longer, which is what they’ve done (2 mythics (1) restricted, 5 → 6 legendaries in (1) and 6 → 8 in (2)).
The restricted monsters that weren’t used much over the last two seasons have been removed. For example, Moku and Polaboss. A lot of people went for link fire and poison end-games which is why we’ve ended up with Infernicorn, Flarevern, Ahuizard, Meatoid, Scorpiogeist and Freezecobra restricted.
I think it’s worth pointing out that despite shiny spectrefox being restricted last season and seeing an enormous amount of play they chose not to restrict it this time. They clearly listened to our feedback about not restricting the stun protection people commonly have.
Lastly, these restrictions are absolutely meant to impact the meta so naturally a lot of you will have to adapt your PvP teams to them. That’s literally what they’re designed to do.