Banned & Restricted Announcement
Changes effective January 2004

Announcement Date: December 1, 2003
Effective Date: January 1, 2004

Standard

    No changes

Extended

    * Ancient Tomb is banned
    * Goblin Recruiter is banned
    * Grim Monolith is banned
    * Hermit Druid is banned
    * Oath of Druids is banned
    * Tinker is banned

Type 1

    * Burning Wish is restricted
    * Chrome Mox is restricted
    * Lion's Eye Diamond is restricted

Type 1.5

(All cards on the Type 1 Banned and Restricted Lists are banned 
in Type 1.5.)

    * Burning Wish is banned
    * Chrome Mox is banned
    * Lion's Eye Diamond is banned

Explanations in Brief

Here are explanations of the changes from Magic R&D:
Extended Bannings

Ancient Tomb
Years of watching constructed metagames evolve has taught us that 
efficient ways to generate fast mana are always a problem. 
Ancient Tomb simply adds too much speed to the environment.

Goblin Recruiter
Goblin Recruiter's ability to stack an arbitrarily large portion of
your deck allows goblin-based combo decks to kill as early as turn 2.
 That's too fast for a healthy environment and the Recruiter is one 
of several casualties of our effort to eliminate realistic turn 2 
kills from the environment.

Grim Monolith
Grim Monolith has to go for essentially the same reasons as 
Ancient Tomb. Things happen too quickly when the available mana 
acceleration cards are this good.

Hermit Druid
The current crop of reanimator decks are winning the game by turn 2 
and they all depend on dumping their entire library into the 
graveyard with Hermit Druid. The Druid simply does too much, too fast.

Oath of Druids
In our effort to make sure games last more than two or three turns, 
we felt we needed to get rid of Oath of Druids in addition to fast 
mana and combo enabling cards. Oath of Druids effectively ends the 
game on turn 2 against almost all creature decks, making it 
essentially impossible to have a healthy environment as long as 
this card is legal.

Tinker
Tinker is both a tutor and a mana accelerator, so we've been worried 
about it for years. The recent release of Mirrodin added many powerful 
artifacts to the environment and put Tinker decks over the top (as 
evidenced by Pro Tour New Orleans).

Type 1 Restrictions

Burning Wish
Most “tutors” are restricted in Type 1 because it defeats the purpose 
of restricting a card if you can play four copies of an efficient way 
to go get it. Since the most powerful cards in Type 1 are sorceries 
(Yawgmoth's Will, Timetwister, Balance, Mind Twist, etc.) it was 
possible to play the equivalent of four copies of any one of these 
simple by moving it into your sideboard. Interestingly, Cunning Wish 
was left off the restricted list because the one extra mana combined 
with the fact that Type 1 has less powerful instants than sorceries 
means it does not appear to be a problem.

Chrome Mox
Time has shown that fast mana is even more powerful in Type 1 than in 
other formats.

Lion's Eye Diamond
Some fast mana cards are easier to abuse than others, but recent 
advances in deck design have shown that even the drawback on 
Lion's Eye Diamond isn't severe enough to balance a zero-mana 
artifact that gives you three mana.