Ban List Evaluation - Goblin Recruiter

Derek Gill Holden Gabriel
Aug 7, 2019
3 min read

Today we are going to look at the Legacy banlist and talk about whether or not one of the cards should stay banned or unbanned.

It is probably no surprise here that I wanted to pick Goblin Recruiter for this.

To see just how powerful this card is let’s break it down.

The text box:

When Goblin Recruiter enters the battlefield, search your library for any number of Goblin cards and reveal those cards. Shuffle your library, then put them on top of it in any order.

The fact that this card can stack your deck is insane. Yeah, most goblins aren’t amazing and don’t do all that much, and knowing what order to put them in is impossible because you don’t always want a Goblin Chainwhirler when you really want a Siege-Gang Commander. If you’re looking at this card purely from the text on it, you are playing something that supports good Goblin Ringleader triggers and can be really good if you’re playing Mono-Red Goblins. Don’t ignore the fact you get to stack the top of your deck with Goblins, it’ll be important later.

The card’s details:

Goblin Recruiter 1R, Creature - Goblin 1/1

This card is a two mana, mass top deck tutor. Mystical and Enlightened Tutor wish they were Goblin Recruiter. All joking aside; this is a creature, so if we want we can do this repeatedly and for cheap (as well as skimp on the mana cost with Goblin Warchief or the less popular Frogtosser Banneret).

Extra card notes:

You can search for any card with the creature type Goblin, including Creature or Tribal cards. Older cards of type “Summon Goblin” and “Summon Goblins” also count. You can’t search for cards that have Goblin in the name but don’t have the creature type Goblin.

Synergy cards:

Food Chain. There is an old Legacy (and Vintage) deck called Food Chain Goblins because you can cast Recruiter, and then every 4 cards you have a Ringleader and you cast all your Goblins by feeding them to Food Chain. This is the main combo with this card, but another way of playing this is with Goblin Charbelcher.

Why this card is banned:

“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.”

Realistically, it is most likely banned because of the amount of time it takes to put all those cards on top of your deck in whatever order you want in a tournament setting. Think about how much time would be taken up by searching your deck for every single Goblin, showing it to your opponent, and shuffling the deck without a Judge standing right next to you because you’ve just picked up your deck and took out one billion cards and then put them on top after shuffling.

Final decision:

This card should stay banned, for now. I think that if Legacy adopts a restricted section of the ban list this card should be restricted. Maybe this is asking a lot but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s removed from the ban list in the future. With the recent printing of Squee, The Immortal, we can go infinite with Food Chain Goblins even easier and more powerfully. I think this deck can exist without Goblin Recruiter, but I’m not entirely sure how good it is.

Example current Food Chain Goblins deck:

Spells: