Whether you play Modern, Commander, Vintage or Standard, you've probably heard of the problematic trickster, Oko, Thief of Crowns. Released in the most recent MtG main set, Throne of Eldraine, Oko is a great example of a card being fairly balanced in theory but heinously powerful in practice. On the eve of his possible ban, let's look at the case for his removal from the standard environment.
Let's break him down. For 1GU, only 3 mana strong, you get a 4 loyalty planeswalker with 3 different, yet powerful abilities. This isn't an insanely new development in Magic's history by far, in fact it almost follows a theme of powerful centre-point cards (I'm looking at you, Saheeli Rai, Liliana of the Veil and Nissa, Voice of Zendikar) so what makes Oko stand out as this powerhouse of unstoppable pressure in today's standard format, even compared to the other examples I gave?
Oko's +2 ability is pretty straight-forward. It makes Food. Food works a lot like Clues (originally introduced in Shadows over Innistrad) but, instead of an artifact token with the ability, "
, Sacrifice this artifact: Draw a card.", Food tokens say ", 
, Sacrifice this artifact: You gain 3 life." Life gain is usually a lot worse than hard card advantage, but in the right scenario, having 3-4 Food tokens out, having that ability to gain up to and over half your starting life total quite easily can prove rather powerful, not to mention that Throne of Eldraine has plenty of ways to abuse having these Food tokens, but we'll get to that shortly. So the +2 is 'good', but where is the power? Well, when you start abusing his +1, (yes, you read that right, this ability is +1!) "Target artifact or creature loses all abilities and becomes a green Elk creature with base power and toughness 3/3." he really starts to shine.
LOSES ALL ABILITIES. That is HUGE. Sorry, did you just pressure my life total with a well-timed Questing Beast? Did you mean a 3/3 vanilla Elk? Wicked Wolf? Lovestruck Beast? Cavalier of Night? All Elks under Oko's hard boot. Yes, that's also buffing my Oko, I know! A 10/10 Hydroid Krasis causing you grief? Poof! It's a... 13/13 Elk now, but at least it doesn't have trample or flying! By the way, this is PERMANENT. Oko doesn't need to stay on the field to continue elk-ifying the targeted creature(s), so if he dies they're still done and dusted. I could go on and on about all the sick cards and plays you can force-feed a healthy dose of lobotomy-sauce to with this ability, but you get the idea.
Lastly, his -5, "Exchange control of target artifact or creature you control and target creature an opponent controls with power 3 or less." just neatly wraps up this whole package. If it wasn't bad enough that he generates vital Food, if the fact that he crushes down your most powerful creatures into compact Bambi clones wasn't making your skin crawl, his ultimate ability interacts with BOTH of those abilities. Food becomes an easy target to give to your opponent, the Elks he creates happen to be 3 power, which means worst-case-scenario he can at least steal those back, and there are plenty examples of powerful, standard-legal cards he can make use of, like Midnight Reaper, Mayhem Devil and the all-powerful Gilded Goose (who actively also enables Oko), to name a few.
In sheer scale of power, it's not entirely fair to compare Oko to cards like Liliana of the Veil or Nissa, Voice of Zendikar, but that's not what makes Oko powerful. Oko essentially answers all of the most powerful creatures and artifacts in the current standard rotation, but only artifacts and creatures, not planeswalkers, which means an Oko can't entirely deal with another Oko. If Oko, the be-all-end-all of answering threats in late 2019 can't answer Oko, what can? That's where the problem begins.
Aether Gust and Fry are some of the 2 most prominent, instant-speed answers to Oko, and there's a small problem with both of these 2 cards. Both of these cards are a 1-for-1, which means simply that they are using 1 card to remove 1 card. This is not 'great' economically, but usually is the way with cards in this design-space. Unfortunately with both of these cards, Aether Gust is not entirely removing the card from the equation entirely, as with a simple shuffle of the library (or even with enough draw) it's back in your opponent's grasp, assuming they don't simply choose to top-deck their trickster and then cast him again. Fry comes in as a more permanent solution, but a smart Oko player will likely predict this play and +2 him first.
For those in the back, adding or removing loyalty from a planeswalker is considered part of the cost of the effect, so before the opponent gets a chance to respond, Oko can be cast and in his owner's priority +2, putting him up to a healthy 6 loyalty. 6 loyalty on a polymorph-wand for 3 CMC? Yes please! 5 damage is laughable to Oko, don't forget that his Elking ability is +1, not -1 (WOTC WHY??) so he'll stay alive AND continue to give you a hernia for who-knows-how-long.
Now, there does exist cards in the current format that allow you to proactively prepare for your opponent to have an Oko, and in a vacuum cards like Thought Erasure and Unmoored Ego are exceptional, but don't offer any protection against an already cast and established planeswalker. Another issue with this kind of threat answering is that it bottle-noses you into calling Oko and not much else.
This is absurdly problematic, as simply whiffing could easily cost you the game, and opening copies of these cards is necessary to combat Oko, along with your opponent seeing the Oko in their opening.
Lastly, you're still technically going 1-for-1. Ego is easier to justify as it simply removes all copies of the card from basically everywhere, but also has that added balancing of costing a whopping 3 CMC for a fancy Duress, and also allowing your opponent to draw additional cards if they happened to have the Oko(s) in their hand at the time, which is very economically unsafe, as in all situations, the hand size of the opponent doesn't change, and chances are their deck has an unrelated win condition to Oko.
There are answers to Oko in standard, but none of the cards mentioned efficiently remove Oko entirely, and that's a part of the problem. Making food and poly-morphing threats is powerful, but it's made oppressive when the only answers you have are all soft-locked into only answering Oko, and nothing else really in the format or, worse still, they don't even fully answer Oko anyway.
This is compounded by the fact that he's exceptionally low to the ground. Existing in a format next to fast enablers like Gilded Goose, it's not impossible to imagine having 3 mana at the very earliest turn 2. It's also relevant to mention again that Oko is Blue AND Green, which hard buffs some of the strongest Black-Green-Blue decks while also enabling White-Green decks in the format to easily sub him into their lists with a small splash of Blue.
But, what about all the other cards in standard at the moment? Sure, there's a few to consider. Gilded Goose may be one, Once upon a Time is definitely another, but the prevalence of Simic (Blue-Green) or Simic-included builds (Sultai - BUG and Bant - WUG) in the upper echelons of the format at the moment seem to favour greatly from Oko sticking around. At the recent Mythic Championships, Oko-related decks made up 69% of the total decklists. And, to further show how dominant the Simic decks are, the top 10 cards played in decks at Mythic Champions last week, all of which are Green, Blue, Simic, and even Breeding Pool (remember, you can only have 4 copies of in a standard deck) counted more copies at the tournament than Mountains, Swamps, and Plains combined.
Everything about what makes Oko powerful has proven exceptionally problematic to balance without the ban of the big man himself. Recently WotC have banned Oko in their pet project, Brawl, (at least on Arena anyway) and it won't surprise us to see him banned in their premier format, Standard. Will it fix Standard's problem with Simic at the moment, probably not, but it will certainly open up the stage for some more interesting builds that are being stifled by Oko's insane capabilities.
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