MTG is banning (and unbanning) some extremely powerful cards to end a tough year

While the previous banned and restricted announcement for these formats took place in August, this was the first to deviate from the previous update schedule – which used to correspond to new set releases in the middle of competitive seasons. June’s banned and restricted list came a week prior to the Pro Tour event. “This can make it difficult for players to feel confident in their deck selection for events they have planned, both from a testing perspective and from a logistics perspective,” Magic designers Dan Musser and Dave Finseth stated in their August announcement.

They also announced that Magic would be reducing the cadence of their updates to align with regional championship events. “We are nearing the end of a round of (championship events),” the Dec. 16 announcement said. “In addition to the gameplay on both MTG Arena and Magic Online, this gave our team substantial data to address any issues with each of the different competitive formats.”

These types of changes to playable cards will be penalized Magic events are typically created under the auspices of making the various formats fairer and more fun to play. In her explanation of the banned cards, designer Arya Karamchandani wrote that cards that disrupt play too much can homogenize the decks people play, because it’s “hard to justify playing a personal favorite card or a metagame-specific call if this means you must give up Jegantha (the Source).” This is becoming an increasingly pressing problem as the number of releases increases dramatically with IP tie-ins like the Universes Beyond Lord of the Rings set, which banned a card on this list.

The full list of updates covers 10 Magic formats, without making any changes to Standard, Vintage, Alchemy, Historic, Timeless or Brawl. The Modern format saw the biggest changes because “this is the beginning of a new era,” the design team said in the Dec. 16 announcement. “Many of you have given feedback time and time again about the good old days of modern Modern skylineThe sets of s began to increase the power level of the format and make iconic decks obsolete. After much thought, we have chosen an initial list of cards to lift, namely Mox Opal, Green Sun’s Zenith, Faithless Looting, and Splinter Twin.

Notably missing from the update is the Commander format – which only came under Wizards’ control after the volunteer-led rules committee resigned after reportedly receiving death threats for banning cards that disrupted the game, but were highly appreciated by collectors. This most recent update doesn’t seem to have sparked the same level of anger from the most vocal online segments of the community. Legacy players on Reddit seem to feel particularly overlooked, noting that Nadu, Winged Wisdom – a card that was the subject of an emergency ban petition before it was ultimately banned in the modern format – was still playable. Many on the forum felt that this was a delay to an inevitable problem with the card, assuming the final ban would come on March 31, 2025, when the next announcement is scheduled for release.