THE BANLIST

Last updated April 26th, 2023

Within any set of cards, there are some that are more trouble than they’re worth. These 46 are those.

BANLIST PHILOSOPHY

THE RESERVED LIST

Firstly, we’d like all decks to be (theoretically) accessible to anyone who wishes to play Middle Class Magic. As such, all cards on the Reserved List – for which no more supply will ever enter the market – will not be part of the format. The following 16 cards are BANNED:

We understand that this does not eliminate all expensive cards from the format (I’m looking at you, Portal Three Kingdoms), but it at least leaves the door open for eventual reprints.

THE ACTIVE BANLIST

The ideal vision for this format is a wide and diverse metagame with aggro, tempo, midrange, control, combo, prison, ramp, tribal, and synergy strategies all represented, perhaps with multiple versions each. So, secondly, for the sake of promoting healthy gameplay and deck diversity, there is a format banlist that will be actively updated. Once cards are added to the banlist, they will not be removed except under extraordinary circumstances. The following 30 cards are BANNED:

• Aether Vial – Don’t let the fancy wording fool you; Aether Vial is one of the most powerful mana rocks ever printed. Capable of producing vast amounts of color-fixed mana for creatures, Aether Vial crushes both the color restrictions and the acceleration restrictions that characterize MCM. It would prove to be an overly dominant approach to creature strategies, even more so than in other formats where it is already a go-to enabler. Oh yeah, it thwarts countermagic too.

• Ancient Tomb – “Fast mana” is dominant in every format it touches, and Ancient Tomb is one of the all-time greats. MCM in particular has less access to acceleration and fewer ways to quickly punish the life loss, and Ancient Tomb would surely dominate the format.

• Berserk – Berserk is a mythic-rare-level card for good reason, and it’s a particularly risky one at that, since counting to ten (or five) remains far easier than counting to twenty. As Berserk stands head-and-shoulders above other available pump spells while simultaneously supercharging them, it is better to play it safe than sorry.

• Channel – lol no. Life is a resource, but not like this. Banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage for good reason.

• City of Brass – Mana, particularly early-game color-fixing, is very restricted in MCM. City of Brass obliterates those restrictions, and with so little downside that it would see overwhelming amounts of play and significantly warp the gameplay patterns of multicolor decks.

• Demonic Consultation – Banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage, a one-mana instant-speed tutor to hand is simply too powerful, even without Thassa’s Oracle or similar cards in the format to produce an immediate win. It is hard to imagine a black deck that would not play it, and it would be a homogenizing force both in the metagame and within individual games.

• Demonic Tutor – Similar to Demonic Consultation – and also banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage – Demonic Tutor’s access to whatever card a player wants for the low cost of 2 mana would homogenize both the metagame and the games themselves.

• Elvish Spirit Guide – Free mana is already a controversial topic before we look at acceleration as a unique constraint in MCM. As a rule of thumb, it is more likely that free mana will fuel uninteractive combos or debilitating prisons than supporting “fair” strategies, and the format does not have anything like Force of Will to fight those lines. Even if it DID have Force of Will, that play pattern compresses too much gameplay into the first few turns.

• Enlightened Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Personal Tutor, & Worldly Tutor – Even if they represent card-disadvantage, one-mana tutors do not tend to promote interactive strategies. More often than not, these cards are used to find critical combo pieces consistently at greater speed than normal and at minimal cost in terms of tempo, homogenizing gameplay lines.

• Force of Will – This mythic-rare-level card defines Legacy and Vintage, and the MCM Rules Tyrant has no desire to allow it to define MCM as well. The banlist is designed to balance the format in such a way that it does not rely on Force of Will, a figurative BAND-AID^® for broken formats, so hopefully “no harm, no foul.” (BAND-AID^® is a registered trademark of Johnson & Johnson.) (No offense to broken formats; Legacy and Vintage are both a ton of fun, but that’s not MCM’s niche.) This card could reasonably be unbanned if gameplay frequently ends up compressed into the first few turns, but we hope that the power level of the format remains low enough to avoid that.

• Goblin Bombardment – Sacrifice outlets in MCM – such as Blasting Station, Makeshift Munitions, and Weaponize the Monsters – are already quite powerful, and Goblin Bombardment is clearly superior. Existing options are capable of either grinding advantage via reanimation engines or combo-killing, but Goblin Bombardment can do both while also offering to immediately turn an existing board into damage when racing. Each of the listed cards currently has a niche it fills, but Goblin Bombardment would likely usurp them all.

• Mana Drain – Counterspell is a card currently thought to be near the upper bounds of the MCM power level. Mana Drain, banned in Legacy, is so far beyond Counterspell in sheer power that it’s ridiculous. Trading one-for-one at UU is already rock-solid, but the incidental mana advantage – even as little as 1 mana – has the potential to completely unbalance a game. This mythic-rare-level spell is too big a risk.

• Mental Misstep – Free countermagic, especially the sort that can hit opposing copies, promotes terrible play patterns. Add to that the lack of color requirement, and this is a card that would likely see play everywhere with no actual gameplay benefit.

• Mishra’s Bauble & Urza’s Bauble – These cheerios are free cantrips in a format with a relative lack of cheap spell velocity; they are colorless and accessible to every deck; and they passively reward artifact-matters and delirium strategies with roughly no downside. There is a strong argument to playing them in almost any deck to simply “start with 52 cards” and extra info. This is not the kind of deckbuilding or gameplay that we would like to encourage.

• Mother of Runes – One of the most powerful one-drops of all time, Mother of Runes quickly disables interaction and allows creature decks to develop their board uncontested. While MCM contains plenty of cheap removal, Mom demands it immediately or it represents a one-mana 2-for-1. Heaven-forbid it survives via something like Touch the Spirit Realm or returns via Abiding Grace. Ultimately, interaction is the core of MCM, and Mom taxes interaction too efficiently.

• Narcomoeba – Only really a problem with Dread Return, Narcomoeba is banned so that Dread Return strategies may continue to exist in MCM. The broken card here is clearly Dread Return, so it is possible that Narcomoeba may be unbanned if Dread Return is banned, but this young format shall naively hope to provide a fair-ish home for Dread Return.

• Reanimate – Before the rules update that put Reanimate on the table, Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, Life // Death, and Necromancy were already some of the most powerful spells to cast in MCM, so powerful that future bans may be necessary anyways. (And if anything could get Force of Will unbanned, it’d be these cards.) At a mere one mana, Reanimate is strictly better than Death (of Life // Death) and mostly superior to the others too, outside of Abdul Adrian combo decks.

• Sensei’s Divining Top – Banned for causing excessive dizziness across all strategies and archetypes. STOP SPINNING

• Skullclamp – Need we even start with this one? An endless stream of Village Rites easily eclipses every card advantage engine in the format and is available to any deck with creatures, regardless of color.

• Sol Ring – Although iconic and beloved, Sol Ring exacerbates existing problems with the play/draw dynamic while also increasing the luck factor of games significantly, as starting hands with Sol Ring are dramatically faster than starting hands without. Furthermore, it eclipses every ramp spell in the format and is available to any deck regardless of colors. I know 4x Sol Ring in a 60-card deck is a helluva drug, but MCM will not be your dealer.

• Steelshaper’s Gift – If one-mana tutors that represent card-disadvantage are risky, then one-mana tutors that are card-neutral are verboten. Steelshaper’s Gift is narrow but far too efficient. While nowadays it might only be fetching Colossus Hammer, the future could give it access to any number of crazy things.

• Strip Mine & Wasteland – Mana is already unstable in MCM, and land destruction is already viable given the relatively low speed of the format. Allowing access to easy, optional land destruction built right into the manabase of random colorless or monocolor decks in addition to dedicated land-destruction decks would be devastating for opposing multicolor decks. Not to mention possible loops with Erinis, Gloom Stalker!

• Sword of the Meek – Only a major problem in conjunction with Thopter Foundry, one of them had to go, and Sword of the Meek is the one that WOTC deemed fit to be upshifted to rare. That’s probably fitting, since automatically returning from the graveyard is inherently more breakable than a mana-gated sac outlet. We’re playing it safe and letting Thopter Foundry survive. RIP, 2/3 oven cats.

• Sylvan Library – Draw-fixing/smoothing is something that MCM characteristically lacks, and Sylvan Library earns its mythic-rare power level by providing free smoothing every single turn, plus optional actual card advantage, with no additional mana requirement. While its effectiveness is reduced by the lack of Onslaught/Zendikar fetchlands to clear unwanted cards off the top (although the Mirage fetchlands and Ash Barrens still exist), its potential in MCM is boosted far over its power in Legacy merely by the lower speed of the format. It would surely be one of the best investments of two-mana that the format has to offer.

• Tinker – Allowing Tinker in a format is just asking for trouble. Turn three Tinker on the play is bad enough, but turn two is very possible with Jeweled Amulet or Crystal Vein + any artifact. Tinker can find lock-pieces like the God-Pharaoh’s Statue, resilient threats like Sphinx of the Guildpact or Darksteel Sentinel, or numerous combo pieces like Crackdown Construct, Basalt Monolith, or Shuko… and that’s not considering what crazy things might be printed in the future! (EDIT: Hello, Su-Chi Cave Guard!) While Miscast and Mystical Dispute serve as punishers for an all-in turbo Tinker strategy, leaving blue with both the question AND the only maindeckable answers is likely to tilt the metagame in a way that is simply better avoided in the first place. Sorry artificers; you’ll just have to plan ahead instead of tinkering around.

THE WATCHLIST

The following cards have been identified as potentially problematic. Some or all of these cards may move to the banlist after additional data is gathered from the format.

Broadly, cards on the watchlist fall into seven categories:

I) Broadly usable fast mana (Crystal Vein, Elves of Deep Shadow)
II) Powerful hosers that function against “fair” decks (Veil of Summer)
III) Combo engines/payoffs (2cmc unconditional reanimation, free sac outlets, Basalt Monolith, Chain of Smog, Colossus Hammer, Windfall, Zenith Flare)
IV) Cheap tutors (Goblin Recruiter, Lim-Dul’s Vault, Steelshaper’s Gift)
V) Answers that are too broad or easy to play (Dismember, Prismatic Ending, Swords to Plowshares)
VI) First-turn plays that threaten to take over the game (Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Goblin Lackey)
VII) Other “fair” cards that easily outclass all alternatives at performing a basic game function (Dragon’s Rage Channeler, Expressive Iteration, Night’s Whisper, Windfall)

ONGOING DISCUSSIONS

We are also keeping an eye on the inclusion of supplemental sets. Currently, we believe that supplemental draft sets (thus far: Conspiracy, Conspiracy 2, Battlebond, Modern Horizons, Jumpstart (2020), Commander Legends, Modern Horizons 2, Commander Legends: Baldur’s Gate, Unfinity, and Jumpstart 2022) do not cause enough problems to outweigh their drastically increasing the format’s available options and mechanics. However, this may change with any given set, which could prompt cutting off supplemental sets after a certain point or eliminating the group from the card pool entirely. The same can be said for Commander products and theme deck exclusives, allowed into the format during the May 2023 rules streamlining.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSIONS

COMMON DOWNSHIFTS

There WAS a discussion about rarity DOWNSHIFTS, especially in Masters/Reprint sets. The original vision for the format excluded not just all rares/mythics, but also all commons. The rules were changed to allow “any card originally printed at uncommon in a draftable set that has not been printed at rare or mythic in draftable set (counting Jumpstart as draftable).” The following are the most notable cards affected by that rules revision at the time, which occurred just before Double Masters 2022. Bolded are cards downshifted only within Masters/Reprint sets.

This sentence links to the full list of “newly” legalized cards.

RARE/MYTHIC UPSHIFTS

There was also a discussion of whether uncommon cards that had been upshifted to rare/mythic should be allowed. As part of the rules streamlining of May 2023, upshifted cards were legalized, with the exception of specific problematic cards.
• Uncommon cards upshifted to rare/mythic (accurate as of 12/08/2022)
The topic of rare upshifts was more contentious. Ultimately, the MCM Rules Tyrant decided that expanding the banlist by ~20 cards is a small price to pay for simplification and increased accessibility for new players.

This sentence links to the full list of legalized upshifted cards.

NON-DRAFT SETS

Sets not intended for Limited-format play were originally ignored for the purposes of legality/illegality in MCM. After all, the link between rarity and power level exists for the sake of Limited; sets without a focus on Limited can, in theory, have dangerously loose card designs at “low” rarities. However, this added a layer of complexity to the rules without an actual power-level justification, since uncommons from supplemental sets like Modern Horizons – already legal – are the most pushed by far, with almost every single non-Limited uncommon deemed safe by manual review. As such, the rules changed with the May 2023 streamlining effort.

This sentence links to a full list of cards legalized by this change.
(About 15 of these were already legal due to reprints in Limited sets.)