OK, now it’s time to go down the whole Modern banlist card by card and talk about why they deserve to be on the list. If you want to get a holistic understanding of the format macro-archetypes and dynamics that frame Modern’s banlist, I recommend checking out Reid Duke’s course on Modern. While some of those initial cards, like Stoneforge Mystic and Jace, the Mind Sculptor, have since been unbanned, many of them are still banned today and have never seen the inside of a Modern tournament since that first event up at Wizards HQ. The banlist for this event was very small, and it was these decks that formed the basis of the first Modern banlist. They’d play a series of often wacky formats to determine a winner and this year their job was to test the waters and see what powerful decks they could come up with for this new format. The 2011 Community Cup was a contest between a team of WotC employees and Magic Online community representatives. The first Modern tournament in history happened in early June 2011 before Modern became a sanctioned format. Many of the banned cards in Modern were banned because of this very rule, though 10 years later the rule has become more and more of an afterthought. They publicly said that Modern should be a “turn 4 format,” meaning that no deck should be able to consistently win before turn 4. While they were obviously concerned about the power levels of certain cards, their main concern was making sure the format didn’t get too fast. WotC was very forthright with their plans for the format’s banlist when Modern was announced.

Extended had a sizable banlist at the time so it was obvious that Modern needed one too. Modern was just as big as Extended at the time but it never rotated which was a big hit with players. So Modern was born in the summer of 2011. It was never very popular since keeping up with two formats that periodically rotated just wasn’t great for players. Extended was a rotating format with over three times as many legal sets as Standard. Modern came about as a replacement for Extended. Ancient Den | Illustration by Rob Alexander

Modern dredge post ban