Back in May, WotC introduced yet another format for playing Magic: Modern.

Standard includes the last two “blocks” of cards, about two years worth of cards. To play in Standard, you have to keep buying new cards. Legacy includes all cards, ever. Many early cards were powerful and will never be reprinted. As a result, the pool of people who can play in Legacy tends to stagnate.

To address this, they introduced Extended a few years ago. Extended originally included the most recent seven years of cards. This was for people who already had a large card collection, but not one as good as those who played in Legacy. Extended was later reduced to four years, which is barely more than Standard. Still, cards rotate out of Extended, just as they do in Standard.

Now comes Modern. Modern is like Legacy in that all cards will always remain in the set (unless they are banned). But the first legal set is 8th. I imagine that around 8 years from now there will be a new “Modern” for the next generation of cardboard crack addicts.

Modern’s original banned list included some of the cards from Legacy and Standard. Some of the cards that were banned in Standard were not banned in Modern or Extended, supposedly because there was potential for a wider range of decks.

WotC just announced “My bad” and added those cards to the Modern and/or Extended banned lists. The list of newly banned cards includes:

Modern

  • Blazing Shoal is banned.
  • Cloudpost is banned.
  • Green Sun’s Zenith is banned.
  • Ponder is banned.
  • Preordain is banned.
  • Rite of Flame is banned.

Extended

  • Jace, the Mind Sculptor is banned.
  • Mental Misstep is banned.
  • Ponder is banned.
  • Preordain is banned.
  • Stoneforge Mystic is banned.

Legacy

  • Mental Misstep is banned.

and the explanation for them is here.