As of September 24, 2026, 52 cards are banned in Modern.
Modern is a non-rotating 60-card format built from 2003's Eighth Edition and Mirrodin onward: a card pool that only ever grows, held in check by a banned list rather than by rotation. Everything banned in Modern right now is below, read straight from Scryfall's legality data.
A banned card may not be played in a Modern deck or sideboard at all. The list below is written into this page each time the site is built and checked against Scryfall again when you open it, so it follows the most recent Banned and Restricted announcement without anyone editing this article.
Built from Scryfall on 2026-09-24
Bans in Modern are not a judgement about a card being strong. They are about what a card does to the shape of the format. Almost every card on the list above fell into one of these three buckets.
Modern tolerates fast decks, but not ones that win before the opponent has had a meaningful turn. Cards that reliably produced a kill on turn one or two, or that paid for themselves the moment they resolved, get removed so games still have a middle.
A card that is correct in any deck that can cast it flattens the format. When deckbuilding starts from a fixed list of cards you must play, the interesting part of the format is already over, and the card usually goes.
Locks that stop an opponent taking actions, and land denial that leaves them unable to cast anything, produce games that are technically still going. These get banned for what they do to the experience, not to the win rate.
| Rule | Modern | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum deck size | 60 cards | There is no maximum, but going above 60 dilutes your best cards. Almost every competitive list is exactly 60. |
| Sideboard | Exactly 15, or none | A sideboard of 14 is illegal. It is 15 or zero, and cards swap one for one between games. |
| Copies of a card | 4 | Counted across main deck and sideboard together, by card name. Basic lands are exempt. |
| Card pool | Eighth Edition and Mirrodin forward | The cutoff is the modern card frame, introduced in 2003. Modern Horizons sets are legal despite never being Standard-legal. |
| Rotation | None | A deck you build today stays legal indefinitely unless a card in it is banned. |
Set a deck's format to Modern and the builder flags anything banned, any fifth copy, and a sideboard that is not 15 while you are still building, not at the table.
No. Modern is non-rotating, which is the whole point of it. Sets are added and never removed, so a deck stays legal for as long as its cards stay off the banned list. This is the opposite of Standard, where the oldest sets leave every year.
Wizards of the Coast publishes Banned and Restricted announcements a few times a year, usually alongside set releases, and occasionally out of cycle when something is clearly breaking the format. This page follows those announcements automatically rather than waiting for someone to rewrite it.
Yes. The Modern Horizons sets are printed directly into Modern without passing through Standard, and they are legal the day they release. Several of the cards on the banned list above arrived that way.
No. A ban covers the whole deck, main and sideboard alike. This is different from Vintage, where restricted cards are legal at one copy.
ArcaneMetriX validates format legality as you build, so a banned card or an illegal sideboard is caught immediately rather than at the table.