As of September 24, 2026, 13 cards are banned in Standard and 20 sets are legal.
Standard is Magic's rotating 60-card format, built from roughly the last three years of premier sets. It is the only major format where a card can stop being legal without ever being banned. Both lists below are read from Scryfall.
Standard bans are rare, because rotation usually solves the problem on its own. When a deck is distorting the format and rotation is still a year away, cards get removed. This is the current list.
Built from Scryfall on 2026-09-24
Oldest first, so the sets nearest the top are the ones that leave next. This list is worked out by asking Scryfall, set by set, what is legal today, rather than counting back three years from the calendar, because Wizards has given individual sets longer lives than the usual cycle.
A Standard ban is an admission that the format cannot wait for rotation. The bar is high, and the reasons cluster tightly.
Standard is meant to be the format where a new player can bring a deck they built and have a game. When a single archetype is half of every event, the cards holding it up come out rather than waiting a year for rotation to do it.
Cards that reliably take over on turn two or three leave no room for the slower decks that give Standard its shape. A format where the games are decided before either player has made a real decision is the one Standard most tries to avoid.
A new card can make an old one dangerous in a way nobody saw at the time. When the combination rather than either half is the problem, the newer card is usually the one that goes.
| Rule | Standard | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum deck size | 60 cards | No maximum, but a bigger deck draws its best cards less often. Nearly every competitive list is exactly 60. |
| Sideboard | Exactly 15, or none | Optional, but a sideboard you bring must be exactly 15 cards. |
| Copies of a card | 4 | The four-copy limit spans main deck and sideboard. Basic lands have no limit. |
| Card pool | Recent premier sets | Listed in full above. Supplemental products and Commander decks are not Standard-legal. |
| Rotation | Annual | The oldest sets leave once a year, which is what keeps the format's card pool roughly this size. |
Set a deck's format to Standard in ArcaneMetriX and the builder flags any card that has rotated out or been banned, so a list you built last year tells you what it lost rather than failing at the table.
Rotation happens once a year, when the oldest sets in the pool leave together. The set list above is regenerated from Scryfall, so the sets nearest the top of it are the ones on their way out.
The full list is on this page, oldest first. It is derived by asking Scryfall which sets currently contain Standard-legal cards, so it stays right even when a set is given a longer life than the usual three-year cycle.
Because rotation can be a year away. A ban is what happens when a card is distorting the format now and waiting for the calendar would mean a year of the same event results.
No. Standard uses premier sets only. Cards printed in Commander decks, Modern Horizons sets and similar supplemental products never enter Standard.
Open the builder, set the format to Standard, and paste in a list or start from nothing. Every card is checked against the current sets and banlist as it goes in.