Nombreux bannissements en Modern et Extended, Mental Mistep banni en Legacy, Fact or Fiction illimité en Vintage

This was Tom LaPille’s comment on the introduction of the Modern format for Pro Tour Philadelphia. It’s a response to people who were surprised at the additional set of bannings since the Modern format test-debuted earlier in the year.

The point was, essentially, “even with additional bannings, we’re still banning way fewer cards than in Legacy.”

Or, to look at it from another perspective, “Modern is less broken than Legacy.”

So how has this changed in the wake of the new bannings?

First, we need to back up a bit and tweak our numbers a little. Although Tom just grabbed the full count of banned cards for Legacy, that’s a bit of an accidental cheat on his part. After all, the Legacy banned list includes not just overpowered insanity like Tinker, but also such competitive favorites as Jeweled Bird and Chaos Orb. I think we can all agree that ante cards and dexterity cards don’t represent broken power levels but simply “things that don’t work in a tournament setting.” We’ll throw Shahrazad into that list as well, since its banning was entirely a function of tournament impracticality rather than power.

With those cards yanked from the mix, the actual Legacy banned count is 49 cards out of 11,740 total cards. Yes, I pulled the 11 suspect cards from the total Legacy card count, too. With the addition of Mental Misstep to banland, that becomes 50 cards banned out of 11,740 total.

Modern, in contrast, now features 27 cards banned out of 6,273 total.

How do those numbers compare?

Well, for whatever reason, my brain went straight to how researchers measure contaminant concentrations when they discuss toxic risks in the environment. I suppose this makes sense – in theory, banned cards were “toxic” to the format, which is why they got the ax. In talking about toxins, we like to think in parts per – typically parts per billion or parts per million, when it’s cancer-causing chemicals in your water. In this case, I decided to convert the banned counts into “parts per thousand” – that is, how many banned cards a format has per every thousand cards in it. Here are the formats, ranked from highest to lowest: