Umezawa's Jitte Is Finally Legal In Modern

One of Magic: the Gathering's most popular formats is getting a major shakeup.

Announced by Wizards of the Coast, today's Banned & Restricted announcement features four changes in the Modern format.

First introduced in 2011, the Modern format features every regular core set and main expansion, starting with 2003's Eighth Edition. The philosophy is that every card that exists in the Modern format is, unsurprisingly, a part of Magic's modern game design.

While designed as an eternal, non-rotating format, Wizards of the Coast has been busy with bannings and unbannings, thanks in part to the format's increased power level from straight-to-modern sets such as Modern Horizons.

Here's the full breakdown of today's announcement, including some surprising bans and unbans across the board.

• Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury is banned.
• Lotus Field is banned.
• Violent Outburst is unbanned.
• Umezawa's Jitte is unbanned.

Umezawa's Jitte Has Been Banned Since Modern's Inception

Let's start with the elephant in the room: Umezawa's Jitte is now deemed not powerful enough to break the Modern format. It makes sense, given the fact that a card like Jace, the Mind Sculptor, isn't good enough to warp Modern. Here's the reasoning from senior game designer Carmen Klomparens:

We've generally been hesitant to unban the card in Modern because it has some play patterns that are … unsavory, to say the least[...]Ultimately, Modern is a strong format that can absorb a lot, both in terms of power level and tolerance for novel play patterns.

It's something that's completely true: Modern has become so powerful that older cards that used to dominate the game seem underpowered by comparison. It's logic like that which made it feel like Violent Outburst was safe to be unbanned, despite being banned two years ago.

As for the cards that received the ban hammer, Phlage was deemed too powerful for the archetypes it was appearing in. As for Lotus Field, that one seems out of left field. However, it feels like Wizards wants to keep a card like Primeval Titan and the Amulet Titan deck as a concept, legal in the format. As such, it makes more sense to ban problematic land cards rather than the deck's namesake.

We'll see how one of the more popular Magic: the Gathering formats responds to such a massive unbanning.