MTG Commander Banned List: Every Card and Why

Wizards' Banned and Restricted List gives Commander 42 card names and four lines of small print. The small print is where half the list lives.

Run the same question through Scryfall instead — the search banned:commander — and the answer comes back as 83 cards. That gap is the whole story of this list: 41 of the 83 are banned by category rather than by name, and those same three categories appear verbatim under Vintage and Legacy on the same page, so none of them are Commander decisions at all. The part that actually shapes deckbuilding is the 42.

Everything below is read off Wizards' own banned list page and the Scryfall database on 30 August 2026. Where a grouping is mine rather than Wizards', it says so.

The list in one table

Those four rows add to 83, which is exactly what Scryfall returns, so nothing is double-counted and nothing is missing.

One card sits outside that total. Lutri, the Spellchaser is legal in Commander but banned as a companion — a designation that did not exist before this year. It gets its own section below.

The 42 named cards, and what each one does

The grouping here is mine; the card behavior in the right-hand column is oracle text from Scryfall, and every card in the table is on Wizards' list. The five original Moxen share a row because they are the same card five times, which is why 38 rows cover 42 cards.

Read down the Cost column and the shape of the list is obvious. Eight of the 42 cost zero. Three of them take a turn. Five are draw engines, and three of those five — Griselbrand, Trade Secrets and Yawgmoth's Bargain — carry no printed cap on how many cards they draw. Commander is a format built around 40 life and a slow multiplayer clock, and the cards on this list are the ones that skip past both.

The 41 cards banned by category

These are the ones the small print covers, and they are the reason a raw Scryfall count is nearly twice the number of names on the page.

25 Conspiracy cards. Conspiracy is a card type printed in the two Conspiracy draft sets, from 2014 and 2016. They start the game outside your deck and change the rules of a draft. Adriana's Valor, Backup Plan, Power Play, Worldknit and the other 21 carry the identical category ban under Vintage, Legacy and Oathbreaker that they do under Commander. They are not on the Standard, Pioneer or Modern banned lists — those formats never included them in the first place.

9 ante cards. Cards that reference playing for ante — Amulet of Quoz, Bronze Tablet, Contract from Below, Darkpact, Demonic Attorney, Jeweled Bird, Rebirth, Tempest Efreet and Timmerian Fiends. Ante means playing for ownership of the cards, which Wizards removed from the game decades ago.

7 cards banned for offensive content. Wizards' banned list carries a standing line that cards whose art, text, name, or combination of those is racially or culturally offensive are banned in all formats. Scryfall's Commander-banned data resolves that line to seven cards: Cleanse, Crusade, Imprison, Invoke Prejudice, Jihad, Pradesh Gypsies and Stone-Throwing Devils.

Only two of these 41 have been printed since 2016, according to Scryfall's release data: the Conspiracy cards Iterative Analysis, reprinted in The List in 2020, and Hymn of the Wilds, reprinted in The List in 2024. The rest are decades out of print. They matter here only when you are reconciling a database count against the number of names on the official page.

Banned as a companion: the Lutri exception

On 9 February 2026 the Commander Format Panel unbanned Lutri, the Spellchaser — and simultaneously created a brand-new designation for it, banned as a companion.

The distinction is exact:

• Lutri can be a card in your 99.
• Lutri can be your commander.
• Lutri cannot be your companion.

Writing on behalf of the panel, Gavin Verhey explained the reasoning: Lutri's companion condition — no two nonland cards in your deck sharing a name — is what Commander's singleton rule already imposes, so a blue-red identity deck pays nothing to run it as a free extra card every game. The panel's stated worry was ubiquity, not power — an unconditional extra card in every Izzet deck forever. The card itself, they decided, was fine. The announcement's phrasing for the decision was to "free the Otter."

There is one more wrinkle worth knowing, because it explains an asymmetry you will see on the Game Changers list. Cards that come off the Commander banned list normally get added to Game Changers on the way out. Lutri did not, because the problem was never the card's power level. Biorhythm, unbanned the same day, did.

What has changed, and when

Four dated events cover everything that has happened to this list since it stopped being a volunteer project.

Nothing has changed since. The Banned and Restricted announcements of 23 March, 18 May, 29 June and 10 August 2026 all left Commander alone — those are Constructed cadence updates, and Commander runs on its own schedule.

That schedule is looser than it used to be. After the April 2025 update the panel said it would not touch the list again that year. In the February 2026 announcement it explicitly dropped that constraint, saying it is no longer limiting itself to one update window per year and can come back later in the year if it decides to.

Three cards that nearly came off

The February 2026 announcement is unusually candid about what did not happen, and it names three cards the panel discussed heavily and then left alone.

Sundering Titan. The panel's argument for unbanning it was that the bracket system already fences off land denial: as a Game Changer it would be locked out of Brackets 1 and 2, and a deck built to loop it is not a Bracket 3 deck either. The argument against was simpler — plenty of tables do not use brackets at all, and a colorless eight-drop goes in any deck.

Iona, Shield of Emeria. Described as right on the cusp of an unban. The stated problem is that naming a color can end a mono-color player's participation in the game entirely, and that it is a premier cheat-into-play target rather than a card anyone casts for nine mana.

Griselbrand. The panel called this the risky one and made the case anyway: it was banned for power level almost immediately after Avacyn Restored, it sees play across the formats where it is legal, and Bracket 3 and up might now be able to absorb it. It stayed banned.

Jeweled Lotus was also discussed and also stayed banned, with the panel noting an unban is not impossible in future. Feedback was invited on Sundering Titan, Iona and Griselbrand specifically, which is worth knowing if you have an opinion — the list is not being treated as settled.

The banned list is not the Game Changers list

These two lists do opposite jobs.

The banned list tells you what is illegal. The Game Changers list is a list of legal cards strong enough to push your deck up a bracket. Wizards' Commander format page sets the caps: Brackets 1 and 2 run none, Bracket 3 allows up to three, and Brackets 4 and 5 have no limit.

A card can be a Game Changer and completely legal at your table. A banned card is not legal at any bracket, including cEDH. Biorhythm is now both: legal to play, and a Game Changer that keeps it out of the two lowest brackets.

36 cards Vintage restricts that Commander lets you play

Here is the cleanest way to see how permissive Commander actually is. Vintage, which Wizards' own banned list page describes as letting you play cards from any set in Magic's history, keeps 52 cards on its restricted list — one copy maximum each. Sixteen of those 52 are banned outright in Commander: Ancestral Recall, Balance, Black Lotus, Channel, Flash, Library of Alexandria, Mana Crypt, the five original Moxen, Time Vault, Time Walk, Tinker and Tolarian Academy. The other 36 are fully legal in Commander, where singleton means you were only ever going to play one anyway:

Sol Ring is on that list. Vintage restricts it to one copy; Commander lets you play it, and Scryfall records 69 Sol Ring printings in Commander-branded products between 2011 and 2026. That is not an inconsistency — it is the format telling you where its actual limits sit, and they sit a long way past the 42 names.

Where to check legality before you buy

Type the card name into Scryfall and read the Legalities box on the card page; it carries a Commander row with one of legal, not legal, or banned. To pull the entire list at once, search banned:commander — that is the query behind the 83-card count in this post, and it updates when Wizards updates.

For anything you are about to spend money on, check the official Banned and Restricted List as well. Scryfall is fast and accurate, but Wizards' page is the source, and it is the one that carries the small print about Conspiracies, ante and the companion designation.

If you are building from scratch rather than auditing a list, the Commander format guide covers the deckbuilding rules underneath all of this, and the how to build a Commander deck walkthrough handles the 99.

Quick Action Checklist

• The list is 83 cards: 42 named, 25 Conspiracies, 9 ante cards, 7 banned everywhere for offensive content. Only the 42 affect deckbuilding.
• Eight of the 42 cost zero mana — Black Lotus, Jeweled Lotus, Mana Crypt and the five original Moxen.
• Mana Crypt, Jeweled Lotus, Dockside Extortionist and Nadu went in one update, on 23 September 2024. Pull them from any older decklist you copy.
• Lutri, the Spellchaser is legal in your deck or as your commander, and banned as your companion. That designation was created on 9 February 2026, and Wizards' announcement says the list is currently just Lutri.
• Biorhythm is legal again as of 9 February 2026, and is a Game Changer, so it is out of Brackets 1 and 2.
• The banned list and the Game Changers list are different tools. Banned means illegal; Game Changer means legal but bracket-defining.
• Sol Ring, Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Necropotence and 32 other Vintage-restricted cards are legal in Commander. Vintage restricting a card says nothing about Commander.
• Check Scryfall's Legalities box before you buy, and the official Banned and Restricted List before a tournament.