Rules & FAQ

Premodern is an eternal format built from cards originally printed between Fourth Edition (1995) and Scourge (2003), spanning the Ice Age through Onslaught blocks and played under the current Comprehensive Rules. Decks are 60 cards or more with a 15-card sideboard and the usual four-of limit, and around 30 cards are banned. For the full legal-set list and deck-construction rules, the official site at premodernmagic.com is the canonical reference; this page focuses on what that list does not explain.

Legality follows the card name, not the set symbol or frame. If a card was printed in a legal set, any later tournament-legal reprint plays identically: a Commander, Modern Horizons, or new-border printing of a legal card is completely fine. Browse our card database at /cards to confirm whether a specific card is in the pool.

Very likely yes, and that is the whole appeal. If they were Standard-legal between 1995 and 2003 they are Premodern-legal, so your old Tempest and Urza-block commons and the dual lands you cracked as a kid are tournament cards again. Look any of them up at /cards to check the pool, and see what they go in over at /archetypes.

Legality follows the card name, not the printing, so if a staple was first printed in a 1995-2003 set, the copy you own from a Commander deck is fine regardless of frame. A card like Swords to Plowshares that saw old-era printings ports straight over. But many Commander all-stars sit outside that window or are banned, fast mana especially, so check each card at /cards rather than assuming a whole pod deck is legal.

Premodern uses the current Magic Comprehensive Rules, not the rules from when these cards were in Standard. The high-level rules that matter: decks are a 60-card minimum with a 15-card sideboard and at most four copies of any nonbasic card; there is no mana burn; combat damage no longer uses the stack; and old Interrupt cards are now Instants. The entries below cover the interactions that most often catch returning players off guard.

No. Under current rules combat damage is assigned and dealt as a single event, so the old 'damage on the stack' step is gone. You cannot block, let damage go on the stack, then sacrifice the blocker to a Mogg Fanatic for extra value before damage resolves; sacrifice it before damage and the creature deals none.

No. Mana burn was removed from the rules, so unspent mana empties at the end of each step and phase with no damage. Tap out a City of Brass or a big mana rock freely; the only cost is the mana itself.

The Interrupt card type no longer exists; every former Interrupt is now an Instant and uses ordinary instant timing on the stack. There is no special 'interrupt window,' so a Counterspell is just an instant that responds to a spell already on the stack.

A phased-out permanent, say one hit by Reality Ripple or Vision Charm, is treated as though it does not exist for almost all purposes, but it never actually leaves the battlefield, so it keeps its counters and attachments and does not trigger leaves-the-battlefield abilities. It phases back in untapped during its controller's untap step.

Banding is the format's most notorious 'I have to look this up' keyword. When a banded attacker is blocked, the attacking player chooses how the blockers' combat damage is assigned; when a creature with banding blocks, the defending player chooses how the attackers' damage is assigned. It is one of the few keywords that hands damage-assignment control to the side taking the damage.

Almost everything in a game happens by players passing priority, and responses resolve last-in-first-out, so the last spell added to the stack is the first to resolve. Get in the habit of saying your intentions out loud, like 'move to combat?' or 'I'll respond,' which keeps the game clean and is normal etiquette here. The stack visualizer above shows how a few stacked spells unwind.

Premodern is a supported format on Magic Online, which runs regular Premodern events, and our /events archive includes that MTGO data. For free casual play, the community runs games on Cockatrice and XMage and organizes webcam matches through Discord; see our community hub at /media for servers and resources.

The cost lives in a handful of staples, mainly original dual lands and the priciest blue cards, but you do not need them to win. Plenty of competitive decks are mono-color aggro built mostly from cheap commons and uncommons; browse /archetypes to find one that fits your budget. Many casual and local events are proxy-friendly, so check a venue's policy before buying anything.

Sixty-card minimum, no maximum (as long as you can shuffle it), a 0 to 15 card sideboard, and at most four copies of any card outside basic lands across deck and sideboard combined. Proxy policy is up to the organizer: championship events generally require real cards, while many local and online events allow proxies to lower the cost of entry, so always confirm in advance.

No commander, no color identity, no singleton: you build a 60-card-minimum deck with up to four copies of any nonbasic card and a 15-card sideboard, played one-on-one rather than in a multiplayer pod. Games are faster and more deterministic, so your mana curve and mulligan decisions matter far more than they do across a 100-card singleton deck.

Yes. Outside basic lands, you can run up to four copies of any card across your maindeck and sideboard combined. Consistency in Premodern comes from redundancy, meaning playsets of your best cards, rather than from a singleton toolbox of one-ofs, which is the opposite instinct from Commander.