MTG Banned and Restricted Announcement (March 2026)

Wizards of the Coast released its latest banned and restricted announcement for Magic: The Gathering on March 23, 2026. The update contained a single change across all formats: Food Chain is now banned in Historic on MTG Arena.

All other formats in MTG bans, including Standard, Pioneer, Modern, Legacy, Vintage, Pauper, Alchemy, Timeless and Brawl, saw no modifications.

Credit: EchoMTG

The change targets a combo enabled by the recent release of Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

According to the official announcement on magic.wizards.com, the card interacts with Sigardian Evangel to generate an arbitrarily large number of 3/1 creature tokens.

Competitive Naya Food Chain decks had already climbed near the top of the Best-of-Three metagame in both share and win rate, with consistent turn-three kills and occasional turn-two wins.

The execution of the combo also proved frustrating in the digital client.

Daniel Xu, a member of the Play Design team, wrote the Historic section of the announcement.

He stated that the team viewed the introduction of Food Chain to the format as an oversight. "In retrospect, this was a mistake," Xu wrote:

"We missed the interaction between Sigardian Evangel and Food Chain."

He added that Wizards prefers to reserve turn-two combo strategies for Timeless rather than Historic. The ban took effect immediately upon the announcement.

The rest of the announcement focused on format health updates.

In Standard, Play Design noted continued diversity with Green-based Badgermole Cub decks facing a mix of blue, black and red strategies.

Mono-Green Landfall has become the dominant version of the archetype, while new tools from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have boosted decks such as Rakdos Rummaging.

No single strategy dominates the metagame, though the overall speed remains higher than internal targets.

Pioneer maintains balance with red archetypes performing within expected ranges and Greasefang, Okiba Boss powering both Orzhov and Abzan graveyard combo variants.

Modern continues to see new cards from recent sets revitalize older strategies, such as Living End builds using Formidable Speaker.

The team expressed satisfaction with the current state of both formats and saw no need for intervention.

Tabletop formats received no adjustments for the second consecutive announcement of 2026.

Carmen Klomparens, senior game designer on the Play Design team, opened the post by noting the more frequent check-in schedule introduced this year:

"Today's announcement is a bit closer to the previous one than the updates we've had over the last couple of years and is in line with our current approach: check in often for the sake of giving ourselves windows to act."

Wizards indicated it will discuss the update further during the WeeklyMTG stream on Twitch the following day.

The full banned and restricted list remains available on the company's website, with no additional changes reported from credible secondary sources or community discussions in the immediate aftermath.