There’s a specific kind of stomach-drop you get when a card you paid retail for becomes a paperweight overnight. The first time it happened to me was Lurrus, back when I’d just dropped $25 on a Japanese foil for the Legacy deck I was building and then watched it eat a Modern ban two weeks later. Foil Lurrus is still fine in Vintage and a couple of EDH brews. That isn’t really the point. The point is the feeling.
I had a similar gut-check yesterday afternoon, scrolling the May 18 Banned and Restricted Announcement on my phone in line at a coffee shop. Phlage, Titan of Fire’s Fury and Lotus Field, both banned in Modern, in the same swing. Two of the actively-played, actively-traded cards I keep at the front of my “I’ll probably need these someday” section of my MH3 binder.
So let’s talk about what just happened to those cards, and then about the other half of the announcement that nobody’s covering yet: the unbans that quietly turned a couple of old binder cards into actual money.
The bleeding side
Phlage is the bigger immediate hit because Phlage is the card most people own. It was the chase mythic of Modern Horizons 3 for a stretch last summer, sitting at $25-30 on TCGplayer through the fall and only really coming down once Boros Energy’s mirror match got boring. Pre-ban it was holding around $17 for the standard MH3 frame. As of this morning the market is starting to settle in the $15 range, with foils close behind at $17. That’ll keep falling. The ban floor on a freshly-banned Modern staple usually lands somewhere between $6 and $9 once the speculators leave and casual or EDH demand sets the actual support level.
The extended-art borderless treatment is more interesting. That one was pre-ban around $45 and is currently quoted around $21 regular and $31 foil. Borderless cards in Modern Horizons sets have historically held their premium better than the standard frame after bans because they double as the “nice copy” for cube and Commander. If you’ve got the borderless, hold. If you’ve got four regular copies sleeved up in a Boros Energy deck that nobody at your LGS plays anymore, the move is to consolidate down to one borderless and sell the other three before the floor finds itself in two weeks.
Lotus Field is messier. It had M20 as its original printing and then got reprinted three times in the last twelve months: Secrets of Strixhaven Commander, Edge of Eternities Stellar Sights, and a Secret Lair drop. The M20 copies are sitting at around $5 with foils at $13.48. The SOC precon reprint is $3.50. The Stellar Sights treatments range from $12 to $30 depending on frame and foiling. Different cards from a finance perspective. The M20 foil is the one I’d actually hold, because it’s the printing EDH players want, and Lotus Field is bonkers in lands-matter Commander decks. The plain SOC reprint is functionally bulk; that’s not a hold candidate.
Arena of Glory is the collateral damage card everyone’s about to underprice. Phlage’s banning kills the engine that made Arena of Glory matter (the haste land for the Boros Energy lineup), and the card is currently at $9.40 with foils at $11.89. That’s coming down. Probably to $5 or $6 for the regular, lower for the cycle’s other lands depending on how their respective decks shake out.
The community reaction has been muted on Phlage, partly because Boros Energy has been the format’s whipping boy for nine months and partly because everyone saw it coming for at least three. Lotus Field is the one I keep seeing complaints about. Combo players feel like they get punished disproportionately, and the Aftermath Analyst plus Shifting Woodland version of the deck was, at minimum, fun to watch on stream. I don’t know that I agree with the complaint. Amulet Titan can find another tool. But the Lotus Field combo specifically wasn’t really hurting anybody. Maybe I’m just sympathetic because I owned three foil M20 copies and was already up on the position.
The lifting side
This is the part that’s not getting covered enough.
When Modern bans two staples, it also tends to balance the ledger by unbanning. May 18 was no exception. Violent Outburst comes back after a two-year ban, and Umezawa’s Jitte returns after fifteen years off the format. That second one is the headline. Jitte is the kind of unban that does what the Lutri unban did for otter foils, except orders of magnitude bigger, because Jitte is a card that’s been a tournament-grade piece of equipment since 2005.
Jitte’s been banned in Modern since the format was sanctioned in 2011. Anyone with a Betrayers of Kamigawa Jitte sitting in a binder has owned a piece of cardboard that didn’t have a home in any sanctioned format outside Commander, Legacy, and Vintage for over a decade. As of yesterday afternoon, that piece of cardboard now sees four sanctioned formats. The original BOK printing is sitting at $12.61 regular with foils at an eye-watering $139.99. The foils were already climbing for cube and EDH demand, but I’d be shocked if the regular doesn’t double in the next month. Modern players need playsets, and the supply on a 21-year-old uncommon foil is, well, you can do the math on what Wizards printed in 2005 vs. what survived.
The other Jitte printings complicate this. There’s a Secret Lair drop from 2025 at $19.32, a 2023 SLD at $12.35, the From the Vault: Lore version, and the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Source Material printing at $2.41 that’s been dragging the floor down all year. So Jitte isn’t quite the no-brainer “buy now” call that the headline implies. The TMNT version is functionally a reprint everyone forgot about, and it caps how high the cheaper printings can climb. The BOK foil is in its own market because of nostalgia.
Violent Outburst is the other unban and honestly the boring one. It’s an Alara Reborn uncommon at $0.53. The Foundations Jumpstart reprint is at $0.36. There’s no version that meaningfully spikes here, because the supply was always going to flood any demand. If you happened to keep a foil from Alara Reborn ($2.19), that one might creep up a little, but we’re talking about a card whose ceiling is “still cheap, just not free.”
I should also mention I’m not actually a Modern player most weeks. I draft, I play Commander, I shuffle my Premodern deck when someone organizes a kitchen-table night. So my read on which deck Jitte slots into might be slightly off compared to someone who actually grinds the format. The binder math is the binder math, though, and the binder math says Jitte foil from Betrayers is the single most interesting card to come out of this announcement from a collector’s perspective.
The practical move this week
If you own Phlage, run the printings against current TCGplayer. The standard MH3 frame is the one that’ll bleed hardest. The borderless treatments will hold better than people expect. Foils are mixed, because Boros Energy was foil-heavy as a deck, so there are a lot of foiled-up copies hitting the market right now from people consolidating out.
If you own Lotus Field, separate by printing in your tracking before doing anything. The M20 foil is a hold for EDH demand. Stellar Sights borderless is also a hold for the same reason. The SOC precon copies and the standard M20 non-foil are sell-or-trade candidates if you’ve got more than one; they’ll find a stable floor around $2 to $3 in a few months.
If you own Jitte from any printing other than TMNT, the question is when to sell, not whether the spike happens. The BOK foil is already past the point where I’d buy in cold, but if you’re sitting on one, hold. Modern Horizons sets have historically pulled in casual players who realize they own an unbanned old card and try to build around it. That demand wave is about ten days out, not today.
Two minutes of work in any decent collection app is enough to pull the actual list of impacted cards from your collection. I keep meaning to write down the workflow because every time bans happen I have to re-derive it. (Scan the binder section. Pull cards by set. Cross-reference against the banned and unbanned list. Mark each one as “consolidate” or “hold.” Sleep on it before listing anything.)
You can also just wait two weeks and see where the dust settles. That’s the boring move, and it’s almost always the right one. The first 48 hours after a ban are noise. Real prices for banned cards happen at the 30-day mark when the speculators are gone and the EDH players are setting the floor. I’d rather be slightly late and right than first and wrong. If you’re using a tracking app of any kind, this is also a great moment to run an honest price check on what you actually own instead of the optimistic number you carry around in your head.
The June 30 announcement is the next checkpoint, which Wizards confirmed in the same article. Marvel comes out a few days before that, which means there’s also a chance of pre-bans in Standard tied to whatever the Marvel set does to the format. So if you’re holding cards across multiple formats, this is a “two ban windows in five weeks” situation, not a one-and-done.
Anyway. Time to go re-sort the Boros section of my binder.