What if you didn’t have to keep up with Magic: The Gathering’s relentless release schedule? What if power creep was a complete non-issue? What if your deck could last forever? That is part of the appeal of Premodern, an MTG format invented by former competitive player Martin Berlin, that has exploded in popularity over the last 12 months.
Premodern uses cards from between Fourth Edition (April 1995) and Scourge (May 2003). It grew out of Berlin’s interest in the 93/94 format, an older fan-made way to play Magic that only uses cards released in two different years. Can you guess which ones?
“While I loved the old school flavour and the idea of a fixed card pool, I felt it wasn’t particularly deep play-wise,” Berlin tells Wargamer. A combination of the extremely weak creatures and the super busted spells (the power 9 is legal) from this time period made 93/94 gameplay (arguably) less than thrilling.
Modern was a relatively new format when Berlin came up with the concept for Premodern in 2012, testing it out initially with six people in Stockholm, Sweden.
“It made for a clean cut with the modern frame, while at the same time leaving out the most broken and expensive cards from the 93/94 format.”
Berlin, who maintains the Premodern website, adjudicates its banlist, and writes a regular blog on the format, has noticed a steady growth in Premodern’s popularity over the past few years, but says, “There has indeed been a spike of interest from around the end of 2025.”
Partly the growth can be chalked up to Magic Online, which added Premodern support in December last year. Clearly there has been a surge in paper players too though, with numerous old cards that were once extremely cheap getting very costly as players buy them up for Premodern decks.
Berlin chalks the meteoric rise up to four things: Magic Online, a growing number of high quality events, influencers like LSV dipping their toes into the format, and “refugees” from other formats looking to escape the high pace of new releases or MTG banlist changes.
“Generally speaking, there is of course a network effect, so the more people playing the format, the higher the chance that you get exposed to it”.
Premodern has a lot going for it. There’s the nostalgia factor of course, but also the relative simplicity of the cards, a decent power-level without games devolving into turn-2 wins, lots of viable strategies and fun, skill-based gameplay.
There’s also the fact that it’s a ‘closed’ format. Cards never rotate and new cards are never added. Berlin explains the appeal:
“For me, being a closed format takes away the stress of having to constantly buy and learn new cards. You can focus on some favourite archetypes and learn to master them. The drawback is of course that things can get a bit stale if you play the format too intensively for a while. Taking a break is fine though, and you don’t have to learn everything from scratch when you come back.
From where I’m sitting, it seems like 2026 is a year with a lot of extra interest in unofficial formats. Not only is this the biggest year ever for Premodern, there’s been a lot of rumbling around Planar Standard – a slowed down version of Standard which excludes UB sets.
It’s interesting that one thing both have in common is that they’re less influenced by the rapid pace of Standard sets. I know it’s hardly a hot take, but could this be a sign that many Magic: The Gathering players would like it if WotC slowed the heck down?
If you love Premodern and have a take on the format, come tell us more about it on the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
