Why was the one ring banned in MTG's modern format?

Bans are nothing new in Magic: The Gathering, but rarely are they as hotly debated as when it came to the banning of one particular artifact, The One Ring.

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This incredibly powerful card has been on the watch list since its release, and it's both a curse to anyone who plays against it and a blessing to those who have it. But why this card was banned and what it means to the game is what we're here to explore.

What is The One Ring?

Coming from the June 2023 Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth expansion, The One Ring was immediately identified as the most powerful card from the set, and it's easy to see why.

This four-mana artifact has a trigger to enter the battlefield that, as long as you cast it, gives you protection from everything until the end of the turn. It doesn't stop all the things from happening to you like a Teferi's Protection can (and even then there are ways around that too), but it does stop you from being directly targeted by everything from cards to attacks to Planeswalker abilities.

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As if that wasn't enough, The One Ring also has another ability that catapults you ahead of your opponent very quickly. You can tap The One Ring to put a very themed load counter on it and then draw a card for each load counter on it. Each turn you choose to do this gives you one card for each turn.

Of course, there is a downside. Being the ring and power of an ancient malevolent Ainur, you lose one point of life at the start of your turn for each burden counter on it.

Why was the one ring banned?

The One Ring into every deck, and there is literally no downside. For slower decks, it can offer some protection against more aggressive early game decks, giving you a turn to pool your resources or cast a spell that doesn't have a direct impact on the board. Then you can use it to draw even more cards to catch up.

For other decks, it can give you tons of extra moves each turn to keep your hand full so you never run out of gas. While not every deck will want to play The One Ring, it was enough to slowly and steadily overtake many other cards in the format.

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With a card like The One Ring, it very easily pushes out other cards from the modern format that players would otherwise run. This reduces variance in decks and across meta as a whole. For example, with The One Ring legal, there's very little reason to run cards like Jace, Mind Sculptor or Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, because you can do everything just a little bit better with Isildur's Bane.

What deck did The One Ring use?

However, with the release of Modern Horizons 3, the power of The One Ring took a slight shift. A small card appeared with its head around that time called Boros Energy. This deck has everything you need to counteract any disadvantages you may suffer from The One Ring.

While The One Ring can technically fit into any deck thanks to its pure generic mana cost, and many people have done just that, there are few viable decks that can handle a constant stream of life loss from these burden counters.

Boros Energy has multiple ways to gain life, between Ocolot Pride pumping out tokens and Guide of Souls providing both energy and life gain, you have a pretty consistent way to counter and even get ahead of the life loss from the Ring.

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Then, if the burdens become too heavy to bear, all you have to do is drop another copy of the legendary artifact to sacrifice the original and reset those counters to zero. Since you probably drew quite a few cards from the first, you'll have plenty of opportunities to draw into the second or third copy of The One Ring. Not to mention, you get an extra layer of protection when you lose the extra rings.

Will The One Ring ever be banned?

The Magic The Gathering card The One Ring 1 by Veli Nyström.

While it's impossible to know what Wizards of the Coast will decide in the future, it seems highly unlikely that Wizards will cancel The One Ring. You can still play with the powerful artifact in Commander, Legacy, Vintage, and the exclusive Magic: The Gathering Arena format, Timeless.

The overwhelming power of the card twists the format just a bit too much to ever be released back into the wild. Much like its literary counterpart, you cannot use it, The One Ring replies to Sauron alone.

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