About the Notoriety Index
The Notoriety Index is our attempt to rank the most infamous cards in Magic’s Banned and Restricted history. Each card is scored based on a variety of factors.
- How many formats it’s been banned or restricted in. A card that’s caused problems across several formats at once is treated as more notorious than one that only ever caused trouble in a single format.
- The power level of the format(s) involved. A ban in a wide-open, high-powered format like Vintage or Legacy says more about a card’s raw strength than a ban in a smaller, more restrictive format like Standard.
- Whether it’s still banned or was later reinstated. A card that remains banned carries more weight than one that was banned and later unbanned — a reversed ban suggests the original concern mattered less over time.
- How quickly it was banned after release. A card that gets banned within its first few months is treated as more notorious than one that took years to become a problem.
- How many separate times it’s cycled on and off the banlist in the same format. A card that’s been banned, later allowed back, and then banned again — sometimes more than once — is treated as more notorious than one that was simply banned a single time and left alone. A back-and-forth history like that usually means the card, or the reasoning around it, was genuinely contentious.
- Whether it was banned on its own merit, or caught in a broad, mechanic-wide sweep. Sometimes a whole category of cards gets banned together for reasons that have nothing to do with
any one card’s individual power. Cards banned this way are treated as less notorious than cards
singled out on their own merits.
- Cards banned for depicting racially or culturally insensitive material are excluded from the index entirely. Including them would run counter to why they were banned in the first place.
This index is meant to be a fun, evolving way to explore ban history, not a precise scientific ranking. The algorithm is subject to change without notice as we figure things out.