Pour one out for the Multiverse’s most reckless driver. In today’s announcement, The Fantasticar was banned in Legacy and restricted in Vintage, closing the book on a two-month saga this blog has been following since the Marvel set was a week old. The flying car that terrorized Magic’s oldest formats has finally been pulled over, and the arc deserves a proper send-off.
The Complete Timeline of a Menace
Recap for those just tuning in: the Fantastic Four’s signature vehicle released in late June with the Marvel set and immediately started posting silly numbers in the Eternal formats — the ones where thirty years of fast mana let you deploy an absurd flying machine long before anyone should own a car. By the June 29 announcement, barely a week after release, Wizards was already publicly eyeing it. I wrote then that they’d signaled a willingness to act fast. Six weeks of tournament data later: banned outright in Legacy, restricted to a single copy in Vintage.
That Vintage detail is worth savoring for the returning players: Vintage almost never bans cards for power — it restricts them to one copy, the format’s badge of honor reserved for the most broken cards ever printed. The Fantasticar now shares a list with the Power Nine. A superhero minivan from a 2026 crossover set sits in the same legal category as Black Lotus. What a timeline.
The Rest of Today’s Ledger
Elsewhere in the announcement, quieter news. Pauper escaped untouched — the format panel spent a month examining a card called Sneaky Snacker and concluded the format’s healthy and varied, and Bonder’s Ornament officially survived its trial unbanning from the spring. After the Pauper drama earlier this summer, a clean bill of health is its own kind of news.
And mark your calendars: the next banned and restricted announcement lands October 12 — conveniently right after Reality Fracture releases, because the lesson of this era is that every set now gets its week-one physical. There’s also a WeeklyMTG discussion of today’s changes tomorrow morning if you want the designers’ full reasoning straight from the source.
The Dad Take
Here’s what this saga taught us, start to finish: the modern ban system is fast. Card releases, breaks two formats, gets flagged inside a week, gets data-checked for six, and gets the appropriate hammer in each format — the full ban where it’s oppressive, the single-copy leash where the format can absorb it. Twenty years ago that process took eighteen months of misery. Now it fits between two of my kids’ growth spurts.
So farewell, Fantasticar. You flew too fast, too early, and too often, and now you’re street-parked in Vintage with one copy and a boot on the wheel. Somewhere, Reed Richards is doing the math on what went wrong. My condolences to the four Legacy players who bought in — and my genuine congratulations to whoever gets to cast the last legal copy in Vintage. Drive it like you stole it. Everyone else did.