Premodern is the most underrated competitive Magic format. Cards from Fourth Edition through Scourge — the era of Counterspell, Goblin Lackey, Wasteland, and Pernicious Deed — playing for stakes that matter. No reserved-list ceiling, no rotating sets, no power creep. Just the cleanest old-school metagame in the game.
We built Play Premodern because the best information about the format is scattered across Discord servers, tournament reports, and a handful of niche blogs. If you’re new to the format — or returning after years away — there’s no single place that says: here’s what people are playing, here’s how each deck works, here’s what beats what.
This site is that place.
What’s here today
- An interactive Meta Explorer ranking the top archetypes by tournament points, with art-cropped previews and one-click deep-dives into each deck’s game plan
- Full deck guides for the top 20 archetypes — Goblins, Stiflenought, Burn, Enchantress, Landstill, The Rock, Stasis, Iggy Pop, Aluren, and more
- A format primer explaining legal sets and the current banlist, with hover previews for every banned card
- Card art and decklists pulled from first-printing data via Scryfall — the way these cards looked when they first hit shelves
What’s coming
- Sideboard guides — matchup-by-matchup boarding plans for each archetype
- Tournament reports — covering the major Premodern events as they happen
- More translations — the site already runs in English and Spanish; more languages on request
How to get involved
Play Premodern is open source. If you spot an error, want to contribute a deck guide, or have ideas for what we should build next, drop into the GitHub repo and open an issue or PR. Everything here is fan content under the WotC Fan Content Policy — credit goes to the format committee at premodernmagic.com, the metagame archivists at tcdecks.net, and the encyclopedic reference that is Scryfall.
Welcome aboard. Now go untap, upkeep, draw.