Few cards in Magic's history have gone from release to outright ban as quickly as Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis. Wizards banned it in Modern on August 26, 2019, barely two months after Modern Horizons released.
Understanding exactly why requires looking at the specific combination of cards that made Hogaak so oppressive, not just the card in isolation.
This guide walks through the deck, the ban process, and why Wizards ultimately targeted the card itself rather than its supporting pieces.
None of this requires having played the deck to understand.
Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis combined with Bridge from Below and Vengevine to enable an explosive graveyard-based strategy that could deploy a huge, hard-to-answer threat well ahead of a normal creature curve. The combination let a deck effectively cheat a massive body into play using cards already sitting in the graveyard.
That speed and resilience, hard to interact with using normal removal, is what separated Hogaak decks from a typical graveyard strategy.
Wizards' initial response wasn't to ban Hogaak itself. It restricted Bridge from Below specifically, hoping that weakening one supporting piece would bring the archetype back in line with the rest of Modern's metagame.
That first attempt didn't fully solve the problem, since the deck continued posting strong results across major tournaments even after losing that specific piece.
Players adopted heavy amounts of main-deck graveyard hate specifically to fight Hogaak, yet the deck kept winning at a high rate even against decks built to counter it directly. That kind of resilience against a metagame actively adapting against it is a strong signal that a card, not just a supporting piece, is the actual problem.
Results from Mythic Championship IV in Barcelona and several Grand Prix events confirmed this pattern wasn't a fluke or a short-term overperformance.
After reviewing the archetype's evolution across multiple deck-building variations, Wizards concluded that Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis itself, not any single supporting piece, was the actual crux of the problem. Banning any one supporting card wouldn't have stopped players from finding another way to enable the same core strategy.
That's a meaningfully different kind of ban reasoning than targeting a single combo piece, and it reflects how central Hogaak was to every viable build of the archetype.
The same August 26, 2019 announcement also banned Faithless Looting, a card that had separately fueled graveyard-focused strategies across multiple archetypes, not just Hogaak. Addressing both cards in one announcement reflected a broader concern about graveyard-strategy power level in Modern at the time.
Stoneforge Mystic was unbanned in that same announcement, making it a genuinely significant update to Modern's overall banned list, not a single-card fix.
A brand-new set producing a card that needed banning within two months is a strong indicator of just how aggressively Modern Horizons pushed power level compared to typical Standard-legal sets. That speed is part of the set's lasting reputation as genuinely format-warping.
Understanding this ban as part of the set's broader story, not an isolated incident, helps explain why Modern Horizons gets discussed so differently from an ordinary new release.
Bans typically reduce a card's competitive demand, and Hogaak's price did see some initial softening immediately after the August 2019 announcement. That said, the card's genuine historical significance has kept meaningful collector demand in place well beyond what a purely competitive-use card would retain after a ban.
This pattern, a real but partial price impact rather than a total collapse, is worth understanding before assuming any banned card is no longer worth collecting.
Modern still supports plenty of graveyard-focused strategies today, just not the specific Hogaak shell that triggered this ban. Players interested in graveyard synergies generally can find other, currently legal ways to build around that same broad strategic idea.
Understanding what specifically got banned, rather than assuming the whole strategic approach was outlawed, helps avoid unnecessarily writing off an entire deck-building direction.
A banned card with this much history is exactly the kind collectors submit for grading, and EVORETRO Graded Card Sleeves protect the slab afterward.
August 26, 2019, roughly two months after Modern Horizons released.
Restricting Bridge from Below, which didn't fully solve the problem.
Every viable build of the archetype relied on Hogaak specifically, not one interchangeable piece.
Faithless Looting, while Stoneforge Mystic was unbanned.
A card with this much documented history is worth more than loose storage. EVORETRO's collector album keeps a banned-but-historic single like Hogaak organized alongside the rest of your Modern Horizons collection.
A graded sleeve is a smart next step if you're considering submitting a copy for grading down the line.
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