Two of the most powerful cards ever printed, Force of Will and Balance, remain fully legal in Legacy and Vintage but are both banned in Premodern. Their exclusion is not an accident or an oversight; it reflects two of the format's clearest design priorities.
Force of Will represents Premodern's stance against free interaction, while Balance represents its stance against extremely efficient, asymmetric resource denial. Both bans date back to the format's founding in 2003 and have never been seriously reconsidered since.
Understanding why these two specific cards were targeted, rather than being left legal as a nod to their playability elsewhere, says a lot about what kind of games Premodern's community wants the format to produce.
This guide covers each card's mechanics and the specific reasoning behind its ban.
Force of Will lets a player exile a blue card from hand and pay one life instead of paying its mana cost to counter a spell. That alternate cost means a player can hold up interaction even while completely tapped out, something no other common Premodern-legal counterspell allows.
Premodern's ban list reasoning frames this directly: the format wants interaction to be mana-based and honest, meaning an opponent tapping out for a big spell should be a genuine risk rather than something Force of Will lets blue decks ignore entirely.
Without Force of Will, blue decks in Premodern must genuinely choose between deploying their own plan and holding up mana for interaction, rather than doing both simultaneously. This raises the relative value of tempo and aggressive decks, since a resolved threat is much harder for blue decks to answer for free.
It also directly benefits combo-adjacent engine decks like GW Enchantress, since a key enchantment resolving against an opponent with no untapped mana is genuinely safe in a way it would not be in Legacy.
Balance is a one-mana sorcery that has each player discard down to the same number of cards in hand, sacrifice creatures down to the same number, and sacrifice lands down to the same number, all simultaneously. Its efficiency, resetting three separate resources for a single mana, was considered too powerful for the format's intended pacing.
The ban list specifically describes Balance as an unfair resource-denial effect, since it can be played asymmetrically to devastate an opponent who is ahead on any of the three resources it targets while leaving a player who is behind largely unaffected.
Balance has a long history of restriction in official Wizards formats, including a stint on the Vintage restricted list for much of its competitive lifespan. Its power level has never been seriously in dispute across nearly any format it has been eligible for.
That established track record made it, like Necropotence, a relatively uncontroversial inclusion on Premodern's founding ban list rather than a card the community needed to debate at length.
Force of Will and Balance target two different categories of problem: free interaction and asymmetric resource denial. Banning both signals that Premodern's founders wanted mana investment to matter consistently, whether a player is casting a threat, holding up an answer, or trying to reset the board.
This consistency is part of why the format has stayed balanced across aggro, midrange, and combo strategies rather than letting a single powerful blue or white strategy dominate the way similar cards have in other eternal formats.
Blue decks in Premodern lean on hard counters like Counterspell and Force Spike instead of Force of Will, meaning they must genuinely commit mana to interaction rather than holding it back for free. White decks similarly rely on more conditional sweepers like Wrath of God rather than a single efficient reset button like Balance.
This shifts the overall pace of games slightly slower and more mana-intensive than a format where both cards are legal, which lines up with the format's broader emphasis on resource management over explosive single-card swings. A dedicated page in a binder is a good way to keep these banned-but-historic cards visible alongside the rest of a Premodern-adjacent collection.
No, it has been banned since the format's founding ban list in 2003.
It provides free interaction, letting players counter spells without spending mana.
It has a long restriction history and remains banned or restricted in most eternal formats.
They rely on hard mana-based counterspells like Counterspell instead.
If you are collecting Force of Will or Balance for Legacy or Vintage rather than Premodern, protect these historically significant cards with a semi-rigid card holder.
!
