Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time are two of the most discussed cards in Magic: The Gathering's modern banned and restricted history, and for good reason. Both were printed in Khans of Tarkir in 2014, and both were sitting on ban lists within about three months of release.
What makes their story interesting isn't just that they got banned, but how differently Wizards of the Coast treated the two cards once the dust settled. They look nearly identical on paper, yet ended up with different fates in Legacy and Vintage.
This guide breaks down exactly what happened, format by format, using the actual language Wizards used to explain the decision at the time.
Understanding the distinction matters for any collector or player trying to make sense of why one card feels more restricted than the other today.
Wizards of the Coast issued its banned and restricted announcement on January 19, 2015, with changes taking effect January 23 in paper and January 28 on Magic Online. The announcement covered Modern, Legacy, and Vintage all at once, a sign of just how broadly these two cards had affected competitive play.
In Modern, Dig Through Time, Treasure Cruise, and the unrelated Birthing Pod were all banned in the same update. That's the only format where both delve card-draw spells were banned together.
Wizards explained that blue-red Delver of Secrets decks, built around efficient creatures, burn, and cheap interaction, had become disproportionately successful in Modern tournament results. Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time were close enough substitutes for each other within those decks that banning only one wouldn't have meaningfully changed anything.
That reasoning is worth remembering, since it's a rare case of Wizards explicitly stating that two different cards were functionally interchangeable enough to justify banning both at once.
Legacy's changes were narrower. Only Treasure Cruise was banned there, while Dig Through Time was left untouched. Wizards' stated reasoning again pointed to blue-red Delver decks dominating tournament results, but Dig Through Time's selectivity requirement made it a slightly less explosive fit for that particular archetype in Legacy's card pool.
This is the clearest evidence that the two cards, despite looking similar, weren't actually causing identical problems in every format. Format-specific card pools changed how dangerous each card actually was.
Vintage took the lightest touch of the three formats, restricting Treasure Cruise to a single copy rather than banning it outright. Vintage as a format already restricts many of its most powerful cards instead of banning them, since its Restricted List exists specifically to let extremely strong effects stay legal in controlled quantities.
Dig Through Time was never restricted in Vintage at all, reinforcing the same pattern seen in Legacy: it simply wasn't considered as dangerous outside of Modern's specific metagame.
The January 2015 update wasn't purely about tightening restrictions. Golgari Grave-Troll came off Modern's banned list in the same announcement, and Worldgorger Dragon came off Legacy's, both explained as low-risk additions that might diversify those formats rather than reinforce the decks already on top.
That pairing of bans and unbans in a single announcement is a good reminder that these updates are about overall format health, not just punishing whatever card is currently strongest.
Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time remain banned in Modern and, in Treasure Cruise's case, Legacy to this day. Neither has been reconsidered for unbanning as of this writing, a sign of how durable Wizards considers the original reasoning behind the decision.
Dig Through Time, meanwhile, is fully legal in Legacy and Vintage, and both cards remain popular pickups for Vintage Cube and casual formats where their power level is exactly the appeal.
This episode became something of a cautionary tale inside Wizards' own design process, frequently cited when discussing how graveyard-as-resource mechanics need guardrails. Card draw spells with delve in particular have been treated far more conservatively in every set since.
That caution is visible in how rarely Wizards has printed anything resembling Treasure Cruise's rate of card advantage relative to cost in the years since 2015.
No, only Treasure Cruise is banned in Legacy.
No, it's restricted to one copy rather than banned.
January 23, 2015, in paper Magic and January 28 online.
Yes, Golgari Grave-Troll in Modern and Worldgorger Dragon in Legacy.
Even banned cards hold real value as pieces of Magic history and remain fully playable in Vintage Cube, casual play, and formats where they're legal. A plastic deck box is a smart way to keep a Vintage or Cube deck built around these cards organized.
Toploaders are worth keeping on hand for any singles you're not actively playing.
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