The Problem With MDFCs: The Case for Bans in Modern and Legacy

Last updated on June 27, 2025

Goblin Charbelcher | Illustration by Jesper Ejsing

Modal Double-Face Cards (MDFCs) were a bit of a revelation when the debuted in Zendikar Rising. They weren't exactly revolutionary, just being a variation of split cards displayed in a different way, but making a split card that was half-land, half-spell was new and intriguing at the time.

And it's clear at this point that MDFCs are deceptively strong. Not that any individual MDFC land is broken on its own, they tend to be a combination of overcosted creature/spell and “strictly worse basic land”, it's more that they've opened up the avenue for broken interactions in certain Constructed formats. You won't see a MDFC hit a banlist anytime soon, but the June 30th Banned and Restricted announcement might feature some cards that get banned because of the existence of MDFCs.

The Big Offenders

There's a subset of strategies in Modern, Legacy, and Vintage collectively known as “Oops, No Lands!” These decks look to play essentially zero lands in the deck, which opens up combo lines with cards like Balustrade Spy/Undercity Informer and Goblin Charbelcher. With zero lands in your deck, these cards always mill over your entire deck, which in the case of Charbelcher results in a one-hit kill, and for Balustrade Spy results in easy wins with Thassa's Oracle.

But wait… how do you play any of these cards if you don't have any lands in your deck? Well, it turns out the old “Oops, No Lands!” name, which used to be accurate, is a bit of a farce these days. These decks actually run quite a few lands, they're just in the form of MDFCs. And for the most part, MDFCs with a spell/land split always have the lands on the back half of the card. That's crucial, because it lets you fill your deck with a bunch of lands, albeit slow or painful ones. However, those lands aren't “seen” by cards that riffle through your deck, like the Spy or Belcher. In other words, you get to build around these one-card combos without actually making any deckbuilding concessions aside from playing a slow manabase.

It used to be that Charbelcher and Balustrade Spy decks had to rely on lots of clunky mana from Chancellor of the Tangle, Wild Cantor, Elvish Spirit Guide, and the like to hopefully cobble together enough mana to play their namesake cards, but that's just not the case anymore. They just get to play a normal gameplan with one-card combos built in. All because of the way MDFCs function in Magic.

Are These Cards Worthy of Bans?

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While some players have called for the banning of Balustrade Spy, and its Gatecrash lookalike Undercity Informer, there's a decent amount of pushback against this. Well-known Storm aficionado Bryant Cook took shots at the two black creatures and Entomb in Legacy earlier this month, but was met with a lot of comments stating that the decks were fine, or Tier 1.5 at best.

Azorius Charbelcher also has a bit of a presence in Modern, even winning an SCG CON Modern 5k in the hands of Austin Deceder back in May. The interesting thing about blue-based Belcher decks is that the MDFCs actually have some utility beyond just being taplands in these decks. The blue ones are pitchable to Force of Negation and Flare of Denial, you can occasionally cast Sink into Stupor as interaction, and you can pick up and cast your MDFCs in a prolonged game with Tameshi, Reality Architect. And all that's in service of powering out a Charbelcher and activating it right away for an instant win.

As powerful as these MDFC-driven Oops No Lands! decks sound, they're still glass cannons at heart, and they're sometimes victims of their own design. Signing up a mana base with all MDFCs is asking for a glacially slow start every game, which can be a death knell against meta-defining aggro and tempo decks like Delver in Legacy or Boros Energy in Modern. So while some people are clamoring for Balustrade Spy or Charbelcher bans, they're not seen as overtly threatening cards in their respective metas, and they'll likely make it through the B&R announcement unscathed.

Back to Bryant Cook's post, it is possible that Entomb hits the banlist at some point, but that'll be due more to the presence of broken reanimator decks long before it's deemed problematic with Balustrade Spy or Undercity Informer.

For what it's worth, those two cards are banned in Pioneer for the exact reasons some people want them banned elsewhere, but Pioneer just has fewer checks in place for broken combos like this. There's no free interaction like Force of Negation in Pioneer, which always puts a damper on one-card combo decks in Modern and beyond.

And the MDFCs? No chance these get touched. They're all individually weak in 60-card formats, and even the best ones like Malakir Rebirth aren't all that impressive. If anything related to MDFCs is problematic, it's the cards like Charbelcher that exploit the way MDFCs work within the rules of Magic.