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Artifact
{tap}, Sacrifice this artifact: Each player exiles all cards from their hand face down and draws seven cards. At the beginning of the next end step, each player discards their hand and returns to their hand each card they exiled this way.
Ban history
Magic's only emergency ban (1999); falls under Premodern's policy against free draw-sevens.
- Banned in Premodern
- On or before May 2018
- On earliest archived list; likely since 2012 founding
- Category
- Power
- Research
- Research confidence: High confidence
- First printed
- First printed in Urza's Legacy (15 February 1999).
Why it’s banned
Power level / draw-seven (official framing 2019).
Official reason
Berlin (2019): the ban list "already includes powerful draw spells like Time Spiral, Windfall and Memory Jar, while being more tolerant to fast mana and tutors." No card-specific explanation.
The story
Memory Jar (Urza's Legacy, February 1999) was so dominant that Wizards emergency-banned it in mid-March 1999, the only emergency ban in Magic's history per MTG Wiki, effective April 1 in Standard, Extended and Type 1.5 and restricted in Vintage. Premodern has banned it on every archived list; Berlin's 2019 post names it with Time Spiral and Windfall as the powerful draw spells the list deliberately excludes.
Premodern changes
- On listOn the earliest archived Premodern ban list.[6]
Other formats (Wizards)
Historical context, not Premodern decisions.
- StandardBanned
- VintageRestricted
- LegacyBanned
- ExtendedBanned
Related cards
Sources
- Ban List Update 2019 (Martin Berlin, 2019-08-20)
- MTG Wiki: Combo Winter
- MTG Wiki: Banned and restricted cards/Timeline
- MTGBans.info per-card timelines (effective dates; site's AI-generated rationales NOT used)
- Draftsim: The Premodern Ban List: All 33 Cards Banned (A.L. Walser, 2026-04-24) — community
- Wayback: premodernmagic.com/banned-watched/ 2018-05-06 (34 banned, 5 watched)
- Scryfall card data (printings, release dates)
- premodernmagic.com legal sets endpoint
Research as of 18 October 2026.
In our decks
Not in any of our curated decklists yet. Find similar cards.
Played in tournaments
Share of published Premodern decklists that play Memory Jar (main or sideboard): 2,457 lists from paper events and MTGO in the last 90 days, through .
Not seen in any of the 2,457 tournament lists from the last 90 days. Browse the meta.
Printings (2)
Every tournament-legal paper printing (no gold-border, World Championship or oversized cards). Hover or tap a row to preview that printing.
