MTG June 30 2025 Standard bans revealed: Breaking the choke-hold of Izzet Prowess and other overpowered decks

MTG’s Standard format is going to be shaken up with the June 30 2025 Standard bans. A “once-a-year” ban drop from Wizards, they aren’t messing around this time. A whopping seven cards for Standard are going to be taken out of the current meta, and honestly, almost all of them make perfect sense to me. Only one or two feel kind of like weird choices. The target of this ban seems to be the overwhelming power of Izzet Prowess.

Quite a few red and white cards, when put together, just allowed players to aggressively push decks into submission. At the Pro Tour, for MTG Final Fantasy, Izzet Prowess made up 40% or so of the decks, so it was probably time for these Standard bans. Here’s what was taken out of the game.

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Which cards were featured in MTG June 30 2025 ban announcement?

When I was previewing MTG Tarkir Dragonstorm, I was pretty sure it was going to be one of the strongest sets in recent memory, and that turned out to be true, looking at this June 30 2025 Standard ban list update.

Cori-Steel Cutter, Abuelo's Awakening, and Monstrous Rage were all sent to the Shadow Realm (Image via Wizards of the Coast)

Surprisingly, the new planeswalkers didn’t hit, because while they were strong, they don’t have the same game-shattering power. Below is the list of cards that you can expect to stop using, as of July 1, 2025:

• Cori-Steel Cutter
• Abuelo’s Awakening
• Monstrous Rage
• Heartfire Hero
• Up the Beanstalk
• Hopeless Nightmare
• This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Cori-Steel Cutter’s presence on this MTG ban list shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. It’s a ridiculously aggressive, powerful card, and with few answers to answer it, people are winning with it in some pretty simple ways. There just aren’t enough ways to solve this problem, so it gets banned.

Abuelo’s Awakening combined with Omniscience decks makes for incredibly simple victories as well, and was something that needed to be resolved by the ban team. It’s incredibly consistent and allows players to just ramp up to the Omniscience and use the powerful reanimation.

Monstrous Rage is one of the most powerful cards in the MTG Standard Red Deck Wins, and is a card that probably should have been banned long before now. Ever since I saw this card, I knew it was inevitable that it would be banned, and now it certainly has.

Heartfire Hero, Up the Beanstalk, Hopeless Nightmare, and This Town Ain't Big Enough are all going away for now in Standard (Image via Wizards of the Coast)

Giving your small, but powerful red creatures trample on top of +1/+1 got out of hand fast. The same goes for Heartfire Hero and while originally only one of these cards were going to get banned, both wound up taking a hit, to try and make the Standard format fun again.

Up the Beanstalk is an interesting card, in that it lets you ramp up pretty fast, and was often used in Domain Overlords decks. It’s a card that, even if you answer it and remove it, the person using it has already gotten something from it, at least one card.

Hopeless Nightmare and This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us work together nicely in tandem, allowing you to use Hopeless Nightmare’s discard and life loss multiple times, and for a very small amount of mana to boot. I don’t really agree with this MTG Standard ban personally, but I can see it become a greater problem in the future.

That’s everything for now, with another ban list update being handed on November 24, 2025, but if this turns out to be a bad decision, it could get turned around at some point. It’s a pretty major hit for MTG’s Standard scene, but I think it’s going to be a positive change.

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• MTG Final Fantasy’s Water Crystal card creates brutal overpowered Mill setups
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Edited by Jason Parker