There are two general types of Magic tournaments: Constructed tournaments, and Limited tournaments. In Constructed tournaments, each player provides his own deck, which much be constructed from a specified card-pool. At Limited tournaments, a random assortment of cards are provided by the tournament organizers.
Constructed
- Vintage — Of all constructed formats Vintage, or "Type 1", features the largest card-pool. Currently, this including nearly every black- or white-bordered card ever printed. The only banned cards are silver-boarded cards from the parody sets Unglued and Unhinged, physical dexterity cards such as Chaos Orb, ante cards such as Tempest Efreet, and subgame cards such as Shahrazad. In other formats cards which are deemed sufficient powerful are banned; however, Vintage instead maintains a restricted list so as to ensure that a card will always be able to be played in at least one sanctioned format. The restricted list contains cards such as the famed Power Nine.
- Legacy — smaller card-pool than Vintage, with cards deemed too powerful (e.g. the Power Nine) banned; but other cards since Alpha allowed.
- Extended — limited card-pool allowing cards from the approximately the last eight years (four Core Sets). The Extended card-pool rotates every three blocks.
- Standard — Standard, which is also referred to as "Type 2", is the most commonly sanctioned constructed format. The Standard card pool generally consists of only the most recently released Core Set and the sets from the two most recent Blocks, even if the block is not complete. Currently, Standard also includes the set Coldsnap which was released outside of the normal block structure.
- Block Constructed — Block Constructed has the smallest card-pool of all the constructed formats. As implied by the name, the Block Constructed card pool normally consists of only cards from a specified Block. However, due to the release of two "mini-Blocks", consisting of a large expansion and only a single small expansion, in 2007-2008 tournament year, the Block Constructed format will instead allow cards from both mini-Blocks.
Limited
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