The One-Mana Answer: How Consign to Memory Became Summer 2026's Defining Card — and Where the Thesis Breaks
The most-played card in Modern is a $3.51 uncommon. Consign to Memory sits in 46.2% of all Modern decklists, has passed Brainstorm in Legacy at 55.4% of all 75s, and shows up in a third of Vintage — we traced the one-mana answer's takeover through our whole corpus, from the Kozilek's Command package to The Fantasticar, including the Pro Tour won with four in the maindeck. And we show where the thesis breaks: the Pauper leg was never real, and Vintage prefers a different weapon.
The most-played card in Modern right now costs one blue mana and came out of a booster pack as an uncommon. Not a fetchland, not a delve threat, not anything on the Pro Tour trophy graphics — Consign to Memory sits in 46.2% of the 2,832 Modern decklists we tracked over the past month (2026-06-21 to 07-21, full 75s, main and sideboard), the #1 most-appearing card in the entire format. Stretch the window to six months and it's still #1: 47.8% of 18,179 lists. In Legacy it's in 55.4% of all 75s — more decks than play Brainstorm. In Vintage it's in one of every three decklists. All of that is decklist-appearance share over our own scraped corpus, not anyone's top-8 highlight reel.
We went into this piece testing a bigger thesis: that one card is quietly defining four formats. Three legs held. One snapped clean off, and we'll show you exactly where — because a data article that only confirms its own premise isn't worth your time.
What one blue mana buys
The text is two lines. "Counter target triggered ability or colorless spell." And Replicate — when you cast it, you copy it for each time you paid the replicate cost, new targets allowed. So answers one thing, answers two, answers three.
Magic has printed narrow counters forever; Ceremonious Rejection already did "counter target colorless spell" for back in Kaladesh. Consign does everything Rejection does, adds every triggered ability in the game as a legal target, and staples Replicate on top — Wargamer called it "a strictly superior version of Ceremonious Rejection" the day it leaked, and the Oracle text backs that up as plain fact. The triggered-ability half is the part that ages well. Cast triggers resolve even when the spell they're stapled to gets countered, which is why the Replicate line isn't a footnote: against an Eldrazi with a nasty cast trigger, answers the spell and the trigger in one card.
The uncommon rarity, for what it's worth, reads like R&D pricing it as a role-player — a narrow sideboard tool, the kind of card that's supposed to be format glue rather than a format pillar. No public design commentary says otherwise (we looked). What changed isn't the card. It's everything around it.
The threats that made it
Modern Horizons 3 (June 14, 2024) brought the Eldrazi back as a mechanical theme, colorless mana costs and all — Mark Rosewater wrote at the time that "colorless mana costs were a great fit for Modern Horizons 3" and "something we want to have as a tool" (magic.wizards.com, May 27, 2024). Two years later, that tool is the spine of the format: at Pro Tour Marvel Super Heroes in Amsterdam (July 17–19, 2026), the Kozilek's Command + Eldrazi Temple package was registered by 89 of 362 players — 24.6% of the field — and Frank Karsten called Kozilek's Command "arguably the strongest card in the entire format" (magic.gg, July 16, 2026).
Then Marvel Super Heroes happened to the eternal formats. The Fantasticar is a Vehicle that flies, turns into a 4/4 whenever you cast a noncreature spell, and — when you cast your fourth noncreature spell in a turn — lets you sacrifice it to create four 4/4 colorless Construct tokens with flying and haste. Wizards' own June 29 B&R announcement did the math out loud: "The Fantasticar has the potential to attack for 16 damage out of nowhere on very early turns … immediately castable off of Mishra's Workshop's mana … If The Fantasticar becomes an issue in Vintage, we won't hesitate to take action."
Our corpus watched that sentence come true in real time. In Legacy the Car went from a single decklist in the two months before June 20 to 19.8% of all 75s (284 of 1,432) in the month since, and from a label our classifier didn't have to the format's #2 top-cut archetype at 6.8% (96 of 1,402 placed lists, with a 55.6% top-cut conversion on an admittedly tiny 9 counted entries). In Vintage it's in 30.1% of decklists — every single one of its 185 appearances landing inside the last four weeks.
Look at what this threat wave is made of: colorless spells and triggered abilities. A sacrifice trigger that makes four colorless tokens. Cast triggers on Devourer of Destiny and kicked Sowing Mycospawn. A graveyard-lurking damage trigger on Kozilek's Return. Ugin, Eye of the Storms exiling something on cast and again on every colorless spell after it. One card answers the entire pattern for , and the format noticed.
Modern: the most-played card, full stop
Karsten's pre-PT breakdown said it plainly: "Consign to Memory remains the most-played sideboard card" (magic.gg, July 16, 2026). Earlier this season, across 1,616 decklists from three Modern Regional Championships, he'd already flagged the bigger version of the claim — at Prague, "the most-played card across all Modern decklists wasn't a mythic rare or a format-defining creature—it was Consign to Memory."
Our corpus agrees, and then some. The top of Modern by decklist appearance over the past month (n=2,832, 2026-06-21..07-21, basics excluded, main + sideboard):
| # | Card | Share of all decklists | |---|---|---| | 1 | Consign to Memory | 46.2% (1,307) | | 2 | Vexing Bauble | 40.7% (1,154) | | 3 | Mystical Dispute | 39.8% (1,128) | | 4 | Flooded Strand | 35.1% (993) | | 5 | Wrath of the Skies | 33.4% (947) | | 6 | Arid Mesa | 33.3% (944) |
A one-mana conditional counterspell appears in more Modern decklists than any fetchland. And this isn't a spike: the non-overlapping older five months (2026-01-22..06-20, n=15,347) had it at 48.1%. Forty-six to forty-eight percent, #1 in every window we cut, for half a year. In Modern, Consign isn't reacting to a hot metagame week — it is the weather.
Here's the detail that makes the number genuinely strange: Consign has outlived most of its own famous targets. Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury — whose enters-the-battlefield sacrifice trigger you could counter to keep a 6/6 — banned May 18, 2026. The One Ring, whose protection trigger it answered: banned. Grief, Nadu, Winged Wisdom and their trigger engines: banned. Four headline reasons to play the card have left the format since it was printed, and its share hasn't moved. The live target list refilled itself: the entire Eldrazi package (Kozilek's Command and friends are colorless spells; Devourer of Destiny's "exile target permanent that's one or more colors" is a cast trigger that resolves even if you counter the creature — hence Replicate), Karn, the Great Creator, Basking Broodscale's token loop that's welded together entirely out of triggered abilities, and Solitude's enters-the-battlefield exile.
The card's Modern résumé stopped being sideboard-only, too. Yuuki Ichikawa won Pro Tour Marvel Super Heroes with four copies in his Simic Neoform maindeck — not the board, the main — next to three Pact of Negation, through a 362-player field:
That's the champion of one of the largest tabletop Pro Tours in years maindecking a "sideboard card" as his primary interaction suite. He wasn't first to the idea — Matt Costa registered four at Pro Tour Edge of Eternities and went 7-3 in Modern with them, per magic.gg, whose Regional Championship coverage has also featured Jeskai Blink lists with the full four in the main — and MTGGoldfish's archetype page has Domain Zoo at 2.3 copies across 95% of lists. The distinction between "most-played sideboard card" (Karsten's per-event copy count) and "most-appearing card in the corpus" (our deck-presence share) is worth keeping straight, but both metrics now say the same thing from different angles.
Legacy: past Brainstorm
Legacy is where the summer story has actual velocity. Same counting method (share of ALL Legacy 75s, main + sideboard), older window against the last month:
| Card | 2026-04-22..06-20 (n=3,683) | 2026-06-21..07-21 (n=1,432) | Δ | |---|---|---|---| | Force of Will | 49.4% | 58.0% | +8.6 | | Consign to Memory | 46.0% | 55.4% | +9.4 | | Force of Negation | 40.6% | 52.8% | +12.2 | | Brainstorm | 47.0% | 50.6% | +3.6 | | Surgical Extraction | 27.7% | 38.3% | +10.6 | | The Fantasticar | 0.03% | 19.8% | +19.8 | | Mindbreak Trap | 18.9% | 11.6% | −7.3 | | Stifle | 4.6% | 10.4% | +5.8 | | Chalice of the Void | 6.6% | 5.7% | −0.9 |
Two months ago Consign trailed Brainstorm. Today it's nearly five points clear of it. Sit with that for a second: a conditional counter printed in 2024 now appears in more Legacy decklists than the cantrip that has defined blue Legacy for two decades. Our own trend line across three successive measurement windows runs 46.2% (April 14–June 12, n=3,978) → 49.2% (June 13–July 13, n=1,076) → 55.4% now — and the whole jump maps cleanly onto the Car's arrival. The table shows the format's revealed preference in one column: trigger-targeting interaction up (Consign +9.4, Stifle more than doubled off a small base), spell-tax answers down (Mindbreak Trap −7.3, Chalice flat-to-down). Counter the trigger; don't tax the spell.
What does it actually do in Legacy? Nearly everything the format is currently guilty of:
- The Car. The fourth-noncreature-spell ability is one triggered ability — counter it and there are no Constructs, no 16 damage, and the Car doesn't even get sacrificed. Joe Dyer credits exactly this ("Cards like Stifle and Consign to Memory are very good versus the Car") for Azorius Tempo's 57.8% non-mirror week, MTGGoldfish, July 8, 2026.
- The One Ring, still legal here — Consign counters the colorless spell outright for , no trigger gymnastics required. When it does resolve, the protection trigger is counterable too.
- Reanimator's payoffs. Atraxa, Grand Unifier's enters trigger gets countered and the ten-card refill becomes a 7/7 with keywords and no fresh grip. Note what it does not do against Emrakul, the Aeons Torn: a reanimated Emrakul was never cast, so there's no extra-turn trigger to worry about in the first place — what you're countering, every combat, is annihilator 6.
- Storm. Storm is a cast-triggered ability, so one Consign counters the trigger and every copy evaporates before it exists — you eat the original Galvanic Relay or Tendrils of Agony and nothing else. The EPIC Storm's own primer concedes Consign "can answer a Galvanic Relay all on its own."
- The cute stuff. Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd exiles an opposing permanent on attack; counter your own return trigger and it stays gone forever — a trick Dyer has written up, and one reason UW Phelia (3.4% of the Legacy top cut this month) plays so cleanly with the card. And the classic: cast Phyrexian Dreadnought, counter its own sacrifice trigger, keep a -mana 12/12 with trample.
The winners' lists walk the talk. The UWx Control list that won MTGO Legacy Challenge 32 on July 12 (nekoyama2) boards exactly two; Kojima Kousuke took down the 51-player Win a Bayou in Nagoya on July 11 with the same two in a Dimir Tempo board; even the combo decks board it against each other. Two copies in the board is simply what a Legacy 75 looks like right now.
Wizards noticed too — the June 29 B&R, explaining why the Car might not need a Legacy ban yet, wrote that "Legacy might be a safe home for the card: Consign to Memory is the most played Sideboard card." When the ban-list announcement cites your sideboard card as the reason a threat gets to stay legal, "format-defining" stops being hyperbole.
Vintage: a third of the format — and still not its favorite answer
Vintage keeps us honest. Consign appears in 34.9% of the 2,143 Vintage decklists in our three-month window — one deck in three, real play by any standard, exactly where Dyer's Vintage 101 coverage places it ("multiple maindeck Mindbreak Trap, Consign to Memory, Null Rod" in the anti-Car decks). But the last month tells a spikier story: as The Fantasticar stormed to 30.1% of Vintage decklists, the format's answer of choice was Mindbreak Trap, which leapt from 59.2% to 74.8% of all 75s, with Null Rod up ten points to 44.7% — while Consign actually slipped from 36.0% to 32.0%.
That makes sense on one reading: in the format where Mishra's Workshop makes the "fourth noncreature spell each turn" clause a turn-one problem, a free "exile any number of target spells" beats a one-mana trigger counter, and shutting off every artifact beats both. Consign is a defining card in Vintage's conversation; it is not Vintage's defining answer. We'd rather tell you that than round it up.
Where the thesis breaks: Pauper
The original thesis had a fourth leg: that Consign "may also be shaping Pauper." It is not, and it cannot, and the reason is airtight.
Consign to Memory has been printed exactly once — Modern Horizons 3, #54, uncommon, Ben Hill art, June 14, 2024. We ran the full printings census on Scryfall: one printing, no promos, no variations, nothing in a Commander deck or a List slot. Pauper legality requires a common printing somewhere in Magic's history; none exists, and both Scryfall and the DeckCortex card database mark it plainly: Pauper — not legal. For belt and suspenders we ran the corpus check anyway: across 8,360 Pauper decklists in our last three months, Consign appears in zero — while the control card in the same query, Counterspell, shows up in a healthy 20.8%. The lookup works. The zero is real.
There's even a neat historical rhyme here: Mental Misstep — the card this article is about to compare Consign to — is also an uncommon-only one-mana counter that never touched Pauper. The formats where free-flowing efficient interaction would hit hardest are, twice now, the ones the rarity line locked out.
So: three formats, not four. We're telling you the thesis broke because that's the point of testing it — and because for Duel Commander, where the raw research guessed "legal, marginal," we can now just measure it: 10 of 2,170 decklists over three months, 0.5%. Legal, marginal, confirmed.
The ban question nobody is asking
Every few years a one-mana answer defines multiple formats at once, and it usually ends the same way.
Mental Misstep (2011) countered any one-mana spell for or 2 life, and every deck — blue or not — ran four until WotC banned it from Legacy within months ("instead of results having blue and nonblue decks playing Mental Misstep, there are more blue decks than ever," September 2011), stuck it on Modern's original ban list, and eventually restricted it in Vintage (2019). Its crime was unconditional universality. Amusing footnote from our own corpus: Vintage still jams the single restricted copy into 63.0% of decklists, and in Duel Commander, where it remains fully legal, it sits in 45.3%. Fifteen years on, the habit never died.
Deathrite Shaman — the "one-mana planeswalker," as the community shorthand went — was the other archetype of the problem: an answer-shaped card so efficient it became a threat, banned in Modern (fall 2013) and Legacy (July 2018) for homogenizing everything it touched.
Consign to Memory is in neither bucket, and nobody serious claims otherwise. It's conditional — close to dead against a colored curve-out with no trigger worth spending a card on. Its play rate is a function of threat density, not card power. Which is why, in a summer full of ban discourse, none of it points at Consign: the conversation is about the threat it polices. Cardsrealm's June 30 piece is literally titled "The Fantasticar might be the next multi-format ban!" and casts Consign as the safety valve that might save the Car in Legacy; Wizards said the quiet part on June 29 ("we won't hesitate to take action" if the Car breaks Vintage). The next scheduled B&R announcement is August 10, 2026. That's the date this entire article is provisional against.
Three dollars and change
Here's the access story, in our own Scryfall paper-aggregate prices as of July 21: Consign to Memory costs $3.51 / €4.31. The premium interaction it shares sideboard space with: Stifle $13.45, Mindbreak Trap $15.46, Chalice of the Void $15.72, Force of Negation $54.18, Force of Will $62.64. The most-played card in Modern and the #2 card in Legacy is the cheapest card on that shelf, at roughly a quarter the price of its nearest neighbor. (Personal favorite line item: the Dreadnought trick costs $3.51 to enable; the Phyrexian Dreadnought costs $277.53.)
Why so cheap? One printing, but that printing was MH3 — a heavily-opened tentpole set with warehouse-scale supply. The card has already shown it can move when demand bites: Wargamer (citing MTGGoldfish) tracked it from about $1.30 to $5.20 inside a week in late July 2024 as Modern demand first materialized, and vendor snapshots this summer sit in the $3–5 range depending on marketplace and metric (MTGStocks, TCGplayer, Cardmarket — external figures, all dated June–July 2026). Meanwhile the threat side just showed what a real spike looks like: our tracked Fantasticar price ran $28.28 (July 2) → $34.63 (July 7–11) → $21.87 today, a proper hype-and-correction round trip in three weeks while its play numbers only climbed. Consign didn't budge through any of it. Supply that deep is a moat — until a B&R or a breakout maindeck trend drains it.
Metagame call or format pillar?
The strongest argument against everything above comes from the storm players, of all people. The EPIC Storm's Alex McKinley calls Consign "a neat piece of sideboard tech that will stay around as long as the best prison decks are colorless rather than Red" — that is: a metagame call wearing a pillar's play rate. Cardsrealm frames it the same way, and Karsten's PT data supports the contingency reading in general (the metagame "closely mirrors expectations"; formats reward whatever answers the current threats). There's also an honest tactical counter: colorless decks punch back. A Necrodominance primer at Mystical Teachings notes dryly that "Kozilek's Command can kill it, Phlage can deal with it" when discussing hate pieces — interaction this cheap trades down against the top of the format's curve, and a Consign in hand is not a lock on anything.
Our data splits the difference, and the split is the actual conclusion. In Legacy, Consign is a metagame call at full sprint — +9.4 points in a month, riding a Car whose top-cut share nearly doubled inside the window's last ten days (3.8% on July 11 → 6.8% now). If August 10 hits The Fantasticar, expect that 55.4% to sag right back toward the mid-40s, and McKinley gets to say he told us so. In Modern, it looks like a pillar: 46–48% in every window for six months, #1 the whole way, through four of its marquee targets getting banned out from under it, with the format's newest Pro Tour champion running four in the maindeck. As long as Modern Horizons 3's colorless engine is Modern's spine — and 24.6% of a Pro Tour field says it is — the answer to it is structural, not seasonal.
What would change our mind, concretely: an August 10 action against the Car and/or the Eldrazi package followed by Consign's Legacy share falling under ~45% (metagame-call thesis confirmed); or, in the other direction, maindeck adoption spreading beyond Neoform and Blink shells while the price pushes past $8–10 despite MH3 supply (pillar thesis hardening into Misstep-precedent territory — the point where an answer stops answering a metagame and starts being one). We'll re-run these exact queries after the announcement.
Until then, the practical takeaway is dull and unavoidable: if your deck can cast in Modern or Legacy, the default is two copies in your board and you need a reason not to play them — the winning lists from Amsterdam to Nagoya already made the choice. And if you've been putting off buying your set: it's $3.51. The defining card of summer 2026 costs less than the booster pack it came in.
Data: DeckCortex scraped corpus, decklist-appearance share over full 75s (main + sideboard), windows and sample sizes as stated inline — Modern 1m n=2,832 / 6m n=18,179; Legacy 1m n=1,432 (staples) and n=1,402 (top-cut meta); Vintage 3m n=2,143 / 1m n=615; Pauper 3m n=8,360; Duel Commander 3m n=2,170; all fetched July 21, 2026. Top-cut shares are MTGTop8-placed lists, not field share; top-cut conversion is our own metric (share of counted entries reaching a cut), not match win rate, and small denominators are flagged where quoted. Prices are Scryfall paper market aggregate via DeckCortex, not a live TCGplayer feed; external quotes and figures are attributed to their sources with dates and were supplied by the research dossier rather than re-fetched. Next B&R: August 10, 2026 — treat every number here as a snapshot taken before it.