What the April 2026 rotation actually removed
Standard now allows blocks 2 through 5. That takes 762 printed block-1 cards off the table — except for the 23 the override list quietly rescues.
The block rotation that took effect on 1 April 2026 is the largest single change to Standard since the format existed. The current window runs to 31 March 2027 and allows blocks 2, 3, 4, 5 and X.
Block 1 is gone. That is a bigger cut than it sounds.
The size of the cut
Of the 2,665 English cards in our catalog, 762 carry a printed block-1 icon — a little over 28% of the game. Counting what is actually illegal in Standard today, after every override is applied, the figure is 739 cards.
The gap between those two numbers is the interesting part.
The override list is not optional reading
Bandai maintains a card-number-keyed override list, and the printed icon on the card is not authoritative. There are currently 47 overrides: 32 assign block X, and 15 assign block 4.
Of those 47, 23 rescue a card whose printed icon reads block 1 — cards that a naive reading of the card face would tell you had rotated out, and which are in fact completely legal.
The block-X group is mostly the Super Parallel Rares and cards sharing their number:
- OP01-120 Shanks
- OP01-016 Nami
- OP02-013 Portgas.D.Ace
- OP05-069 Trafalgar Law
- OP05-074 Eustass"Captain"Kid
- OP05-119 Monkey.D.Luffy
- OP03-122 Sogeking
- OP04-083 Sabo
The block-4 group is a separate, explicitly designated list, legal through March 2029:
- OP02-068 Gum-Gum Rain
- OP03-072 Gum-Gum Jet Gatling
- OP03-097 Six King Pistol
- ST01-011 Brook
- ST02-007 Jewelry Bonney
- ST06-008 Hina
- and nine others
Every one of those 15 still reads block 1 in Bandai's own card data. Not one of them carries a printed block-4 icon; the block-4 designation exists only on the override list. If your deckbuilder reads the icon off the card, it will reject all fifteen as rotated, and it will be wrong every time.
And one card has no block at all
OP15-096 Swallow Bond en Avant has no block icon whatsoever — a literal dash in the card data. It is the only card in the catalog in that state. It is not "block 1 and rotated"; it has no block, which is a different thing, and any tool that coerces a missing icon to a number will get it wrong.
What this means in practice
If you are checking a list by eye, the rule is: do not read the block icon. Check the card number against the override list. collected.gg does this for you — every legality badge on the site resolves through the override table first, then the printed icon, never the other way round.
The practical effect is that a handful of very old, very good cards — Shanks, the OP05 Luffy, Law — are still perfectly playable in a format that on paper rotated them out two sets ago.