The reserve list is a list of cards that for all intents and purposes are never going to be printed again. For a while, there was a loophole in the reserve list which allowed foil versions of some cards to exist. This is no longer the case and now the hard rule is that no tournament playable functionally equivalent cards will be printed. If you want the read the entirety of the reserve list, you can find it here.

Why does the reserve list exist? It was started as a promise that was supposed to quell the fears of collectors and players whom had invested a lot of money into the game. Chronicles is the set that sparked this change. Magic: The Gathering is the oldest card game in existence and the idea of “reprints” was still not a concept that people looked upon fondly yet. Chronicles is the earliest attempt at a Masters set and was met with a lot of backlash. It had included a lot of (at the time) expensive and rare cards from the first few expansions of the game which caused the value of those cards to plummet. The reserve list was set up consequently as a promise to collectors that the value of their collection would not depreciate significantly if it contained cards on this list. Mark Rosewater later included these points in his article about “Twenty things that were going to kill Magic.”

There was a period of time (until 2011) that the reserve list was a little fuzzy. If you’re a Magic chronologist like myself, you’d know that Urza’s Saga was the only set of the Urza block that did not have foils included in the booster packs. Well from its inception, it had some weird rules but basically didn’t include “premium” printings, which basically means foils. That’s why despite cards like Gaea's Cradle being on the reserve list and foils not appearing in the booster packs it was contained in, there are foil copies of this card available. In 2010, a whopping 9 reserve list cards were printed in foil which caused some outcry from players. Wizards of the Coast later revised its stance on the reserve list to also now include premium versions of the cards. This final nail in the reserve list coffin has been one of the main reasons that some Judge foil versions of popular reserve list cards (ex Gaea's Cradle, Survival of the Fittest, Wheel of Fortune) are now some of the most expensive foils available.

Moving forward, it’s unlikely that any cards get removed from the reserve list (although it has happened before) so it is likely the prices of these cards will continue to climb. The fact that there will always be fewer copies of the cards in existence every year means that they will become rarer with time until the point where there are so few that it’s impossible to play with them. Although I have no proof, I do believe the long term solution to the reserve list cards will be to ban them in all formats that they are currently legal. At some point the cost will be too much and negatively affect the game. As it is, some expensive cards are purely collector items now anyway.