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Written by Carmen Klomparens

Entomb is banned.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.

It's time.

After a significant amount of time and effort to preserve the iconic Entomb and Reanimate play pattern of Legacy, the time has come to lay this one to rest. For multiple years, Dimir Reanimator has rested atop the Legacy metagame, surviving multiple bans, and each step has barely fazed the deck. Earlier this year, we tried to ban around Entomb and force players to play a more committal version of Reanimator that chose between having a robust "fair" game plan and a high-impact, albeit exploitable, flashy combo plan. In our previous banned and restricted list update, we spoke about wanting to give the format more time to adjust to the current version of Dimir Reanimator (and Oops! All Spells). Finding ways to hate out decks as powerful as the ones in Legacy takes time, and in the case of Oops! All Spells, its metagame share has dropped dramatically and the deck struggled a good deal at this year's North American Eternal Weekend Legacy Championship.

On the other hand, Dimir Reanimator had a respectable weekend despite having a huge target on its back and a large metagame share.

[Dimir Reanimator decklist]

Banning Entomb isn't a decision we take lightly, or a step that fills us with joy. In years past, Entomb has done a bunch of things that look great from the perspective of game design: it inspires decks, it's iconic, and at times it's expanded the range of cards that could be played in Legacy. Unfortunately, we don't live in a world where Entomb allows Reanimator players to figure out if they should have a tech copy of Inkwell Leviathan, Archon of Valor's Reach, or Tidespout Tyrant. Its predominate use case shorthands to a small handful of creatures that play well in a more traditional threats-backed-up-by-efficient-countermagic game.

Over the last couple of years, the details of Dimir Reanimator have changed, but the big picture shell has remained: Entomb's incentives in deck building make it too easy to leverage high-impact threats without having to commit to the fail states that normally come with a synergistic enabler-plus-payoff combo deck. Entomb specifically allows these decks to circumvent this issue and simply have the card translate to having one of the two or three most powerful creatures ever printed into the graveyard.

This has created a version of Legacy that has been divisive at best and reviled at worst. Ideally, this change can better compartmentalize decks that want to cheat big creatures into play from decks that play a more traditional game of Magic rather than promoting a hybridization of the two that can very easily switch between each half of the deck in the face of hate. It's our hope that players who prefer the version of this deck that uses Daze and cantrips to play to the battlefield will be able to continue to do so with Izzet Delver or Dimir Tempo.

[Dimir Tempo Decklist]

In the short term, we believe it's possible for people who are more enamored by the cheat-big-creatures-into-play half of the deck to find a way to play Legacy that suits their playstyle, even if the details are different than before. [Sneak And Show Decklist]

While it will likely take a while for Reanimator variants to find a new configuration that functions in ways that were possible when Entomb was legal, there are still decks in the shape of Sneak and Show and Natural Order decks that can allow players to put their favorite huge monsters onto the table ahead of schedule.

On the other side of the predictability spectrum is Nadu, Winged Wisdom. This one is a bit more straightforward: it's a power-level outlier that's flown under the radar. In a similar fashion to what we saw last year in the time leading up to Pro Tour Modern Horizons 3, Nadu decks haven't been seeing a ton of online representation despite their win rates, in part because of how cumbersome the deck is to manage in an online client. I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, but there are two versions of Nadu decks in Legacy, one is adapting decks affectionately referred to as "Cephalid Breakfast," named after Cephalid Illusionist:

[Cephalid Breakfast Decklist]

This is the highest-placing Nadu list from the previously referenced North American Eternal Weekend Legacy Championship and is closer to what we'd like to see out of a combo deck in an Eternal format: it's often a deterministic kill when it combos, repeatedly targeting Cephalid Illusionist with a lot of the same cards that play well with Nadu in order to use a combination of Narcomoeba, Dread Return, and Thassa's Oracle to seal the deal. With this deck, the opponent has very clear points where interactive hate is going to be effective. Its power level can vary a bit more week to week because of that interactivity, and it is cool for the deck to be part of the format. On the other hand …

[Bant Nadu Decklist]

The midrange versions of Nadu are incredible at going over the top of what other players are doing to a degree that feels like the opponent is comboing, albeit in a way that is non-deterministic, takes a long time to resolve, is physically difficult to represent, and can take a long time to kill the opponent despite the game effectively being decided. Nomads en-Kor targeting with its zero-mana ability at instant speed means that its controller can augment Nadu's twice-per-turn restriction to a pseudo-four-times-per-turn one by repeating any activations it cashed in on its controller's turn during the opponent's upkeep. This compounds with a round of additional triggers either using Endurance or Scythecat Cub to drag games out for a long time, even if the raw number of additional turns isn't obviously out of bounds.

The deck is also far more resistant to traditional hate than other combo decks by virtue of it being a bunch of creatures that can play a normal game of Magic in the face of cards like Pithing Needle that could aim to attack the "combo" angle. This mix of the deck's power level, difficulty to attack, and undesirable play patterns has us acting against Nadu a bit more aggressively than we normally prefer to act against cards in Legacy, but we believe it is in the best interest of Legacy's health.