The Nov. 10, 2025 Legacy B&R (But Actually Edited)
Originally published by Wizards of the Coast (WotC) on Nov. 10, 2025. All added definitions to help clarify WotC's colloquial language were added and are not WotC's definitions of those undefined terms. Editorial liberties are made.
- Entomb is banned.
- Nadu, Winged Wisdom is banned.
Entomb
It's time.
Legacy has been divisive at best and reviled at worst.
After significant time and effort to preserve the iconic Entomb-Reanimate play pattern in Legacy, it is time to lay it to rest. Dimir Reanimator has been atop the Legacy metagame for years despite enduring multiple bans — Grief, Psychic Frog, Troll of Khazad-dûm — which barely fazed it.
For the three most recent banned and restricted (B&R) announcements, we banned around Entomb to compel Dimir Reanimator toward something more committal: either a robust fair* plan or a high-impact, albeit exploitable, combo plan. Our attempts failed.
*WotC defines "fair" as a deck that does not have a means to win the game outright via an intended combination of cards. In Laymen's terms: not a combo deck.
In our June 30, 2025, B&R list update, we spoke of giving Legacy more time to adjust to Dimir Reanimator and Oops! All Spells. Finding sufficient and effective hate for Legacy's powerful strategies takes time. Since then, Oops! All Spells' metagame share has dropped dramatically. Oops! struggled at the 2025 North American Eternal Weekend Legacy Championship — zero players made the top 64.
On the other hand, Dimir Reanimator had large metagame share, a target on it, and still scored 14 players in the top 64, three of which were in the top 8.
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Banning Entomb is not a decision we take lightly, nor does it fill us with joy. Entomb used to accomplish several desirable aspects of game design: inspired deck building, was iconic, and, at times, expanded the range of cards played in Legacy.
Unfortunately, Entomb no longer incentivizes Reanimator players to toolbox various threats like Inkwell Leviathan, Archon of Valor's Reach, or Tidespout Tyrant for specific positions against a diverse meta. Even when those cards were considered many years ago, they were narrow, since Griselbrand was the obvious go-to creature an overwhelming percentage of the time.
In current Legacy, Entomb's predominant use is to put Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Archon of Cruelty into the graveyard to Reanimate and then protect with Daze, Force of Will, and Thoughtseize.
The play pattern of Dimir Reanimator has not changed despite our attempts to weaken the deck. Entomb leverages high-impact threats too easily without risking the fail rate inherent to synergistic enabler-plus-payoff combo strategies.
Ideally, banning Entomb compartmentalizes strategies that cheat** big creatures into play from strategies that play a more traditional game of Magic***. We recognize and understand that hybridizations of these macro strategies (combo and tempo****) have continuously and consistently proven problematic. We commit to taking aggressive action swiftly in the future when this hybridization is apparent.
**WotC defines "cheating" a creature into play as: circumventing a creature's mana cost to put it onto the battlefield by more efficient means. When we design big creatures, we are fully aware that the most likely use of those creatures will be to cheat them into play. As such, we will tweak our design process going forward to more aggressively account for this play pattern.
***WotC defines a "traditional game of Magic" as casting spells for their mana costs toward interactive gameplay that results in a player winning by reducing their opponent's life total to zero via combat. Nontraditional games of Magic include combo and prison strategies that win the game by alternative means. Although combo and prison strategies have existed since Magic's inception, "traditional" Magic is a term we use to communicate a play experience we aim for the majority of players to have.
****WotC defines "Tempo" strategies in Legacy as a cheap threat, typically costing one mana, backed by Daze and Wasteland.
Players affected by this ban can still experience the Daze-Wasteland-cheap threat play pattern that has historically always been one of the best strategies via Izzet Cutter or Dimir Tempo. Alternatively, players can still experience the cheat-big-creatures-onto-the-battlefield play pattern via Reanimate, Animate Dead, and Exhume in combination with discard outlets and a higher density of big creatures, Show and Tell and/or Sneak Attack, or Natural Order.
Nadu, Winged Wisdom
We should have banned Nadu, Winged Wisdom long ago. It's a power-level outlier that has not flown under the radar. We knew Nadu was a design mistake when we explicilty said so on Aug. 26, 2024.
Nadu strategies aren't represented much online despite their win rates, in part, because of how cumbersome Nadu is to play on Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO).
There are two versions of Nadu in Legacy. One is affectionately called "Cephalid Breakfast," named for Cephalid Illusionist, which was the highest-ranking Nadu variation at the 2025 Eternal Weekend North America, reaching the semifinals.
Cephalid Breakfast is what we believe combo should be in an Eternal format. It's often-deterministic combo repeatedly targets Cephalid Illusionist via Shuko or Nomads en-Kor to mill their entire library, which contains Narcomoeba, to flashback Dread Return targeting Thassa's Oracle. There are many ways to combat this combo, including graveyard hate, countermagic, creature removal, and targeting effects like Pithing Needle and Disruptor Flute.
Midrange strategies are typically understood to exist on the fair axis of the format. Midrange strategies that feature Nadu are indistinguishable from non-deterministic combo strategies. Nadu in these decks takes a long time to resolve, is physically challenging to represent, and may not actually win despite the game being effectively decided.
Unlike Cephalid Breakfast or other combo decks, Nadu midrange strategies are more resistant to traditional hate by virtue of its actual midrange makeup — creatures that operate well in a traditional game of Magic that disregard the hate targeted at the Nadu combo. Nadu's existence in these strategies make them challenging to attack and an undesirable experience at the table and online.
Nadu's undesirable play patterns compel us to act more aggressively than we prefer in Legacy. Still, it is in Legacy's best interest.
Regarding the lack of acknowledgement of The One Ring or Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student in this announcement:
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