A Plea for Modernity: How to Treat Legacy Like a Competitive Format on June 30, 2025
Written by Brendan McGrail
Introduction: Retirement Home for Competitive Players
Magic has continuously evolved since the first Pro Tour in 1995. Block Constructed, Extended, Type 1.5, and Rochester Draft have been retired in favor of Pioneer, Modern, and Legacy to meet the competitive needs of the player base and Wizards of the Coast’s (WotC) bottom line.
Card and deck design have improved as players and designers gained experience. Formats attract audiences based on their card pools, play patterns, and competitiveness. A substantial amount of self-sorting drives the internal dynamics of WotC-run and community-run formats.
As a consequence of tournament Magic’s long history, some formats, particularly Legacy and Vintage, straddle the line between the competitiveness of formats that lead to the Pro Tour and more casual environments like Commander and Premodern.
Many of today’s paper Legacy players invested in the format during the heyday of the SCG Tour, Legacy Grands Prix, and the Bazaar of Moxen series — high-level Legacy events that occurred weekly in the US and at a slightly lower frequency in Europe and Japan.
This period ended over a decade ago. Many enfranchised Legacy players have aged out of tournament grinding and may struggle to dedicate time to the non-trivial complexity of RCQ season alongside their professional and familial obligations.
Still, they want to play Magic at a high level. Legacy has, for many of us, become a retirement home for competitive play. The format evolves slowly enough to track, but new printings and the high rate of online play drive metagame evolution. Many of us found this state of affairs congenial until Modern Horizons 3 (MH3) was printed.
Community Sentiment and Format Management
Prior to MH3, the decision to ban or restrict cards in competitive formats was limited to when concerted efforts of players failed to find new edges in tournaments or when new cards created problems (cf. Flash and Companions).
In both cases, bans served a clearly discernible purpose: to allow metagames to escape the static equilibria characterized by an “S-tier” strategy that allowed only itself and anti-strategies to exist.
Cost barriers usually prevent Legacy metagames from reaching equilibrium, but the net effect is the same: innovation slows or turns inward toward S-tier mirrors, solutions to anti-S-tier strategies that exist, and the S-tier deck exceeding its metagame share in top 8, 16, and 32 finishes.
After several months of this metagame playing out, WotC would act to nerf or kill the S-tier strategy, allowing for the metagame to reach a dynamic, and hopefully interesting, equilibrium.
The increased power of Modern Horizons and Commander sets since 2019 has largely been balanced within this framework. Aggressive use of bans managed dominant strategies fueled by powerful printings not balanced at the appropriate power level for Standard. I approve of this shift, though I admittedly would’ve moved more swiftly against Expressive Iteration when Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer was banned and UR Delver continued to dominate the metagame.
I want WotC to push new designs and use bannings to fix their mistakes. However, this increased willingness to ban cards in non-rotating formats has not gone unnoticed by less competitive players of Legacy and Modern.
In the August 26th, 2024, banned and restricted (B&R) update, Grief was banned in Modern despite the marquee deck in which it saw play was driven from the metagame in the wake of MH3. The reason given was unambiguous:
“While Grief is not currently seeing as much play as it has in the past, it is still a format staple used by several decks. Mono-Black Necrodominance, Esper Goryo's Vengeance, Living End, Rakdos Midrange, and a handful of other decks still use one-mana cards to abuse Grief's manaless evoke interaction. In the interest of making the format more fun, we are banning Grief today.”
—Dan Musser and Dave Finseth, “August 26, 2024, Banned and Restricted Announcement”
A card was banned from a Pro Tour format not because the metagame couldn’t reach a dynamic equilibrium in its presence, but because people disliked playing against it.
I’ll be direct: this is nonsense and antithetical to the idea that the format should be played competitively. Part of competitive Magic is finding solutions to unpleasant play experiences. Indeed, many pointed out that Legacy is full of absolutely wretched play experiences.
Getting locked out by Chalice of the Void or Blood Moon, getting Dazed and Wastelanded out of a game, or being killed on turn zero with protection aren’t fun for most, but none of those strategies win at an unacceptable rate to the best of the community’s knowledge. Oops, All Spells! is the debatable exception.
Sowing Mycospawn was banned in Legacy for a similar reason. The immediate concern is that this insidious argument is turning up again in articles and Discord discussions leading to the June 30th B&R, but this time in reverse: people are desperately trying to preserve old cards they enjoy playing with despite them creating metagames with an identifiable S-tier strategy.
Some advance arguments for banning Orcish Bowmasters and/or Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student to preserve the legality of Entomb and/or Reanimate, which compelled the bannings of Grief and Troll of Khazad-dûm due to the misguided desire to preserve old cards at the expense of new ones. The moment we accede to this mode of format management, Legacy becomes irrelevant to competitive Magic.
UB Reanimator and The Mishra’s Workshop Problem
Since summer 2023, UB decks featuring four copies of Reanimate alongside a reliable ‘fair’ beatdown plan has defined Legacy’s top tier. Starting with a port of Modern’s RB ‘Scam’ deck, these strategies exploded in power with the innovation of cutting the deck’s Sauron’s Ransom-fueled endgame.
Doing so accommodated a minimal Entomb package featuring two to three large monsters; most often Atraxa, Grand Unifier and Archon of Cruelty, with occasional appearances by Griselbrand, Harvester of Misery, or Valgavoth, Terror Eater, and varying reanimation effects like Animate Dead and Emperor of Bones.
UB Reanimator's simultaneously threatens a fast combo and play a typical Tempo or Midrange via Grief, Psychic Frog, Orcish Bowmasters, Murktide Regent, Barrowgoyf, and Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student backed by Thoughtseize, Daze, Wasteland, and Force of Will. It has proven to be too much for the cardpool to handle despite multiple bans.
Without the Entomb package, UB Scam never crossed WotC’s often-articulated “sustained non-mirror win rate” of > 55%, making the Grief ban debatable on the merits. At the time, I was disappointed. Full disclosure, I believe Grief creates good games and encourages much more interesting deckbuilding but community sentiment is likely the best tie-breaker when there are many reasonable options for a ban.
People disliked playing against Grief. Three months later, the continued dominance of UB Reanimator led to the banning of Psychic Frog. Though it had all the hallmarks of a problematic Tempo threat and may have been banned eventually anyway.
On March 31, 2025, UB Reanimator was still the best performing deck in Legacy, and Troll of Khazad-dûm was banned, ostensibly to increase the liability of running six to eight reanimation effects with only four Entombs.
The results have been UB Reanimator becoming more stable with a consolidated endgame. Players added lands and adopted Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student over most of its two-mana reanimation.
UB Reanimator is arguably better than it was three months ago. If the community continues to be upset by UB Reanimator, and WotC continues to respond to their displeasure with bans, then Entomb and Reanimate will join Daze as ‘pillars’ of Legacy. This will surely lead to longer and more embarrassing list of mediocre cards banned in their wake.
If WotC is determined to find a witch, Entomb is the best target. Banning Entomb kills hybrid-reanimator strategies. They cannot run enough reanimation targets to support Careful Study in large numbers without becoming dedicated combo decks. Unmarked Grave costs two mana and only finds Archon of Cruelty.
A Modest Proposal
The largest Magic: The Gathering Online (MTGO) Legacy tournament recently was the Legacy RCQ on June 20th, 2025, with 130 players. Despite Oops! All Spells! and UB Reanimator being two of the top performing decks, the top 8 had an average of 3.75 pieces of graveyard hate in sideboards, including Karn, The Great Creator targets in the Mystic Forge decks.
Maindeck graveyard interaction was limited to Crop Rotation in Lands and Karn, the Great Creator wishing for