Legacy: The Pre-Ban Format and What 2025 Still Has In Store for Us

Greetings, Legacy community! We're about to get another banlist update - on November 10th! I can't recall, after all these years writing about Legacy, of a moment we all felt so uncertain about this format as the one we're living in now.

In the past, WotC had a few clear targets when a new banlist update came around: White Plume Adventurer, Grief, Psychic Frog, and Vexing Bauble (ironically, cards that are powerful enough to see play regularly in Vintage). 2025 rolled out, and we started to struggle to see where the format was heading. WotC decided to go down a different path, particularly as they had to deal with an archetype that was clearly performing a lot better than the others in a way some were calling "questionable".

In the last 4 banlist updates, including the last one (the one that didn't change anything), one deck was sitting at the top of the format: Dimir Reanimator has been dominating Legacy for a while now. It survived even after WotC removed 3 critical cards (Grief, Psychic Frog, and Troll of Khazad-dûm). To make things worse, the sets released in 2025 barely impacted the format. Some cards were relevant, like Stock Up, Ugin, Eye of the Storms, Tezzeret, Cruel Captain, and Pinnacle Emissary, but sets like Final Fantasy and Spider-Man went by unnoticed by Legacy players. This means this year was just about the same throughout, and mostly the same decks as one year ago are still seeing play.

When I reviewed the NA Eternal Weekend meta, the biggest Legacy event of the year, I highlighted that 13 of the 16 most popular decks in 2025 were also the most popular decks in 2024. Out of the 3 decks remaining, Blue Post was the only one that was actually a new archetype.

A year without anything too new or relevant made some players "abandon" certain events, particularly if they were dedicated to archetypes that lost space in this resolved format. In tabletop tournaments, in which actually having the cards you want to play is a bigger problem than it is online, players usually only have 1 or 2 archetypes ready to play. Some Legacy players migrated to Pre-Modern, others moved to Commander, and some simply stopped playing. This year's Eternal Weekend welcomed 200 players less than last year, which is not a coincidence.

The truth is, even in an Eternal format, players enjoy change and the possibility that a deck that today isn't seeing much play can start seeing play tomorrow and catch everyone off-guard. A resolved meta with very little space for new ideas, where most decks play graveyard answers in the main deck (though even that hasn't been enough to knock down Reanimator from the top of the format), is clearly struggling to self-correct. Even if the other archetypes are quite diverse.

Unlike the other times I discussed future bans, this time I won't speculate about what WotC will announce on November 10th because of one singular reason: we can't communicate with WotC, so we have no way of knowing what they have in store for this format and what they want it to be.

Until June this year, we had a pretty good grasp on what they would ban, even if we missed one card or two. But when June came along and the banlist update was "no changes", we were hit hard. Yes, a few players wanted no changes at all, but they were definitely not the majority of us.

Most players understood Legacy was struggling and that new sets alone wouldn't be enough to resolve its problems.

If almost everyone agreed on that, why did WotC go down a different path? This split between what players believe and what the team responsible for keeping Legacy fresh believes means we can't really predict the future anymore. If they thought Legacy was balanced enough to not do anything in June, why would they change their minds about, essentially, the same format a mere 5 months later?

So, though we can't predict what WotC will do, we can try to guess and see how that will impact Legacy. Let's take a look at how Legacy could change from November 10th onward.

No Changes

In June, not many players believed they would let the ban window pass by and not do anything, but now, a lot more players believe this is exactly what will happen on November 10th. The reason for that is what we discussed above: nothing has really changed so far, and if WotC found that format balanced, then this one is as well.

The consequences, in this case, should be what we're already seeing: the same format dominated by the same decks and the hope that Avatar or the TNMT can impact it enough to result in actual change. It isn't looking like they will, though, and, as I've said, a format that stays the same for more than a cycle is boring. Players will become even more disinterested.

Some Targets

Another way to deal with the current meta is the path of least resistance, that is, by hitting one or two targets to nerf a few decks at the top of the format but not actually knock them down from their throne. Their basic strategy will remain the same.

The change I see most players suggest in this sense is to ban Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student. This is not only the card that really makes a difference in Reanimator but also makes it able to shift gears from combo into a tempo strategy. However. However, Tamiyo also sees play in some other tempo decks and Nadu archetypes. Low-cost creatures that can create a truckload of value usually get banned in Legacy, and Tamiyo fits the same criteria that kicked out Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Dreadhorde Arcanist, and Psychic Frog from the format.

Another option is to hit anything in the Reanimator kit: Entomb, Reanimate, or Atraxa, Grand Unifier. Banning Entomb will change this archetype the way we know it forever, but removing the other cards will only make us play more copies of Animate Dead (if they ban Reanimate) or Griselbrand (if they ban Atraxa, Grand Unifier).

If they do this, the same thing that happened when they banned Troll of Khazad-dûm will happen again: it won't be relevant. Yes, if they ban Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student, Reanimator will be a lot weaker. But won't it just adapt with more Orcish Bowmasters and/or Barrowgoyf and move on? Sometimes, yes, a single hit could fix a complicated situation, but we can't bet on that.

A Glorious Dawn

One take that has been gaining traction among some players is that WotC decided to wait so that they could finally take drastic action later on, similarly to what they did with Modern last year, in December. Moving up the banlist update by two weeks, which sets it 17 days before the European Eternal Weekend instead of only 3 days away, makes this possibility a bit more likely.

If they decide to go nuclear like this, WotC would remove several cards at once from the format to, essentially, destroy the top decks in the format and open space for others to fill that power vacuum. It would be something like banning, all at once, Entomb, Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student, The One Ring, and Nadu, Winged Wisdom, or another combination of cards that see play in the main decks. They could also remove from limbo a few cards that could see the light of day again - unbanning Troll of Khazad-dûm and banning Entomb at the same time seems like a logical decision, for instance.

The problem with these types of radical changes is that they're unpredictable. Wouldn't destroying several predators at once open space for something even more problematic to grow? A deck like Oops All Spells would be overjoyed to see decks with Force of Will and Thoughtseize disappear for now. Changing so much in a format as wide as Legacy means we'll have to consider too many variables to try to predict what will happen.

The conclusion this time is that we haven't reached any. As Wizards of the Coast hasn't told us what they think an ideal format is, we can only speculate. Some are asking for an Entomb ban, but, considering the last decisions WotC made, they don't seem willing to kill an entire archetype. Instead, they have tried to nerf everything around it. Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student is similar to a few cards they have banned, both in power level and how widespread it is in the meta.

What do you think? Tell us your thoughts in our comment section below.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!