Why do I even keep following Legacy as a format? Is it just inertia for having been invested in the format for the past 21 years? Is it that unbanning Mind's Desire somehow bought more of my interest? Is it that I just love to complain about WotC? If it's that last one, they sure are giving me material to work with. Banning Nadu and Entomb is dumb. I will now step onto my soapbox...
Carmen Klomparens said:
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.
Two important points here. Firstly, Reanimator was merely one of the top decks. It was not dominating the metagame. Saying that the archetype has "rested atop the Legacy metagame" is severely misleading. I think that it is unacceptable for official announcements to use weasel wording when it comes to the issue of whether the contention is that a card enabled a dominant archetype, or whether the card is being banned for some other reason. In the case of Entomb in Legacy, anyone who has followed the actual numbers would know that it's the latter, but this explanation could easily convince uninitiated readers that it is the former. And I hate that crap.
Secondly, this point has come up before. WotC have decided that they
want Reanimator players to play glass cannon decks that lack followup or backup plans. Players do not want to do this. Banning cards won't make them change their minds. They'll just stop playing Reanimator. More likely, since the card pool is so wide-open, they'll adjust in some other way. But they won't "commit" to something that isn't robust. Players want robustness.
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.
And there's the admission within the explanation itself: Dimir Reanimator had a "respectable" weekend, even after they banned other cards. And WotC apparently cannot tolerate that, so another card has to go. Also, I just want to take a moment to emphasize how
insane it is to make ban decisions on the basis of a single event. Yeah, Legacy is virtually a dead format, so Eternal Weekend is almost all they have to go on, but
that's a problem they created in the first place.
For those who don't know, the top 8 for the North American Legacy Championship consisted of...
1. Reanimator
2. MUD
3. Cephalid Breakfast
4. Loam Pox
5. Reanimator
6. MUD
7. Reanimator
8. MUD
Even based on that one tournament, it's not really a dominant archetype. And it was overrrepresented in that tournament anyway.
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.
And? Why is that a problem? Seems healthy to me.
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.
Yes, that's how the card works. Incidentally, that's how Reanimator decks were built before all of these stupidly broken new creatures existed and even before Entomb was originally unbanned. The idea is to overwhelm opponents by using Reanimate to cheat out a huge threat, but to be able to pivot and protect win conditions, rather than just folding to a single response from an opponent. Players want to win, not lose.
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 will not do that. Stop trying to control what players do. Players crave flexibility. They don't want to play decks that go, "Gosh, I guess I lose" if the opponent has removal. I thought everyone understood this, but apparently Carmen Klomparens does not.
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.
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.
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.
You don't get to decide what deck players will switch to after you ban decks out from under them, you pretentious oaf.
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:
While Cephalid Breakfast was another powerful archetype in the format, it also wasnt dominant and did not warrant any bans.
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.
I bolded that part because it's extremely obnoxious and captures the problem here succintly. Neither I nor anyone else should care about what Carmen Klomparens "would like to see out of a combot deck in an Eternal format." Bans should only be implemented for good reasons, not because someone doesn't like to see something.
I think that even a lot of people who do follow developments in the Legacy format, myself included, are a bit puzzled that WotC are clearly admitting that the Cephalid Breakfast archetype wasn't a problem, and it's also the most successful and prevalent Legacy deck employing Nadu, Winged Wisdom. It's surreal. We're being told that the best deck to use a particular card isn't too good, but that the card needs to be banned anyway on account of what it does in some far less successful deck. What?
On the other hand…
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.
In case I haven't driven the point home enough already, the contention isn't that Bant Nadu decks are too strong (this is essentially a tier 2 deck), but that its play patterns are so boring that WotC want to kill it, so they'll ban a card.
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.
Quite the opposite. The format was already basically dead anyway, but now you dunces are stripping what's left of its identity by banning so many cards.
