This Week in Legacy: North America Eternal Weekend 2025 Legacy Championship
Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're diving right into the results from the North America Eternal Weekend 2025 Legacy Champs event held in Pittsburgh, PA this past weekend!
In addition to that we've got some Challenges from last week to also look at.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
North America Eternal Weekend 2025 Legacy Championships
This past weekend was the North American Eternal Weekend 2025 event, with the 2025 Legacy Champs event taking place over the course of Saturday and Sunday. This year's event was a very interesting departure from past year's Legacy Champs event, in that it was a true Day 1-Day 2 event much like how Grand Prix were structured in days of old. This is an amazing thing to see because it resulted in a very large 15 round event with cut to Top 8. The first 9 rounds of the event were played on Saturday, and then everyone with a record 6-3 or better was able to advance to Day 2 and play 6 rounds plus cut to Top 8. All VODs for this event can be found over on CardTitan's Twitch channel here.
It's so cool to see this kind of structure used for Eternal Weekend, as it really does bring back the glory days of old school Grand Prixs. And honestly? I think it worked out great, and there were 944 players in this event to support that hypothesis. While this is down from last year's 1155, it's still a heck of a good number of players for this event.
What this does mean is that with the data for this event, that we get to have a lot of data sheets for it, because we can do the splits between Day 1 and Day 2 and actually get access to some data for conversion rates, which we will discuss first. Here first thing is all of the data sheets associated with this event:
You can find all of the decklists for this event here. Let's begin by looking at the overall graphs for both days.
Overall, Dimir Reanimator was the most popular deck of the entire event, making up close to 15% of the event in sheer metagame presence. Its overall win rate was pretty good as well with a 53.68% non-mirror win rate. Mystic Forge was the other big popular deck of the event, and it also had a pretty strong win rate at around 54.08% non-mirror. I think going into this event, a lot of people understood that very recently Mystic Forge Combo has been gaining in popularity, primarily due to the existence of Tezzeret, Cruel Captain having greatly improved the deck's power level. The rest of the field here was primarily made up of things like Dimir Tempo, Cephalid Breakfast, Izzet, Nadu Midrange, etc.
Now, this is where we can do some further dissection, and that is pretty cool. Let's look at how things broke out for the conversion rate from Day 1 to Day 2.
So, out of 944 players, a total number of 217 played the rest of the event on Day 2. This resulted in a 22.99% total conversion rate overall for the event. Of the decks that made it into Day 2, several of them overperformed in converting to Day 2. Dimir Reanimator and Mystic Forge both did quite well, with Reanimator converting 29.71% of its players (41 players out of 138 total), and Mystic Forge converting 26.44% (23 out of 87). The decks that underperformed here was things like Dimir Tempo, Izzet Tempo, and Red Stompy. These decks did not have a huge representation on Day 2. So let's look at the graphs for Day 2 specifically.
Dimir Reanimator's performance across the remaining six rounds was quite good, boasting a 55.06% non-mirror win rate. Mystic Forge also did extremely well in this vein, having a 57.27% non-mirror win rate. Despite putting a copy in the finals, Cephalid Breakfast did not have a very good rest of the event with a 41.76% non-mirror win rate, and decks like Dimir Tempo, Lands, and Eldrazi all suffered at the hands of the smaller field. Nadu seemed to be quite strong with a 52% non-mirror win rate.
I think it's safe to say that the decks that made the most waves overall in this event were indeed Dimir Reanimator and Mystic Forge. These two decks were at the top of everyone's minds in this event, and there was a lot happening with how these decks were shown on camera. Mystic Forge proved many times how powerful it is by being able to straight up ignore hate pieces like Null Rod thanks to Tezzeret and Glaring Fleshraker. Dimir Reanimator showcased multiple times that having a hate piece is not quite enough to shut down cards like Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student and the deck's tempo plan. If there ever was two decks that made up the life blood of this tournament, it was Reanimator and Mystic Forge.
I also have a filtered H2H matrix for this event to share, based on the overall event and for a cutoff of 25 decks or more (the same cutoff in the graph for the overall event).
As we can see here, Dimir Reanimator had a strong win rate versus decks like Dimir/Izzet Tempo, a near close to 50% win rate versus Mystic Forge and some less than positive win rates against Eldrazi, Lands, Nadu, and Painter. Mystic Forge on the other hand, had some insanely good matchups across the board versus a large slew of decks, with the only less than 50% win rate being Dimir and Nadu. Nadu also had a solid win rate against a lot of things. It's a very interesting tale of how this event broke down and how these decks interacted with each other. It does paint a picture that a lot of decks came prepped for Dimir and didn't fully respect Mystic Forge, or they were a deck that could deploy a hate piece versus Forge and then not close the game quickly. It's a very interesting thing to think about.
This does lead into the conversation that we have a ban announcement on November 10, 2025. This takes place a few weeks before EU Eternal Weekend on November 27-30 in Lucca, Italy. Wizards has already stated that while the core of this BnR has to do with Standard, it is a BnR that will involve all formats because it is a BnR window. Does anything actually happen on this BnR for Legacy?
The most realistic take I can have here is that I don't think there will be any changes. I think the proximity to EU Eternal Weekend is still just too great; people have booked flights overseas, etc, that Wizards will not make any changes to the format because of it. Does anything need to change is a big question to consider. We know that Dimir Reanimator and Mystic Forge have both proven very problematic to the format at large. Dimir's ability to leverage tempo elements with its combo elements has made it extremely powerful, and Mystic Forge's raw power and ability to sidestep hate pieces like Null Rod have been very difficult to fight through.
There's a number of different options here. I know many people in the community have been discussing Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student in this regards, and I do think the card is extremely powerful. There is a world where it is banned in Legacy. Realistically, if we're still okay with Deathrite Shaman being banned and it being something of a "one-mana Planeswalker" then the actual one-mana Planeswalker probably is also bannable. Tamiyo's ability to stress removal by being able to flip at instant speed if need be, combined with its flexibility (shutting down creature decks, recurring protection) and its game-winning ultimate, make it a very potent thing to have in Legacy overall, and I can see all the reasoning for it.
That being said, I don't know if just banning Tamiyo would rein in Reanimator again. We've had this "ban one thing from Reanimator, hope it works" pattern for a while now, and it hasn't proved to actually do much to the deck's dominance. If this is truly something Wizards doesn't want at the top of the format, we do have to consider banning either Reanimate or Entomb. I personally think Entomb is a fine ban in this regards, because Reanimate is actually a pretty cool card to exist in this format, and Entomb removes a lot of the guesswork and up front work of that equation. I would prefer to get rid of something like that over Reanimate, and force decks back into an axis where they need to play cards like Faithless Looting or even Careful Study.
On the Mystic Forge end of things, Wizards has already said that a card they've looked at in the past on other BnRs is The One Ring, and I do think that if there is a card that could leave the Forge Combo deck and impact it quite a bit, it would be the Ring. The One Ring at the time that Wizards was talking about this was referring to how good the card looked in Red Stompy shells, but I think the Ring's powerful nature when used in conjunction with the Keys (Voltaic Key/Manifold Key) that is when the card starts being actually somewhat obnoxious. I do think this is a card worth thinking about.
Do I think Wizards will actually do some of this? I actually doubt it. I doubt we get a meaningful ban until 2026 personally, due to how close these Eternal Weekend events are. Is that fine? I think it has to be. I don't think its's worth divebombing events like this especially when they are overseas events that people may already be travelling to in the time period between the ban and the event, and given that these events are the biggest events of the year for these formats, I think you just have to let them ride and then deal with the aftermath later.
With all that said, let's look at the Top 8 of the event.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Mystic Forge Combo | 1st | Tom Basketball |
| Dimir Reanimator | 2nd | Hans Jacob Goddik |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 3rd | Johan Larsson |
| Loam Pox | 4th | Jacob Murray |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 5th | Jon Barber |
| Dimir Reanimator | 6th | Tonmmy Wray |
| Dimir Reanimator | 7th | Eric Ratkowski |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 8th | Michael Puchkov |
Six out of Eight decks in this Top 8 were both Dimir Reanimator and Mystic Forge. I said before, that the big story of this event was these two decks, and it rang true all the way until the finals. The winner of this event was Tom Basketball on Mystic Forge in a stunning 2-1 finals match versus Hans Jacob Goddik on Dimir Reanimator.
Tom's deck is incredibly powerful, and it speaks to incredible power boost this deck got from the printing of Tezzeret, Cruel Captain. Tezzeret fills a niche role in the deck, being able to fulfill several roles in one card, and it's incredibly sticky. More likely the only way you're getting a Tezzeret off the battlefield is if you play a second one to replace the first. The amount of loyalty the card generates is massive, making it very difficult to kill in combat, and even so one activation in a situation where you need it to do something specific is often all you need in a single turn. Part tutor, part accelerant is a wild thing for a card that almost never gets used for its ultimate.
All in all, it makes for a very potent strategy, and we really saw that in the finals match how powerful this deck and how explosive it really can be. We also did see how quickly it can be shut down with pressure though, as the finals was a 2-1 match. And that really is what you need to be able to beat this deck. A way to pressure it and force it to try to play ahead, or some form of lock piece backed up by threats and constant pressure is what really makes this deck struggle. A single Null Rod with no other action or follow-up pressure isn't going to beat this deck. It will eventually find a way out of it. Thanks to cards like Planar Nexus, this deck can easily make colored mana for stuff like Portable Hole, which conveniently Tezzeret, Cruel Captain can go fetch. If you can stop that follow-up and apply consistent pressure, you're more than likely to win the game.
In Second Place was as noted before, Hans Jacob Goddik on Dimir Reanimator.
This list is pretty much what we've come to expect as a mostly stock list for Dimir Reanimator. In terms of how this deck pairs up against Mystic Forge, I do think you want to be able to lean hard on your fast graveyard shenanigans in Game 1, and then grind lock them + apply pressure in your post board games. Cards like Consign to Memory and Engineered Explosives go a long way in terms of dealing with Mystic Forge's powerful plays, but you need ways to beat that too. The awkward thing here is that despite the fact that Tamiyo is great, she isn't pressuring your opponent's life total either. Getting to possibly ultimate her is nice, but you may be dead before then. It's also worth noting that Mystic Forge has things like main deck Soul-Guide Lantern and cards like Leyline of the Void in the sideboard (we saw this card do a ton of work in Game 3 of the finals) to where your graveyard stuff is shut off, but even some of the tempo elements get shut out too because of being unable to delve for Murktide Regent or have a lot of P/T for Barrowgoyf.
It's an interesting matchup, and ultimately I think it's one that comes down to raw player skill and variance. Sometimes both of these decks have their moments where you draw the wrong part of the deck and you just can't find a place to turn the corner. Dimir at least has stuff like Brainstorm and Ponder to help with that, but sometimes you can't convert that into anything. We saw that a lot in the last game of the finals from the Dimir side.
Honestly, it was a pretty cool finals and well worth watching. I definitely recommend going and checking it out on the CardTitan Twitch VODs.
Also, big shoutout in this Top 8 to Jacob Murray making it into this with LOAM POX. That's right. Legitimate deck playing Smallpox in Top 8 of a 944 player tournament. Very sweet.
There's a Chains of Mephistopheles in this deck. Just saying.
Legacy Challenge 32 10/8/2025
The first Challenge event of the week was the Wednesday event. This event had 44 players in it thanks to the MTGO website.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Both Dimir Reanimator and Izzet Tempo were super popular here. Both had some pretty reasonable win rates too. Dimir Tempo did very well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Izzet Tempo | 1st | i_b_TRUE |
| Dimir Tempo | 2nd | AFX |
| Dimir Reanimator | 3rd | Munchlax446 |
| Cradle Control | 4th | hellonewton |
| Azorius Control | 5th | TeaW1thRum |
| Red Stompy | 6th | Marcuzinho |
| Mono Black Reanimator | 7th | Roodslay |
| Oops! All Spells | 8th | silencsong |
Definitely an interesting Top 8. At the end of the event it was Izzet Tempo that won.
Delver and Cori-Steel Cutter aren't typical of this shell, as Delver often ends up being the cut. Even so it seems like they only wanted three Delvers anyways. Pretty solid list overall though.
In Second Place we had Dimir Tempo.
This is a pretty stock looking list overall here. There isn't a ton of deviation from the norm other than some main deck Nihil Spellbomb action.
Legacy Challenge 32 10/10/2025
The second Challenge event of the week was the Friday event. This event had 39 players in it thanks to the MTGO website.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Dimir Reanimator was the most played deck and it had a really strong win rate. Red Stompy and Dimir Tempo both looked good here too.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Dimir Reanimator | 1st | rootpon |
| Dimir Tempo | 2nd | luvadepedreiro |
| Jeskai Control | 3rd | gOOgs |
| Omni-Tell | 4th | Redhotphil87 |
| Selesnya Depths | 5th | CruetusNex |
| Mono Black Reanimator | 6th | SuperCow12653 |
| Oops! All Spells | 7th | HotspringsGames |
| Dimir Reanimator | 8th | fingers1991 |
Very interesting Top 8 here. At the end of the event it was an interesting take on Dimir Reanimator that won.
Oliphaunt being a stand-in for the now banned Troll of Khazad-dum is cute. It also comes with some sideboard cards as well. Meltdown feels pretty good for addressing decks like Mystic Forge Combo for sure.
In Second Place we had Dimir Tempo.
Again, not much of a change from stock lists here. I do like Engineered Explosives here in the sideboard. Seems really good at mopping up certain things.
Legacy Challenge 32 10/11/2025
The third Challenge event of the week was the Saturday event. This event had 40 players in it thanks to the MTGO website.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Dimir Reanimator was the most played here, and it looked pretty great. Eldrazi and Other Aggro decks also looked good here.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Dimir Reanimator | 1st | mortr3d |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 2nd | musasabi |
| Beanstalk Control (Non-Yorion) | 3rd | AlexanderRosdahl |
| Rakdos Aggro | 4th | DominiqueTutor |
| Selesnya Depths | 5th | Sol-e22558 |
| Dimir Reanimator | 6th | Munchlax446 |
| Dimir Reanimator | 7th | Doome |
| Izzet Tempo | 8th | habsburger |
This is a pretty neat Top 8, but good amount of Reanimator. At the end it was Dimir Reanimator that won.
Very stock looking list overall here. Not much frills at all.
In Second Place we had Mystic Forge.
As stated in our EW coverage, this deck is super solid and has been doing quite well. It has a lot of powerful plays and does quite a bit. This looks pretty stock to how these decks go.
Legacy Challenge 32 10/12/2025 - 1
The fourth Challenge event of the week was the first Sunday event. This event had 32 players in it thanks to the MTGO website.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Both Eldrazi and Sneak and Show were the most popular decks, and both did very well. There was a SINGLE Dimir Reanimator player in this event, outside of the cutoff. Given the timeframe of this event, were all the Dimir players at Eternal Weekend? Most likely.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Eldrazi | 1st | Nanovo |
| Paradoxical Outcome | 2nd | Chris_McNasty |
| Eldrazi | 3rd | Boin |
| The EPIC Storm | 4th | MyPotatoes |
| Sneak and Show | 5th | snoopy-magic |
| Dimir Tempo | 6th | EmperorOppai |
| Dimir Reanimator | 7th | Munchlax446 |
| Grixis Control | 8th | _INF_ |
At least that lone Reanimator player made Top 8. At the end of the event it was Eldrazi that won.
This is pretty on par for what we've had out of these decks as of late. Sire of Seven Deaths is certainly one heck of a cool card.
In Second Place we had Paradoxical Outcome.
Plagon, Lord of the Beach is a super awesome card, and being able to PO it seems actually sweet with Glaring Fleshraker, since it makes 0/1 tokens (which then add to the count for Plagon's draws). Such a cool list.
Legacy Challenge 32 10/12/2025 - 2
The final Challenge event of the week was the second Sunday event. This event had 60 players in it thanks to the MTGO website.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Dimir Reanimator was the most popular deck, but its win rate wasn't too great. Eldrazi, Beanstalk, Mystic Forge all looked good. Dimir Tempo didn't do too well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Loam Pox | 1st | Didackith |
| Izzet Tempo | 2nd | WeareVenom |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 3rd | Peppe |
| Eldrazi | 4th | Thebigempty92 |
| Helm/RIP | 5th | SB3K |
| Death and Taxes - BW (Yorion) | 6th | yoshiwata |
| Red Stompy | 7th | TheGrimLavamancer |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 8th | Dafne17 |
Lot of variety here in the Top 8. At the end of the event the winner was Loam Pox.
We saw this list that was like three cards different do well at Eternal Weekend. This list is sweet. Eumidian Hatchery is a really sweet card.
In Second Place we had Izzet Tempo.
Very similar list to the other Izzet Tempo list that did well this past week. Not much to really speak of.
Around the Web
- Bryant Cook is playing some Black Belcher. Check it out here.
- DasSourKraut has a video on Yorion Creative Technique. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
All of our Spice will come from NA Eternal Weekend. LET THE SPICE FLOW!
Y'all like Furnace Hellkite?
Omni-Tell but also Doomsday?!
YAWGMOTH.
We out here playing Leylines. What a brave soul.
THIS. IS. MINOTAURS!
Rogues be Roguing.
Wrapping Up
That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Legacy!
As always you can reach me at all my associated links via my Link Tree! In addition I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the MTGLegacy Discord Server.
Until next time!
