This Week in Legacy: Reanimator Lives On

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 going to be focusing primarily on the Banned & Restricted Announcement from 6/30/2025. While there were no changes it's important to discuss what Wizards had to say about Legacy in general here. On that note, I'm not going to be covering the Challenge events from this past weekend because I wanted to get this article out the door so I could get it published. We will be covering a paper event from over the weekend in the form of Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 22.

We will be back to covering Challenge results next week, but this past weekend's data has been included in the data we'll be discussing today.

Banned & Restricted Announcement 6/30/2025 - No Changes

We had the Banned & Restricted Announcement on June 30 this past week and with that there were no changes to the Legacy format. You can find the full article here, but we're going to dissect the statement about Legacy a little and talk about what this means for the format at large.

Right off the bat, I feel like something is off in some of these statements. Dimir Reanimator did dip in the initial month after the last B&R as players weren't really sure about its future, before people began to figure out that the deck was still just absolutely cracked. In that period of time we've seen the deck jump right back up to the most played deck in the format (which is called out appropriately in the B&R) but its win rate has not seemed lower when factoring in only the Challenges and Qualifiers. If anything, it's seemed worse. Now I will grant that Wizards has access to a lot more data than we do, and that our data is crowdsourced in the Legacy Data Collection Project, and that it is possible that overall Dimir Reanimator's win rate isn't that great.

Based on what we know in the crowdsourced Challenge data, Dimir Reanimator's non-mirror win rate is 57%. This seems like a rather high win rate for a deck that has had multiple bannings to knock it down a peg and doesn't really evoke a "mixed to positive" result as mentioned in the statement. Furthermore, I don't fully believe that it is difficult to disentangle the fact that Dimir Reanimator is just a good deck versus being a deck full of cards that players like to play with. To me, that statement seems somewhat tonedeaf to the fact that it wasn't until a perfect storm of cards from Grief/Troll, Bowmasters, Frog, Tamiyo, even Barrowgoyf all existing that pushed Reanimator into this weird space of Tempo/Graveyard Combo where the deck can easily flip back and forth between the two when prior to this the deck was nothing but a full on Graveyard Combo deck. It is fair to say though that it's possible that this shell could have existed all along and players just never put two and two together of registering Entomb and Daze together, but who knows if that was the case or not.

I did recently take a moment to work on updating some of the H2H data from the past month of just June (lot of events in June) just to see what decks Dimir Reanimator seemed to excel against and it performed poorly against. This data only looks at the decks that showed up in that period of time. Looking specifically at just the decks where it had between 60% and 100% (because 100% represents scenarios where the sample size could be low enough to be an outlier), I found the following:

Dimir Reanimator performs quite well against a pretty large swath of the current format, including decks that are fairly popular like Oops! All Spells, Dimir Tempo, and even Jeskai Control. To contrast, I looked to see what decks Dimir Reanimator seemed to struggle against, looking for things specifically below 40%. Here is what I found:

For me it seems somewhat crazy that some of the possible worst matchups for Dimir Reanimator is such a small number of decks when the deck seems polarized against a whole bunch of other decks. What worries me about this lack of change to this shell is that we will continue to see this deck dominate to a point where players are ultimately unhappy and stop playing the format and that it might affect Eternal Weekend attendance, since the next BnR is on November 24,2025 which is before NA Eternal Weekend (but VERY close to EU Eternal Weekend and Asia Eternal Weekend right before), and that because of the closeness there it might end up in no changes there as well because of the proximity to those larger events.

I am going to keep updating the H2H data as I move forward week to week and see if we can keep pushing a better understanding of what decks each of the top decks is good and bad against. I think this is going to be a much more productive use of my time than griping about this BnR. Should they have hit something from Dimir Reanimator? I personally think the data did show the deck was a problem, and that something should have been addressed.

Now, this wasn't the only statement on Legacy. They did discuss Oops! All Spells.

One major thing they call out here is people's frustration with Oops as a deck that exists in the game, and that it does do a lot of things that feels like it is "abusing" the rules and game engine that Magic functions on. However, they do also call out that some people find that challenge interesting and that being able to do things that "shouldn't" be allowed can be fun and showcases how deep the rules of the game are. The opinions on this deck are pretty heavily polarized, and they do state that the only reason this deck exists is because of a few one-of-a-kind cards (namely Balustrade Spy and Undercity Informer) and that they could run the risk of killing the deck completely if they attempted to address the deck. That being said, they do note that because of the strong negative reactions that some players have against this deck, the bar to address it is much lower than some other decks, but they don't fully explain what that bar is. They do mention that the deck currently is showing up at a lower range than what it previously was and that it has a win rate that is within permissable ranges (again without being fully transparent on what win rate is beyond permissible).

The data we do have on this deck says that since March it's the third most played deck but it's win rate is now at around 50.2% non-mirror. In the H2H data we found that the deck is pretty poor versus Dimir Reanimator (36.14% versus Dimir Reanimator) and that does explain quite a bit why Dimir is so popular in general. While Oops does have a fair win rate versus a number of other decks, it has just as many matchups where the win rate is pretty atrocious and there's very little middle ground. The deck being 22.22% versus Lands says a lot about how this deck is operating in the current sphere of Legacy. For me, I do think the data didn't warrant a change to this shell, and any changes to that shell are pretty tenuous given what you may need to ban to correct it and what possibly might kill it if you did do that. I think if the deck does increase back to a space where its overpowering the format it should be addressed, but I don't think we are at that space right now.

Now, is it fair to say that because Oops has such a poor matchup vs Dimir Reanimator that banning something out of Dimir would improve Oops' position in the format? Maybe, but maybe not. We don't know fully well what other things Dimir Reanimator is suppressing that it could very well be something else that is able to manage Oops. Players being able to play appropriate hate like Grafdigger's Cage and other things might help as well. I do agree that we should only be touching things that are problems and not trying to anticipate problems because that thing might not be a problem. People really assumed Nadu was going to be the huge thing to do once Psychic Frog was gone... and it just wasn't. I think it's fine to keep light touches on this format because it helps things move along more fluidly, even if sometimes the light touch didn't move the needle so much (as what happened with Frog and Troll bans).

At the end of the day, the only thing that worries me here is that we will only have two Standard sets before Eternal Weeekend, and whether either of those (Edge of Eternities and Spider-Man) can really impact the format it will be curious to see. If they don't, we may end up in a position where we are stuck with a very similar Metagame through NA Eternal Weekend, and the proximity of the next BnR to the other two Eternal Weekend events gives me pause that they would do anything before those events anyways. We might be stuck with a lot of things throughout this next year, and that's where things start feeling problematic and where event attendance might be impacted, and that is the main thing that worries me in general.

Regardless, I'm going to use my time to more productively keep up on the data we have available, and will continue to share that data as we move into the future of Legacy this year. I do hope that both EoE and Spider-Man have some possible things for Legacy. I do always prefer to organically evolve formats through new cards and I do think the new Tezzeret could be very interesting for the format, so especially Edge of Eternities could be fun.

What are your thoughts on the BnR? Please share in the comments, but also I ask that you be respectful!

Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 22

This past weekend in Texas was another Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy event held at Dragon's Lair Comic and Fantasy in Houston. This particular event had 37 players overall in it, which is pretty reasonable turnout. Again, major thanks to the BCDL team for providing us all the information on these events. Reminder that they are still having a whole weekend in August here in Columbus, OH (8/2 - 8/3) so be sure to go sign up!

You can find all of the decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

BCDL Events do always have interesting metagames. Pretty much nobody showed up to this event with Dimir Reanimator, despite its position in the format. Of the decks above the cutoff here, Dimir Tempo, Red Stompy, and Beans all did exceedingly well. Mystic Forge, Blue Painter, and Grixis Control all did pretty poorly.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Fair bit of Tempo, Combo, and Stompy decks here. At the end of the event it was Robert Wilson (of BCDL) who won on Dimir Tempo.

Fairly straightforward looking Dimir Tempo build here. The real powerhouse in this deck is Kaito, Bane of Nightmares. It's just a really strong Planeswalker that is also really difficult to interact with, thus why we're seeing cheap removal like Bitter Triumph showing up in order to deal with that and so much more. Triumph deals with Murktide, Kaito, and a number of other cards that Fatal Push does not.

In Second Place we had The EPIC Storm.

Very solid TES list. Gamble is a cool inclusion here lets you utilize Echo of Eons to great effect. Really fun looking deck.

Around the Web

• BoshNRoll has an Oops League. Check it out here.
• StrassDaddy has 4C Loam with Rydia. Check it out here.
• BeExcellent has BACK TO BACK trophies with Mono Blue Control. Check it out here. This deck only cost $600!
• Douges has a video on Legacy Lands. Check it out here.

The Spice Corner

Now that Leagues are posted throughout the week, let's find some Spice!

Rydia, Summoner of Mist!

MONO BLUE CONTROL.

HOGAAK.

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!