Wizards of the Coast announced the introduction of the Legacy format on September 1st, 2004. More recently, Wizards has announced several major Legacy tournaments – the World Championships took place at Gen Con 2005, and two Grand Prix events feeding into Pro Tour: Hawaii will use Legacy instead of Extended as the tournament format. Weekly Legacy tournaments have begun to gain in popularity across the world, and interest in the format is rising daily. With all the talk of Legacy, Legacy, Legacy, many people are left with one simple question:
What, exactly, is Legacy?
A Semi-Brief History of Constructed Magic
Magic debuted in 1993, and people quickly began to organize tournaments. House rules were established in each location, and confusion quickly set in as the rules in one store might be completely different than from a store one town over. Wizards of the Coast formed what would become the DCI (Duelists Convocation International) which became the governing body of Magic rules. The DCI is responsible for, among other duties, maintaining the rules for Magic, maintaining tournament play, handing player disciplinary action, and calculating player ratings.
Tournament Magic can be divided into two formats: Constructed and Limited. Constructed events are those in which you bring your own cards from home – Limited events use cards from sealed booster packs or tournament decks which are supplied on site. Originally there was only Constructed, in the form of “everything goes” – you could play four of any card in Magic. Because certain early cards were too powerful in multiples, they were quickly restricted – meaning instead of the normal four-per-deck, players could only use one copy of that card. A couple of cards were so powerful that they became banned outright – such as Channel and Mind Twist.
So we’ve got a Constructed format, but there are a constant influx of new cards being added into Magic every few months, and players are having a hard time keeping up with the sets. To make things worse, Wizards had seriously dialed down the power levels of the top cards in sets circa 1995 – necessary because many of the cards from the initial sets were too powerful for their costs. This created a situation where certain cards – such as Black Lotus and Ancestral Recall – would be perpetually played. This would eventually cause stagnation and would stunt sales – why buy an Ice Age pack for Brainstorm, for instance, when you could play Ancestral Recall? To solve both of these problems at once, a new format was born: Type II. Type II allowed only a few of the more recently printed sets, and disallowed many of the initial releases. On top of this, Type II would continue to rotate over time, whereas the old format (now known as Type I) would accumulate sets without any rollover.
Wizards began developing sets on a 3-a-year cycle starting with Mirage. This facilitated a smooth transition for Type II – the newest base set (xth edition) plus the last two blocks worth of cards would be allowed in the format. Once a new block was introduced, the entire last block would no longer be playable in the format. The introduction of the block format also gave birth to a third Constructed format, the aptly named Block Constructed format. Only cards from that one particular block could be played (this began with Ice Age/Alliances, though Mirage/Visions/Weatherlight is the first true full block). You had three formats that existed for quite some time:
Type I (anything goes, except for the banned and restricted list)
Type II (The latest two blocks plus the newest base set, except for the B&R list)
Block Constructed (Only cards from one block’s worth of sets, except for the B&R list)
Moving ahead a bit, blocks began rotating out of Type II and there was a dead zone between Type I and Type II where several sets worth of cards were essentially lost to tournament play. Wizards created a fourth format, called Extended. Extended initially was all sets from Revised forward, with rotations happening whenever Wizards felt like rotating the environment. Wizards also made a new policy for banning and resticting cards – only Type I would maintain a restricted list, while every other format would only have a banned list – either a card was four of or none of, with no in betweens.
Okay, so now we’ve got Extended, Type II, Type I, and Block Constructed. Here’s where Legacy comes in – remember how Type I had a restricted list? Many of the cards on the restricted list were overly powerful, and tended to make games a bit too swingy. An offshoot format of Type I was invented, and was named Type 1.5. The rules of 1.5 were quite simple – any card on the Type I restricted list was banned in 1.5. Aside from the restricted cards are banned clause, the two formats were identical.
Unfortunately, Type 1.5 became the unloved stepchild of Type I. Cards were restricted in Type I (also known as Vintage) with virtually no regard to how their restriction would affect the banned list in Type 1.5, which led to a large banned list with many spurious members. For the stalwart few who supported Type 1.5, this was an agony they were forced to endure. Many tried to petition Wizards to separate the Type I and Type 1.5 restricted/banned lists, but to no avail – there simply wasn’t enough support for the format to warrant that sort of attention.
This changed with the advent of Magic Online. This electronic version of Magic: The Gathering began with the Invasion edition. Wizards decided that they wanted to eventually have the most popular Constructed formats (Standard and Extended) synch up in both the paper and electronic versions of their game. The rotations for Extended were changed from “whenever we feel like it” to “three blocks rotating out every three years.” This made Extended a sort of glacial version of Standard (formerly known as Type II), but would allow players to use cards that were otherwise out of rotation in Standard for a much longer period of time.
For a long time, Extended began with the Tempest block and moved forward from there. The first three-year/three-block rotation was set for the fall of 2005, at the release of the Ravnica block. This created a dilemma – Wizards would have four supported Constructed formats: Vintage, Extended, Standard, and Block Constructed. There would be a huge gap in playable sets between the Ravnica 2005 Extended and Vintage – a gap of over two dozen sets worth of cards! By comparison, the new Extended would fewer allowable sets than out-of-rotation sets. This left a huge gap to be filled, and the old 1.5 format wasn’t up for the task.
Enter Legacy
In September of 2004, the DCI completely gutted the old 1.5 format. This was done in a number of ways:
They separated the Vintage and 1.5 restricted/banned lists. Legacy was given its own unique banned list, one that was not dependant on any other format.
Several previously unbanned cards were banned, as they were unbalancing to the new format.
The name was changed – at the time the format had no official name, but after a quick poll of players on MagicTheGathering.com, the format was coined “Legacy”.
Legacy can best be described as being very similar to the original, ages old Extended format, except with every set usable instead of just sets from Revised forward. This allows for Alpha/Beta/Unlimited, Arabian Nights, Antiquities and Legends to be played in the format, along with Promo cards (Arena, Sewers of Esthark) and Starter-level cards (Portal I, Portal II, Portal III, and Starter 1999 – these are currently not legal but will become legal on October 20th of 2005, which will be in time for the two Grand Prix which use the Legacy format). The format has its own banned list. It is currently (as of August 2005) as follows (this list courtesy of Wizards of the Coast):
Ancestral Recall
Balance
Bazaar of Baghdad
Black Lotus
Black Vise
Bronze Tablet
Channel
Chaos Orb
Contract from Below
Darkpact
Demonic Attorney
Demonic Consultation
Demonic Tutor
Dream Halls
Earthcraft
Entomb
Falling Star
Fastbond
Frantic Search
Goblin Recruiter
Grim Monolith
Gush
Hermit Druid
Illusionary Mask
Jeweled Bird
Land Tax
Library of Alexandria
Mana Crypt
Mana Drain
Mana Vault
Memory Jar
Metalworker
Mind Over Matter
Mind Twist
Mind’s Desire
Mishra’s Workshop
Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Mox Pearl
Mox Ruby
Mox Sapphire
Necropotence
Oath of Druids
Rebirth
Replenish
Skullclamp
Sol Ring
Strip Mine
Tempest Efreet
Time Spiral
Time Walk
Timetwister
Timmerian Fiends
Tinker
Tolarian Academy
Vampiric Tutor
Wheel of Fortune
Windfall
Worldgorger Dragon
Yawgmoth’s Bargain
Yawgmoth’s Will
That’s the entirety of the Legacy format! Except for the cards listed above on the banned list, anything goes. You can play the original ten dual lands (Badlands, Bayou, Plateau, Savannah, Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author], Taiga, Tropical Island, Tundra, Underground River, Volcanic Island), Lightning Bolt, Moat, Kobolds, Tradewind Rider, Fire / Ice, Arcbound Ravager, Eternal Witness – pretty much any card in Magic you can get your hands on. Many players who played pre-2005 rotation Extended will be able to easily transport their favorite decks to Legacy, with a few tweaks. This is not to say that there are no decks unique to the format – there are many, many possibilities opened up in Legacy for creative and adventurous deckbuilders that aren’t available in any other format. Unlike in Vintage – where a person is pretty much going to play the same core of cards for a large percentage of the viable decks in the field – the Legacy player will see and play with a much wider variety of deck types.
Legacy is the most wide open, fertile format in all of Magic at the moment. It beckons to players from multiple arenas – those who like playing with their older cards, those who are fans of Vintage and want to test their skills in an environment without the most overpowered of cards, those who have cards they can no longer play in Extended or Standard and wish to keep playing with those cards, those who enjoy the challenge of building new decks in a field where innovation is rewarded. Legacy is the format where anything is possible, and hundreds of players will descend on Philadelphia on November 12th and Lille, France on December 17th, 2005 to try their hands at Magic’s exciting newest format!