Hello, folks! The reserved list has been big on people’s mind for a few weeks due to the upcoming Eternal Masters set that’s coming this week. There are a lot of powerful cards on the reserved list that are required for a lot of Vintage and Legacy play, and due the impossibility of them being reprinted, a lot of things have been happening.

And this obviously hurts a lot of casual players who look to reserved cards like Angus Mackenzie, Eureka, and even fun-but-junky stuff like All Hallow's Eve, Goblin Wizard, or Preacher. That’s what happens.

But as many folks have pointed out, there is a break on too many people joining the Legacy-and-Vintage bandwagon. There are only so many of these cards going around. So it doesn’t matter how many people might want to try Legacy or Vintage—there’re only so many copies of the critical stuff in print.

Let’s take dual lands for example. Suppose the average tournament Legacy deck requires four duals. Now let’s say, for total imagination, that three are fifty thousand sets of four of each dual land out there. Some of those are in Commander decks, some are in deck stock that no one touches, some are in boxes people opened back in ’93 and shoved away in some attic, long since forgotten about, and some have been destroyed and damaged. But let’s say that, today, we have fifty thousand sets of any given dual land. That obviously puts a limit on the number of Underground Seas out there. Since many of those sets are already owned by folks who are actively playing in Legacy or Vintage, and most aren’t on the market, there is a limit to the number of players that can come into the format and grab a deck, based on these cards.

And dual lands are the obvious example, but there are others out there, too. Lion's Eye Diamond is played in a ton of decks and was reserved—plus, there’s nothing else out there to replace it. You have to run four, and you have to play the LED; nothing else can do what it does. It’s similar with a card like Gaea's Cradle—that card is also heavily coveted by the casual crowd. So there are a ton of Cradles in Commander decks and Elf decks and whatnot. The reserved list breaks the number of LEDs out there or Cradles out there, and that creates a scarcity for Legacy that doesn’t exist for Modern. It doesn’t matter how many people pick up Modern, as there will always be new printings that can be made in Modern Masters or Commander decks or Conspiracy or the newest Standard set.

So the reserved list is always going to be a hard cap on the number of players for Vintage and Legacy. Now there are some ways to finagle it.

How?

We can adhere to the rules of the list itself.

Take The Abyss as a great example. It’s a 4-mana, clunkily-worded enchant world. Clean it up, remove the “world” part of the enchantment, and you know what? (If testing showed the 4-mana iteration was overly dominant, you could bump it up to 5 mana as well.) Now print it in the next Conspiracy or Commander product that has cards that aren’t legal in Modern and Standard. And there you are, you have printed a new The Abyss variant. You can do the same with a lot of powerful cards on the reserved list.

If Wizards of the Coast committed to printing ten to fifteen of these cards annually that were very close to the original cards, I think we’d remove the fake brake on the formats and help them grow. You could have snow versions of dual lands or a variant of the Cradle that only tapped for 1 green mana for each creature type you control (so when it arrived on the battlefield, choose a creature type, and you tap it to add a green mana to your pool for each creature of that type you control). Swap Nether Void from a world enchantment to a legendary one. Print Morphling but as an Illusion rather than a Shapeshifter. Print a Juzam Djinn that’s a Demon instead of a Djinn. (This is obviously just for conversation—Wizards can figure out what would make the most sense.)

But until that happens, I think the folks arguing that the reserved list is a hard and total cap on Legacy and Vintage have a very compelling point.

Some folks have created a Legacy variant called Eternal, which has basically all of the rules of Legacy but with every reserved card banned from the format. That way, there’s no cap.

It certainly seems Eternal is an interesting map to explore. And casual players are not required to invest heavily into reserved-list cards that might have artificially swollen in price or that are required in the various formats to compete. It seems to be a solid place for casual players to find themselves. A lot of players like playing with older cards, and you can play with pre-Modern stuff all right; in addition, you aren’t required to run duals or other pricey cards.

Now, obviously, there are some tweaks I expect a lot of casual groups to make. Cheap, casual-only reserved-list cards might be allowed, such as Eladamri, Lord of Leaves in an Elf deck. But the Eternal format certainly seems to be a good place to start for a lot of playgroups.

So let’s make a few decks!

Obviously, making decks that are Eternal-legal is only going to matter if you want or need cards from the reserved list. An Eldrazi deck that's Legacy-legal is probably going to look very similar to one that's Eternal-legal. Many simple little casual builds, such as General Tazri Allies or a discard deck around Megrim and Liliana's Caress aren't likely to run up against any many reserved cards anyway. So that’s not much of a restriction.

On the other hand, take an artifact-heavy deck. An artifact tutor like Tinker is banned in Legacy, and another that would be legal, Transmute Artifact, is on the reserved list, so it’s gone, too. So if you are looking to cheat out a big artifact much like green cheats out big creatures, you need to head elsewhere.

So I want to look at some deck concepts that make sense in Eternal, rather than just Legacy, and thus are interested in dipping into that bowl of beeswax.

Pox ? Eternal | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (2)
• 2 Nether Spirit

• Planeswalkers (4)
• 4 Liliana of the Veil

• Spells (30)
• 4 Dark Ritual
• 2 Duress
• 2 Innocent Blood
• 2 Innocent Blood
• 2 Inquisition of Kozilek
• 2 Thoughtseize
• 3 Pox
• 3 Smallpox
• 4 Hymn to Tourach
• 4 Sinkhole
• 2 Bloodchief Ascension

• Lands (24)
• 14 Swamp
• 4 Mishra's Factory
• 4 Wasteland
• 2 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

Buy This Deck

I adore Pox, and I have run it regularly. Cards I pulled from my more controlling builds include Cursed Scroll, Nether Void, and Helm of Obedience. I've also run variants with four Scrublands and Vindicates before as well—and maybe a fetch land or two to accommodate that. But that's about all I've done with it. Without the Scrublands available, I decided against going with the Godless Shrine. Life-loss isn't something Pox wants to embrace too often. But you could swap out the Sinkholes for Vindicates and add in the Shrines if you wanted. But the key cards in Pox are fine. Some sideboards cards (Dystopia, Gustha's Scepter) are also out of bounds as well.

What else fancies my interest?

While there are numerous decks that simply could not be made (like Aluren deck since Aluren is reserved and thus banned), there are some that I like to see if we can dip into something else outside of their shell. I’m thinking of the classic Rec/Sur deck that was built around Recurring Nightmare and Survival of the Fittest; the first is just reserved, and the second banned in Legacy and reserved, so it should be too hard to build a strong Red/Sur deck, right? (And cards like Oath of Ghouls are reserved as well.)

Not So Rec/Sur ? Eternal | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (29)
• 1 Craterhoof Behemoth
• 1 Loaming Shaman
• 2 Acidic Slime
• 2 Nekrataal
• 2 Reclamation Sage
• 2 Shriekmaw
• 2 Woodfall Primus
• 3 Eternal Witness
• 4 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Fauna Shaman
• 4 Satyr Wayfinder
• 2 Liliana, Heretical Healer

• Spells (7)
• 3 Living Death
• 4 Dread Return

• Lands (24)
• 8 Forest
• 8 Swamp
• 4 Llanowar Wastes
• 4 Overgrown Tomb

Buy This Deck

Who says you can’t have a Rec/Sur-esque deck that is really feeling a bit like the old deck. You have plenty of creatures with a variety of different abilities all tacked on, and you can bring them into play or back with cards like Dread Return or Living Death—as well as Eternal Witness rocking the same context.

This deck uses cards both old and new to splice together a quick lil’ shell for finding the right card, playing the right creature, and reanimating a whole boatload of creatures while also doing some prep work for you. It’s a fun deck!

Let’s do one more quick little Eternal build, just to demonstrate the format for you. Then we’ll call it an article.

Enchantments A-Go-Go ? Eternal | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (8)
• 2 Ajani's Chosen
• 2 Auramancer
• 4 Mesa Enchantress

• Spells (28)
• 2 Fact or Fiction
• 4 Dismiss
• 2 Idyllic Tutor
• 2 Enchanted Evening
• 2 Ghostly Prison
• 2 Oath of Scholars
• 2 Propaganda
• 2 Sigil of the Empty Throne
• 2 Sphere of Safety
• 4 Attunement
• 4 Starfield of Nyx

• Lands (24)
• 8 Island
• 8 Plains
• 4 Hallowed Fountain
• 4 Prairie Stream

Buy This Deck

Many of the major components of the major enchantment deck of the day are all reserved and thus disallowed from Eternal: Humility, Opalescence, Replenish, Academy Rector, and such. You can have your normal lists of stuff with cards that will draw cards and/or put more in the graveyard (Fact or Fiction, Attunement, Oath of Scholars) twinned with a lot of enchantment-reanimation and creature-making for wins—or turning all of your enchantments into beaters. Either way, you set up a nice and solid win for everyone else.

So what did you think? Did any of these decks tease your fancy? Are you going to be hitting any up Eternal stuff for future deck-building questions? Check out the Reddit thread for more info.

And tune in tomorrow when I count down ten cards that I would most want to pull off the reserved list!