In January of last year, Worldgorger Dragon was unbanned in Legacy. Initially, there was much fanfare about how this powerful reanimation target might shake up the format, but then… nothing. No one ever found a shell capable of actually killing opponents more efficiently, consistently, or resiliently than traditional reanimator or Show and Tell strategies. This week, LMental is looking to change that:

Dragon Reanimator ? Legacy | LMental

• Creatures (7)
• 1 Oona, Queen of the Fae
• 2 Worldgorger Dragon
• 4 Snapcaster Mage

• Spells (36)
• 3 Intuition
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Entomb
• 4 Force of Will
• 3 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Ponder
• 2 Necromancy
• 4 Animate Dead
• 4 Lotus Petal

• Lands (17)
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 2 Bloodstained Mire
• 2 Flooded Strand
• 2 Nephalia Drownyard
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 4 Underground Sea

Buy This Deck

For those who are unfamiliar with the Worldgorger Dragon combo, here’s how it works. If you cast a reanimation enchantment like Animate Dead targeting Worldgorger Dragon, the dragon enters play and its ability triggers. The trigger exiles all of your permanents, including Animate Dead, which kills your Dragon and triggers its death ability. Then all your permanents return, including untapped lands and Animate Dead. You rebuy your Worldgorger Dragon, float some mana in response to its trigger, and repeat until you have infinite mana. You have to be careful though, as unless you have a way to break the Worldgorger Dragon loop or win the game outright, this interaction will end the game in a draw.

In Vintage, winning is trivial once you’ve generated infinite mana, as Bazaar of Baghdad lets you loot through your deck until you find Oona, Queen of the Fae to mill your opponent out. It turns out finding a mana sink which fits into the shell but also contributes to winning the game is more difficult. LMental has introduced two interesting pieces of technology into this list, making that step much easier.

The first is Nephalia Drownyard. If you can generate infinite mana, this land will either let you mill your opponent out or mill yourself until you find Oona. The problem with going all in on this as a win condition is two-fold. The first issue is it’s a colorless land, which will disrupt your ability to cantrip into the combo or protect it on critical turns. The second problem, you really don’t want your win condition be vulnerable to Wasteland.

The second key piece of technology is Snapcaster Mage. This card completely changes how the deck functions. Now, you have a powerful card advantage engine which provides redundancy to your cantrips and disruption, as well as providing a backup plan of beating down. Furthermore, Snapcaster Mage gives you a win condition when you go for the Dragon combo.

Because you can flash in Snapcaster Mage, you can cast him mid combo to flashback whatever you used to get Worldgorger Dragon into the graveyard. This also makes Intuition plus a Reanimate effect into a two-card combo. The first Intuition finds Snapcaster Mage and double Worldgorger Dragon. This ensures a Worldgorger Dragon gets into the graveyard so you can combo off and generate infinite mana. Once you’ve done that, the Animate Dead can target Snapcaster Mage to let you flashback Intuition for Oona and two Reanimate effects.

All told, this is an exciting new take on Reanimator in Legacy. The compactness and redundancy of the combo allows for more space to be dedicated to cantrips and disruption, which gives this deck the potential to be more resilient and consistent than more traditional builds. Vulnerability to removal spells is something to consider, but there is certainly a lot of power in this shell.