Disclaimer: I have no way of knowing if this is already an idea someone else came up with. If so, my bad, but hey, at least that shows maybe there’s an audience of people as weird as I am about this game.
What is the most eternal format? I’m sure for most people who actually know what a Magic format even is, the answer is probably Vintage, Magic’s first* format. The asterisk is because when Magic started, Vintage wasn’t called Vintage; it was called Magic. And also to call it the first format ignores a few of the strange ways this crazy game we love came to be. A lot of people didn’t stick to 4-ofs building their decks. In kitchen table, which is still one of if not the biggest Magic format, nothing was off the table.
And yet, eternal isn’t also about looking backwards. For something to be eternal, it has to stand the test of time. Some of Magic’s most iconic spells: Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Wheel of Fortune - all fail this test because the vast majority of Magic players won’t ever see one in person in their life. Homages yes, videos, but not a physical piece of cardboard they can call their own outside of proxying.
Several formats try to capture the eternal. We’ve mentioned Vintage, but Legacy opts to be a more accessible version of this origin point of Magic, and in recent years Premodern seeks to capture a time before the more recent powercreep that’s only natural after thirty something years of printing cards. Pauper seeks to strike the difference, with vintage level power but common level rarity. In their own ways, Modern and Pioneer seek to time capsule Magic too, making eternal versions and mashups of Standard decks of the past. Yet as more powerful cards keep emerging, those formats drawing from the new pool tend to push out the old. Some players seek to hold closer to that ancient Magic with Old School 93/94, a format that places a hard cap on its intake from the earliest years of the game, cards with nostalgia for those of their era, but less so for players who never had the chance to sling them. And again, comes the issue of unproxied affordability.
This is not a critique of any of these formats. In fact, what I present to you today is a love letter to all of them, as someone who has played every format named here. And, in that way many of us naively fantasise about from time to time, this is my attempt to add a new piece to that canon: this part format, part museum, and part kitchen table with the loosest restriction. It is a format designed to be as accessible as one can be, and in all likelihood it is possible to make a deck with what your LGS has on hand.
Welcome to Eternalized.
I mentioned several formats in this post. To recap them, here are the main non-Arena 60-card formats, with one omission for a reason I will explain later:
Pioneer
Modern
Legacy
Vintage
Pauper
Old School 93/94
Premodern
This new format has one restriction: for a card to be legal in Eternalized, it needs to be currently legal in all of these paper eternal formats. Now, the Arena formats are a little tricky: the difference between omitting them and not is three cards, which if people like this idea for a format I would beg Wizards to put into an Arena set to make them legal, and truly be every eternal format. (For those interested, the cards are Pyrotechnics, Spell Blast, and Wall of Fire.) That makes for a format with an astronomical, 24 legal cards. Five of those are basic lands.
A note on Penny Dreadful: I adore Penny, and in a way it seeks a similar goal to Eternalized, but the rotation aspect is antithetical to the ‘eternal’ theme of this format, whereby the only way for a card to leave is for it to earn a ban in one of the eternal formats. As Penny is a rotating format even with its entire history of the game spanning card pool, I hope that distinction feels appropriate.
There is one other key aspect to Eternalized, which harkens back to the earliest days of Magic: the four-of restriction does not apply. 40 Savannah Lions and 20 Plains? Go for it. 60 Ornithoptors? I love you. 40 Spell Blasts and 20 Islands? Who hurt you?
With a card pool this small, it seems doubtful if the format actually sees some play that it will go long without being solved. If we are lucky, it will solve into two or three different archetypes, with maybe some experimentation around their edges. But while this pool of cards is small, the one thing that isn’t eternal, is how small it will remain. There are currently 354 non-Reserved Old School 93/94 cards that are already Pauper legal, which for all we know WotC will print into Standard (and thus make Pioneer legal and so forth). There are a whopping 408 other possible contenders on top of that if a reprint made a card Pauper legal. Almost none of them have any hope of a Standard reprint, but the knowledge that any day now, a 25th card might enter the pool and shake everything up feels evocative of the new kid turning up with a card no one until then had opened before, changing the game all over again.
This is what you might call a headless format: the whitelist for cards is set entirely by the banlists and reprints of other formats. Every possible card that could end up in Eternalized is known, but there is almost no way of knowing which ones will. So in effect, if you stumble onto this website two, ten, or twenty years after it went live, the format is maintained, remains eternal, and entirely at the whims of the future. Maybe Giant Growth gets banned in Pauper for, some reason. Maybe a new card breaks Feldon’s Cane and Legacy has to make the most absurd ban of all time after Standard banning Attune with Aether. Is it flawed? Incredibly so. Note the almost complete lack of removal outside Pyrotechnics, except weirdly for Artifacts (and Enchantments, of which there are currently zero in the entire format.) But in a way, that adds to the charm. Who knows how it will change in the future. We might even get Oubliette.
I look forward to seeing what you all come up with, and if you somehow make Oops all Ornithoptors viable I will be thrilled.
Disenchant - Feldon’s Cane - Fire Elemental - Fog
Forest - Giant Growth - Giant Spider - Immolation
Island - Llanowar Elves - Mountain - Ornithopter
Plains - Pyrotechnics - Raise Dead - Savannah Lions
Sengir Vampire - Serra Angel - Shatter - Spell Blast
Swamp - Tormod’s Crypt - Unsummon - Wall of Fire
(Above accurate as of October 15th, 2026)
