A New Beginning for Eternal

While System Gateway has brought a breath of fresh air to Standard and built the foundation for the Startup format, we want to offer the combo-loving, power-thirsty players something new and exciting! 

Our previous attempt at moderating the Eternal format had the goal of using as light a touch as possible and tried to remove only a few of the highest-powered cards. But over time it became clear that with this approach there would always be one deck able to use a combination of extremely powerful cards the best. This leads to a narrow metagame and a less interesting format with less room for experimentation and expression.

Simply removing these cards runs contrary to the spirit of the format. In the future, we want to try something fundamentally new and let Eternal become a format where every single card ever printed is playable, but at the same time a variety of viable archetypes exist. Instead of removing cards from the card pool, we will implement a points system. Each deck can spend a total of 5 points and playsets of cards on the list cost either 1 or 2 points. Before I go more into detail on how testing this new format will be done, here’s our initial draft, created in collaboration with 2019 World Champion Pinsel. Keep in mind, though, that this could change significantly during testing.

Since the current NISEI playtesters for upcoming sets and for Standard Ban Lists have not been recruited for other formats and there is no need for secrecy, we are opening up the testing process to the entire community. Follow this link to join our Discord server, where initial testing will take place. After this initial stage, there will be a series of public tournaments open to everyone. These will be used to further refine the list until it is ready to go into effect for official tournaments.

With your help, we’re looking forward to seeing Eternal become an exciting, high-powered, but diverse format. Stay tuned for the tournament announcements!