One of the best things about Magic: The Gathering’s remarkable longevity is getting to see strategies evolve over time. In older formats especially, decks that have been played for decades are still viable, spurred on by additions in modern sets. The continued success of lists like Delver, Sneak and Show, and Workshops in Legacy/Vintage are just a few great examples. This week, we saw another, as Legacy Smallpox brought on board a new MTG card from Edge of Eternities.
More specifically, it gained a card from the Edge of Eternities Commander precons. It’s easy to forget, what with all the Commander marketing, but these cards are legal in Legacy and Vintage too. This one fits Smallpox like a glove, pushing its twisted brand of attrition to new, friendship-crushing heights. It may not be enough to get Smallpox out of its current rough spot in Legacy, but it’ll certainly give it a good chance.
Legacy Smallpox Gets A Great New MTG Land
The big new MTG addition to Legacy Smallpox from Edge of Eternities is Eumidian Hatchery. This is an untapped black source that builds up counters over time, eventually dispensing an equal number of 1/1 Fliers when it hits the graveyard. Solnox took a Smallpox list to a 5-0 finish in yesterday’s MTGO Legacy League, running a full playset of the card. Several other Smallpox players, like Reeplcheep and Didackith, have had similar success with the card recently. This should give you some idea of just how synergistic it is in the deck.
For the uninitiated, Smallpox is a kind of extreme Control deck, along the lines of Lantern Control in a sense. The aim is to totally lock down your opponent’s options, so you can win via one inevitable threat or another. The titular Smallpox is your best tool for doing this, since it gets rid of your opponent’s lands, leaving them without resources. It hits your lands too, but your deck is packed with ways to balance this out.
The main way Smallpox handles this is through land recursion. Between Life from the Loam, Witherbloom Command, and Malevolent Rumble, you have no shortage of ways to get your own lands back post-Pox. Once you do, you can easily pull ahead. Hatchery adds another arrow to your quiver in this regard, as a land that actually wants to go to the graveyard. Sacrificing it to Smallpox will feel great, even with just one or two counters built up. The Insects you get from it make great fodder for future Smallpox plays, too, since it also asks you to sacrifice a creature.
No Small Synergy
Hatchery is great just as part of Smallpox’s day-to-day game plan, and it also works fantastically with the recursion suite above. It adds an extra layer of grindy value to proceedings, which pairs perfectly with the strategy as a whole. It also adds unexpected synergies elsewhere. These really elevate it from a gimmicky ‘new card’ inclusion to a near-guaranteed future staple for the deck.
For a while now, Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis has been the go-to finisher for the deck. The once-scourge of Modern is an ideal fit here, as a powerful creature you can cast once you’ve filled your ‘yard, running your opponent out of resources. All of your land recursion pieces also offer some self-mill, so it’s not hard at all to cast Hogaak for its Delve cost. This is doubly true when you consider how many cards Smallpox puts in the graveyard by itself.
Hatchery is fantastic with Hogaak because it produces several black Insects at once, all of which can be tapped to pay for that Convoke cost. Outside of Hogaak and Orcish Bowmasters Smallpox doesn’t play any other creatures, so this is a big boost in that department.
Hatchery tokens can also help you Flashback Cabal Therapy. Alongside Thoughtseize, this is a key card in the deck that gets your attrition plan started early. From there, you can control the threats that do get through with Smallpox and removal. Grist, the Hunger Tide plays double duty here. It lets you trade in Hatchery tokens for removal, and it also makes tokens of its own while loading your graveyard.
Solnox’s brew also runs an Urza’s Saga package. The big target here will usually be Mox Diamond for ramp, but you can also get Nihil Spellbomb for graveyard hate or Lavaspur Boots to speed up your Hogaak.
A Hostile Environment
While it’s just one MTG card, it’s wild how much Eumidian Hatchery does for Legacy Smallpox. It’s also great to see such a long-running archetype still putting up results in 2025. You may not enjoy the deck’s grindy playstyle, but you at least have to respect its tenure.
Unfortunately, despite the boost Hatchery offers the deck, it’s still not particularly well-positioned in Legacy at the moment. According to MTG Decks, Smallpox has rough matchups against both of the current best Legacy decks. It only wins 40% of the time against Dimir Reanimator, and just 33% against Mono-Red Prison. While the site draws from limited data, these numbers do make perfect sense.
In the case of Prison, a single Blood Moon or Magus of the Moon basically shuts Smallpox down completely. Both are near-impossible to get off the board, even if you do have access to usable mana from basics. Dimir Reanimator is a bit better, but still very much a bad matchup. As a deck that wants a lot of cards in its graveyard anyway, Smallpox can often just hand it a victory unintentionally.
The one saving grace for Smallpox is Mystic Forge Combo, the format’s next-best deck after the two above. With so many hand attack, you should be able to keep your opponent from popping off long enough to close things out. The deck also relies a lot on Sol lands like Ancient Tomb, so Smallpox hits them harder than most.
Sadly, one good matchup does not a meta deck make. That said, if Wizards prints more tools like Hatchery in the future, we could see Smallpox in the top tiers at some point.
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