This Week in Legacy: Keeping the Spirit of Legacy Alive
Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're going to be diving into some more Legacy community related things and various ways that the community at large has been keeping the spirit of Legacy alive! One of those things, which we'll discuss in depth, is the YouTube Channel 90sMTG, who I've referred to several times in my "About the Web" sections. We've also got two Challenges to discuss and of course our Spice Corner.
One thing I will note, is that I am stopping the 2019-2020 card tables for Challenge events. They haven't felt like useful data for a while now, and gets rather repetitive now that we're looking at the span over time of each event via the Ban Watch section. You can of course, continue to view these events in Goldfish and get statistics on most played cards. Instead I'm going to use this space to highlight decks outside of the Top 8 more often.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Community Spirit of Legacy
One of the most incredible things about Legacy is the Legacy Community, hands down. There's a lot to be said about the Legacy format, with its deep intricacies and subtle decision making, but at the end of the day, one of the big things that has continually kept me invested in the future of the format is many of the people involved in it. There are numerous members of the community who each do their own part to keep the spirit of the format alive. As such, let's talk about a few of those entities in the community that really take it to the next level.
90sMTG - Supporting Live Webcam Play
90sMTG is a Twitch stream + YouTube Channel, hosted by Chris Banuchi and CSMagicAlters. For as long as they've been around, they've done nothing but support the Legacy community at large with paper Magic content. Chris and friends run streams during the week of various formats, generally voted on by their loyal following, but the primary format they tend to play a lot of is Legacy.
It isn't easy putting together a Twitch stream in general, as there is a lot of work for it, but to add on top of that a stream consisting of remote players with webcams and making everything work along with commentary takes a lot of work and a lot of determination, and ultimately a lot of love for the Legacy format and its community.
I was given a great opportunity to join the crew for a few rounds on Monday 10/19 (after Legacy Eternal Weekend), and had an incredibly fun time (despite some minor technical difficulties here or there) playing with everyone involved. If you're inclined, check out the video below for some sweet sweet Omnath, Locus of Creation action.
I played three rounds with the crew, ending the night at 2-1 on the back of the wonderful Twitch Chat voting for me in the final match (which went to time after a deadlock 1-1 match vs Phil Blechman of Eternal Durdles). Also huge shoutout to Phil Nguyen for some incredibly sick games vs U/W Bomberman! I had an insane amount of fun hanging out and playing that I am greatly looking forward to doing it again.
This kind of real dedication to continually providing content is definitely superb, and more people should check out 90sMTG because of this! Continue supporting outlets like this that are supporting Legacy.
You can check out 90sMTG over on Twitter.
The Community Legacy League - Promoting League Play and Awesome Prizes!
Another solid community entity, since it's right even in their name, is the Community Legacy League held by The Magic Online Society. If you ever wanted to get into playing Legacy on Magic Online without the monetary pressures of Leagues to start learning the format, the Community Legacy League is the right place to go.
The CLL runs events every Wednesday at 7PM EST and they are completely free Legacy events to play in, with prizes and everything! The CLL is sponsored in part by Patreon donations, which you can find here. They are also sponsored by our good friends at CardHoarder, who are continually serving the Magic Online community with their services.
The CLL was founded by BoBoFraggles for the purpose of offering players to have an outlet to play Magic as well as to continue to build a solid and long lasting community. As evidenced by the fact that players continually keep playing in their events, it seems they've definitely succeeded at this.
Be sure to check out the CLL on Twitter!
The Legacy Pit - Keeping Paper Legacy Alive and Well
The last community entity we'll be talking about this week, The Legacy Pit offers a unique experience on Twitch, by not only playing live webcam matches of Legacy (or hosted remote matches) but also by making it possible to provide viewers with a request and see type setup, where viewers can request specific matchups and the Pit can make that happen.
Started by our good friend Travis Parsley, the Legacy Pit has been continuing to support their craft even through a pandemic by adopting remote match models and bringing players and other community members together from all over the world. Their goal has always been to provide great content and to keep paper Legacy alive and well, and have done a fantastic job rolling with the punches of 2020 to make that happen.
Recently the gang over at the Pit managed to pull of a 24 Hour stream, which is a real big deal! 24 hours of live Legacy is certainly something worth celebrating!
You can check out all the fun from the Pit over on Twitter!
Legacy Challenge 10/24
Our first Challenge of the weekend was the early morning Saturday Challenge event. Let's jump right into the Top 32 breakdown.
There was a lot of Death and Taxes decks in this event, and it makes a lot of sense to me, given how well the deck performed the weekend before during Eternal Weekend that more people would be poking at picking up the deck for events. There was also quite a bit of Doomsday in the event, which translated really well to the Top 8.
Now let's look at the Top 8 of the event.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| RUG Delver | 1st | MarkPenaFlorida |
| Doomsday | 2nd | Cwoj |
| Doomsday | 3rd | Fuz65 |
| Elves | 4th | Prima-Plum |
| Death and Taxes | 5th | Toondoslav |
| Snowko | 6th | McWinSauce |
| Doomsday | 7th | Azerate218 |
| Esper Vial | 8th | FrancoBolli |
As noted, Doomsday put three out of the four players on the archetype in the Top 32 into the Top 8 here, while DnT converted one pilot out of the five. Yet, it was amusingly still RUG Delver that took it all down.
This is our pretty commonly accepted stock-like RUG Delver list, with Goyf and Mandrills as the threats in the flex spots. The one interesting thing here is three Arcanist over the typical four, but I don't think that's obviously hurting much.
In Second Place we have Doomsday.
Doomsday is definitely a highly effective Dark Ritual based deck, and splashing red for powerful sideboard action like Pyroblast is pretty free to do so. You can definitely tell Death and Taxes is back on the map though from the presence of cards like Massacre and Dread of Night.
Since Third Place was also Doomsday, let's go down to Fourth Place with Elves.
Elves continues to coalesce in list construction as the Elvish Reclaimer builds fall more and more out of favor for the 4x Nettle Sentinel variants, thanks mainly to the card Allosaurus Shepherd. This deck has certainly received a huge boost in speed and power over this past year, and is still one of the harder decks to pilot well in the format.
In Fifth Place we have Death and Taxes.
Toondoslav was the winner of the Rishadan Port EW event, so I'm not surprised to see them do well and continue to make Top 8s on DnT. It looks like the deck is definitely back and in business for sure.
In Sixth Place we have Snowko.
Omnath and Field of the Dead are incredibly strong, and seem like a natural evolution to the Snowko archetype overall, along with Felidar Retreat. These cards are very good in the mirror matches, as they just require playing lands to be good. Field has a great leg up because the deck doesn't need to play spells even to enable it.
Since Seventh Place was also Doomsday, let's round out the Top 8 with Esper Vial.
Esper Vial is another deck that has done well at adopting new cards as it can adopt really anything playable that has a solid effect and can be found via Recruiter of the Guard. Skyclave Apparition, much like it has been in DnT, is another natural evolution to that.
Outside of the Top 8, it's worth pointing out Reeplcheep in 12th Place with the Curse Stompy deck.
Modal DFC lands certainly have made some archetypes incredibly interesting. In the case of this deck it's Pelakka Predation, which is a discard spell that can be played through Chalice since it costs three mana, but also can be a tap land when need be.
Further down the Top 32 we have a sweet Gyruda Bomberman variant.
Fae of Wishes! Really intriguing tech here for sure.
Legacy Challenge 10/25
Our other Challenge of the weekend was the normal Sunday event that takes place during the day. Let's dive right into the Top 32!
Despite RUG Delver being a huge chunk the Top 32 Metagame, I would like to point out just how solidly diverse of a metagame this is. Approximately 20 different archetypes in a Top 32 is a solidly diverse field for sure, and despite how prominent some decks look... the Top 8 of this event was incredibly surprising, so let's take a look at that now.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudpost | 1st | Twibs |
| Cloudpost | 2nd | Into_Play |
| Elves | 3rd | TrincoTeq |
| Elves | 4th | Testacular |
| Doomsday | 5th | Matrijx |
| Snowko | 6th | McWinSauce |
| RUG Stifle | 7th | MagicPlayer1151 |
| Hogaak | 8th | HT991122 |
Bwuh?! CLOUDPOST?! ELVES?! What a wild and wacky Top 8 this had to play out as. Despite being so all over the place, RUG Delver didn't even scratch a single Top 8 here. The finals however, was Cloudpost vs Cloudpost in two very different lists. Let's take a look at them both.
Both of these decks are very different, despite having a lot of similar choices in the mana department. Twibs' list is more focused on the mana development of cards like Thought-Knot Seer and Reality Smasher backed by the game ending effects, and All Is Dust is solid here because all of the effects in the deck are colorless. Into_Play's variant is more green based and plays cards like Elvish Rejuvenator and packs a Crop Rotation package for Depths kills when need be. Still, incredibly wild to see both of these lists up in the finals and facing off against each other no less.
Third and Fourth Place were both Elves, so let's look at the Third Place list.
Pretty close to the other list in the first Challenge that did well, however, it's worth pointing out the sideboard Okos. We've seen them from time to time out of these lists, and it's not like they really have to stretch to cast them. Seems like a really solid backup plan for the most part.
Down in Fifth Place we have Doomsday.
This version is not splashing red at all, instead leaning on the green splashes for things like Abrupt Decay and of course, format all star Carpet of Flowers. If there's anything I've learned about this format right now, it's to never go anywhere without this card it feels like.
In Sixth Place we have Snowko. This same pilot made Top 8s at Eternal Weekend and the other Challenge this weekend, so solid performance!
In fact this is pretty much their same 75, but consistency speaks volumes, so big congrats to this player for such solid finishes lately!
In Seventh Place we have RUG Stifle.
Only two Stifle to go on here, but the shell of this deck, often referred to as PokePile, is very very strong. Arcanist, Coatl, and Uro are really powerful cards and work very well with each other.
Rounding out the Top we have Hogaak.
Worth noting that there are two Brainstorm in the main here, which is amusing to see. One of the big things missing here is Carrion Feeder, which often serves a role as sacrifice outlet + beat stick. Still, a powerful list regardless.
Outside of the Top 8 we have some cool inclusions like this Green Stompy list.
Garruk Relentless and Voracious Hydra BE STILL MY BEATING HEART!
And of course, we have our obligatory Rick sighting further down still in Legacy Humans.
It definitely seems like Rick is here to stay within this archetype. I don't mind it, but I do mind the distribution method of those cards.
Ban Watch
Two more Challenge events gives us even more data to add to our chart of tracking "bannable" cards, so let's take a look at that now.
Things are wibbly-wobbly and all sorts of back and forth right now with these cards. I suspect that the format is still in a very good place, even post Eternal Weekend. Thankfully that much data should give Wizards some information on how best to approach what may or may not need to be done to Legacy as a format. No matter what happens though, I'll definitely continue doing these to keep track of these things. Look for another Round Table around Kaldheim release.
Around the Web
- The Canadian Threshold released a new episode! Go check it out here.
- Our good friends at Everyday Eternal did a solid review of Eternal Weekend Legacy. Check that out here.
- Also in podcasts, the good guys at In Response posted their 10th episode! Congrats on a small milestone! Check it out here!
- One of my good friends, Lawrence Harmon, recently started writing for Channel Fireball. Go check out his first article on Delver and the Legacy Ban List here.
The Spice Corner
ANT with a 1-of Fae of Wishes... and Chandra, Awakened Inferno in the sideboard?! What spice!
Landfall/Spells Matter U/R Delver. Also Nivmagus Elemental and Storm spells!
Arcanist/Young Pyro Reanimator? I'm in.
Dice Factory in Legacy!
What I'm Playing This Week
Expect a set of videos to my YouTube this week on this pile...
Wrapping Up
That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Legacy!
As always you can reach me on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon! In addition I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the /r/MTGLegacy Discord Server and subreddit.
Until next time!
