This Week in Legacy: Magic Online Legacy Format Playoffs
This past week was the third of five legacy Format Playoffs. This is the tournament that requires 35 Legacy Format points to join. Originally there were going to be four Format Playoffs where everyone who makes Top 8 would be invited to a special Mythic Championship Qualifier event. That would be a 32 person Mythic Championship Qualifier. However, with the addition of a fifth Playoffs event there will be 40 players in the Legacy Format Championship.
With that being explained, the Format Playoffs tend to be filled with some of the best legacy players out there. Lots of people, myself included, tend to find the field of players to be one of the year's most difficult Legacy tournaments. This past weeks tournament had a total of 199 players. We are going to take a look at the Top 16 results to see what was popular and what performed well.
Top 16 Breakdown
Nearly half of the Top 16 players, and the tournament winner, played RUG Delver. Many people are calling it the clear best deck of the format. Agree or not, it is clearly the deck to beat.
In past weeks I have said it is one of the best decks and likely the best brainstorm deck in Legacy. The deck has adopted to beat Depths strategies pretty consistently with a new angle including Crop Rotation and Karakas. Other than the Dark Depths decks, which Delver is now quite prepared to beat, most of RUG Delver's worst matchups are underrepresented in Legacy these days.
If you would like to metagame for RUG delver, I would recommend playing Humans, Death and Taxes, UW Blade or BR-Reanimator. With the inclusion of Wrenn and Six RUG Delver will have game against most of these decks with Humans being the most difficult matchup for Delver. Aether Vial, Cavern of Souls, and a plethora of annoying creatures that quickly blank Wrenn and Six give Humans a huge edge versus this week's deck to beat.
Tied for the second most popular deck in the Top 16 of this event are Death's shadow and The Epic Storm (Ad Nausem Tendril's)
The Death's Shadow deck is a more aggressive Delver strategy than RUG Delver. The benefit of playing this deck over RUG is that it tends to have a better matchup against combo decks. That being said, RUG has the tools to beat all the currently popular combo decks. The downside of Shadow is that it can be quite difficult to manage life totals versus lightning bolt decks and it is even weaker to the Swords to Plowshare decks that are already difficult for Delver decks.
TES (Ad Nausem Tendril's) is a fast storm deck that uses Ad Nausem to draw a huge number of cards to help it storm off with Tendri's of Agony. This deck has the speed and disruption needed to beat most fair decks. One of the reasons that this deck does well versus fair decks is because it can be quite difficult to correctly use counterspells to stop the combo. Not only because of the discard spells but because the combo is often resilient enough that one counterspell is not enough to stop it.
Similar to RUG Delver, some of its difficult matchups were underrepresented this past weekend. Those difficult matchups usually include Chalice of the Void decks and BR-Reanimator.
There are also two breakout decks in the Top 16 of this week that I am sure people will be testing for this month's upcoming Star City Games and Magic Fest Legacy tournaments.
This deck looks a lot like a miracles strategy without any miracles cards. It also has a pretty heavy red splash. A22EN went with the more aggressive Monastery Mentor strategy over the more grindy Terminus strategy that we usually see in this type of deck. I think A22EN accurately identified that being too grindy with sweepers is a losing strategy due to the increasingly fast nature of the format along with the resiliency that Wrenn and Six gives to many decks that Miracles used to be good against. Instead, A22EN has added more aggression to the deck as well as the red splash for extra spot removal that can hit creatures and Wrenn and Six.
This Infect deck with a Red splash for Wrenn and Six was brewed and piloted by yours truly.
Infect seems fairly well positioned due to the nearly complete lack of Blue Black based control decks that overload on removal, a lot of similar benefits to RUG Delver, and a pretty good RUG Delver match up. This is something I had figured out on accident while streaming a traditional infect deck earlier in the week. The night before the tournament I had decided that Wrenn and Six, being as powerful as it is, might fit into Infect.
The Wasteland lock, that has warped the format into what we see today, can give the deck an angle of attack versus some matchups that infect would normally fold to. It also fights against opposing Wasteland decks very well by recurring Inkmoth Nexus which tends to be one of the most potent threats in the deck. The other thing that this planeswalker adds to the deck is the fact that most decks cannot ignore it. This means they may have to tap out to find and cast an answer giving the infect player a window to combo kill with pump spells on an infect creature. Lastly, the Wrenn and Six ultimate will quickly end the game as it lets you cast free Invigorates for each land you discard.
I would like to note that when building this deck I forgot to change the fetch lands in order to be able to fetch Volcanic Island. I did not notice this mistake for the first 15 rounds that I played the deck, goes to show that maybe that land shouldn't be in the deck. I recommend cutting the Volcanic Island or changing the fetch lands so that you can find it when needed.
Eric Landon, or “ewlandon,” is a long-time Magic and Legacy enthusiast. He is a full-time Magic streamer and Mythic Championship hopeful (hopeful to qualify someday).
You can find his schedule on https://twitter.com/Ewlandon1 or catch him live on Twitch at twitch.tv/ewlandon. He is also a co-host of Everyday Eternal, a regular Legacy podcast that can be found on most podcast platforms.
