This Week in Legacy: The Road to Pittsburgh
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 deep into some really awesome news about North America Eternal Weekend in Pittsburgh this weekend! We'll also be talking about the Banned and Restricted announcement and the commentary on the health of Legacy, and also a slew of Challenges plus the Showcase Qualifier event was this past weekend.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
North America Eternal Weekend - Big News! Legacy Capped At 950 Players!
Something really crazy big happened over this past weekend. In the past few weeks we'd been discussing what might happen with Legacy Championships at NA Eternal Weekend and its attendance. Attendance seemed to day by day continue to skyrocket.
Over this past weekend, it hit critical mass and the event capped! That's right... North America Legacy Championships will consist of 950 players overall! This is insane! This has easily become one of the largest events of the year, the largest of the three Eternal Weekend events, and definitely the largest Legacy event of the year.
What does this mean for this event? Well, a few things really. One of the important things to note is the event schedule overall. This event will be 11 rounds of Swiss, but they're not going to be doing all 11 rounds on Saturday of EW. They're going to be doing Rounds 1-9 on Saturday with Rounds 10-11 being played out on Sunday morning, and then the Top 8 will occur immediately following the Vintage Top 8.
It's great to see Card Titan break it up like this. Having been at an event where all 11 rounds were played in one day, it's absolutely brutal.
Another awesome thing is that because of hitting the cap, Card Titan went ahead and boosted the prize pool from $25,000 to $40,000! In addition, prizing extends down to the Top 128! This in and of itself is amazing.
I am so looking forward to this event and the awesome coverage that we will have thanks to Anuraag Das and folks like Julian Knab providing commentary! Legacy is alive and well and in demand for people to play for an event like this to cap. It's amazing to see!
Banned and Restricted Announcement 12/4 - The Health of Legacy
This past weekend was a Banned and Restricted announcement that impacted multiple formats. Legacy was not one of those formats that had a change made to it, but Wizards did talk about Legacy in the announcement. You can find the full announcement here.
Here is what Wizards had to say about Legacy.
I am thankful first off that no changes were made before Eternal Weekend, but at the same time I also like the messaging here that they are looking at data but they are also looking at the community sentiment of the format, which very recently has been quite good. People are happy with Legacy at the moment, and they are expressing that. Several new cards have impacted the format, but they have integrated well into the current format.
I am pretty happy with this update, but it's also nice to glean some further information from how Wizards views the format.
Data Collection Woes
You may have noticed a slight bit of a trend in the past few weeks or so with data collection. Slowly and steadily we've been running into weekends where one of the events in the weekend the Legacy Data Collection Project has not been able to get full data for events. This weekend marks the first weekend where we have data for none of the events.
It's kind of unfortunate, but I hope that we can get back to a regular form of data collection soon. The holiday season tends to make this harder on folks as people have a lot of other things going on. I'm a firm advocate that people's IRL time is vastly more important than spending time collecting this data, but if you are a player who has the time to spend helping to collect, please reach out to the Legacy Data Collection Project and let us know.
In addition, I recommend continuing to upvote this forum post on MTGO's forums in regards to simply publishing all Challenge decklists. It is marked as "In Consideration" currently, so showing Daybreak that there is further support for it will help immensely.
Legacy Challenge 12/2
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event. With no data for the event, we don't know how many players were in it.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. Because we had no data for this event, let's look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Black Midrange | 1st | makuto86 |
| BUG Control | 2nd | JKnecht |
| RUG Delver | 3rd | ReformedPaolo |
| Oops! All Spells | 4th | beiic0n |
| Sneak and Show | 5th | JPA93 |
| Lands | 6th | Moonmadness-_- |
| Boros Stompy | 7th | almostomniscient |
| Death's Shadow | 8th | gatekappa |
Fairly interesting Top 8 overall here. At the end of the event it was a deck some people have been calling "Rescaminator" that won.
This deck combines elements of Saga stompy builds with Scam and Reanimator in a lot of different ways. The big thing that ties this together is Troll of Khazad-dum being able to fetch a Swamp or Badlands off an Urza's Saga.
In Second Place we had BUG Beans.
Full-on BUG is a pretty interesting way to approach the Bean formula. I especially love it when cards like Murderous Cut are good because of the Beans.
Further down the Top 8 we had Lands.
Fairly stock looking build, but it's a good one for sure. Sphere lands has proven how good it is in the current metagame.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Death's Shadow.
Shadow took a dip here or there in lieu of Dimir Scam becoming the Dimir Tempo deck of choice. However, this list looks very powerful and Shadow still has a very interesting game plan now.
Legacy Challenge 12/3
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the mid-afternoon Sunday event. With no data for the event, we don't know how many players were in it.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. Because we had no data for this event, let's look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| RUG Cascade | 1st | Killah_SUV |
| Red Stompy | 2nd | J.A.Eliso |
| 4C Uro Control | 3rd | Benjamin_S |
| Doomsday | 4th | monkeyscantcry |
| Sneak and Show | 5th | JPA93 |
| Sneak and Show | 6th | maximusdee |
| Black Midrange | 7th | ScavengingBooze |
| Boros Stompy | 8th | lazerbeam |
Another interesting Top 8 of the weekend! I have a feeling that Eternal Weekend next weekend is going to be insane! At the end of the event, it was RUG Cascade that won!
It's honestly kind of cool that this deck exists in Legacy. It's doing some Legacy-powerful things and leveraging fast mana super hard, which is cool. I am digging it.
In Second Place we had Red Stompy.
Broadside Bombardiers may just be one of the best Stompy threats to exist in a real hot minute for these kinds of decks. It's versatile and powerful and very aggressively costed. I love it.
Further down the Top 8 we had Sneak and Show.
Straightforward list here, leaning more on Atraxa than Griselbrand. Seems pretty smart right now with all of the Bowmasters floating about at the moment.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Boros Stompy.
I very much believe we'll see some quantity of this deck in the Top 8 at Eternal Weekend. The deck is just so strong. Brutal Cathar and Boromir, Warden of the Tower both seem like sweet inclusions here.
Legacy Showcase Qualifier 12/3
This past weekend was also the end of the season Showcase Qualifier event. These events are invitation only, being fed by the Showcase Challenges that take place throughout the season as well as Last Chance Qualifier events. Because these events are invitation only, the metagames for these events tend to be based on what people have qualified on and it tends to bring out a lot of deck specialists with builds that are keyed to the very specific metagame. The winner of this event gets to go on to play in the MOCS as well as a PT level event.
You can find the Top 16 decklists for this event here. Because we had no data for this event, let's look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Doomsday | 1st | wonderPreaux |
| Reanimator | 2nd | kanister |
| 4C Uro Control | 3rd | MentalMisstep |
| Black Midrange | 4th | Gabanaci |
| RUG Delver | 5th | NeodivergentGangulit |
| Thought Lash Combo | 6th | hateatos |
| 4C Uro Control | 7th | Do0mSwitch |
| 4C Uro Control | 8th | ziofrancone |
Good amount of 4C Uro Control decks, aka Beanstalk decks, and I do think this will be a big deck at Eternal Weekend for sure. At the end of the small field it was Doomsday that won!
Doomsday getting to tech a bit versus Control and other decks is quite interesting. The deck it wants to see the least here is Delver strategies, but we aren't getting a ton of that. The One Ring and Sheoldred are solid sideboard jukes for dealing with various decks that want to put pressure on Doomsday's life total. WonderPreaux is a really strong Doomsday player overall, so it's no surprise to see them do well.
In Second Place we had Reanimator.
Reanimator, while it's not very well positioned right now in the larger metagame, seems like the perfect deck for a small five-round event like this where it can very easily demolish unsuspecting pilots. This particular list looks strong for sure. Kanister is quite a strong player and this is a really good read on a small metagame event.
Also in this Top 8 we had Thought Last Combo.
This particular user qualified with this deck, and the run deep into Top 8 continued there. This deck looks quite powerful and does some broken things for sure.
Around the Web
- StrassDaddy has a sweet video on Candy Trail Maverick. Check it out here.
- In Response has a new podcast episode! Check it out here.
- Eternal Glory Podcast is talking about Eternal Weekends. Check it out here.
- The Legacy Gambit is playing the new "Rescaminator" deck (I like this deck name a ton). Check it out here.
- Kai Got Crushed by a Burn Prodigy is your new holiday hit! Check out the new podcast here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Bant Stiflenought is pretty cool.
This deck wants to Wheel you.
Questing Druid Phoenix is pretty sweet.
This take on scam is super hot. I am loving everything about this list.
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 at all my associated links via my Link Tree! In addition, I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the MTGLegacy Discord Server.
Until next time!
