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This Week in Legacy: A Legacy Left


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 talking about the Leaving a Legacy Open, a paper Legacy event that just occurred last week! In addition to that we've got at the very least a Super Qualifier and a Legacy Challenge to discuss, as well as our Spice Corner. The Saturday Challenge event did not fire this past weekend due to a big Super Qualifier.

Worth noting that we have a lot going on with MTGO lately, with several conventions worth of events for both Legacy and Vintage that all involve the Mythic All Access Token. Be sure to check those out because those events seem like a lot of fun.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that next week I am taking a vacation week! I am technically on vacation right now but I wanted to take a week to let the Innistrad: Midnight Hunt spoilers breathe a little so I can come back to them after they are pretty much done. Plus, next week's part of my vacation is REALLY busy! (Disney Magic busy!)

Without further ado, let's dive right in!

The Leaving a Legacy Open in Acton, MA

With paper Magic returning more and more, we are starting to see these events coming back into the US as well in other areas in the world. One such event that rose up to the forefront in the past week was the Leaving a Legacy Open held at Gaming Etc. in Acton, MA on 8/28. This event was a fully sanctioned Legacy event, and had 96 players overall in it. Pretty sweet turnout for this event! The event was held in conjunction with the Leaving a Legacy Podcast, hosted by Jerry Mee and Patrick Euglow. It was also streamed on Twitch, which you should be able to still check out the VOD for here.

This was a Competitive REL event and had a pretty interesting metagame to it, so let's talk about that metagame first. I was only able to get roughly 90 of the players for this breakdown as we didn't have the full 96 to look at, but 90 is pretty close enough to get a good understanding of the most popular decks.

A big chunk of the overall metagame was UR Delver, and this is frankly no surprise. UR Delver has been a reigning deck on MTGO for a while now, and as we discussed in the past few weeks that the online vs paper metagame is not quite as far apart as it may actually seem. D&T was the second most played deck in this event, a trend that has tracked for a bit as well.

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This brings to light further for me an interesting conversation on the subject of paper versus online metagames, and again I think this tells us that these differences aren't quite as pronounced as people make them out to be. While it is accurate that there were a lot of represented archetypes in this event, as someone who manages to be in a position to see all of the data for the MTGO Challenge events the amount of archetype diversity in those events isn't nearly as small as people believe, especially for an event of this size or greater. This event does stand in a position of one of the larger paper Legacy events in just the US (Italy and 4Seasons events had 100+ player events in July) since paper events have started reopening, which is ultimately great to see. Kudos to the LaL team and Gaming, Etc. for running a good event and of course, thanks again to Jerry and Pat for furnishing me what data they could get me.

Let's take a look at the Top 8 of the event.

Deck Name Placing Player Name
GW Depths 1st Tom Kessler
UR Delver 2nd Roland Chang
Bomberman 3rd-4th Odin Enzmann
UR Delver 3rd-4th Zach Grant
Worldgorger Combo 5th-8th Rood Hannigan
Mono Red Storm 5th-8th Tony Scapone
Hogaak 5th-8th Kevin Thanakit
Sneak and Show 5th-8th Zachary Derpentigny

Interesting Top 8 here for sure with some stellar names amongst the crowd. At the end of the event however, it was Tom Kessler on GW Depths that took the whole thing down.

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One of the big interesting things here was the shunting of the copy of Field of the Dead to the sideboard, as the card is typically only really useful in matches like Bant Control and the like where games get super grindy. This deck was one of the decks to really benefit from the existence of Modern Horizons 2 for sure.

In the Second Place slot of this event we had our good friend Roland Chang on UR Delver!

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I love the addition of Tarfire here as an additional way of turning on Delirium for Dragon's Rage Channeler with the tribal subtype. Definitely a powerful list and a very powerful player.

Also in the Top 4 we had Bomberman!

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The addition of Urza is pretty solid, giving the deck a further way of interacting with Urza's Saga as well as another outlet for winning the game with Auriok Salvagers going infinite on mana (i.e. simply cast your whole deck).

Down in the rest of the Top 8 we had two decks that really stood out. The first is resident Jeska's Will player Tony Scapone on a deck he has been calling "The EPIC Gamble".

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This deck has continued to get better and better over time, gaining more access to cards and technology that make it better. Primarily in the past year the big two were Jeska's Will and Birgi, God of Storytelling, but more recently the deck also got Galvanic Relay which is very powerful.

The other list that drew a lot of attention in this Top 8 was Rood Hannigan on Mono Black Worldgorger Combo.

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This deck is pretty SPICY all around. Part Reanimator, part Dragon, all awesome that's for sure. I also love the sideboard plans of boarding into Rotting Regisaur and the main deck win condition of Piranha Marsh (pinging the opponent for life every time you loop Dragon). Just a super cool list all around.

Leaving the Best Legacy

This event certainly looked like a lot of fun and it was not in the cards for me to make it up to such an event right now, but hey maybe next time!

Legacy Super Qualifier 9/4

While we did not have a Challenge on Saturday morning, on Saturday proper we did have a Legacy Super Qualifier event. This event had 200 people in it, thanks to the data collected by the Legacy Data Collection Project. We did have some Unknown lists from this event unfortunately because of some misses in the data, so if you see an Unknown deck in the sheet and you either are that player or know that player and know what they were playing feel free to reach out!

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

Quite a lot of UR Delver in this event for sure. 47ish UR Delver players is pretty staggeringly overwhelming, and the deck had a pretty much perfect 50% win rate (which makes a lot of sense considering that there had to be a lot of mirror matches in this event). The next most played deck was the Jeskai Ragavan Variants, followed by Anuraag's 4C Control deck that won a Challenge last week and Death and Taxes.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name Placing MTGO Username
Blue Karn/Artifacts 1st Minest110
UR Delver 2nd _BMJ_
Jeskai Ragavan 3rd nathansteuer
4C Control 4th AnziD
UR Delver 5th Falco_Lombardi
Doomsday 6th monkeyscantcry
UR Delver 7th Mzfroste
The EPIC Storm 8th Bryant_Cook

Definitely an intriguing Top 8, with a lot of Daze in it thanks to three copies of UR Delver and one of the Jeskai Ragavan deck. At the end of the event, it was Minest110 on a Blue Artifact base build that took it all down.

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This list is definitely intriguing. Cutting Karn, the Great Creator for cards like Thought Monitor and full four Sai, Master Thopterist is pretty sweet.

In Second Place we had UR Delver.

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Again we see the trend of cutting down to two copies of Delver of Secrets, a trend that has been occurring more and more as the blue arms race between the Delver decks continues to build. As we noted in past articles, this also allows decks relying on Dragon's Rage Channeler the ability to play cards like Mishra's Bauble more.

Speaking of the 4C Control deck from earlier, we have that deck in Anuraag's hands in the Top 8 here as well.

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Expressive Iteration is definitely interesting for this deck, providing it a lot of strong card selection. This is definitely a strong list for sure and the results show it.

At the bottom of the Top 8 we've got Bryant Cook on The EPIC Storm!

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Having cards like Orim's Chant back in The EPIC Storm is pretty sweet, as is the addition of Prismatic Ending as a highly flexible answer in the sideboard is super cool.

Outside of the Top 8 we've got a Bant Ephemerate shell that is cool.

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Slightly surprised to see zero Solitude in this list with the aspect of casting Ephemerate on it, but this list is really powerful looking and a lot of fun.

Legacy Challenge 9/5

The second Challenge event of the weekend did indeed fire, but it only fired with the minimum of 64 players. I can only guess that this had more to do with all the convention stuff for PAX going on this weekend as well as the Super Qualifiers.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

As is typically expected of most events these days, lots of Tempo up at the top and with good performance to boot. UR Delver was the most popular with Jeskai Ragavan in second.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name Placing MTGO Username
Death and Taxes 1st YawgmothPT
High Tide 2nd Iwouldliketorespond
Elves 3rd EronRelentless
UR Delver 4th dunkin90
Jeskai Ragavan 5th Bohnz
Jeskai Ragavan 6th r0cknati0n
Sneak and Show 7th Xpz98
Jeskai Ragavan 8th OceanSoul92

A LOT of Jeskai Ragavan in this Top 8, putting a lot of Daze in the top tables. However, the finals of this event was pretty sweet because it had both D&T and HIGH TIDE in it. At the end of the event it was D&T that took it down.

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Kind of interesting to see Palace Jailer here as the card has largely fallen out of favor here or there. Two copies of Urza's Saga is also really interesting. I'm not sure I like the card in the D&T shells because it cuts into the number of white sources the deck has to run, but it is very interesting.

As mentioned before, the Second Place list was our good friend Marcus Ewaldh on HIGH TIDE.

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What year is it?! Seeing High Tide is super cool. What an incredible run for Marcus here, congrats to him on winning with such a sweet deck!

Also in the Top 8 we had a bunch of Jeskai Ragavan, so let's take a look at one.

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Dack Fayden is a spicy inclusion into the stock list. Seems like a great way to fuel Delve for Murktide Regent.

Outside of the Top 8 we had Fenruscloud on Infect!

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Phyrexian Crusader is a super neat inclusion into the deck, given that it dodges both Bolt and Swords to Plowshares + Prismatic Ending. Really smart threat to have in the current climate of Legacy's prime removal spells.

Around the Web

  • Bryant Cook has a video on his Top 8 run of the Legacy Super Qualifier. Check it out here.
  • Decklist submissions and Registration Confirmation for the Legacy Pit Open has begun via MTGMelee. You can check that out here if you are registered for the event.
  • Our good friend Phil Gallagher has a video on Painter/Tezzerator. Check it out here.
  • The complete video of the MTGFirst Legacy 2K is now available over here.

The Spice Corner

Burn with Dragon's Rage Channeler is pretty sweet indeed.

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Pretty interesting take on the Affinity shell.

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This deck is really neat.

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otaba has got some sweet ideas for Aluren decks, including Expressive Iteration!

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xJCloud wins all the Spice Corners everywhere and the Internet forever for this deck.

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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 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!



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