This Week in Legacy: Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 8
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 the Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 8 event from over the past weekend as our primary focus. These events are always a ton of fun, and I myself had a stellar time at the event. In addition to that we've got two Challenge events to talk about and of course, a Spice Corner.
My Streets of New Capenna set review will be reserved for next week when preview season is over!
Without further ado let's dive right in!
Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 8
This past weekend was yet another Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy, the Eighth such event, held in Columbus, OH at Comic Town. This tournament series, hosted by Robert Wilson, is a series of full proxy Legacy events meant to help players play Legacy and win sweet cardboard as prizes, while enjoying each other's company over tasty buffalo chicken dip. I've written about these events multiple times because I generally attend each one of them. These events are an awesome way for players to learn and play Legacy and the prizing is always super sweet. This past event was no exception with First Place being given the choice of a Mox Diamond or a Lion's Eye Diamond, and Second Place receiving the one of these not chosen by First Place. Third-Fourth each got a City of Traitors, while the rest of the Top 8 got a Force of Will from Alliances.
Because this event reached its cap at 64 players, there was additional prizing to Top 16 with 9th - 16th getting an Ancient Tomb from Tempest.
Suffice to say, these events are great for a lot of reasons, and they continue to draw an excellent crowd of people and some really powerful Legacy players as well. Folks like Brian Coval, Karl Schulz, David Lance, and even Patrick Green came down for this past weekend's event, and it was simply a stellar time. Check out some pictures below of the event.
The event was also streamed over at the BCDL Twitch page, but the VOD can be watched over on YouTube.
This is definitely an event series to continue to keep an eye on if you are in the area and can make it to it. Well worth playing at and always a lot of fun. Keep an eye out on the BCDLegacy Twitter account for future updates on future events!
My Event Report
My own event this go around actually ended up very reasonable. I ended up playing the new hotness in 8Mulch, with a focus skewed on attacking the UR Delver matchup as well as the 8Cast matchup (both decks that had a very reasonable showing the last BCDL event). I also considered the Reanimator and Uro matchups to an extent, as both of those kinds of decks had a strong showing at the last event as well. I spent a lot of time tweaking a list that also splashed blue for Otawara, Soaring City but in the end, I ended up hooking into a list that Kellen Pastore split the Showcase Challenge Finals on last week.
At the end of the event, I ended up 4-2, placing 12th overall for a sweet sweet Ancient Tomb as a prize.
This is the decklist I registered for this event along with some sweet proxy deck pics.
My primary thoughts on the deck before I go into my own event. I ended up self fulfilling a prophecy of sorts by not registering two copies of Flame Jab in my sideboard primarily by the sheer fact that Blood Moon Aggro decks have never been super popular at the BCDL events. So of course, I ended up playing against the single Blood Moon pilot in the room (who also went on to Top 8). Flame Jab is a card that has seen a measure of play in the sideboards simply because it's a card that murders the Magus of the Moon (as otherwise the deck simply has no way to deal with this card). In the future, I may be more considerate of this one, but I still think my read on the metagame going into things was an okay one because I expected Delver and 8Cast.
Another change I had made to the list was a main deck copy of Glacial Chasm. I still think this card warrants further testing and it felt interesting versus especially the 8Cast matchup where it is much more difficult for that deck to deal with that loop. I may run without it in the future, as Tower of the Magistrate still feels very much like a necessary card for the 8Cast matchup and as long as that deck remains popular I think it's a powerful thing to have.
For those unaware of what this deck aims to do, the primary game plan of this deck is to utilize effects like Exploration and Manabond to turbo lands into play, while using Life from the Loam and Mulch/Winding Way to dig through the deck for more lands. Primarily the win conditions for a deck like this are Field of the Dead and the Marit Lage combo. Because of Field of the Dead the deck plays a bunch of singleton one-of lands, and one of the biggest reasons this deck works is because of this card:
Yavimaya is such an incredibly powerful card in this deck because it ties together so many hands and board states where you have multiple lands that either don't produce mana (Tabernacle, Maze of Ith) or lands that only produce colorless mana (Field, Thespian's Stage). Yavimaya allows these lands to tap for mana in order to keep casting spells and playing lands.
I'm going to go over a really brief overview of my event because there was some interesting stuff in there!
R1 vs UR Delver (Alex Roach) 2-0 WIN
UR Delver is one of the matchups I specifically needled in on when building the sideboard for this deck, and knowing this matchup really paid off here. Both games were rather smooth and I even managed to end Game 2 with a Manabond trigger that resulted in at least 6-7 Zombie tokens off Field of the Dead combined with a Pyroblast topdeck for a Murktide Regent.
This match was a textbook example of why I built the deck the way that I approached it and what matchups I hoped to face (i.e. Delver). Unfortunately, this was the only Delver match I played all day!
R2 vs Food Chain (Karl Schulz) 1-2 LOSS
I had an inkling of what Karl was on because he Top 8'ed the last BCDL event on Food Chain, so I kind of expected it. I managed to win Game 1 off typical Lands-y shenanigans, but lost both post board games to the combo. To be fair, I did mis-board in this matchup and didn't consider the Force of Vigors which I should have done, and while I was able to blow up a Food Chain in Game 3 with a Boseiju, my opponent had a second one to deploy immediately. To re-approach this matchup I would definitely board more correctly for sure.
R3 vs UB Stiflenought (MWood781) 2-0 WIN
This matchup felt less scary, but my opponent was playing main deck Pithing Needle which is slightly frightening as well as maindeck Stifle for plenty of activated and triggered abilities my deck does. Much of their manabase was basic land heavy so Wasteland was not pulling much weight here, but Boseiju took care of a lot of things in Game 1 and I did end up giving advice to my opponent after the match on using Needle versus Boseiju and how that worked.
Game 2 of this match I saw a Planar Void which I haven't seen in literally forever so that was super awesome. That game was won mainly off of Field of the Dead value.
R4 vs Metalworker Post (Ramy Mansour) 2-1 WIN
I am honestly not quite sure how I managed to win this matchup as Post decks in general are often quite fast and can go over any sort of mana denial very quickly. The upside of this variant of Post is that it plays a lot of artifacts, which my sideboard was well tuned to fight against. Game 1 was a loss to the combo itself of Metalworker+Staff of Domination.
My post board games were much better here, with Collector Ouphe being a major player. In fact, Game 2 was won off putting a Marit Lage into play and an Ouphe, making it impossible for the opponent to combo off. Game 3 was much grindier, with Karn and Ballista with my Ouphes in play and multiple Wasteland activations to keep the opponent off mana. I eventually was able to utilize Boseiju to great effect to remove several problematic permanents and turn up the heat with Field of the Dead.
R5 vs Blood Moon Aggro (Ian Littlefield) 1-2 LOSS
Oh right. This deck. I definitely put myself in the immediate position of "I need to combo fast to win these games" and that only came together for exactly one of these games, and that was Game 1 where Manabond put me on Marit Lage immediately. Games 2 and 3 were resolved over the fact that as I alluded to earlier, I just didn't expect this deck and thus didn't have a sideboard option that involved being able to beat it with Flame Jab for Magus.
Such is life. This was the only Blood Moon Aggro player in the house, and they went on to Top 8!
R6 vs 8Cast (Adam Fronsee) 2-1 WIN
This is the other deck that I was really geared towards beating and I was hoping at this point to squeak out a win for X-2 to make Top 16. Game 1 had a lot of things occur but I was able to push through with Zombies to get there.
Game 2 was increasingly one of the more intricate and interesting games I've played against the 8Cast deck, with things such as being able to pay Ward 4 to Maze of Ith Kappas to nearly getting my opponent to 3 life and never finding a Life from the Loam to recur Glacial Chasm + Thespian's Stage to keep myself alive through their army of Constructs, Kappas, and Emry. Definitely a wild game for sure.
Game 3 of this match was a bit of a non-game. Both of us mulled to 5, but I was able to pull through with a combination of Wasteland and Crop Rotation value, combined with a Surgical on Saga. My opponent never saw another 0 mana artifact or another land beyond a single Otawara, and with an Exploration in play I was able to make multiple Zombies a turn to attack with to seal the game.
Making Top 16
Suffice to say, I was pretty pleased with the deck and how it functioned. This feels like a deck worth exploring if you are interested in beating up on Delver, but I also enjoyed this from the standpoint of the fact that many of these cards have been legal for some time, and this deck only appearing just now is very intriguing. This tells me that there is still so much unexplored deck space in the Legacy format and that there's still so much we can do with this format.
The Event Itself
Now that we've got my own event details out of the way, let's talk about the overall event and look at the Top 8.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.
Quite a bit of UR Delver in the room but they all seemed to either be completely concentrated in the top tables or spread out because most people I spoke to said they didn't play against it too much. UR Delver had a really solid performance here though, but it was GW Depths that was really pushed over the top here. It is worth noting that currently we do not have a classification yet for 8Mulch (which is changing soon) so at least two of the Lands players (myself and Chris Hafner) were on this deck.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| GW Depths | 1st | Bill Comminos |
| Jeskai Control | 2nd | Ryan Hayes |
| GW Depths | 3rd | Gabriel Ebady |
| UR Delver | 4th | Minhajul Hoq |
| UR Delver | 5th | Samantha Murphy |
| Blood Moon Aggro | 6th | Ian Littlefield |
| 8Mulch | 7th | Chris Hafner |
| UR Delver | 8th | Brian Coval |
Incredibly stacked Top 8 here for sure. Sure, there's a good amount of Delver, but we had some solid players here from Bill Comminos, Minhajul Hoq all the way down to Brian Coval. Also, big shoutout to Samantha Murphy, who has been attending these events for some time and typically plays Doomsday making her first BCDL Top 8 on UR Delver!
Also, secondary shoutout to Chris Hafner, who apparently I have some sort of mind meld with because we've played the same list pretty much the past two BCDL events.
The event overall was won by Bill Comminos on GW Depths.
This is definitely another deck to consider if you're looking for something that has good game versus multiple top decks of the format, and it's a very rewarding deck to learn too. It's very powerful and has plenty of different angles of attack to it.
The Second Place finalist was on Jeskai Control.
This deck is super sweet. Mentor, Teferi, even The Wandering Emperor? Really sick looking list overall that is stocked with value.
Legacy Challenge 4/9
Our first MTGO Challenge of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event, which had 61 players in it overall thanks to data collected by the Legacy Data Collection Project.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Delver had a strong representation but a middle-of-the-road performance, while Jeskai Control had a very strong performance overall. This was definitely an interesting event coming off the heels of several events where Delver absolutely slaughtered their metagames.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Stoneblade | 1st | davy2892 |
| Death and Taxes | 2nd | JUJUBEAN__2004 |
| Jeskai Control | 3rd | wiky |
| ANT | 4th | twinlesstwin |
| Bomberman | 5th | kanican |
| Death and Taxes | 6th | Bobovic |
| Jeskai Control | 7th | WaToo |
| Jeskai Control | 8th | Butakov |
Very interesting Top 8 for sure. Lot of Jeskai and some combo, D&T, and at the end of the event it was Stoneblade that took it all down.
Sort of. This is more like a Delver/Stoneblade mix deck, and four copies of Stifle is something. Very interesting deck for sure. Not even a Batterskull in sight here which is crazy to consider, but Kaldra is so game-ending that it makes sense.
Speaking of Batterskulls, Second Place was Death and Taxes.
The light red splash here to enable Magus of the Moon and blast effects is unique and something I've seen xJCloud post about a bit here or there, so it's interesting to see it populate into a winning list. Magus seems pretty strong right now with a lot of Depths + Lands builds and 8Mulch running around.
Down to the first Jeskai Control list in the Top 8, which came in Third.
This list is not leaning as hard on the Day's Undoing combo as other Jeskai lists have done in the past. One thing I love about this list though is the sideboard copy of Sevinne's Reclamation. That card is super sweet.
Also in this Top 8 we have the return of Bomberman Legend kanican!
I always love seeing kanican's takes on Bomberman. They're always cutting edge and full of interesting cards. In this case, this is the deck that really popularized and showcased the power of Ingenious Smith, which is awesome to see.
Legacy Challenge 4/10
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the Sunday event, which had 97 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Legacy Data Collection Project.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.
Delver was again exceedingly popular while straddling the middle of the road in win percentages. Reanimator did well here, as did ANT and Jeskai Control.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Reanimator | 1st | ik1cksquirrels |
| Grixis Stiflenought | 2nd | Call1Me1Dragon |
| Doomsday | 3rd | wonderPreaux |
| Stoneblade | 4th | Rhianne |
| UR Delver | 5th | WeareVenom |
| ANT | 6th | DemonicTutors |
| Jeskai Control | 7th | Trohck |
| Painter | 8th | Delthar |
Definitely an interesting Top 8 with only one Delver player to be seen. Quite a bit of other stuff going on here though! At the end of the event it was Reanimator that took it all down.
This list showcases an interesting return to some old school Tin Fins technology by playing both Children of Korlis and Tendrils of Agony as a way to win the game with a Griselbrand by regaining the life in order to keep drawing through the deck. Definitely some interesting stuff!
The Second Place finalist was on Grixis Stiflenought.
Dress Down was one of the best things to ever happen for these decks for sure. Being able to cast one at instant speed and then deploy several Dreadnoughts all at once is very very strong, much stronger than the "wait and cast Stifle in response to one of them" line, and Dress Down not only draws a card but is also good for cards like Kroxa, Titan of Death's Hunger as well.
Down the Top 8 we had a showing by ANT.
DemonicTutors has been really pushing this list as of late, and it looks really good. Malevolent Hermit in the sideboard is a really powerful inclusion to this deck as it does so much in matchups where you are stressing removal and countermagic, because everything it does is a 2-for-1 basically.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had a showing by Painter.
Definitely a strong list here. I really like Breya's Apprentice as a card. It's very strong and does a lot of powerful things with Welder effects.
Around the Web
- Our friends over at The Legacy Pit recently posted a teaser for their next Legacy Pit Open event. There's no set date yet, but check it out here.
- The Eternal Glory podcast had a great episode recently on 8Mulch. Check it out here.
- 66 Card Doomsday
- Phil Gallagher plays a little Magecraft combo. Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdles is hype for New Capenna. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 decklists over here.
Jax the combo master is showing us how to Witherbloom.
This UG post list is definitely frightening. So much going on here.
Enchantress Lands is so cool.
TonyScapone with a new take on Birgi Combo, this time featuring Malevolent Hermit.
This wins every Spice Corner ever now at this point because well, you have to look at it. It's Battle of Wits Azorius Control!!!!
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 MTGLegacy Discord Server.
Until next time!
