This Week in Legacy: EU Eternal Weekend 2024
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 all about Eternal Weekend Europe in Prague! In addition to that we've got some data across all three Eternal Weekend events for the year, as well as some Challenges from last week.
Also it's worth noting that I will be in attendance at MagicCon Chicago in February as a featured Creator! Come out and say hi!
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Eternal Weekend 2024 Europe
This past weekend was the final cap on Eternal Weekend 2024 events for the year with Eternal Weekend Europe held in Prague and hosted by J.K. Entertainment. The Legacy main event for this Eternal Weekend had a solid 832 players, which makes it the second best attended Eternal Weekend of 2024 behind North America Eternal Weekend. Overall this event looked like a very interesting event given what happened at NA Eternal Weekend.
You can find all of the decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
UB Reanimator was the most popular deck of the event by a very wide margin at roughly 12.38% of the metagame. The deck not only boasted a large metagame percentage, and while it didn't win the event the deck's non-mirror win rate was a solid 55.38%. To be clear, this is the deck that everyone knows and expects to see and is gunning for, and it had the highest metagame share and a really strong win rate. That in of itself is pretty notable and seems kind of nuts. Dimir Tempo made up another 7.21%, so just in general Psychic Frog decks were almost 20% of the metagame in just two subarchetypes. Dimir also had a very positive win rate.
The boogeyman of NA Eternal Weekend, Mystic Forge Combo, had a strong 54.37% non-mirror win rate. This is despite the fact that the deck did not make the Top 8 of the event, but it showed up pretty well in across the Top 64 players of the event. The real outlier of this weekend was the Nadu Elves deck, which had a great outing at a 61.71% non-mirror win rate with just over 3% of the metagame.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Cephalid Breakfast | 1st | L4rss0n |
| Esper Control | 2nd | Raphael Weder |
| Nadu Elves | 3rd | Edward Yueh |
| ANT | 4th | Hanlin X |
| UB Reanimator | 5th | Ergazpo |
| Nadu Elves | 6th | JLenger |
| Stiflenought | 7th | Brian Coval |
| UB Reanimator | 8th | Cena |
Overall, this is an interesting Top 8. The two decks making up half of the Top 8 here are Nadu Elves and UB Reanimator. After those we've got some interesting decks such as Breakfast, ANT, even Stiflenought.
The end of this event was decided by a battle between Cephalid Breakfast and Esper Control, with the winner being well known Cephalid Breakfast player L4rss0n.
Nadu has definitely impacted Legacy and especially Cephalid Breakfast overall, to the point where it's simply the best thing to splash in some green lands to be able to play Nadu in this deck. L4rss0n is an old hat at Cephalid Breakfast however, and is generally on the cutting edge of the deck's construction. One thing I really like here is some of the sideboard stuff like Teferi and Tamiyo, being able to reinforce slightly some of the fair game plan aspects that allow this deck to dance around combo hate. It's a really strong way to approach building this deck and it really shows.
The Second Place finalist was Esper Control.
This deck is honestly really kind of cool. It takes some inspiration from the Jeskai Control lists that were playing both Narset + Hullbreacher alongside Day's Undoing but it does it with the ability to also leverage cards like Orcish Bowmasters and Psychic Frog into the mix. There's also a copy of Void Rend in this list, and somewhere I can hear Crim rejoicing in glee.
Eternal Weekend 2024 Aggregate Data
Now that all three Eternal Weekend events are done, it's an interesting thought experiment to see how these events look from a higher level by aggregating all the results from them. You can find the link to this data sheet here.
Let's start first by taking a look at the graphical data associated with this sheet.
One thing that I think is very clear from the overall aggregate data is that UB Reanimator is definitely the most widely played deck of all three events combined and that's kind of a no-brainer. We knew that it was going to be the case. The overall aggregate win rate of this deck across the three events however is also very good at a solid 54.8% non-mirror win rate. UB made up 15.6% of the metagame with a whopping 405 copies, with the next deck being Dimir Tempo (another Frog deck) at 186 copies. A little over 200 copies in difference between the two decks. This is honestly kind of crazy to see, especially when most of the time you see these kinds of stats and overall the win rate trends down towards 50% with more mirrors and the like, but this is a deck that has the biggest target painted on its back and still has incredible metagame share and a really good win rate? Something is definitely crazy.
In terms of popularity, as noted Dimir Tempo was also very popular across all three events, making up another 7.2% of the metagame. After that, both Red Painter and Red Stompy have a lot of representation but overall their win rates trended down quite a bit, to the point even where Red Stompy, generally regarded as a reasonably strong deck right now, had a 48.9% non-mirror win rate.
So let's talk about the big three decks that people are definitely asking about right now. We mentioned Frog decks, so what about Mystic Forge? Mystic Forge in general did quite well, despite only being 3.6% of the overall metagame. It had a 57.9% non-mirror win rate, which sounds incredible, but also a lot lower sample size than some of the other decks at 94 copies. Still, this is a strong performance across all three events, and especially given how good the deck looked at NA EW.
Nadu on the other hand, is split across a few different archetypes. Nadu Combo itself, which is the more midrange style decks that play Brainstorm, Cephalid Breakfast, and Nadu Elves. All three of these subarchetypes had some strong percentages, with Nadu Elves having a solid 59.8% non-mirror win rate, but at a pretty tiny 1.5% of the metagame at 40 copies. Cephalid Breakfast had 86 copies and a 52.4% non-mirror win rate while the midrange deck was the most played at 107 copies with a 52.9% non-mirror win rate.
The big questions continue to be what will actually happen next week in the Banned and Restricted announcement. I do expect that the most obvious thing will occur, and that is the banning of Psychic Frog. I know there has been some talk about looking at these results and wondering if Frog is actually just fine in the format, and that we should ban cards like Entomb or Reanimate instead, but I don't personally agree with that stance, and I know a lot of Legacy players that would prefer to just ban the new card instead of the old cards, and that is something that is certainly a lot of what Legacy is about from a high level standpoint, and it seems like Wizards has generally agreed with that over time.
Frog definitely has to go, and a lot of that is due in part to the fact that it has very much warped the format around its very existence. Not the Reanimator deck, which Frog does fit very cleanly into, but Frog itself has warped the format around its existence. Cards like Lightning Bolt being played less and less, more things like Fatal Push, even cards like Shoot the Sheriff and Go for the Throat. Pyroblast showing up in main deck construction, Nihil Spellbomb to combat multiple aspects of the card (for example, denying them the ability to give Frog flying). Frog is a card that very much has overpowered Legacy as a format, and I do think it will be banned.
The second big questions is what Wizards thinks of Vexing Bauble, as that card seems to be the linchpin of many of the combo decks of the format that are able to utilize it well. Very specifically the Mystic Forge deck is a prime example of the one of the best Vexing Bauble decks. I think that mostly due in part to Bauble's ability to shut down cards that have often been considered prime safety valves for Legacy as a format (namely Force of Will) I do think it is certainly possible for Wizards to enact a ban on this card. I do wonder if they will not simply because of wanting to see where things may go without Frog and go from there, but I think it's also a good decision for them to hit Bauble at the same time.
The somewhat controversial one here is Nadu. Nadu is definitely one of those cards that you either really love or really hate, and there's very little middle ground. Nadu is definitely a card that sits well within the power bounds of Legacy as a format honestly. It's a strong card, yes, and the biggest selling point against it really is the play patterns of the card. People definitely don't like the Nadu player spinning their wheels (even though most of the time if your opponent has Nadu+Nomads you're basically just dead and should be conceding) and I think a majority of that comes from how the deck has been banned in other formats now that people have this perception of it that playing it in Legacy is just like that, when often times it is not.
I could see Wizards banning Nadu, primarily because of community sentiment. Lots of people don't like it, and Wizards could enact a ban on that grounds primarily, but in the end Legacy is overall a really touchy subject for Wizards and I can definitely understand why they prefer to move in small ways first. I do think a ban that is just Frog, Bauble, and Nadu is a realistic one, but I also think that Wizards could just end up banning Frog and call it a day. What kind of stinks about that one is that the next ban window is not until March, and if things really do go off the rails would they be able to respond to it? Not sure and that's another reason they could end up banning multiple cards.
Regardless we'll be here next week to see how this BnR goes!
Legacy Challenge 32 12/4
The first Challenge event of the week was the Wednesday event. This event had 40 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Dimir Tempo | 1st | Ale_Mtg |
| Dimir Tempo | 2nd | dganev |
| UB Reanimator | 3rd | -Fish |
| Doomsday | 4th | romariovidal |
| Oops! All Spells | 5th | choutin |
| UB Reanimator | 6th | Jumba |
| Red Stompy | 7th | Harvey_Specter |
| Jeskai Control | 8th | hermanomlg |
Quite a bit of Psychic Frog in this Top 8. At the end of the event it was a pair of Dimir Tempo decks that were First and Second.
These two decks are mostly the same but there are some key differences. The winner is more traditional with their approach to the creature base while the Second Place deck is playing a little more diverse spread of things including cards like Baleful Strix. The Second Place list also has an interesting hedge in a pair of Reanimate which can be pretty interesting in certain matchups. Counter your opponent's Reanimate and then cast your own to take their Atraxa, Grand Unifier or Archon of Cruelty is a super clever play. Even in fair matchups it seems pretty good.
Legacy Challenge 32 12/6
The second Challenge event of the week was the Friday event. This event had 41 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 data sheet here.
Red Stompy was the most popular deck but it's win rate was not really all that good. Both Sneak and Show and Mystic Forge looked really good, as did Eldrazi and Dimir Tempo.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Sneak and Show | 1st | snoopy-magic |
| UB Reanimator | 2nd | Ryuho090 |
| Dimir Tempo | 3rd | JoyfulWaffle |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 4th | Neopolis |
| Dimir Tempo | 5th | _Batutinha_ |
| The EPIC Storm | 6th | Entropy263 |
| Death and Taxes (Yorion) | 7th | Stanshine |
| Sneak and Show | 8th | JPA93 |
Very interesting Top 8 here. At the end of the event it was Sneak and Show that won.
Sneak and Show is a deck that plays quite well against quite a few decks in the format, so it's popularity online is because of that aspect. It's a deck that rewards some really fast wins and against a number of decks it just kind of goes over the top of them. Adding both The One Ring and Vexing Bauble to the mix is really good.
In Second Place we had UB Reanimator.
Sink into Stupor is a really sweet card here. A land that pitches for Force, but also can get rid of a problematic permanent if it needs to do so? That level of flexibility is very good. It's also interesting to see down to only one Metamorphosis Fanatic and a single copy of Abhorrent Oculus.
Legacy Challenge 32 12/7
The third Challenge event of the week was the Saturday event. This event had 43 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mystic Forge Combo | 1st | acydcytryk |
| Dimir Tempo | 2nd | wiky |
| Death and Taxes (60 Card) | 3rd | l337erhosen |
| Red Stompy | 4th | GodOfSlaughter |
| Dimir Tempo | 5th | RyanWu |
| Sneak and Show | 6th | John1111 |
| Omni-Tell | 7th | shiwasu |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 8th | Ark4n |
Kind of an interesting spread of decks here, with Dimir and Mystic Forge taking up half of the event. At the end of the event it was Mystic Forge that won.
This shell has the benefit of being able to jam together a whole bunch of cards that produce mana and are backed up by Vexing Bauble and The One Ring and it can pretty much do whatever it wants at that point. There's some flex spots here or there and it shows in the general deck construction pilot to pilot. At the very least, the biggest core of the deck is the manabase now. The Planar Nexus + Urza's Tower base has proven to be extremely powerful at allowing this deck to resolve its threats, most of which cost four.
In Second Place we had Dimir Tempo.
This is firmly a fairly stock looking list for Dimir, execpt in this case opting to go for Go for the Throat over Shoot the Sheriff as its mostly unconditional removal spell.
Legacy Challenge 32 12/8
The final Challenge event of the week was the Sunday event. This event had 51 players in it thanks to the MTGO website. There was no data for this event.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. The Top 8 is below.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| UB Reanimator | 1st | albertoSD |
| Sneak and Show | 2nd | wingzeronfc |
| Sneak and Show | 3rd | 2plus2isfive |
| UB Reanimator | 4th | davy2892 |
| Nadu Elves | 5th | galatriste |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 6th | lollerstank |
| Dimir Tempo | 7th | Peterpan226 |
| Sneak and Show | 8th | chanel-santini |
Lot of Sneak and Show here, and this finals was a reverse of the earlier Challenge event with UB Reanimator winning.
No copies of Fanatic to be seen here, but two copies of Abhorrent Oculus. This card seems quite good to bring back from the graveyard, and even just casting it sometimes can be good because more than likely you'll have six cards you don't really care to lose. If this thing sticks around eventually you're going to bury your opponent. What is interesting about "manifest dread" is that the card you put the card you don't pick into your graveyard, which lets you have some form of Entomb-like card selection. You could pick up another creature to put into your graveyard to Reanimate or Manifest a Psychic Frog which is kind of silly.
In Second Place we had Sneak and Show.
This list is playing a card that has really caught my eye out of these decks and that is Yggdrasil, Rebirth Engine. It's a really unique card that is sort of like a Sneak Attack that lets you pull a creature from exile, and you can even set it up with Brainstorm to rip a creature into exile on end step in order to activate it the following turn. It does have the downside that it has to tap to do this, which is not quite like Sneak Attack being able to activate immediately again.
My Video of the Week
I put out another video on "What Does This Deck Do?" this past week, this time focusign on Cradle Control! Enjoy!
Around the Web
- Bob Huang has an article on bannings in Legacy. Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdles polled 30+ Legacy Players on what needs to happen with the BnR. Check it out here.
- Learn Cephalid Breakfast from EU Champ L4rss0n! Check it out here.
- Bryant Cook has a Necrodominance build with no Reserved List cards. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
Now that Leagues are posted throughout the week, let's find some Spice!
This deck did really well at EU EW, and it's just literal Tron.
Do you miss Pioneer Mono-Green Devotion? Well PunishingWaterfalls has the deck for you.
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!
