This Week in Legacy: Forging Ahead
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 some of the intricacies of the Mystic Forge deck a bit in addition to a look ahead to this weekend's Eternal Weekend in Prague. We've also got some Challenges to look at in addition to a Showcase Qualifier.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Forging the Way
With Eternal Weekend North America in the rearview mirror, people are talking a lot about Mystic Forge Combo decks and of course, Vexing Bauble. Mystic Forge Combo has proven that it is a competitive and powerful deck. Let's talk about some of the things this deck does and what actually hurts this deck.
Mystic Forge as a deck is a surprising name, because more than often lately the deck has actually cut its namesake card down in number of copies in the main deck, often shunting one copy to the sideboard for Karn, the Great Creator to fetch. The deck's primary game plan is to leverage the insane number of haymakers that it plays. Nearly every card that the deck wants to deploy is a way for it to generally win the game, and the deck is just no longer focused on establishing The One Ring or Paradox Engine to combo off. Everything this deck wants to do is huge, and generally it all boils down to whatever combo game plan presents itself with your mulligan and deck construction decisions.
The big selling point for this deck is the combo of Glaring Fleshraker and Kozilek's Command. Both of these cards are exceptionally high power. Fleshraker in general is very powerful with a bunch of the low cost cards in the deck, but Kozilek's Command really pushes Fleshraker into new levels. By having the flexibility to do a huge number of things, Command is one of the bigger cards that when it resolves it is usually doing something really powerful. The popular mode here being the Eldrazi Spawn mode due to its interaction with Fleshraker, and the Eldrazi Spawn mode creates a bunch more colorless creatures that can then be used for another Kozilek's Command, turning Fleshraker into a sort of colorless Fireball.
Another big set of cards here is Karn, the Great Creator and The One Ring. Both of these cards present some really powerful ways to win the game, Karn by locking out the game with Lattice or The One Ring drawing a bunch of cards.
What really makes this deck tick is the manabase allowing this deck to really hum. Planar Nexus and Urza's Tower makes four mana which is where this deck wants to be with cards like Mystic Forge and The One Ring. This set of lands work really well at generating a bunch of mana, and one of the notable additions to the deck to improve this is a singleton copy of Candelabra of Tawnos being able to untap these lands and then use things like Manifold Key to untap the Candelabra, which is absolutely insane.
The biggest thing this deck wants to do is have a functioning opening hand, which often revolves around some amount of fast mana backed up by either protection with Vexing Bauble or a few haymakers that bait the opponent's counterspells. Playing out a Bauble on Turn 1 into The One Ring or Karn on Turn 2 is a pretty reasonable set of turns. Sometimes you can go pedal to the metal if you know the deck you're playing against in Game 1 simply cannot interact with you well.
One of the bigger things I've heard about this deck lately is that more Null Rod and more Collector Ouphe is what is going to beat this deck, but I don't personally believe that actually impacts the deck as much as people would really think. This deck was seen in the finals beating four copies of Collector Ouphe (made by Springheart Nantuko) with lethal Kozilek's Command from two life. While these effects are very good against a sub portion of the deck, they're not good as the only piece of hate especially if you can't follow up that with some form of a clock to keep them down. One card I would really look at for this deck is cards like Consign to Memory because of how powerful in general that card is.
The best way to beat the deck in general is to attack their mana and the things that enable them to get to higher cost effects but you have to have a clock on them at the same time, and this is where things get rough. If you can put the Mystic Forge player under the clock they have to be under pressure to generate advantage and win if they can't develop a plan fast enough to beat the clock. Ancient Tomb damage adds up and that also helps the clock a bunch as well. Post board games, you are definitely going to need that same advantage but also just multiple angles of attack. You can't rely on Forcing a single thing anymore with this deck, and changing up your play patterns to beat the deck and understanding it better will help a lot.
One thing that could help? Listening to the Champion himself! Kelvin Wallace was recently on with Ecobaronen talking about how to beat this deck, and it's worth taking a listen to. Check it out below.
Regardless of what happens going forward in a few weeks with the Banned and Restricted Announcement, it's worth knowing what this deck does and how to beat it. We'll see what happens at Eternal Weekend Prague.
Eternal Weekend Prague 2024 This Weekend!
This weekend is the final event of our trio of Eternal Weekend events, being held in Prague this weekend! This event is being held by JK Entertainment and you can find all of the information on the events taking place at this EW here.
The last thing I heard about this event was that there's a fairly large amount of Legacy sign-ups for the event (over 800ish) so we may be looking at quite another large EW event (but probably not as large as NA).
Legacy Challenge 32 11/27
The first Challenge of the week was the Wednesday event. According to the MTGO site, this event had 50 players in it. 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 | Graciasportanto |
| Eldrazi | 2nd | Flossed |
| Dimir Tempo | 3rd | Sven745 |
| Esper Tempo | 4th | Hammafist |
| Dimir Tempo | 5th | GuiBonella |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 6th | Bezerra_da_Silva |
| Dimir Tempo | 7th | Ale_Mtg |
| Dimir Tempo | 8th | Messi_10 |
Quite a lot of Dimir Tempo variants here in this Top 8. At the end of the event it was *GASP* Dimir Tempo that won.
Kaito seems like a really solid card for this deck that probably should be explored more. It looks really good with things like Tamiyo and Baleful Strix since more than likely neither of those cards are generally going to be blocked by anything. The value in the surveil is nice, while the emblem is only good with Kaito himself.
In Second Place we had Eldrazi.
Sire of Seven Deaths! I kind of had an inkling that this could be a card Eldrazi could play given how cost-reduced it could get between Eye of Ugin and It That Heralds the End. Sometimes just having a giant threat that's really hard to deal with (paying 7 life is rough) is great.
Legacy Challenge 32 11/29
The second Challenge of the week was the Frday event. According to the MTGO site, this event had 35 players in it. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| The EPIC Gamble | 1st | TonyScapone |
| Oops! All Spells | 2nd | Cachorrowo |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 3rd | ecobaronen |
| ANT | 4th | hugofreitas1 |
| Sneak and Show | 5th | JPA93 |
| Red Painter | 6th | utley26 |
| Sneak and Show | 7th | Asa_Akira |
| Grixis Control | 8th | JamesKisau |
Large amount of combo decks here, with the Top 4 being all Combo decks. At the end of the event it was The EPIC Gamble that won.
There's a ton of moving parts in this deck, and it's wild to me to see that while this deck has four Vexing Bauble that it does still have twelve zero drop spells in it. They're definitely high impact spells but that does have to cause the occasional brick sometimes I'm sure. The wish board is really sweet though.
In Second Place we had Oops! All Spells.
The real MVP of these current Oops lists is definitely Memory's Journey. It makes interacting with the graveyard in this deck a really interesting conundrum, since the deck can easily set up another win with their Oracle. It's a solid card and playing around it is very interesting. Generally the trick is to have multiple pieces of interaction to push through it.
Legacy Challenge 32 11/30 - 1
The third Challenge of the week was the first Saturday event. According to the MTGO site, this event had 45 players in it. 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Doomsday | 1st | Wanbo |
| Red Painter | 2nd | SK8000 |
| Oops! All Spells | 3rd | choutin |
| Dimir Tempo | 4th | kentaro_hokori |
| Death and Taxes (Yorion) | 5th | yoshiwata |
| Sneak and Show | 6th | 2plus2isfive |
| UB Reanimator | 7th | Galaxy_Impact |
| Nadu Combo | 8th | SHAKELION |
This is a much more varied Top 8 overall. At the end of the event it was Doomsday that won.
The Tempo Doomsday variants certainly are quite strong. I like the shift to full on tempo with Barrowgoyf and Murktide Regent out of the sideboard for sure. Goyf in general is an incredibly powerful card that can close games out super fast, especially with the lifelink swing but also growing when it deals combat damage in general.
In Second Place we had Red Painter.
Bauble has certainly really injected itself into Painter, but it's very good there with Saga and the ability to prevent interaction on their combo pieces, but also the ability to cycle them from the graveyard with Goblin Welder and Goblin Engineer.
Legacy Challenge 32 11/30 - 2
The final Challenge of the week was the Wednesday event. According to the data collected by the Legacy Data Collection Project, this event had 41 players in it.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
Dimir Tempo was the most popular deck here but it's overall win rate was not very good. Mystic Forge did very well here, as did Dimir Delver.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mystic Forge Combo | 1st | musasabi |
| Dimir Delver | 2nd | PierrePoilievre2025 |
| Red Painter | 3rd | kanican |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 4th | Chris_McNasty |
| Nadu Combo | 5th | Lavaridge |
| Doomsday | 6th | Geodude_Jared |
| The EPIC Storm | 7th | ScreenwriterNY |
| Oops! All Spells | 8th | Trohck |
Lot going on in this Top 8 with a lot of combo presence. At the end of the event it was Mystic Forge Combo that won.
We talked quite a bit about this deck already, and the effects that its win at EW are having are being felt across MTGO at the moment for sure.
In Second Place we had Dimir Delver.
The major difference here between this and Dimir Tempo is sheer play patterns. Dimir Tempo playing out Tamiyo is a much different range of options versus playing out Delver on Turn 1. The lists are very similar in construction otherwise, but the Delver openings is the key thing here. Having a Delver opening means quite a bit over the 0 power creature that while it's good, it does change the texture of how turns play out.
Legacy Showcase Qualifier 12/1
This past weekend was also the Legacy Showcase Qualifier event for this season. These events are invitation only as invitations are earned through either making Top 8s of Showcase Challenge events or doing well in Last Chance Qualifier events. The winner of a Showcase Qualifier earns not just great prizes, but also an invitation to the Champion's Showcase on MTGO and either a PT invite or Worlds invite. This weekend's event had exactly 32 players in it that qualified.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.
These events are generally always very inbred metagames, because of the nature of how one gets into them (by invite), so a lot of deck specialists and generically good players tend to end up in them. As such, they tend to skew towards teching for what players generally qualified with because that acts as a bit of a tell on what people will play. In this case, Red Stompywas very popular and it did very well, but it was UB Reanimator that ended up being supremely strong.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| UB Reanimator | 1st | FreeEducation |
| Oops! All Spells | 2nd | aManatease |
| Nadu Elves | 3rd | Xenowan |
| Esper Vial | 4th | jtl005 |
| Red Stompy | 5th | PintuMtg |
| Doomsday | 6th | Enrichetta |
| Dimir Delver | 7th | Oceansoul92 |
| UB Reanimator | 8th | gatekappa |
Quite a varied Top 8 actually. At the end of the event it was UB Reanimator that won (and both players on the deck made it into the Top 8).
This is certainly a very interesting take on the deck. Main deck Barrowgoyf is really interesting actually since it mills you which sets up some Reanimation spells too in addition to the surveil lands.
In Second Place we had Oops! All Spells.
This version of the deck has been steadily gaining popularity and it's not hard to see why. It's constructed quite well and has a bunch of interesting things it's doing. Poxwalkers in general as just a backup threat is pretty cool.
Around the Web
- 90sMTG has a recap on the Gamestoria 1K event. Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdles talked to Maxtortion recently about his Vintage Champs win and also Legacy success. Check it out here.
- Some Bant Nadu content! Check it out here.
- Fenruscloud has another 5-0 with Jeskai Control. Check it out here.
- BRING OUT YER DEAD, I MEAN NULL RODS!
The Spice Corner
Now that Leagues are posted throughout the week, let's find some Spice!
This Yorion deck is something else.
8Mulch is a really fun deck! Good to see it.
Killabee gonna Killabee.
This player does NOT like other players having lands at all. AT ALL.
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!
