This Week in Legacy: Golden Chicken 3.0

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Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week I'm going to be talking about a great paper Legacy event that I attended over this past weekend in Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 7! In addition to that we've got our first weekend of Challenge and Showcase Challenge results in the bag from the post-Ragavan ban metagame to discuss, as well as a Spice Corner.

I am not going to be doing any Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty spoilers yet, as I generally leave set reviews until the full set is spoiled, but suffice to say that set is shaping up to bring some changes to the metagame for sure!

Without further ado, let's dive right in!

Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 7

I've written about Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy fairly often before on this column. The tournaments that TO Robert Wilson puts on are some of the best events and incredibly fun. Since returning to form last December, these events have not only increased in payouts and fun, but they've also been a great example of holding events safely (both masks and vaccination required). This past weekend was Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy 7, an event which capped at 64 players of 100% proxy allowed Legacy.

For those unaware of this series, the events were so named because of their humble beginnings in Robert Wilson's need to bring more Legacy to people that wanted to play it, starting with his immediate playgroup of friends where he would make Buffalo Chicken dip for their gatherings. The Dip itself has become a fixture of Robert's events. Come for Legacy, get some Dip, and play some fun games. In addition to that, Robert's vision of these events is such that prizing is very specific, often being expensive Reserved List cards to allow players to win those cards either for their decks or to help supplement getting further into Legacy. This is one of the primary reasons that BCDL is 100% proxy allowed, to give players the means to win duals or other cool prizes.

This particular event was no slouch. First prize was a Gaea's Cradle, and Second Place got a Badlands, while Third-Fourth each got a Plateau. Fifth through Eighth got an Alliances Force of Will, and Ninth - Sixteenth got an Ancient Tomb from Tempest. This was the first event held at 64 players, and was the first event to pay out to Top 16. Not only that, it was the first paper Legacy event in the post Ragavan ban world where players could watch the action from home, because naturally... this event had COVERAGE featuring two great friends of mine Minhajul Hoq and Nathaniel Snyder (sickest coverage team ever). Coverage which you can check out over on the BCDL Twitch.

I was fortunate enough to attend this event this past weekend and had a real blast at it. In fact, I'm going to talk about my tournament as well as the overall event, so let's dive into the event itself first.

The BCDL Metagame

As I mentioned before, this event had 64 players in it, so pretty healthy for a paper Legacy event. Let's look at how the overall metagame broke down.

You can find all of the decklists for this event here and the data sheet here.

One thing that was readily apparent in the room on Saturday was that it didn't seem like there was much Delver as is represented here. Six players in a room of 64 didn't feel like all that much, and the deck had a fair win rate throughout the event. The decks that really did well were decks like GW Depths and Painter, putting up really solid win rates overall. Reanimator was also really popular as was Bant Control, but neither of them seemed to have a solid win rate.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	Player Name
Painter	1st	Roger Sikes
GW Depths	2nd	Gabriel Ebady
Food Chain	3rd	Karl Schulz
Yorion Zenith	4th	Andrew Bailey
Sneak and Show	5th	Kory Kasler
UR Delver	6th	Roland Chang
Doomsday	7th	Nicholas French-Seats
8Cast	8th	Amin Ebady

For the first large-ish paper event since the ban and in the first weekend no less, this is a decent-looking Top 8. Plenty of different archetypes, and lots of interesting stuff going on. At the end of the event however, it was a stunningly decisive victory by a very good friend of mine in Roger Sikes on GR Painter!

This list is sick, and I definitely watched some amazing games of Roger's throughout the day. Once Upon a Time seems ultra amazing when you consider you're trying to find your Welders/Painters but also your copies of Urza's Saga. Definitely powerful list from a strong Painter player.

The Second Place finalist was on GW Depths.

A lot of this list doesn't really change with the banning, with the exception of maybe running your Prismatic Ending in the sideboard as opposed to a copy or two main deck. I like the makeup of this list a lot though. GW Depths definitely seems like a great deck if you're familiar with the ins and outs of it.

Also in the Top 8 here we had Karl Schulz on Food Chain!

I always enjoy seeing Food Chain in these events (and because of Joe Palazzo I'm guaranteed to always see it once) because I think the deck is incredibly fun. It's only awkward for Magic Online because of all the clicking but even that isn't too hateful. I'd love to see it more. This list is great for sure and seems very well-tuned.

Down next in the Top 8 we had a copy of Yorion Zenith.

Basically the big value mana deck of the format now, this deck wants to try to make games go long so that it can develop its mana into game-winning finisher threats like Uro and Primeval Titan w/ Field of the Dead at the top end. It's definitely got some strong chops.

Down near the bottom of the Top 8 we've got the lone UR Delver of the Top 8, and it's our good friend Roland Chang!

I dig the spread of threats here with having to go back up to four copies of Delver and two Young Pyromancer. What's great here as well is the addition of Tarfire as another card type to help turn on Dragon's Rage Channeler. Three Murktide is a statement for sure, but the card is so very strong that one to two of them generally ends the games super quick.

My BCDL Experience

My own BCDL experience was pretty fun in all regards, as most of my losses came from sheer matchup lottery (a chance you take playing the deck I played) so I'm not actually upset about how I finished (3-3 overall). I had spent a lot of time waffling on what I wanted to do with for event (mostly because of the ban), even almost playing the Asmor/Cookbook deck from the video I posted last week. It was Nathaniel Snyder who put the thought in my head of playing Madness, but not just any build of Madness. He had been playing a list utilizing Careful Study over Burning Inquiry and has been putting up some results with it, so we hashed out a final list and went ahead with it.

Suffice to say, I was pretty happy with how the deck performed in general. The extra consistency of Study made for many games where Hollow One got to see play far more, instead of those games with Burning Inquiry where you accidentally discard some number of them. Having this extra bit of redundancy really mattered in so many of the games I won. You can find a more recent list of Nathan's over here more tuned for the Magic Online metagame if you're looking for a place to start with this deck. It definitely was a ton of fun and I would have played it again no matter what happened.

I'm going to briefly talk about my tournament rounds from a high-level overview.

R1 Vs Aluren (WIN 2-1)

I told Eric (my opponent) that he would definitely see his list in this article this week because holy cow this deck was super sweet. I had a quick win Game 1 and a loss to Aluren with Acererak the Archlich in Game 2, following it all up with a stellar Game 3 where I just had so much quick action that it made it hard to win. But still, this deck was sweet and it looked like a ton of fun.

R2 Vs 8Cast (LOSS 0-2)

This is one of the matchups for Madness that is basically one of the worst to possibly play. A lot of Madness hinges on winning Game 1 because of the surprise factor of the deck plus the fact that many decks aren't prepared well for the aggressive starts the deck has. 8Cast turns this on its head with Urza's Saga and Sai/Emry and makes it really hard to push through damage, especially when your opponent has a Shadowspear equipped to a Construct. Post board, I mulled for hate and while I had the Meltdown in hand, I never drew a second land to do Ancient Grudge plus Meltdown and when it did happen it was Forced. Such is life!

R3 Vs Bant Control (LOSS 1-2)

Bant is a deck you ideally want to play against, as most fair blue piles can have a hard time vs Madness, provided you are able to just kill them before Uro is escaped from the graveyard. If anyone is able to ever escape Uro, you are pretty much losing the race here and it's rough. I did get to kill an Endurance with a Firestorm and a pumped Rootwalla, so that part was pretty cool in this matchup.

R4 Vs Doomsday (WIN 2-1)

My Game 1 of this matchup involved one of the very few ultra busted hands of finding another Hollow One off Once Upon a Time and turning a Careful Study and a Street Wraith into two Hollow One and a Vengevine. I lost Game 2 to a well crafted pile that had to pass the turn, but I was unable to push through enough damage to make it work. Game 3 was simply high-velocity combat math and some Surgical Extraction here or there to cut off cantrips and force through threats.

R5 Vs Colorless 12-Post (LOSS 0-2)

This deck played maindeck Leyline of the Void and Helm of Obedience and I had functionally zero agency in either game. It was rough.

R6 Vs Infect (WIN 2-1)

Infect is another semi aggro deck, albeit one that does get to play Daze. Playing around Daze is generally fairly easy for Madness so basically these games turn into racing to win before they do. I did get to really leverage Firestorm in post board matchups after losing Game 1 to two swings off a Blighted Agent. Solid games for sure.

My Final Thoughts

I think Madness is probably a pretty solid deck in the current metagame still. It has a ton of velocity and you can catch people unprepared easily. Two of my major losses came from hitting extremely lopsided matchups in general and some variance, and I felt that my play was pretty reasonable in general. The deck is still so much fun when it does what it's supposed to do that I think it can definitely be a contender moving forward.

Big shoutout to Nathaniel Snyder for helping me with my list and providing me great encouragement throughout the day and advice! It was definitely a pleasure learning from your experience, as all of us can learn from others.

Legacy Challenge 1/29

We had our first Saturday Challenge fire this past weekend since the banning of Ragavan this past week as well as a change being made to this Challenge to make the minimum number of players 32. As such, this event had 81 players in it, thanks to the data collected by the Legacy Data Collection Project.

You can find the datasheet for this event here. Unfortunately we don't have full decklists for this event because they were not posted to the Wizards website (more than likely due to the change in the event structure).

Definitely an interesting first post-ban Challenge. UR Delver had a pretty popular representation here, alongside a solidly reasonably win rate. Yorion Zenith also did really well, and so did Doomsday. Some of the outliers below the cutoff also had very reasonable win rates too.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
4C Control	1st	TrueHero
Yorion Zenith	2nd	ecobaronen
Eldrazi	3rd	Hakumei1234
RUG Delver	4th	DimitriQED
Reanimator	5th	Slatorade
Reanimator	6th	Funnyman31399
Blood Moon Aggro	7th	Maximum_Zen
UR Delver	8th	Numstall

Pretty intriguing Top 8. Fair amount of Reanimator here and a few Delvers, plus some Blood Moon action. At the end of the event however it was TrueHero on 4C Control that took it all down. We at least have that list from Twitter.

This deck is wild. Having copies of Master of Death as a pitchable force card that also pitches to Dack Fayden for card advantage is silly, and it can easily be surveilled by the Dragon's Rage Channelers because it will come back to hand next upkeep. Really fun looking deck in general.

Legacy Showcase Challenge 1/30

This weekend was also the first Legacy Showcase Challenge of the season. These events are premier play events only enterable with Qualification Points (QPs) and the Top 8 feeds into the Showcase Qualifier at the end of the season. This event drew 217 players thanks to the data from the Legacy Data Collection Project.

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

UR Delver had a massive presence in this event, dwarfing the next most popular deck of Jeskai Control at 43 copies overall. In addition to being the most played deck in the event, the deck boasted a 57% non mirror win rate in the event, which is pretty good. Death and Taxes also had an insane performance in this event at 11 copies with a 63% non mirror win rate. As we will see by the Top 8 however, D&T did exceedingly well overall.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
Death and Taxes	1st	luinil
UR Delver	2nd	Nammersquats
Jeskai Control	3rd	mahzinha_linda
4C Control	4th	Ozymandias17
UR Delver	5th	MaxMagicer
4C Control	6th	Stormguyisme
UR Delver	7th	ConnorM426
Reanimator	8th	Ark4n

While yes this Showcase had 3x UR Delver in the Top 8, the real story here is right at the top with a win by Death and Taxes. The winner here is Jason Murray (aka luinil), who is among some of the best D&T players in the entire format. It's a real statement that many of these 200+ player events are being won by excellent D&T players like luinil and xjcloud. It really shows what dedication to one's deck means in the Legacy format, and how knowing your deck and how it relates to the format is still ever so important.

This list is definitely incredibly solid, hitting all the right notes of an expected format where not much was expected to really shift too much, and luinil hit it all right on the nose. Solid performance overall, congrats Jason!

In the Second Place seat we have UR Delver.

Brazen Borrower is definitely a card I expected to come back in some capacity. It seems pretty good. A main deck copy of Pyroblast also shows up here, as a hedge against other Murktides and escaped Uros.

Also in the Top 8 we had the Jeskai Hullbreacher pile that's been making the rounds.

This deck is pretty interesting. It has a solid control game plan but it can turn a corner pretty quickly with their combo aspect of Narset/Hullbreacher + wheel effect. Very strong deck indeed.

At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Reanimator.

The current Reanimator lists keep running back and forth on their flex spots, like this list playing Chancellor main while we've seen others play it in the sideboard. I really like Archetype of Endurance though, that card is solid for sure.

Legacy Challenge 1/30

Beside the Showcase Challenge there was also a regular Challenge event that fired. This event fired right at 64 players 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.

This Challenge had a strange meta to it since it took place pretty much at the same time as the Showcase Challenge. A lot of players were double queuing these events, and big shoutout to Ozymandias17 (Matt Vook) who not only double queued both of these events, but Top 8'ed both of them AND collected data for the regular Challenge and the Showcase. Definitely a hard worker! As noted though, there was a lot of Reanimator in this event, and also a good amount of UR Delver (which had a great performance overall).

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
Doomsday	1st	Enrichetta
Reanimator	2nd	piao
UR Delver	3rd	Mammonth
Death and Taxes	4th	imakekiblercry
UR Delver	5th	UnderwaterBimbo
Mystic Forge Combo	6th	susurrus_mtg
Painter	7th	utley26
4C Control	8th	Ozymandias17

Definitely an interesting Top 8 here. At the top end though, we have Doomsday taking it all down!

Doomsday is definitely a deck that is more interesting to consider what it can do if we fall into a world where Delver is able to be pushed back, and having Ragavan gone is technically much better for the deck anyways. Ensnaring Bridge out of the sideboard is kind of slick tech for sure against a good portion of decks like Elves or other decks that are able to make hasty threats (or even just stonewalling Murktide Regent).

In Second Place we've got Reanimator.

As previously noted, here's yet another main deck configuration of the deck, with nothing like Serra's Emissary and more cards like Archon of Cruelty and sideboard plans of cards like Prismatic Ending to answer hate cards. Seems pretty strong for sure.

Further down the Top 8 we had colorless player extraordinaire Michael Coyle on Mystic Forge Combo.

There's a lot going on in this deck, but Paradox Engine and Mystic Forge with casting spells and mana rocks is pretty groovy. Seems very strong indeed.

At the bottom of the Top 8 we have Painter.

This is more akin to the "Strawberry Shortcake" variants of Painter, where you get cards like Enlightened Tutor to get either half of the combo, but Saga also nabs the Grindstone directly to play as well. Really strong and interesting list for sure.

Around the Web

• Everyday Eternal asks the question "Have You Seen This Monkey?"
• The Eternal Glory Podcast also weighs in on the Ragavan ban over here.
• The Competitive Lands Podcast posted a new episode this past week. Check that out here.
• TonyScapone wrote a great article on The EPIC Gamble, which you can find over here.

The Spice Corner

You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.

STIFLENOUGHT.

Mono Black DETH (Helm/Depths) is pretty sweet. Chains of Mephistopheles in the sideboard!

Sick Rector Nic Fit list with a Living Wish sideboard package.

Flow_true is out here living their best life with Dice Factory in Legacy.

Really neat WB Affinity-esque deck here with Oswald Fiddlebender.

Another Nic Fit list, this one with Greater Gargadon!

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!