This Week in Legacy: Goodbye, Sweet Prince
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 are diving into the Banned and Restricted announcement from this week on January 25th. Because of this announcement I will not be covering the Challenge from this past weekend, but I will have a Spice Corner.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Death of a Monkey
Well, we had a Banned and Restricted Announcement this week and there was indeed a change to the Legacy format. You can find the full announcement here.
Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer is now banned in the Legacy format. This is certainly a ban that I expected to occur, but for me I don't think these changes go far enough for Legacy. Ragavan certainly had some problematic play patterns, but I believe that we may see little change in the overall Legacy metagame with this card gone. The changes to UR Delver are pretty simple as the deck is forced to go back to four copies of Delver of Secrets. This doesn't change much of the primary shell construction in the deck, but it does change some flex spots here or there. In addition, because of the density of cards like Dragon's Rage Channeler and Murktide Regent as well as Expressive Iteration there still is very little reason for Delver to splash into other colors, so staying in the UR color pairing is correct.
What this does mean for the rest of the metagame is that we can expect to see decks like D&T and 8Cast knocked back a little bit because of how good those decks were against Ragavan in specific, but especially if other decks find room for sweeper effects that deal with these types of strategies. Control shells receive a bit of a boost from Ragavan being gone as the card was specifically very good in blue matchups. Furthermore, Doomsday has a bit better play potentially because of the back and forth between Delver and Control. The recent resurgence of Reanimator may go down again because of Control being able to have cards like Endurance and Force of Negation in greater quantities.
As far as addressing the actual ban announcement itself though, Wizards stated that while recent events haven't been conclusive of Delver's win rates, Magic Online league data was showing the deck to have a 56% non mirror match win rate and more than twice as many trophies over the next highest archetype over the past few weeks. It's definitely clear from this that a change was needed, it's just that I don't know if just Ragavan was the right change. Regardless, this is the change we have to deal with so hopefully I am wrong and the metagame proves to be more interesting. At the bare minimum, games in general versus UR Delver are likely to be a little less frustrating with Ragavan stealing cards.
The article does address the fact that they will continue to keep an eye on the metagame and step in if further adjustments are needed, so hopefully we are able to make these adjustments a little quicker.
Another side note on this banning comes with the announcement that the Saturday Legacy Challenges (and only the Saturday Challenges) are being moved back to a 32 player minimum in hopes that this reinvigorates this event to fire again.
Regardless of what happens next, I and the Legacy Data Collection Project will keep looking at the metagame data and providing the best analysis that we can with the data we have available. I'm definitely looking forward to my weekend at Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy to see what people come up with for this metagame shift.
Around the Web
- While we were waiting for the BnR, Phil Gallagher had us going with Laelia and Rhinos. Check it out here.
- The DDFT Wiki posted a sideboard guide! Check that out here.
- Challenge winner TonyScapone posted a video on recapping the win on The EPIC Gamble. Check that out here!
- The EPIC Storm website has an article on the 8Cast vs TES Matchup. Check that out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find all the 5-0 League lists from this past week here.
Our first list is from our good friend 1MrLee with a sweet White Eldrazi build.
This is a spicy Aluren/Nic Fit variant for sure!
A good friend of mine 5-0ed with this sweet Painter list. Oswald Fiddlebender!
This Enchantress build is SOMETHING SWEET.
Finally, this deck from Stryfo... there are no words.
What I'm Playing This Week
I had some time this past week and was playing around with a pretty sweet deck. It's a little thing we're calling "Cooking Up Value"!
This deck was pretty fun, so I even took some time to record some video on it! I ended 2-3 in this league but got to do some sweet stuff with Time Sieve.
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!
