This Week in Legacy: Halloween Tribal
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 getting into the spooky season for my last article before my vacation next week by digging into some Halloween Tribal lists! These are totally for fun and not meant at all to be competitive, so go nuts! We've also got Challenge data this week for both events. I do also have some information on the Axion Now events over this past weekend in Europe as well as some news on Eternal Weekend!
Just a reminder that as noted, I am out on vacation until the 12th of November, so there will be no Legacy/Vintage articles here the next two weeks.
On a somber note, I did learn this past weekend that one of the Seattle Legacy scene's best and brightest Legacy players Jordan Aisaka has passed away. If you ever checked out Card Kingdom's Legacy streams, Jordan was a familiar face there, and he was also well known in the community for white bordering a lot of Legacy staples as well as being a huge Lands player. We're keeping Jordan's family in our thoughts this week for sure. I didn't know him personally, but he was one of the most welcoming and friendly faces in the Seattle Legacy community.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Halloween Season!
As something super fun I thought I'd do this week before I went on my vacation, I thought it would be fun to theorize what various Halloween Tribes could potentially look like in Legacy. For this I'm looking at the bigger three we often see a lot of, which are Vampires, Zombies, and Werewolves. None of these decks are tuned at all (or even tested), so they are all generally jank/fun decks to try out. I will at least explain the thought process that took me through the process! This was kind of fun for me, and even though none of these could be considered super competitive, I hope you find them fun!
Zombies!
The first Tribe that felt interesting was of course Zombies. I thought about the variety of Zombies here and how the color pie has shifted for this tribe, given that this tribe has been dipped into both blue and white, but ultimately I chose to remain in Mono Black for the Zombies here. One big thing I wanted to look at here was the interaction of Poxwalkers as a new card with Cabal Therapy and Gravecrawler alongside cards like Carrion Feeder and Champion of the Perished.
I also ultimately chose to not include Aether Vial here, even though that can be a common tribal card in a sense, there doesn't seem to be a huge payoff for it here especially when Diregraf Colossus wants you to cast Zombie spells like Gravecrawler.
Vampires
For the Vampires deck, I chose to focus much more on a very aggressive slant with cards that grow larger with damage, as well as a minor focus on Blood tokens. In the long-term late game of the deck, stealing other creatures with Captivating Vampire became a thing, and also having something that kills the opponent with Blood Artist.
My only self-critique on this one is that I would like to maybe work in Phyrexian Altar or something similar as a mana sink and some form of token generation. Still, this was a fun one to build.
Werewolves
Werewolves were interesting because we have had in the past a basis of Werwolves in a Stompy shell so that's sort of where I went with it. I opted to not bother with a Chalice of the Void based Aggro Stompy variant to focus on pushing out better creatures. I also utilized Blood Sun over Blood Moon here to allow City of Traitors to stick around better and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker as a way to push card advantage and mana production with a late game of copying other Werewolves.
This one most of all intrigues me and seems super fun to try to play for sure.
Eternal Weekend 2022 Events
We finally got some confirmation on Eternal Weekend events for this year, and it seems like with very short notice we are getting an in person set of Eternal Weekend events this year for both Asia and North America in addition to an online event. You can find the announcement at Magic.gg for all of this. One big change to this year is the fact that the Top 8 competitors from every Legacy Eternal Weekend event will receive a special paper promo copy of Ponder shown below. This means only 24 of these will be in existence.
Let's take a look at each of the events.
Asia Eternal Weekend
The Asia Eternal Weekend events are being held in Aichi, Japan by BIG MAGIC on November 26th-27th. The winner of the Legacy Championship for this weekend will receive a Gaea's Cradle artwork trophy.
Details on this event are forthcoming on BIG MAGIC's website.
North America Eternal Weekend
The North American Eternal Weekend is being held in Philadelphia by Card Titan on December 9th-11th. The winner of the Legacy Championship at this event will receive a Scrubland art trophy.
All the details for this weekend will be on Card Titan's website, but nothing is available just yet. As it stands I am highly unlikely to be able to make it to such an event as six weeks notice is a bit too close to make good plans. Hopefully next year we can do this and have better long term notice.
Magic Online Eternal Weekend
We are getting a virtual version of Eternal Weekend this year again with a lot of differences from past Eternal Weekends we have had online. This is due in part to the fact that scheduling for a European Eternal Weekend fell through and thus the prizes for that event have been shunted to the MTGO event.
The MTGO events will take place on December 10th-11th with the Legacy event happening on December 10th starting at 1 AM PT (4 AM ET). Unlike past events this event is not an All Access Event. The Legacy event does however only cost 20 Event Tickets or 200 Play Points to enter.
The winner of the Legacy event will receive a The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale artwork trophy. Top 8 competitors will receive the physical promo copy of the Ponder, not a MTGO copy.
Full details of the MTGO event are over on MTGO.com.
Axion Now - Axion The Gathering Weekend
Axion Now had a huge weekend event in Birmingham with two different Legacy events on Saturday and Sunday, each one of these boasting over 100+ players in each event! In fact thanks to our good friend Callum Smith I've got the Top 8s for both events below here and some of the spicy decklists that showed up. You can check out all of Axion's events and stuff here.
Saturday
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Painter | 1st | Jasper Murison-Bowie |
| ANT | 2nd | Alex De Lis |
| 8Cast | 3rd/4th | Steven Walsh |
| RG Valakut | 3rd/4th | Andy Fernandes |
| Yorion Zenith | 5th/8th | Anders Thiesen |
| Yorion Zenith | 5th/8th | Theo Andreiser |
| UR Delver | 5th/8th | Sam Pontyr |
| Reanimator | 5th/8th | Lewin Keller |
The big spice of this Top 8 was Andy Fernandes' RG Valakut list. Andy is also very responsible for resuscitating interest in Applejacks most recently as well.
Very sweet list. Very much a sort of Stompy deck without Primeval Titan here and it does some cool stuff.
Sunday
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Naya Stompy | 1st | Andy Fernandes |
| Painter | 2nd | Andreas Hofverberg |
| Sticker Goblins | 3rd/4th | James Mills |
| Sneak and Show | 3rd/4th | Alexander Ebinger |
| Yorion Zenith | 5th/8th | Anders Thiesen |
| 8Mulch | 5th/8th | James Calver |
| 4C Control | 5th/8th | Enrico Donisi |
| Cradle Control | 5th/8th | Francis Gene-Rowe |
Andy Fernandes returned with a vengeance in this event, not only Top 8'ing again but winning the event on Naya Stompy. This deck has some real spice to it.
New cards such as Mawloc and White Plume Adventurer here are super duper sweet and everything being tied together by Fable of the Mirror-Breaker really shows how good that card is.
Of course we would be remiss to not mention the fact that there was someone playing Turbo Sticker Muxus. Yes, this list is gross.
Definitely some wild stuff here in this. Casting Muxus super quick with the Sticker Goblin is something else.
All in though this looked like a sweet weekend for Legacy!
Legacy Challenge 10/22
The first Challenge event this weekend was on Saturday and was early morning. We do know that despite no decklist data that there were 51 players in this event.
You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here. Please note that the event itself on Wizards' site has some funkiness in regards to the order of the Top 8 decks. This is likely due to the transition to Daybreak Games and will hopefully improve as time goes on.
UR Delver was very popular over the next top decks and while it didn't have an insane win rate the deck did do well at the top end. Much of this event had a lot of decks below the cutoff here, with stuff like Stoneblade, D&T, and even Gruul Prison.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Doomsday | 1st | _INF_ |
| UR Delver | 2nd | Baku_91 |
| Gruul Prison | 3rd | Agam1985 |
| 8Cast | 4th | Butakov |
| Stoneblade | 5th | davy2892 |
| Death and Taxes | 6th | YukinoRin |
| Sneak and Show | 7th | MoMo321 |
| Painter | 8th | ganesh_69 |
Quite an interesting Top 8 here with some solid entries. At the end of the event though, it was Doomsday that won it all.
The Sheoldred tech in the sideboard here is still seemingly very good and really well showcased here as to how powerful that card is. Solid list overall.
The Second Place finalist was on UR Delver.
The big tech here is going into a sideboard color splash specifically for Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes which is super interesting. Otherwise this is a relatively stock main deck. The M&B tech is cool though for sure.
Also in this Top 8 we had Gruul Prison.
This deck is super sweet. Laelia, Caves of Chaos Adventurer, and Squee? Very cool list overall. Fable of the Mirror-Breaker really pulling its weight here for sure.
Legacy Challenge 10/23
The second Challenge event of this weekend had 94 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. Please note that the event itself on Wizards' site has some funkiness in regards to the order of the Top 8 decks. This is likely due to the transition to Daybreak Games and will hopefully improve as time goes on.
UR Delver was at the top yet again with a positive win rate of 56.12% non-mirror win rate. Doomsday did well, as did Elves and Reanimator. 4C Control piles did slightly worse than before, and a bunch of other things did pretty badly as well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| UR Delver | 1st | Baku_91 |
| GW Depths | 2nd | DNSolver |
| UR Delver | 3rd | OceanSoul92 |
| GW Depths | 4th | Didackith |
| Doomsday | 5th | Eureka22422 |
| Displacer Kitten | 6th | Iwouldliketorespond |
| 8Cast | 7th | Butakov |
| 4C Control | 8th | Ozymandias17 |
The big thing here of note is that 2/3 of the GW Depths players in the event made it into this Top 8. Very strong. At the end of the event it was a UR Delver deck splashing green in the sideboard for Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes that won the event. This was the same pilot who placed Second on Saturday's event.
Not only is this deck doing a sideboard juke of Minsc & Boo, but we also have a maindeck set of Counterbalance which has got to be pretty good versus the mirror really, given how much of those decks revolve around one-two MV spells. Seems very strong for sure.
The Second Place finalist was on GW Depths.
Strong list overall here. The sideboard Hall of Gemstone is pretty wild and super cool.
Further down the Top 8 we had an interesting setup of our good friend Marcus Ewaldh with a Displacer Kitten/Doomsday deck.
This is pretty sick I have to admit. Seems like a super fun list. I like the Kitten aspect of it, but it can also just Doomsday you. Very fun way to take things.
Around the Web
- The Lost and the Damned...
- Phil Gallagher is hitting some BUG Pox. Check it out here.
- Good old Sneak and Show. Check it out here.
- The Eternal Glory Podcast hit on the topics of Heritage and Supplemental sets in Legacy this past week. This episode is well worth checking out right here.
- 90sMTG has 4C Minsc Control vs Dungeon Stompy! Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here. League data was published but was not findable until Fireshoes on Twitter found it. Thanks, Fireshoes!
We have a Splinter Twin situation here.
4C Aluren with red splash? Wowza.
Mono White Stompy is pretty sweet.
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!
