This Week in Legacy: Joining Forces

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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 taking a moment to put a little spotlight on a deck I personally have been playing around with in the form of Winota Stompy. In addition to that, we also have two Legacy Challenges to talk about, one of which we have an interview with the winner (on one of the coolest decks in the Legacy format right now). Finally, as always we have our Spice Corner.

Without further ado, let's dive right into the thick of things.

Joining The Stompy Force

It isn't super often that I get to talk directly about the games that I play in the Legacy format. I spend a lot of time trying out various decks and all sorts of strategies, so I tend to switch around a lot between decks. I especially enjoy when new cards impact the format in more positive ways and create decks that didn't exist prior.

One such card that stuck out at me recently was Winota, Joiner of Forces.

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

This card had shown up in a few of my Twitter feeds in a White/Red Prison shell, and as someone who readily enjoys Chalice of the Void decks I dove right in, snagging a list from MTGO user abr off of one of the League 5-0 decklist dumps.

My initial experiences with this deck sofar are that it is like most Stompy/Chalice decks in existence. For every game/match that you do your thing and completely blow apart the opponent, there is a game where you either simply flood out or draw the wrong half of your deck, or have to mulligan a lot. Thankfully, the existence of the London Mulligan benefits this kind of deck well. Seasoned Pyromancer is also very good at helping filter through the deck to try to get to a payoff.

One of the big things I like about this deck is the fact that it can be so exceptionally aggressive that every combat step can almost be the opponent's last. Having the biggest payoff in the deck of Angrath's Marauders is one of the big reasons to play this deck, as putting that into play off Winota can simply spell lethal damage very quickly. Even without Marauders, you can do nearly as much as 13 points of damage in a single early combat step, immediately presenting lethal to the opponent.

I recently played a league with this deck, the first league that I felt comfortable playing with it. As some out there are aware, I have a bit of a weird anxiety thing about leagues and tend to play them very sparingly. That being said, I put together a 3-2 on the deck the first time out, so I am reasonably pleased with the performance of it. The league went as follows:

• Match 1 vs Worldgorger Dragon (2-1 WIN)
• Match 2 vs Sneak and Show (2-1 WIN)
• Match 3 vs Sneak and Show (0-2 LOSS)
• Match 4 vs GB Depths (2-0 WIN)
• Match 5 vs Dredge (0-2 LOSS)

I took the opportunity to go back and do a replay w/ commentary of this league, that I posted over on my personal YouTube channel, which will be shown below here. Note that I am aware of a few minor technical issues with the video, that were unfortunately hard to fix in time to post this. (I know enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be great at video editing!)

I recommend this deck if you're looking for an aggressively slanted deck that can also play a prison game.

Community Legacy Update

I do have at least one update for this section and that is about the Legacy 40K held by MissouriMTG (Jeremy Aaronson). Jeremy did confirm this week that this event is postponed and will be moved to a later date. Given the current state of things, this is the best thing to do with an event like this. Unfortunately, it seems like some folks are putting Jeremy under fire in DMs for this decision. My statement to those folks is to knock it off. Playing paper Magic is going to be rough for a while with a pandemic going on, so please don't yell at people having to make hard decisions like this. They're doing what they're doing for the safety and health of the community.

Legacy Challenge 6/27

Our first Challenge of the weekend was the early Saturday morning Challenge. As such it had only 34 players in it, thus leading to a fairly interesting Top 32 Metagame breakdown.

There was a lot going on in this event, despite the number of players overall. One thing to note however is that even with this many players, one thing that didn't show up was a lot of Snowko nor was there a ton of RUG Delver. To me it feels as if the Legacy metagame is evolving to include the Snow Control decks as part of the metagame, but not actually overpowering it like initially thought. It's neat to see the Legacy format continue to evolve back and forth.

Let's check out the Top 8!

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
RUG Delver	1st	Wakarock
RUG Delver	2nd	Yehua
Merfolk Oracle	3rd	Haneman
Yorion Stryfo Pile	4th	Lynnchalice
Ninjas	5th	Norumi
LED Dredge	6th	The_Daddy
G/B Depths	7th	Laywer
Aluren	8th	Yamaro

Despite not being a very large portion of the field, RUG Delver did a great job of converting, putting both pilots into the Top 4 and in the finals. Let's take a look at both lists.

Both of these lists are relatively similar in nature as to how they approach the Delver equation. There are no things like Stifle here, instead focusing on the value plan of Dreadhorde Arcanist and powerful creatures like Tarmogoyf. Both lists even have reasonably similar sideboards with Klothys, God of Destiny showing up. Still, both very powerful lists and powerful pilots.

In Third Place we have Merfolk Oracle.

I love the evolution here of how Merfolk has become more of a combo/control deck a la Splinter Twin decks. It operates on a very interesting axis and has breathed new life it seems into the archetype. Really cool stuff here.

In Fourth Place we have Yorion Stryfo Pile.

This deck is very powerful, having a lot of ways to utilize the bigger deck space provided by playing Yorion. Dack Fayden is very powerful in this deck, giving ways of filtering through the deck as well as being able to ditch cards that recur easily, such as Punishing Fire, Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath, and Cling to Dust.

In Fifth Place we have Ninjas.

This deck is incredibly cool, adding green into the mix for Oko, Thief of Crowns and Abrupt Decay. However, the base game plan of tempo'ing in Ninjas for effects is very strong. It is so great to see this deck still doing well.

In Sixth Place we have LED Dredge.

Dredge continues to be very strong lately, and I would not put it out of your mind when playing the format. It continues to put up impressive results. Also note the presence of Oko in the sideboard here, which is a reasonable play in grindy matchups.

In Seventh Place we have G/B Depths.

This is a pretty clean cut list and is fairly straightforward in its game plan. Depths in general is fairly popular and strong. Very powerful stuff indeed.

Rounding out the Top 8 we have Aluren.

It's pretty cool to see Aluren doing well. The deck is pretty strong now that plenty of the Snow based cards like Ice-Fang Coatl are around.

Now let's take a look at the 2019-2020 cards in this event. To approach this, we're only looking at 2019 cards with 10 copies or more, and 2020 cards up to Ikoria with 10 copies or more.

Card Name	Number of Copies
Veil of Summer	34
Force of Negation	23
Oko, Thief of Crowns	23
Prismatic Vista	22
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath	22
Ice-Fang Coatl	20
Once Upon a Time	18
Thassa's Oracle	14
Echo of Eons	10
Barrin, Tolarian Archmage	4
Conspicuous Snoop	4
Peer Into the Abyss	4
Song of Creation	4
Eliminate	3
See the Truth	3
Vito, Thorn of the Dusk Rose	1
Yorion, Sky Nomad	1

Quite a few Core Set 2021 cards showed up in this event, and it was interesting to note over the weekend as people attempted to utilize cards like Conspicuous Snoop. One thing I heard about Snoop consistently all weekend is that the combo itself felt a little too sluggish, but time will tell as to whether the correct shell will be found eventually for it.

Legacy Challenge 6/28

Our second Challenge of the weekend was the normal Sunday Challenge, and boy was it pretty incredible. Let's take a look at the Top 32 Metagame.

Again as noted before, the amount of Snow Control in this event was exceptionally low, with no actual 4C Snowko decks in the event. Instead, many of the Snow based decks in the event were other strategies like Yorion, Doomsday, etc.

Let's take a look at the Top 8. I'm excited, because this is awesome!

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
Worldgorger Dragon Combo	1st	Fire10798
Aggro-Loam	2nd	Ozymandias17
Hogaak	3rd	Vereno
RUG Delver	4th	Silviawataru
Elves	5th	NathanLipetz
Rector Nic Fit	6th	Overhaul
Infect	7th	SylwesterStruzyna
Death and Taxes	8th	3Erpz

This Top 8 is pretty cool simply because there are a lot of diverse archetypes in it. But at the top of the event is a severely cool archetype that has grown exceptionally over time and a well deserved Challenge win. That's right, it's Worldgorger Dragon Combo.

I got the opportunity to sit down with Kyle (Fire10798) on his Challenge win, as well as talking about Worldgorger in general.

First off, congratulations on your win. I caught the tail end of your stream and there were some incredible games there. Let's start by telling our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got into Magic and Legacy.

My name is Kyle, I’m currently in college, I’ve played Magic on and off for over 10 years now. I started playing in actual tournaments around the release of Return to Ravnica back in late 2012. From there I played a lot at my local LGSs until around the end of high school when I top 8ed GP New Jersey 2017 and got to go to Kyoto for my first PT. This was my first taste of professional Magic where in spite of going 1-5, I was quickly hooked. I did everything I could to get my next invite including grinding all my local PTQs, and PPTQs back when those were a thing. I was eventually able to qualify for PT Eldraine where I finished in 34th place. This was around the time I started to dip my toe into Legacy since I had a bit more disposable income, and wanted to have my go at the most complex format in Magic. I never did too well though since my deck choices of UW Stoneblade and later Bant Snowko (pre-Uro) had a hard time beating unfair decks, but it was always a ton of fun! The whole pandemic also gave me a lot more time to delve into this amazing format recently.

What got you into playing Worldgorger Dragon? Give us a little history on the deck.

The history of Worldgorger Dragon actually goes much, much further back than me. My good friend Alex was actually the one who pioneered all this way back in 2015, right after it was unbanned. He had mild to moderate success with it, but for the longest time it just wasn’t clear that Dragon was better than getting back something like Griselbrand, as it took much more work to get it back with specifically Animate Dead, and didn’t even win the game more often than the aforementioned creature. The scales started to tip towards dragon when Modern Horizons came out with the cards Arcum’s Astrolabe and Ice-Fang Coatl. These cards started to cement a brand new identity for dragon as a combo-control deck, very similar to Splinter Twin, since the cards you were using to go off with now were also just extremely powerful cards in their own right. Entomb being an instant also meant you can go for combo only when you are ready, making the deck very resilient to graveyard hate! The next year was also very kind to Dragon, as Wizards kept releasing broken Sultai cards that happened to slot right into it, such as Veil of Summer, Oko, Thief of Crowns, Mystic Sanctuary, and even Drown in the Loch. The deck then got a massive buff when Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath was released in Theros: Beyond Death as not only was the card an insanely powerful option that helped you combo in the colors we were playing, but it also turned extra Entombs or Entombs without an Animate Dead from unplayable garbage to some of the best draws we could have going late. It was also around the release of Theros: Beyond Death that Alex started streaming the deck, and set the groundwork for the community. I slowly got more involved until eventually, the stream changed hands to me and I was playing Dragon around 3 days a week. Playing the deck so often helped me refine the numbers until now I think we have it in a really good place, and if you want to know more about some of the decision making we made in creating it we have a 14 page write up talking all about everything Dragon related in order to help new players learn it!

Tell us a bit about your event. Were there any games or plays that stuck out?

The event was a wild ride from start to finish! To be fair, playing Worldgorger Dragon in any event is almost always a wild ride due to the split nature of the deck being able to end the game on turn 2 but also grind out to turn 20. I started the event losing round 1 to 4 color 80 card Yorion since he had the perfect answer at every point from veiling my early Thoughtseize to having Teferi, Time Raveler in play to brick my Plague Engineer preventing him from comboing with Aluren. However from there we were able to get the good old fashioned 9-0 to lock it up! Some of the dumber games involved me using Teferi, Master of Time to phase out my opponent’s Worldgorger Dragon in the mirror to break up the combo (do not ask me how I ended up in the mirror), using Duskmantle Guildmage to deck my Doomsday opponent with a mill 2 in response to a Brainstorm with 4 cards in deck, in the quarterfinals almost winning the first game after an Ugin, the Spirit Dragon had resolved off of an Omniscience, and in the finals using a Ponder to dig for an Entomb to win, but instead finding the 1 of dragon and a Thoughtseize on myself to seal the deal! Even the games where nothing particularly crazy happened, there was a lot of good Magic played, and I think I got to show most of the strengths of the deck all throughout the challenge.

You played Teferi, Master of Time in this list. Being a new card, tell us a little bit about how playing it came about and how did it perform?

So on Thursdays I started recently trying to play more spicy or “memey” versions of Dragon to have a fun break from playing the stock list all the time. For last Thursday’s meme stream I decided it would be perfect to try out Teferi, Master of Time since it was the flashy card from the new set that just came out, with a passive that goes off with Dragon to boot! Plus I could throw in some joke about how they keep printing broken Teferi's for good measure. What I didn’t expect was Teferi ended up being so much better than I expected that I knew almost immediately once playing with it that it was going to be a staple in Dragon. What makes it so uniquely powerful in Dragon is fills nearly every role we needed in a curve topper. It helps dig for combo pieces at a very fast rate, discards useless Thoughtseizes and forces that I wouldn’t have been able to cast otherwise, fills the graveyard to enable Uro extremely fast, has a phasing ability that allows you to buy time in against anything from a Tarmogoyf to a Marit Lage, will absolutely run away with the game if left uncontested for more than 2 turns, and can even discard the Dragon if you were unfortunate enough to draw it. We used to alternate between Oko and Narset, Parter of Veils in those 2 slots, but the problem with Oko is it was mainly relegated to generating threats that were often irrelevant to our combo plan, and Narset was often very bad if we needed to protect ourselves or if we wanted to run away with the game. Teferi plays both of these roles at the same time, not only in the sense that it can do both things but also thanks to its passive it can do both of those things at the same time! It will be a staple of Dragon decks going forward, and I’d have to imagine it will make waves in every other format as well. The card plays a lot better than it reads!

Are there any changes you would make going forward to your list for another event?

I think the list was very solid for the event today, but it's important to make sure you are adjusting the deck as the metagame evolves. I’d have to imagine that I will likely change cards going forward, but I’m not sure on the exact cards I would want to swap until we see how the metagame grows and evolves. I do have a good feeling more Plague Engineers are going to be quite good going forward, as both Goblins and Elves got some very real upgrades in the recent sets, so playing the proper hate will likely be rewarded.

Any shoutouts you'd like to throw out there before we wrap up? Also feel free to drop any social media links and any information people might look for on WGD.

Yes! I want to start by thanking Alex and everyone else in our amazing Discord server, as they are the lifeblood of the dragon community and none of this would have been possible without them https://discord.gg/5gtzCGB, and the Leaving a Legacy Facebook group as great place for all sorts of Legacy stuff. Also if you want to see some Worldgorger Dragon live check out the stream at https://www.twitch.tv/worldgorger115, or if you want to check out the VODs you can do so at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCItI6-gVTSg4BD7w-c_2cpA. Finally, if you just want to learn more about dragon I definitely recommend taking a look at the write up here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vIFE7pwsJsy-vzjz_paYImle8Hm-TihDPMJorlhef1I/edit?usp=sharing!

Thanks for joining us! Congrats again on the win and never forget that you are awesome!

Thanks for having me! :)

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In Second Place we have Aggro-Loam by powerful wizard Matthew Vook.

Matt's list is pretty powerful, playing a lot of the commonly found powerful cards that have come about in 2020. Strong run indeed from a powerful wizard!

In Third Place we have Hogaak.

This is the Jund build of the deck, going on more of an explosive game plan with Faithless Looting and Putrid Imp. This deck is exceptionally powerful, and highly aggressive.

In Fourth Place we have RUG Delver.

This list is pretty much the standard list for RUG Delver these days, with Arcanist and Mandrills. There's no Goyfs here or Klothys, but this is a powerful list.

In Fifth Place we have Elves, featuring brand new card Allosaurus Shepherd.

As I understand from following Nathan on Twitter is that Allosaurus Shepherd was pretty great in this deck, and it's no surprise to see that it is. This is a powerful card and really good in this kind of strategy. I expect to see it even further in Elves going forward.

In Sixth Place we have Rector Nic Fit.

This deck is really quite interesting, leaning on utilizing both Arena Rector and Academy Rector to cheat into play big permanents such as Omniscience or Ugin, the Spirit Dragon. It's great to see Rector Nic Fit doing well, as both Rectors lend themselves to really powerful plays.

In Seventh Place we have Infect.

This is a pretty straightforward Infect list, with cards like Oko around to shore up grindier matchups. It's great to see this do well, as it is a really powerful and fun deck.

Rounding out the Top 8 we have Death and Taxes.

This is yet another straightforward list, and honestly it is cool to see D&T still doing well in a metagame that does appear to be overtly hostile to the deck. However, there will always be really good pilots around that enjoy and play the deck well.

Now let's take a look at the 2019-2020 cards in this event.

Card Name	Number of Copies
Veil of Summer	26
Ice-Fang Coatl	23
Arcum's Astrolabe	20
Force of Negation	19
Force of Vigor	19
Oko, Thief of Crowns	19
Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis	15
Prismatic Vista	14
Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath	13
Shark Typhoon	6
Song of Creation	4
Winota, Joiner of Forces	4
Yorion, Sky Nomad	4
Allosaurus Shepherd	3
Muxus, Goblin Grandee	2
Peer Into the Abyss	2
Teferi, Master of Time	2

It's quite interesting to see the new cards from Core Set 2021 and JumpStart appear right out of the bat. There weren't many in this event, but there were some key ones between Allosaurus Shepherd in Elves and Muxus, Goblin Grandee in Goblins. Muxus especially was incredibly impressive over the weekend, showing that the card may be even better than Conspicuous Snoop. Speaking of Muxus, the showing the event was from our good friend John Ryan Hamilton (xJCloud) in 18th.

In addition, it's worth noting that we saw a bit more Yorion, Sky Nomad out of this even than we have before since the Companion rules change. It will be interesting to see how this trend continues going forward.

Around the Web

• Our good friends over at ELO Punters posted a new episode, covering M21 and JumpStart which you can find here.
• Our other good friends over at MinMaxBlog (comprising of Minhajul Hoq and Max Gilmore) posted an update concerning their content. Check it out here.
• /u/Johanvl1981 posted an updated Legacy Humans primer, which you can find here.
• Muxus is a reasonable Magic card.

The Spice Corner

A rare Elk sighting of Jegantha, the Wellspring right here.

Hogaak... Shadow?

Anzi Shark Do Do Do Do... Anzi Shark.

And finally, this deck, which is not quite Naya Loam but is instead commonly referred to by it's Legacy-esque name in Applejacks.

Wrapping Up

That's all the time we have this week folks! Thank you for your continued support of the column and join me next week as we continue our journey into Legacy.

As always you can reach me on Twitter, Twitch,YouTube, and Patreon! In addition, you can always reach me on the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the /r/MTGLegacy Discord Server and subreddit.

Until next time!