This Week in Legacy: Legacy Eternal Weekend 2020
Howdy folks! It's time for yet another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we have a MASSIVE amount of things to talk about, because we have THREE events from Eternal Weekend 2020 to cover, as well as two Challenges, as well as talking about my own experience with Eternal Weekend, as WELL AS some commentary on the health of the format. Oh, and of course, we also have our Spice Corner.
In the interest of time and content length, I will not be doing the 2019-2020 cards for all events today, however I will be pointing out specifics from various events, especially Eternal Weekend events.
It's gonna be a doozy, so let's get right to it!
Eternal Weekend 2020
This past weekend was the culmination of the three Eternal Weekend 2020 Legacy events on Magic Online. There were three separate events with the top prizes being unique artwork for three different cards (Karakas, Rishadan Port, and Maze of Ith). All three of these events were exceptionally popular, with all three events coming close or at the capacity of 672 players.
One of the biggest takeaways from this event for me was just how much people really wanted to play Legacy. Despite all the issues ongoing in the format right now, people really wanted to play the format and had a lot of fun doing so. This combined with the All Access accounts really says a lot about formats like Legacy and how people would approach it if card availability wasn't a real issue, and the consensus seems to be that people want to play the format. It's incredibly cool to see this pan out.
The other big takeaway I had this weekend however is that there definitely needs to be some reworking on the prizing structure of these kinds of events on Magic Online. These events only paid out to Top 64, which meant that there were a ton of players who ended up not prizing at all with a solid record due to breakers. I expect that there should be some sort of scaling structure put into place to accommodate this, but whether Magic Online can handle this kind of thing is another story.
Still, it was very cool to see these events be as popular as they were, and I hope to see somewhat similar results for the Vintage events next week.
My Eternal Weekend Experience with 5C Omnom Fit
I was only able to partake in one of the Eternal Weekend events, namely the Karakas event on Friday evening. This event started at 5 PM EST for me, and ran for 10 rounds, so it was exceptionally late at around 3 AM EST when the Swiss rounds ended.
I had spent a lot of time agonizing over what I was going to play for this event, struggling a lot with my desires to want to do well in the event. This led to a lot of feelings of inadequacy on my part, something I struggle with a lot on a very regular basis. At the end of the week, I decided that I was going to play something fun for the event, something that I would enjoy playing and just let the chips fall where they may. I had been working on a decklist that had been provided to me by my good friend Arianna McKee (aka @VeteranExplorer) and we had spent some time tuning it.
This is the end result of that tuning, with 5C Omnom Nic Fit.
The core of this deck is a typical Nic Fit setup, using Veteran Explorer and Cabal Therapy to ramp over the opponent while pulling apart their hand with Therapy. While Legacy currently has a lot of Basic Lands in the format at the moment, it is still quite possible to catch opponent's off guard with this kind of strategy. Outside of the core packages, the deck is playing a bunch of the common Snow Control threats, from Ice-Fang Coatl to Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. The real heavy hitter of the deck was Omnath, Locus of Creation. Nearly every time I put this card into play, it was incredibly powerful and very swingy. Another very strong card in this list was Field of the Dead, as it has a potential to be a solid mirror breaker in mirror shell matchups, since Oko is very bad against the card overall and the mirrors tend to not run Wasteland type effects.
I did indeed play all 10 rounds of this event, even though I ended up at a record of 4-6 with the deck. Mainly I continued playing because I recorded every match, which I posted to my YouTube. You can find the whole playlist for this event here. Despite being incredibly tired at the end of the event, I had a really fun time with the deck overall, and really enjoyed just getting to play something I liked, which helped a lot with my mental state of the week. This was a super fun event however, and I encourage you all to go watch the videos. There were some really fun games in there!
Now let's take a look at the overall event results.
Eternal Weekend - Karakas
The first event of the weekend was for a unique artwork of the card Karakas. This event had 581 players overall and was 10 rounds of Legacy. Since Wizards only published the Top 16 decklists of the event, let's take a look at that metagame breakdown.
RUG Delver and Snowko certainly proved to be the decks of the weekend to beat and still continued to put up incredible numbers. I'm sure if we had access to every list here, it would be incredibly interesting to see what the extrapolation of how many of each of these top two decks there were. Still, in this small breakdown, they were all over this Top 16.
Now let's look at the Top 16 in list form. I normally would only show the Top 8, but since Wizards published only the Top 16, it seems fine to recognize these players who did this well in a 500+ player event.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Snowko | 1st | Greenpm33 |
| RUG Delver | 2nd | Gul_Dukat |
| Hogaak | 3rd | HeyyQT |
| Death and Taxes | 4th | ChristianYBarr |
| Snowko | 5th | JPA93 |
| Snowko | 6th | MatthewB3 |
| Eldrazi Aggro | 7th | Blade400 |
| Death and Taxes | 8th | Bombtrack |
| RUG Delver | 9th | Mr_Dr_Prof_Patrick |
| Yorion Snowko | 10th | Victor2 |
| Snowko | 11th | Slasher21 |
| RUG Delver | 12th | PoobMaster |
| Snowko | 13th | DiegoNunes |
| RUG Delver | 14th | Ramp |
| RUG Delver | 15th | KarateDom |
| Painter | 16th | Utley26 |
At the end of the event, it did indeed come down to RUG Delver and Snowko facing off. Both pilots did opt to split the finals however, so let's take a look at both lists.
Patrick Green (Greenpm33) is no stranger to Eternal Weekend fame, having won Eternal Weekend 2018 on Miracles. This deck is right up Patrick's alley in his control/midrange roots, and really shows some of the most powerful things to be doing within this shell. I especially enjoy the tech of Felidar Retreat in the sideboard, which I can only imagine is really solid for the mirror.
The other list was our good friend Daniel Goetschel, GP Niagara Champion, and well traveled player on RUG Delver with a bit of a twist that is really cool and very powerful.
Instead of the typical green creature threats in Tarmogoyf and Hooting Mandrills, Daniel instead has opted for two Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath as well as two Sylvan Library in the main deck list. Having tested around with this list myself (given that Daniel already has results with it in Challenge events), I found that Uro was really strong and very easy to get to four mana to cast, even in a four Wasteland deck. These are definitely some top competitors however, and their skill level with the format really shows.
Also in the Top 4 we have Hogaak.
The BUG variants of this deck continue to keep putting up results in the hands of skilled pilots. This is certainly a solid list and worth continuing to explore in Legacy going forward.
Also in the Top 4 we have Death and Taxes.
We'll talk more extensively about this deck and it's place in the metagame later here, but the biggest thing to note is the presence of Spirit of the Labyrinth. I face two separate D&T matchups in my event as well, and Spirit was exceptionally powerful at dealing with cantrips as well as making cards like Uro much much worse. Being able to protect it with Mother of Runes too is even further on the scale of powerful.
Further down the Top 8 in terms of unique lists we have Eldrazi Aggro.
The biggest unique difference here from typical Eldrazi Aggro lists is the presence of the three Karn, the Great Creator and a small wishboard of cards for Karn to acquire. Karn definitely is one of the most powerful four mana Planeswalkers in the game right now, even better than Jace, the Mind Sculptor simply on the basis that most of the time Karn's cost is only actually two lands (Ancient Tomb/City of Traitors). Karn represents some really powerful inevitability if the opponent simply does not have an answer to the card.
Further down the Top 16 we had an interesting showing by a Yorion Snowko variant that is sort of like Stryfo Pile with Dack Fayden, but not quite centered in Stryfo's typical colors (no black).
Nahiri, the Harbinger for Emrakul seems pretty ultra hilarious for this deck to have up its sleeve for sure.
All the way at the bottom of the Top 16 we have Mono Red Painter, which is super cool to see.
With all the Snowko running around it's cool to see a 4x Blood Moon deck do well (and it wasn't the only one this weekend). Again, Karn definitely pulls a ton of weight here and is often just a free win when you have it.
This was certainly an interesting event, but the events continue to get more and more interesting throughout the weekend.
Eternal Weekend - Rishadan Port
The second event of the weekend, starting at 3 AM EST (a time slot picked specifically for players on the other side of the world), was for a unique artwork of Rishadan Port, and had 447 players for yet another 9-10 round event. Let's take a look at how the Top 16 broke down for this event as well.
The effect of RUG/Snow seems less pronounced in this Top 16 breakdown, and there were a few other varying archetypes poking through the veil of these two top decks. This event especially looked very interesting thanks to continued presence by Death and Taxes.
Now let's take a look at the Top 16 in list form.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Death and Taxes | 1st | Toondoslav |
| Poke Pile | 2nd | Baku_91 |
| RUG Delver | 3rd | LuisMJ |
| Mono Red Prison | 4th | Basuta |
| Snowko | 5th | AnziD |
| Hogaak | 6th | SetOnline |
| Snowko | 7th | McWinSauce |
| RUG Delver | 8th | Wiky |
| Depths Combo | 9th | Lactone56513 |
| Death and Taxes | 10th | Hopkins23 |
| Esper Vial | 11th | SaltyHealer |
| Lands | 12th | YekCat |
| RUG Delver | 13th | BurstMeow |
| Yorion Stryfo Pile | 14th | LynnChalice |
| ANT | 15th | DavidVanderraven |
| Snowko | 16th | Mannes |
That's right, at the end of this event it was indeed none other than Death and Taxes that took it all down (no splits, killed them all!). Let's take a look at the list.
Zendikar Rising certainly did a lot for this archetype, and it was Skyclave Apparition that really boosted things a crazy amount. Giving these decks a legitimate answer to Oko and other cards that wasn't as exceptionally narrow as it looked exceptionally strong, especially on a three drop that can be put into play with Aether Vial. D&T is a deck that I'm well aware of that you can never really put down because it can always find a way to poke holes in a metagame, even in a format where Arcum's Astrolabe is making Port + Wasteland harder to play. That being said, it's also INCREDIBLY fitting that D&T won the event where the painting to win was Rishadan Port. Very poetic.
The Second Place list is Poke Pile, aka RUG Stifle.
This list is really cool and very powerful. It has a lot of ways to grind through games and is just a generally interesting deck all around.
In Third Place we have RUG Delver.
This is a pretty typical list for the variants playing Mandrills solely these days. Klothys continues to be exceptionally strong and necessary in these decks.
In Fourth Place we have Mono Red Prison.
Another Blood Moon deck that did quite well this weekend, Basuta has been tearing up events like this on this deck, owing a lot to their skill and deck construction skills. Shatterskull Smashing finding a home is also really super cool.
In Fifth Place we have repeat Top 8 offender, Anuraag Das, on Snowko.
Lean and clean list here. Shark Typhoon showing up in these lists fills me with a giddy happy because I just really enjoy the card so much. It's so much fun to play with.
In Sixth Place we have another BUG Hogaak, which we looked at already today, so let's move down to Seventh Place with a fun new take on Snowko.
More Omnath, Locus of Creation! This card is very powerful and I would not be surprised to see more lists like this continue to crop up here and there. In addition, this pilot is also playing the Field of the Dead tech, which is an excellent mirror breaker.
Further down the Top 16, it was really cool to see Lands break into the mix.
Valakut Exploration definitely appears to be the real deal in these decks. It's certainly very powerful and I love every bit of it.
This event was super sweet looking, and it's cool to see D&T taking it home, but the third event got really wild!
Eternal Weekend - Maze of Ith
The final event of the weekend was the Sunday event, which capped at 672 players! Crazy stuff! This event was for a unique artwork of Maze of Ith. Let's take a look at the Top 16 breakdown for this event as well.
Whoah. Very few of the two popular top decks converted to this Top 16, while decks like Death and Taxes, Elves, and OOPS! ALL SPELLS did quite well overall. What an exceptionally wild event!
Now let's take a look at the Top 16 in list form.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Elves | 1st | Eduzzera |
| Oops! All Spells | 2nd | Sherwinator |
| Hogaak | 3rd | WestvalePreacher |
| Death and Taxes | 4th | S063 |
| RUG Delver | 5th | TwistedWombat |
| Cloudpost | 6th | C-Cream |
| Snowko | 7th | AnziD |
| Esper Vial | 8th | HeynongMan |
| Lands | 9th | Alli |
| Snowko | 10th | MechinT |
| Oops! All Spells | 11th | ReanimatorFiend |
| Karn Echo | 12th | Garyln |
| The EPIC Storm | 13th | TPC2000 |
| Death and Taxes | 14th | Tashizm |
| Death and Taxes | 15th | SteveRN |
| Elves | 16th | ReiderRabbit |
Holy fast combo, Batman! At the end of this event it was two very interesting decks that duked it out, with none other than Elves taking the top spot.
Quite possibly one of the most difficult decks in the format to master, Elves has gotten a huge boost in the recent year thanks solely to the printing of Allosaurus Shepherd. The card is such an incredibly powerful card, but also a win con in its own right. I heard that this pilot won this match 2-0, which is saying a lot for playing against the Second Place list in Oops! All Spells.
This pilot went on record on Twitter stating that they basically had a 13 card sideboard, as Ground Seal they realized was not quite the card they wanted. Not only that, this pilot was undefeated coming out the Swiss rounds at 10-0! Insane to see and such a cool list. The pilot has stated that the two SB slots would end up being Chancellor of the Annex if you fancy giving this deck a go.
Seeing as how we had a lot of repeat performances through the Top 8, let's look at the other unique lists we haven't seen in today's article by moving down to Sixth Place with Cloudpost.
Exceptionally interesting list, especially with playing Candelabra of Tawnos in the list. Golos is a solid inclusion to these kinds of lists, acting as both mana ramp and mana sink in one, given that Cascading Cataracts exists.
Rounding out the bottom of the Top 8 we have Esper Vial.
Another powerful list that benefitted by the printing of Skyclave Apparition, Esper Vial is an exceptionally cool archetype with a lot of power behind it. I especially love the Sevinne's Reclamation in the sideboard here. Solid interesting card.
State of the Eternal Weekend Legacy Metagame
As these are some of the biggest events we've had in a while on MTGO, it is important to keep in mind where things were at with these events. One of the most resounding things about these events that I heard was that while people have a low opinion of the overall format right now, the events themselves were well set up and fun to play in, and it was great to get more people hopefully into the format.
The biggest thing I heard all weekend was really about Oko, Thief of Crowns, and whether or not these are the events that force Wizards to consider making ban list changes to the format. I sort of honestly expect them to do so, as this kind of data can easily present what trends exist in the format at the moment. Whether that ban is for Oko or another card, or even multiple cards I'm not sure, but I expect there to be potentially something on the horizon for the format.
I took a chart much like we do for our normal Ban Watch and applied to the three events and what data we have access to from the Top 16 metagames.
The big takeaway is that a lot of the typical stuff dipped pretty hard from the first event to the third event in terms of Top 16 converted lists. This is certainly overall interesting enough and sort of makes me also wonder if newer printings are doing a good job of impacting the format in appropriate ways, as decks like Death and Taxes and even Oops! All Spells continue to do well.
All in all, these events were certainly a lot of fun, and while there are definitely improvements to be made to the format, it is possible we could see some trending back out of this as time goes on without any bannings. However, that being said, I do still believe that this is a big enough picture of data for Wizards with so many players that it is likely impossible to ignore this much data.
Legacy Challenge 10/17
While Eternal Weekend was going on, we still had two Challenge events, the first of which was the early morning Saturday one. Let's take a look at the Top 32 Metagame breakdown!
A lot of the same top decks we saw in EW this weekend taking up big space in the metagame, and Snowko certainly converted a small number of pilots into the Top 8, which we'll now look at.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| RUG Delver | 1st | ZiyangHuakai |
| Maverick | 2nd | Achilles27 |
| Cloudpost | 3rd | Into_Play |
| Snowko | 4th | MechinT |
| Oops! All Spells | 5th | Martin_Dominguez |
| Snowko | 6th | Slasher21 |
| Omni-Tell | 7th | Vmi-Nav |
| Hogaak | 8th | Kuranari-Jackpa |
What a wild and interesting Top 8 this was really. Lot of interesting decks to talk about, for sure. However, it was indeed one of the boogeymen in RUG Delver that won it all.
Magmatic Channeler is a sweet card to see show up in these lists. Seemed overall like a very powerful card in the spoiler season.
In Second Place we have Achilles27 on Maverick!
Maverick is an incredibly powerful deck that can be tuned well to specific metagames. Achilles is a long time pilot of the archetype and has put up several Top 8 results with it, showing that deck specialization can be very good for results.
In Third Place we have Cloudpost.
Allosaurus Shepherd has certainly found its way into these decks for good, and has given them an exceptional way of beating Force of Will/Force of Negation but also Chalice decks. Very strong card indeed.
Since Fourth Place has a Snowko list we've already looked at well in this article today, let's move down to Fifth Place with Oops! All Spells.
Oops as an archetype has continually received more and more attention since the release of Zendikar Rising, and with good reason. The deck is quite frankly, very powerful, and not respected well enough. Thankfully placings like this one and the earlier Eternal Weekend placing show how respected it should be.
Sixth Place also had a Snowko list so let's drop down to Seventh Place for Omni-Tell.
Omni is quite simply the best of the truly linear combo decks at the moment, as it's really hard to beat out Omniscience into Griselbrand / Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. These newer versions playing a mix of fair and unfair game is also really strong, since it can easily masquerade as Snowko until the bomb drops.
Rounding out the Top 8 we have a BUG Hogaak list with one minor sideboard twist.
Oh, boy. That is indeed Oko's in the sideboard of this list. If this is a thing that is going to occur out of these lists, definitely be prepped for it. It's a solid backup plan to this deck when things fall off the rails.
Legacy Challenge 10/18
The second Challenge of the weekend went on while the final Eternal Weekend event was happening, so let's dive right into its Top 32 breakdown.
This event must be where all the RUG and Snowko players went after Friday and Satuday! Just kidding, but there was definitely quite a bit of them here. But frankly the Top 8 was actually super interesting, which we'll look at now.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Snowko | 1st | WeFoldForFood |
| Lands | 2nd | BouncingYeti |
| Tin Fins DD | 3rd | ElfKid |
| LED Dredge | 4th | Orim67 |
| U/R Delver | 5th | BurraRun |
| RUG Delver | 6th | Althayos |
| Yorion Snowko | 7th | KauffJ |
| Humans | 8th | Oderus Urungus |
Sure, Snowko won the event, but the rest of the Top 8 was pretty interesting overall. There's even some amusing things to the Eighth Place list (bet you can't guess what it is!). Of course, as noted it was indeed Snowko that won.
This is more of a Miracles type list with Terminus and Shark Typhoon. Seeing Izzet Staticaster again in sideboards is incredibly interesting.
In Second Place we have Lands.
Again, Valakut Exploration seems to be a mainstay of the deck now. It's definitely a powerful card for sure. It is also interesting to see Drop of Honey again the sideboards.
In Third Place we have a SWEET list in Tin Fins DD.
This is billed as a Tin Fins deck in Game One that transforms into Doomsday in post board board games as a way to beat graveyard hate. Either way, it's a really sweet list for sure.
In Fourth Place we have LED Dredge.
Ox of Agonas seems to be relegated to the sideboard, as is a sideboard copy of Oko, Thief of Crowns, which we've mentioned before on here. Dredge is always at its best when it is flying under the radar, so this is a solid finish by a very established pilot of the archetype.
In Fifth Place we have U/R Delver.
I really love Sprite Dragon. It's a solidly fun card and really powerful. Seeing it in U/R Delver makes me very happy to see it see play.
In Sixth Place we have RUG Delver.
This list is doubling on the green threats, playing both Goyf and Mandrills. Other than that, it's a fairly stock list overall.
In Seventh Place we have Yorion Snowko.
This is more of a BUG Zenith Snowko build with Yorion, and stays within colors for the most part, only really splashing white for Swords to Plowshares.
Rounding out the Top 8 we have Humans, featuring SURPRISE! Yep it's Rick, Steadfast Leader.
Seeing Rick see play in these decks is wild and crazy for a card that had such a limited print run with Secret Lair. Let's hope that at some point there is a way to reprint these once we get back to paper Magic so that people that want to try Humans can do so.
Legacy Ban Watch
Two more Challenges means two more entires on our ongoing chart, which I've kept separate from the Eternal Weekend events because those would really skew the ongoing Challenge data. Let's take a look at where things fall.
Things seem to be all over the place for these cards, with the major consistency being in copies of Plague Engineer. Astrolabe especially is so up and down it isn't funny. We discussed before what we think about this ongoing metagame, and I expect that Eternal Weekend will be a big part of any considerations for changes that might be seen.
Around the Web
- 90sMTG continues to post some great videos, and I myself will have recently been on the stream as well! Check out another great set here.
- Everyday Eternal posted a new episode! These guys are really great and have great content, so check that out here.
- Alex McKinley posted a great article on The EPIC Storm website about Mindbreak Trap. Well worth the read, so check that out here.
The Spice Corner
SNOW NIV-MIZZET.
Rich Cali with some sweet Eldrazi playing Swords to Plowshares over Chalice main.
Tezzerator!
Humans Specialist Eddie Zamora with another 5-0 featuring Rick, Steadfast Leader, but also Kelsien, the Plague.
What I'm Playing This Week
While I still have the All Access Account, it's time for the real memes to begin.
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 on 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!
