This Week in Legacy: One New World
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 going to be taking a look at the immediate impact of Phyrexia: All Will Be One after it's release on MTGO this past week. In addition to that we've got some Challenge data to look at (which also includes some ONE goodness) and a Spice Corner.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Brave New World of Oil and Gears
Phyrexia: All Will Be One was released this past week to Magic Online and as players get their hands on the cards in the set we are starting to see a raw immediate first week impact of how Legacy is being affected by its presence. We're going to talk about the early initial winners and see how things are shaping up.
The Biggest Winners - Atraxa, Mercurial Spelldancer, Vindictive Flamestoker
Among the big time winners early on in Week one have been cards such as Atraxa, Grand Unifier, Mercurial Spelldancer, and Vindictive Flamestoker.
Atraxa's immediate impact was very apparent on the format overall as many players are scrambling across several formats to try out this card, and it's more than likely this card becomes a pretty solid multiple format all star. Upon initial evaluation the card on paper doesn't sound insane (although I myself and a few others such as our good friend Peter van der Ham quickly identified the power level of it), in practice the card is exceptionally powerful in a lot of ways. It's seen play sofar in everything from Show and Tell based decks to Reanimator and even Natural Order control piles.
In fact, it is quite possible that Atraxa as above could herald a return of UB Reanimator as a viable option in the Legacy metagame, providing a secondary variant to the BR Reanimator deck. This is mainly because Atraxa as a blue and black card can pitch to both Forces and also Grief making that aspect of it flexible but then also works great when put into play as it will often draw 5-6 cards when it does in this kind of deck (Creature, Instant, Sorcery, Land, Artifact, Enchantment) and that kind of card selection across seeing ten cards is pretty insane.
Mercurial Spelldancer on the other hand is another card that has shown up in a great capacity, as the parallels between it and banned card Dreadhorde Arcanist are pretty apparent. The card does seem to require a lot more setup than Arcanist ever did, but once it gets rolling it does seemingly provide an endless source of card advantage. Copying Expressive Iteration with it is very powerful and does a lot of things. This seems to be a big winner anyways despite needing to understand better how to build around the card because of how immediate players jumped on it to try it out.
Vindictive Flamestoker is also another card that looked very interesting but wasn't sure on, but it seems to be finding a home in the Riddlesmith Combo decks as a source of draw engine that also discards cards for the purposes of Containment Construct. It seems like a very powerful card in that context given that those decks cast a lot of low-cost noncreature spells.
The Intermediate - Mycosynth Gardens, Minor Misstep
Before we get to the spice that is The Mycosynth Gardens let's talk about Minor Misstep for a bit. Based on what I've seen thus far on the card results on this card have been rather mixed. Some people have said they think it's really good, where others have said they think it is just an okay sideboard card and others still have noted it doesn't really do much that other spells like Pyroblast, Spell Pierce, and Flusterstorm all tend to do. I'm personally on the side that I think the card has possible sideboard card implications at best but I also don't think it's insanely good, so this one may just need some more long term in the cooker to figure out how good it really is. I definitely saw lists this week trying anywhere from two to four copies in a main deck capacity but not every deck was doing this, so it's intriguing to see where this one will land.
The Mycosynth Gardens on the other hand is an exceptionally interesting card and people are already looking at ways to potentially break it. Due to how this card interacts with Lion's Eye Diamond as LED does not require to be tapped in order to activate its mana ability, this opens up a lot of interesting things one can do with this card. I've seen people trying out this card in Storm based decks such as The EPIC Storm, but it was our good friend Max Gilmore (@maxtortion) who made an interesting notation that this card could revitalize a deck I myself am intimately familiar with and that's Gyruda Combo.
Being able to copy LED with Gardens means that making the extra three mana to put Gyruda into hand with this deck is very easy and this could be the card that could help revitalize this as an archetype. I definitely would be super interested in seeing this as a deck again, as it was one of the decks I really enjoyed a ton when it was first coming around.
Legacy Challenge 2/11
The first Challenge of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event, which had 49 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.
UR Delver was the most popular deck of the event but it also had a very bad win rate overall at 40% non-mirror. Reanimator did very well as we will see, as did Cephalid Breakfast. White Stompy didn't crack the cutoff here, but it had two pilots and had a reasonably great win rate for the sample size.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Painter | 1st | DNSolver |
| Riddlesmith Combo | 2nd | Killabee |
| UB Reanimator | 3rd | Maraxus_of_NL |
| White Stompy | 4th | McWinSauce |
| Black Stompy | 5th | michaelvlevine |
| UR Delver | 6th | Mogged |
| Black Depths | 7th | aooaaooa |
| The EPIC Storm | 8th | buildorburn |
Very interesting Top 8 all around. Despite being dragged down in overall win rate, we did see one UR Delver in this Top 8. At the end of the event though it was DNSolver on a complete tear lately on Blue Painter.
This list is pretty sweet. Painter in the 8Cast shell is really cool and interesting, and new cards like Haywire Mite make for some very interesting gameplay especially when found off Urza's Saga. I dig the Gaea's Blessing in the sideboard here too.
In Second Place we've got RIDDLESMITH.
New card Vindictive Flamestoker poking through in this list. It makes a lot of sense since the deck casts a ton of noncreature spells that it just acts as a discard hand draw four for one red mana typically. Seems pretty great with Containment Construct for sure.
Also in this Top 8 we had some Reanimator action, but this time in UB instead of BR by our good friend Peter van der Ham.
We've discussed already how strong Atraxa is, so it's no surprise to see it show up here. The card is quite good and it's amazing to see a list like this where the number of Griselbrand is exactly one. All will be ONE after all.
Also in this Top 8 we had some Black Stompy action.
This deck is certainly pretty cool. Has a lot of really powerful things it can do and Sheoldred+Karn are really good still right now when paired up with Dark Ritual and Chrome Mox. Stromgald Crusader as a black pro-white card for Initiative matchup is awesome.
Legacy Challenge 2/12
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the mid-afternoon Sunday event. This event had 85 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 data sheet here.
UR Delver was quite popular here and it boasted a strong win rate overall with a 52.48% non-mirror win rate. Reanimator did well again, as did Elves. Painter tanked it this event, while Cephalid Breakfast below the cut did very well.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| UR Delver | 1st | stu909090 |
| UR Delver | 2nd | wiky |
| Elves | 3rd | Comeback |
| Elves | 4th | DawsonCreep |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 5th | HJ_Kaiser |
| UB Reanimator | 6th | _INF_ |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 7th | Enrichetta |
| BR Reanimator | 8th | RNGSpecialist |
Weird Top 8 for sure here. All of the Top 8 is made up functionally of four different decks, despite the variances between the Reanimator lists. At the end of the event it was UR Delver v UR Delver: Dawn of Justice? Let's take a look at the winner.
New card Mercurial Spelldancer is already definitely proving its worth in this Delver-less Delver list. The card as we discussed above is definitely very good and has a lot of parallels with Dreadhorde Arcanist in a lot of ways. Solid looking list here for sure.
In Second Place we've also got some Delver.
The Snuff Out Delver decks have been primarily to combat White Stompy, but the Snuff Out plan also has additional matches its pretty good in for having a free removal spell.
Also in this Top 8 we had Elves.
Another new card makes its way here in Tyrranax Rex from Phyrexia. Very interesting list here with a very clean manabase and clean combo setup.
Further into this Top 8 we've got Cephalid Breakfast.
This deck is so strong right now and I think it's definitely one to continue to keep on your radar. It does a lot of really powerful things.
Around the Web
- Bryant Cook testing The Mycosynth Gardens with LED! Check it out here.
- 90sMTG has Esper Attractions vs Mono White. Check it out here.
- PunishingWaterfalls recounts his Challenge run with Lands. Check it out here.
- Bazaar of Boxes is going into some Fury! Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Fiend Artisan and Mono Black with Maralen of the Mornsong is super cool.
Ellaone with some BR Scam style gameplay but also with Knight of the Ebon Legion?!
Arena Rector Control! I love this deck so much and seeing a new version with Kaya, Intangible Slayer is super sweet.
GB Nic Fit featuring several new Phyrexia cards including Vraska, Betrayal's Sting is sweet.
A Madness style deck with Curse of Fool's Wisdom is pretty cute.
Look. If you ever wanted to just you know... pay seven mana for Atraxa, Grand Unifier or even pay eight mana to Green Sun's Zenith for it... fishduggery has got you covered. (You madman)
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!
