This Week in Legacy: Player Spotlight Series - How to Be Heard Before Being Seen
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 doing yet another Player Spotlight Series! This week's spotlight is on UK based and ELM founding member Sahar Mirhadi! In addition to that we've got two Challenges to talk about of which one of those was a Showcase Challenge!
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Player Spotlight Series - Sahar Mirhadi
This week we've got a great Player Spotlight Series, one I've been wanting to do for some time now. Sahar Mirhadi is a UK based player and also one of the founders of the European Legacy Masters tournament series. Now, I've never met Sahar (but I definitely hope to someday) but Sahar absolutely radiates positivity. Her infectious positive nature really shines through, and I'm really excited to shine a light on her and her accomplishments.
As we like to do with these things, let's hear from Sahar in her own words. Much thanks to Sahar for giving us her story and her perspective!
How to Be Heard Before Being Seen
Greetings, I am Sahar Mirhadi and I am a UK-based magic player, games researcher and founding member of the European Legacy Masters.
You can usually hear me before seeing me, be it at events or just at the local game store, which I have realized is very useful for my friends to locate me. My passion lies in promoting the Legacy format and fostering a community that embraces it. You may also know me for producing solid results with the Delver and Stompy archetypes (RIP White Plume Adventurer).
How it all Began
My journey with Magic: The Gathering began in 2014 with the release of Core Set 2015. Initially, I played casually with friends at home, but then I moved on to Commander and started playing competitively in the Modern format from 2016 to 2019. My favourite decks were Burn, Tron, and Scapeshift. I have a deep affinity for the color Red in Magic: the Gathering, with Lightning Bolt being my favorite card ever (I even started collecting them!).
But in the summer of 2019, I discovered my true love for playing Legacy and have been a strong advocate for eternal formats ever since. I picked up Legacy at a time when Oko, Thief of Crowns and Wrenn and Six were legal along with some other powerful cards. I immediately fell in love with Legacy's power level and the welcoming community. I have had some great experiences playing over the years, such as going 9-0 on Day 1 of GP Bologna in November 2019 and winning Axion Mega Legacy in February 2023.
Representation in Eternal Formats
As a staunch advocate for diversity and representation in eternal formats, I strongly believe that having more vocal people of marginalised gender in the space is essential to shake up the status quo. While the trend is catching up across all formats, it is still relatively slower in eternal magic. Nonetheless, I have met some fantastic people across the globe, and I am thrilled to see the scene growing. My goal is to provide an inclusive space for players while encouraging more players of marginalised gender to participate in eternal formats.
European Legacy Masters
As a founding member of the European Legacy Masters, I oversee communication and social media for the project, which aims to promote Legacy locally and crown a Legacy champion. This year, we have over 100 qualifiers held across Europe, culminating in the invitational finals taking place September 2nd at 4Seasons Summer, Bologna. The growth of proxy legacy across Europe has been a positive development for getting players in the format, and I am thrilled to be a part of it.
Looking Ahead
I have some exciting projects in the works for the future. With my co-host Sarah, we are launching a new YouTube channel called the Legacy Gambit. Our channel will be dedicated to sharing our passion and enthusiasm for the Legacy format and its diverse range of legacy decks. Our goal is to make the format accessible to everyone, just as others in the community did for me many years ago. We will be launching soon with a fun episode, and we would greatly appreciate your feedback.
I aim to be an enjoyable commentator, a player dedicated to ongoing improvement and a positive force in the Magic community. Until next time, may you draw lands and spells in the correct order and keep enjoying playing this game that we all love.
Sahar x
The best place to find all the work I do is through Twitter
Legacy Challenge 5/13
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the regular Saturday Challenge. This event had 62 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 incomplete data sheet here. Some major technical difficulty getting data for this event (MTGO dropped the person collecting data), so this means no fancy graphs basically.
Let's look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| 8Cast | 1st | jessy_samek |
| Reanimator | 2nd | snoopy-magic |
| Reanimator | 3rd | shindy |
| 4C Uro Control | 4th | trunks132 |
| Reanimator | 5th | satu2112 |
| Yorion Zenith | 6th | LeoFa |
| 8Cast | 7th | ItsSwiftyTime |
| Mystic Forge Combo | 8th | Cherryxman |
Wild Top 8 here. Lot of Reanimator. At the end of the event, it was an 8Cast deck that won it all!
Very clean and straightforward list here for sure. Definitely no frills or cute cards, just good old-fashioned 0 mana spells and win conditions.
In Second Place we've got Reanimator.
Reanimator having so many crazy tools now is very interesting and it makes the builds even more interesting. Gone are the heydays of 4 Griselbrand for sure, which is certainly wild to see but there's so many strong Reanimator targets now.
Also in this Top 8 we had Yorion Zenith.
This list has a lot of really strong cards in it. It's toolbox-like nature makes it very powerful against a wide range of things, and Natural Order for Atraxa just seems pretty insane especially if you can put a Yorion into play and blink it.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Mystic Forge Combo.
Very straightforward deck for sure here. It has a really solid game plan that knows what it wants to do and it does it well.
Legacy Showcase Challenge 5/14
This past weekend was also a Showcase Challenge event! Showcase Challenges are larger premier play events that require QPs to enter, and the Top 8 of the event gets an invitation to the Showcase Qualifier at the end of the season. This particular event had 215 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 incomplete datasheet here. Now, there were a lot of technical issues with MTGO with this one as well unfortunately, so no fancy graphs again. I will say, I realize that this has become a small issue and primarily it really just boils down to not having a larger number of people able to watch MTGO replays to where it can account for issues like MTGO or for emergencies on the part of our existing data collectors. It's unfortunate this happens, but this is a fully crowdsourced effort, these things are going to happen.
I will note that our team is absolutely out there trying to get this sheet filled in so it might even be filled in by the time this article goes live, which would be super sweet. I will also say that by the numbers of this event, both 8Cast and Reanimator were insanely well represented (with each one having 20-21+ copies each) over UR Delver, and both had really strong win rates.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Boros Stompy | 1st | MKC |
| RUG Cascade | 2nd | ecobaronen |
| Death's Shadow | 3rd | iKhada |
| Jeskai Control | 4th | Thalai |
| Lands | 5th | theMutz |
| Reanimator | 6th | MDecker |
| Lands | 7th | alli |
| Jeskai Stoneblade | 8th | zNoodz |
Very interesting Top 8 here. Some control, some tempo, some Ancient Tomb and even some Rhinos. At the end of the event it was Boros Stompy that won the event.
The red splash is a little deeper in this build than some of the Boros lists we've seen, where they are only really playing Caves of Chaos Adventurer. We've also got Fable here and Fury to help round out the power level of this deck.
In Second Place we had RUG Cascade.
It always amazes me when decks get ported over from other formats like Modern. The "Rhinos" deck in Modern is definitely very good, and having access to other cards like Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes and dual lands seems solid for the archetype for sure.
Also in this Top 8 we had Death's Shadow.
As an appreciator of Baleful Strix I really appreciate its inclusion here. This deck looks super fun for sure.
We had two Lands players in the Top 8, so let's look at the higher placing one.
This list seems definitely quite straightforward really. I am ever surprised to see Punishing Fire as it does not seem like that card is super good in current Legacy, but maybe it performed well here in this metagame.
Around the Web
- TonyScapone has a great video on Bolas's Citadel. Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdle's Zac Clark intereviewed Gavin Verhey at MC Minneapolis! Check it out here.
- TURN ZERO WIN WITH BELCHER
- Phil Gallagher plays some Cephalid Breakfast. Check it out here.
- 90sMTG covered a Legacy 1K at Gamestoria with the one and only Reid Duke! Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Combo Master Jax has some Dream Halls for us.
Mono White Painter / Stiflenought... but also featuring Glasses of Urza!
This is a sweet Lands-like list.
Vesuvan Drifter from Aftermath showing up in a Sneak and Show list!
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!
