This Week in Legacy: Reconfiguring The Battle of Wits
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 taking All Acces on MTGO even further with a deck that only exists in the realms of pure insanity. It's my favorite thing to do on MTGO pretty much ever. That's right, it's Battle of Wits time! In addition to that we've got some Challenge data to discuss as well as a Spice Corner!
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Battle for the Wittiest Deck Name
I love love, love Battle of Wits. While it's a deck that is pretty much insane to play in paper, on MTGO if you have a computer that can handle playing it (because searching the library is sometimes pretty rough) then it is worth trying out once every All Access Period because of how much fun it is to play. This particular All Access season was no different, as I sought to try a newer version of the deck. I'm no stranger to this pile, as I play it pretty often enough and even played a version for Eternal Weekend Online last year.
One of the things I seek to do when piecing together these lists is come up with a general fair game plan and some combo elements that augment that just in case I see them, and more often than not some of those elements are merely searchable throughout the deck via a lot of tutors and a massive amount of cantrips. One of the big mainstays of this deck is keeping it centered in Bant colors because of the power of the cantrips, threats, and tutor effects in those colors, most notably cards like Green Sun's Zenith and the full cantrip suite. We get to splash into other colors like Black and Red for specific cards such as Expressive Iteration, Baleful Strix, and even Dack Fayden.
I especially really enjoy having cards like Elvish Reclaimer and Knight of the Reliquary as mainstays of the deck, because they provide such powerful utility (as well as Crop Rotation) that makes it easy to color fix in scenarios while providing shuffle effects for the deck to utilize.
It's certainly a fun deck, and I took the time to stream this during this past week so as to show off the deck a little bit. While the League itself went rather poorly, it was cool getting to nail at least one kill with Battle of Wits itself on stream.
This is some of the most fun I ever get to have with a deck and I love it so much. So much so that I started looking at other ways to configure a Battle of Wits list! Thankfully I received some solid inspiration in this from Joey Frantz on Twitter. They posted a super fun version of the deck, taking the idea of Yorion Taxes even further with "Wits and Taxes". I took their initial decklist and made a few changes, but this looks incredibly fun for sure!
I definitely am glad to see that people can have fun with this because while the archetype isn't so viable in paper, it's so incredibly fun on MTGO and I will definitely seek it out for every time we have an All Access pass because it is so so so so incredibly worth it.
What would your ideal Battle of Wits deck look like? Let's see those lists posted to my Twitter, people!
Paper Event Update - AZMS City Champs @ Gamer's Guild in AZ
This one comes to me by way of Matt Hackbert! There was a 44 player paper event in AZ over the weekend, their City Champs event at Gamer's Guild. Matt was kind enough to send me the Top 8 for this event, which you can find over here. Thanks Matt for the paper event news!
Legacy Challenge 3/26
The first Challenge of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event which had 64 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 had an incredibly strong event here with a solid win rate and powerful representation. In addition, we saw quite a bit of 8Cast but that deck seemed to not do so hot. D&T and ANT had some strong performances as well here, especially with D&T putting two of its three pilots into the Top 8 of the event.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| UR Delver | 1st | ReformedPaolo |
| Elves | 2nd | EronRelentless |
| Death and Taxes | 3rd | joker10289 |
| Death and Taxes | 4th | IsolatedSystem |
| UR Delver | 5th | ARAPAKO |
| ANT | 6th | DemonicTutors |
| Food Chain Goblins | 7th | grumsh |
| Sneak and Show | 8th | snoopy-magic |
Interesting Top 8 for sure, with quite a few different decks really in terms of diversity. However, at the end of the event it was indeed UR Delver that took it all down.
We're closely seeing what has come to be expected as stock for these lists again, as the deck continues to settle into a routine with the metagame. There's massive healthy respect for 8Cast here, not just from the blast effects to deal with Kappa Cannoneer but also cards like Energy Flux and Meltdown for that deck as well.
The Second Place pilot was our good friend EronRelentless on Elves!
The Reclaimer builds of this deck have become the defacto best build to play at the moment and it isn't hard to see why when Elvish Reclaimer is simply one of the best creatures in the entire format right now for what it does and how it plays. Definitely, a very strong deck to be aware of.
We had two showings for D&T, so let's take a look at the first one.
Fairly stock enough here as is to be expected. The Sky Noodle construction is so good that it takes incremental things to really break into the deck, such as the recent addition of Lion Sash to the deck. This is definitely one of the better decks in the format right now and it isn't hard to see why.
Also in this Top 8 we had a showing by Food Chain Goblins!
This deck does some cool stuff. I've seen games out of this deck where you can Turn 2 a Muxus, Goblin Grandee by exiling a Fury for mana in response to the Evoke trigger with Food Chain and that is simply glorious.
Legacy Challenge 3/27
Our second Challenge of the weekend was the Sunday event which had 102 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.
Delver again had stunning representation and so did 8Cast. Delver had solid performances and 8Cast was also very reasonable, but it was D&T that really took it to the top here.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Death and Taxes | 1st | IsolatedSystem |
| UR Delver | 2nd | Baku_91 |
| Sneak and Show | 3rd | wingzeronfc |
| Elves | 4th | kurohiren |
| 8Cast | 5th | koko_lopez |
| UR Delver | 6th | Lord_Beerus |
| Elves | 7th | bit_error |
| Lands | 8th | Delthar |
Definitely, an interesting Top 8, however it is worth pointing out that the finals is a bit of an issue here as despite what was recorded, apparently the event crashed during the finals and caused some issues (see Twitter post here) for both players. We'll just take a look at both of their lists in order here starting with IsolatedSystem on D&T.
I really dig how strong a card like Timeless Dragon is. It's definitely very powerful. I don't much care for the split of Snow-Covered and regular Plains personally (because there is often no reason to do this at this juncture of the format) but I know the major reasonings why (typically to play around cards like Predict).
The other finalist was on UR Delver.
Three Daze is intriguing for sure, and two copies of Brazen Borrower is really good as well. Outside of Null Rod kind of surprised to see not much hate for 8Cast, considering how everywhere that deck feels for All Access week.
Speaking of 8Cast, that deck came in Fifth Place.
One of the other best cards for this deck is honestly Otawara, Soaring City, which has proven itself to be a very powerful addition to this deck's strategy making it adept at dealing with various cards.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Lands.
Kaheera is a neat inclusion as Companion given that the deck is playing Elementals for two main deck Endurance. Lands is a solid place to be right now as it has a lot of really strong games.
Around the Web
- 90sMTG has some Jeskai Hullbreacher vs Lands action! Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdles has a Deck Tech on UR Delver up! Check it out here.
- Our friends at Everyday Eternal have a new episode up! Check that out here.
- Eternal Glory Podcast also has a new episode out! Check it out here.
- 1MrLee's Ukraine Fundraising Stream raised $1000! Check out the post here!
- The ABCs of TES!
- Our good friend Phil Gallagher has been challenged to 5-0 with D&T for $300 bounty! Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Scroll Rack and Titan Stompy?! NICE.
Malevolent Hermit seems pretty great for Thought Lash combo.
This Brought Back deck is super cool.
There is a lot going on in this deck. Honestly, it's definitely super cool for sure.
This is a weird conundrum considering that this is Jegantha Painter, but you can't reveal Jegantha Game One which is wild to consider (because of Chandra, Torch of Defiance).
What I've Been Doing This Past Week
All Access is always loads of fun and I've been trying my best this past week to start off by recording and streaming more. In fact, I did a stream on Thursday 3/24 of both Chain of Smog Nic Fit and Battle of Wits! But hey, here is the video and decklist that I played for Chain of Smog Nic Fit, featuring Ben Bauer who has been the most active player on the deck (including a 9th place finish at the last Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy event)!
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 Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon! In addition I'm always around the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the MTGLegacy Discord Server.
Until next time!
