This Week in Legacy: The Cat's in the Bag
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 talking all about Displacer Kitten and how utterly cool that card is! We're also going to talking about some unfortunateness with the Commander Legends release on Magic Online, All Access Tokens, and much much more!
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Letting the Cat Out of the Bag
As we'll be talking about later here in the article, the Commander Legends cards are now available on MTGO for use with the All Access Tokens, and while the whole set is not available (see below for all about that), one of the cards that did make it into the set is one of the cards that we reviewed during our set review, and that's Displacer Kitten.
Since this card did get programmed onto MTGO, a lot of people are trying out the card and honestly, so have I. My initial impressions of the card thus far have been that it is definitely far better looking in practice than it looks on paper, and the cards it wins with are pretty interesting. While I have seen some people playing the Teferi combo (and I've played it myself out of Battle of Wits), the other big combo card with the Kitten is Karn, and thanks to MTGO user gurig we have a really sweet list featuring the Kitten/Karn combo.
The big thing to note is that you only ever just need Kitten and Karn in play together and that is a deterministic kill. I'll kind of go through the explanation here in how this works. With both in play, you downtick Karn to fetch Lion's Eye Diamond from your sideboard. Cast LED and reset Karn with the Kitten trigger. Activate LED for three blue mana. Downtick Karn again to fetch Tormod's Crypt from the sideboard. Cast Crypt and reset Karn with the trigger. Activate Crypt targeting yourself, which will also put the Crypt in the graveyard as it is sacrificed before the activation resolves. This will exile your graveyard including both the LED and Crypt. Downtick Karn to fetch LED from exile this time, and then repeat these steps until you have enough mana to cast all the game winning cards in the sideboard. I recommend jamming Mycosynth Lattice first, since if an opponent has just been hanging back and waiting for with a Force of Will on the payoff, Lattice makes them completely unable to interact and forces them to have to interact with the Lattice itself. Then you can fetch Walking Ballista because Lattice will also create a trigger to reset Karn.
The best thing about this combo is that it's about as reasonable to perform as the Bomberman combo is, and you don't have to make as many long term clicks as you do in that combo, as you are not ever spending mana on things within the combo (as everything costs zero to cast). This makes the combo really attractive on Magic Online which helps its chances of seeing greater play.
What really helps this kind of deck is the interactions the Kitten has with other parts of the deck. Resetting Grim Monolith for ramp is very strong, and so is resetting something like Urza, Lord High Artificer. In fact, resetting an Urza a few times in a turn is absolutely back-breaking if the opponent cannot answer the Constructs.
There's probably still plenty of ways to play around with this card, as it seems like it is far better than initially estimated, and it looks like a really solid and interesting card overall for the Legacy format. Definitely looking forward to seeing how these shells evolve in the future for sure.
Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur's Gate MTGO Release
We talked about this possibility during our set review for Commander Legends and now we are finally seeing the extent of how much of the set is actually programmed onto the Magic Online client. Unfortunately, a great number of the cards we talked about for Legacy purposes are simply not available on MTGO at this point in time with the release of the set and what we can see with the All Access Tokens. The way that you can tell if this is the case with a card on MTGO is to zoom in on it in the client's Collection tab when searching and look for the presence of a red border around it. The red border means the card is not collectible because it was not programmed in.
This does include cards such as Abdel Adrian and Sailors' Bane, and even extends to potential fringe playable cards like Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes. While we did know that this was something that could possibly occur, it's still a little frustrating to see cards not make it onto the client, especially since there are so many other cards not available from past Commander set releases (Maddening Hex and Creative Technique would be nice to see!) as well.
While we don't know the future of what will happen with Commander Legends cards on MTGO, we can only hope that at some point we can get many of these cards programmed.
Converting Currency Into Lands
While we didn't get a ton of the cards from Commander Legends, this past MTGO update did bring somewhat of an interesting surprise in the form of bringing Currency Converter onto the client.
While it's obvious this will be added to Treasure Chests at some point here in the future, the only way to currently get to this is to have an All Access Token. That being said, many Lands players who had been really hoping to see this card get added to MTGO are now super thrilled. In fact, one of its primary proponents, Albert Lindblom, has already started posting some 4-1s with a version of Lands he's jokingly calling "Crypto Lands".
Having had a chance myself to see Converter in action, it seems like a pretty solid card overall and definitely better than I thought it would be. Alli has really enforced the use of the card's power in the Lands shell by playing additional cards that pitch cards to the Converter for value like Dack Fayden and Izzet Charm. Looks like a sweet list and I look forward to seeing further iterations of it.
Another list with this card that caught my eye was one from Minest110, using it in a Standstill list.
The synergy here with Timeless Dragon is honestly super sweet. Converter on Turn 1, and then curve into Standstill, Plainscycle Timeless Dragon and then getting both a 2/2 and the Eternalized Dragon is sweet. Turning your Shark Typhoon into a Shark and a 2/2 is great, and using the pitch ability to create artifacts with Lands for Urza's Saga constructs is super sweet.
I was not initially high on this card in my set review for this one, but I'm starting to see the strong applications of it, and I think it will be cool to see what it will do in the future. I'm always of the mind of loving it when something new and interesting enters the format and makes it onto MTGO, so this is great.
All Access Tokens Back on MTGO for 20th Anniversary!
Magic Online is turning 20 years old, and Wizards is doing some big events for it, but primarily one of the best things is the return of yet another few weeks of All Access Tokens. These tokens went on sale in the MTGO store on 6/8 and lasts until 6/29, and they cost $25 in the MTGO store.
These tokens are an awesome way of being able to play formats like Legacy / Vintage and try them out to see if you want to play them regularly. It's a very cheap way of trying the formats out and a bunch of decks without having to switch like you would with a rental service.
Check out the main article here on MTGO turning 20!
Legacy Challenge 6/11
We had two Challenges this past weekend, the first of which was the early morning Saturday event. This event had 59 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 and Red Stompy were the big decks of the event (which Red Stompy we'll cover in the next event in greater detail because it did super well there as well), with both decks having a really solid win rate overall. Jeskai Control also did very reasonable, and despite you know... winning the event 8Cast had otherwise poor performance dragged down by the number of pilots on the deck.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| 8Cast | 1st | Tixis |
| UR Delver | 2nd | Baku_91 |
| UR Delver | 3rd | Mogged |
| Death and Taxes | 4th | artilleryfrost |
| Red Stompy | 5th | dgreen16 |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 6th | sora1248 |
| 4C Control | 7th | NooxTom |
| Red Stompy | 8th | SanPop |
As noted before, we had a lot of solid hits by UR Delver and Red Stompy, but it was an 8Cast deck that took it all down.
This deck continues to be incredibly powerful and despite some win rate dragging it down I still think this is a great deck to approach the current format with. It's very powerful and proactive and has a lot of really game-ending threats.
The Second Place finalist was on UR Delver.
This list is cutting down to one copy of Delver itself and going up more on things like Baubles and Stifle even. Definitely interesting seeing the trend of how Delver is evolving again to where Delver is seen as the worst card in the shell once more.
Also in this Top 8 we had Yorion Breakfast.
This deck is honestly so cool and interesting. It's such a fun fair/combo deck that it looks so powerful and fun.
Towards the bottom of the Top 8 we had some 4C Control action.
Definitely some greedy manabase action going on here with wanting to have Hymns and Jace and other stuff. Neat list, but definitely looks incredibly Czech Pile-ish for sure.
Legacy Challenge 6/12
The other event of the weekend was the mid afternoon Sunday event. This event had 118 people 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 a huge portion of the metagame, but it's overall performance was fair to middling. Jeskai was also popular but didn't perform all that well either. The breakout star of this event was Red Stompy with a solid 64.15% non mirror win rate.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Red Stompy | 1st | Nerdkneereape |
| Red Stompy | 2nd | Granham |
| 8Cast | 3rd | __Ghost__ |
| ANT | 4th | Eureka22422 |
| UR Delver | 5th | Bullwinkkle6705 |
| Doomsday | 6th | wonderPreaux |
| Blue Karn/Artifacts | 7th | IPlayBadDecks |
| Jeskai Control | 8th | greenpm33 |
Wow. What a wild Top 8 here. At the end of the event it was a Red Stompy vs. Red Stompy fight to the death to see who was the greatest Rabblemaster of them all. In the end, only one prevailed. Let's take a look.
This is kind of what we've come to expect out of these lists, with a more aggro slanted feel where cards like Goblin Rabblemaster and Fable of the Mirror-Breaker are reigning supreme.
The other Finalist was on a more Planeswalker slanted version of Red Stompy.
Jokulhaups!!!! Super interesting list for sure. It's cool to see that there is still some variation in these builds for sure.
Also in this Top 8 we've got some ANT action.
Aeve is a cool main deck inclusion, given how exponentially it kills opponents if you are resolving it. Definitely a fun looking ANT list for sure!
At the bottom of the Top 8 we've got some Riddlesmith going on!
This deck is so wild. It's weird to consider how one arrives at playing only one copy of Karn, the Great Creator, but it's a super sweet deck and looks like a ton of fun.
Around the Web
- The Legacy Pit has some classic Delver vs Elves content for us. Check it out here.
- Bryant Cook plays Nossman's UG ThoughtShift Combo deck. Check it out here.
- Phil Gallagher has some Green Painter for us. Check it out here.
- Our very own SaffronOlive took susurrus_mtg's green Dino Prison for a spin. Check it out here.
- This league is not problematic at all, nope.
- Some 8Mulch content! Check it out here.
- The Dead Format is back! Check out their most recent episode with The Legacy Pit crew over here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Haven't seen a Loam deck in a while. This one is rocking some real spice from new Ob Nixilis to Riveteers Charm.
Tin Fins Omni-Tell?!
Maxtortion really kicking up on the Ledger Shredder.
DETH variant by Phil Gallagher!
This is a wild 4C like... big Depths deck? It's hard to really quantify this but it's super cool nonetheless.
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!
