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This Week in Legacy: The Masters of European Legacy

by Joe Dyer // Sep 13, 2023

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 diving into the overall results of the European Legacy Masters event! In addition to that we've got some Challenge data plus a Super Qualifier to look at with the first weekend's MTGO results from Wilds of Eldraine available.

Without further ado, let's dive right in!

European Legacy Masters 2023

Over the first weekend of September at the 4Seasons event in Bologna, Italy, the second-ever European Legacy Masters took place. This event series is a year-long qualification-only series with each country involved having a team of players who make it into the event at the end of the year via ELM Qualifiers.

This dedication to Legacy as a format is incredibly admirable and the turnout for these events is absolutely stellar. This year's ELM event had 102 players in it which is just an absolutely stunning group of players. The ELM team is super awesome to work with, and they have a really strong presence showcasing their events.

You can find out everything you need to know about the ELM on their website and their Twitter. The event itself from that weekend was indeed streamed with full coverage and the VODs for that event will be available on the ELM YouTube Channel. Major thanks to both RonColpoCinese and Sahar Mirhadi for all of their help with providing information on the event to me and especially RonColpoCinese for his tireless dedication to collecting full data for the event.

I have been told that the Top 8 decklists are on MTGTop8, but that there was an incorrect aspect to them, but those lists should hopefully be on Goldfish soon. The ELM data sheet however can be found here.

Dimir Scam ended up being the most popular deck of the event, but its win rate was less than stellar. Grixis Delver also did well, as did 8Cast. Lands and Cradle Control underperformed in this event.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	Player Name
Black Stompy	1st	Juda František
Grixis Delver	2nd	Cerqueira Bruno
Dimir Scam	3rd	Moreno Dario
4C Uro Control	4th	Cadei Angelo
Jeskai Control	5th	Varga Tomas
Cradle Control	6th	Bender Sebastian
Grixis Delver	7th	Kryda Bartosz
Jeskai Control	8th	Steurs Johan

There is a lot of Control in this Top 8 for sure. As we indicated in last week's article, the winner of the event was František Juda at 17 years old on Black Stompy.

As even the initial week of Wilds of Eldraine being around has seemingly indicated, Beseech the Mirror's best home definitely seems to be this deck. It's powerful and proactive, it plays to the board well, and it has a strong combo that is hard to interact with well in pre-board games. It is an exceptionally powerful deck and Beseech just made it a whole lot better by giving the deck multiple ways of accessing its combo pieces, its threats, and bargaining simply seems far too easy with this deck as compared to more glass cannon tactics.

If you're looking for a deck with Beseech this is probably the best deck to pick.

All in all, this looked like a stupendous event and a lot of fun. Major thanks again to the ELM team for continuing to support Legacy and for making this event structure work. It's a truly unique thing and very interesting.

Legacy Super Qualifier 9/9

The first major event of the weekend was the Legacy Super Qualifier event on Saturday. This event was a full-on Super Qualifier which cost either 40 Tix, 400 PP or 40 QPs to enter, and the Top 4 received invitations to an upcoming Regional Championship event. This event had 264 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.

4C Uro decks were the largest brunt of the field, having a slightly less than 50% win rate overall, but a big part of that was the initial inclusion of Up the Beanstalk in these decks. Boros Stompy was also quite popular and had an incredibly strong finish, but its overall win rate was dragged down a bit. Dimir Scam did very well as did Black Stompy and Grixis Delver. Reanimator performed poorly as did D&T.

Let's take a look at the Top 8. For the purposes of all lists for this event, we'll only be looking at lists from the Top 4 as those are the four players who received qualifications.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
5C Control	1st	Kihara_Works
Boros Stompy	2nd	mmapson125
Golgari Depths	3rd	o0oHyperiono0o
4C Uro Control	4th	McWinSauce
Lands	5th	sebastianpozzo
Cradle Control	6th	EronRelentless
Cephalid Breakfast	7th	GanYanCHN
Mystic Forge Combo	8th	markdm

Nice variety of decks here honestly. Good amount of different archetypes which is always fun to see. At the end of the event it was Kihara_Works on a sweet 5C Control list.

This deck is super interesting. Leveraging the power of Delighted Halfling is quite good when you have things like Leovold, Teferi, Slogurk, Uro, and M&B. Definitely seems like a solidly powerful deck.

In Second Place we had our good friend Michael Mapson on Boros Stompy.

Very strong stock list here. This deck has a lot of power behind it and can very quickly crush other decks. Definitely a deck to continue to keep your eye on if you like Ancient Tomb.

Also in the Top 4 here we had Golgari Depths.

We don't see straight Golgari Depths too often anymore as more often Abzan/Naya are the defaults, but you can't put Vampire Hexmage down for too long, and I think Bowmasters is a great power-up to this deck.

At the bottom of the Top 4 we had 4C Uro Control.

Our first look at a list playing Up the Beanstalk here. There's a lot of power for that card here in this list, and I can confirm from direct experience playing against this card that it's definitely the real deal. This list looks super fun for sure.

Legacy Challenge 9/9

The first Challenge event of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event. This event had 50 players based on what the Legacy Data Collection was able to get.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the incomplete datasheet here. Because the Super Qualifier also going on the same day, there weren't enough folks collecting data. With that said, let's look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
Black Stompy	1st	TGB12
Boros Stompy	2nd	burrarun
Black Saga Storm	3rd	Eurekea22422
Grixis Delver	4th	piao
RUG Cascade	5th	jvidarte
Chain of Smog Combo	6th	DragonDayDragon
Black Stompy	7th	AFX
Cradle Control	8th	lampalot

Lot of Ancient Tomb in the Top 8, with the finals being decided by Black Stompy.

This is a deck that probably got the most power-up by Beseech the Mirror as indicated earlier when we talked about the ELM event. It gives the deck multiple ways to tutor its combo pieces and bargaining is super easy for this kind of deck.

In Second Place we had Boros Stompy.

Comet is the best dog ever. That is all.

Also in this Top 8 we had a sweet Black Saga Storm variant.

Beseech with Gaea's Will is quite interesting as a way to simulate Yawgmoth's Will in Legacy. Definitely an interesting list.

Further down the Top 8 we had Chain of Smog Combo.

The Chain of Smog deck getting to adopt the Scam combo is pretty gross. Mausoleum Secrets also proving great here as a tutor for Chain of Smog as getting two creatures into the graveyard is super easy with Troll and Generous Ent.

Legacy Challenge 9/10

The second Challenge event was the mid-afternoon Sunday event. This event had 95 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.

Grixis Delver was popular with a solid win rate, while Boros and Other Control variants did poorly. Mystic Forge Combo did reasonably well, however.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name	Placing	MTGO Username
Dimir Scam	1st	wambocombo2020
Dimir Scam	2nd	bernardocssa
Sneak and Show	3rd	wingzeronfc
Jeskai Control	4th	Oceansoul92
GW Depths	5th	Sprouts
GW Depths	6th	FedericollMadao
Grixis Delver	7th	JakeTMS
Oops! All Spells	8th	BERNASTORRES

Very interesting Top 8 for sure. At the end of the event it was a Scam vs Scam faceoff.

This one is quite interesting and it's very amusing indeed to see a copy of Atraxa, Grand Unifier as this is leveraging cards like Currency Converter to pitch it to the graveyard to Reanimate it. The saga angle here is quite sweet. Definitely different.

As noted the Second Place list was also Scam, but a more stock variant.

Palantir of Orthanc is such a sweet sideboard card, especially in a deck like this where you have stuff like Troll, etc. and your opponent can't easily chance not letting you draw.

Further into this Top 8 we had Jeskai Control.

This seems to be the most common variant of Jeskai at this juncture. Forth Eorlingas! is a great finisher for the deck that scales well across the game.

Also in this Top 8 we had GW Depths.

Main deck Gaddock Teeg makes a ton of sense with everyone trying to cast cards like Beseech the Mirror honestly.

Around the Web

TonyScapone is doing Paradoxical Outcome in Legacy! Check it out here.
Bryant Cook is rolling the dice with Pair o' Dice Lost in ANT. Check it out here.
The Eternal Glory Podcast is discussing the power of Grief. Check it out here.
The Legacy Gambit has a great new video on Painter. Check it out here.

The Spice Corner

You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.

Spicy Culling the Weak Beseech Combo deck.

Interesting take on Boros Stompy with zero Initiative dorks. Forth Eorlingas! is strong.

Legacy Paradoxical Outcome, as brought to us by TonyScapone.

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!