This Week in Legacy: Braving the Wilds
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 diving into the Wilds of Eldraine with a look at what that set will bring for Legacy! In addition to that we've got a paper event from a few weeks back from China as well as a look at the MOCS event from this past weekend!
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
Wild Wild Eldraine
A new Standard set is upon us quite soon with Wilds of Eldraine and the Wilds of Eldraine Commander products coming soon as well. We're going to look at what cards from these sets could see play in Legacy.
There's a returning mechanic in this set in the form of Adventures, but also two new mechanics in the form of Bargain and Role tokens. Bargain is an effect that occurs when casting a spell if you sacrifice an artifact, enchantment, or token as you cast it. Role tokens are enchantment tokens that get attached to permanents via effects on cards.
Let's look at the cards that could see play here!
Agatha's Soul Cauldron
This card is quite amusing given that it has a goofy interaction with Grist, the Hunger Tide by giving creatures with +1/+1 counters on it the loyalty abilities of Grist because it's a creature in the graveyard. This doesn't give those creatures loyalty counters by default, so they need to plus to add counters before they could use Grists minus abilities. Probably not good, but it's amusing and fun.
Beseech the Mirror
This is the card that has provoked the most discussion going into this spoiler season and it is definitely the most playable and powerful card in the entire set for Legacy. The Bargain aspect is completely trivial to fulfill in decks that want this and it's an incredibly powerful effect. It can nab any solid payoff like most Storm kills (Tendrils) but can also nab some cards that have not seen much play in Legacy overall (Gaea's Will for example). It can also nab stuff like Balustrade Spy in an Oops shell. The list of powerful cards this casts is pretty long.
This is a card to keep an eye on as it will definitely see play in a number of combo shells because it is quite good in so many ways. It's going to take some time for people to really nail down where this goes the best, but it's very good.
Court of Ardenvale
The Commander product this go around introduced a new cycle of Courts (first seen in Commander Legends). The white Court here seems quite strong since if you can retain the monarch you can basically Sevinne's Reclamation literally every upkeep which is absolutely absurd in a number of ways (looping Teferi seems quite good). I think this is very interesting for sure and is more than likely a sideboard card but it's very strong.
Court of Garenbrig
The green Court is kind of nutty in being able to close games out. Not only are you growing your creatures with +1/+1 counters by default, but the upside of retaining the monarch is you get those counters and then double the number of counters. This is pretty good at creating a powerful clock to end the game with.
Court of Locthwain
The black Court is kind of sweet for sure. Being able to remove options from your opponent's game plan is always interesting, but the fact that this lets you cast the spell is good as well. The upside of retaining monarch here is that you get to cast anything exiled with the Court for free, which is silly.
Feral Encounter
It just would not be an Eldraine set without cards that are excessively wordy. This card does a lot of things and they're not all actually connected. The first thing this does is finds you a creature and lets you cast it that turn, and then also sets up a trigger to have one of your creatures deal damage to an opponent's creature. I don't know if this is good in Legacy and it's more than likely not.
Likeness Looter
Phyrexian Dreadnought still exists, and so any means of having something be a Dreadnought are always worth the look. This one loots too, it's cheap, and for one mana you get a flying Dreadnought. Quite spicy for sure.
Questing Druid
A Reckless Impulse that turns into a Quirion Dryad is kind of neat, but I don't know if this is good enough in Legacy right now. It's very slow to utilize and Quirion Dryad itself has not been playable in ages, so the Adventure half doesn't necessarily make this playable either.
Slumbering Keepguard
This is amusing just a bit in Enchantress based strategies since it can get pretty large, and getting to scry for every enchantment is fun. It's still no Destiny Spinner though.
Syr Ginger, the Meal Ender
Ravager Stompy hasn't quite existed for some time (aka Steel Stompy) but this would be a good card for that type of deck for sure. If your opponent has a Planeswalker this can kill quickly, but if your opponent doesn't have Planeswalkers it isn't so good.
Food Knight however is the best creature sub type so there is that.
Up the Beanstalk
Wow this card is something. There are a lot of mana value 5 spells in Legacy that get cast for essentially free, the biggest of which being Force of Will, so getting to just draw whenever you Force something is pretty incredible. Fury, Solitude, Yorion, Sky Nomad are just a number of other mana value 5 spells that are regularly cast, so I could see this being quite good as a draw spell. It replaces itself too and that's awesome.
MTA 10th Fest Legacy
Earlier this month in China, MTA held a two day weekend event to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of the organization. MTA was kind enough to provide some information on their organization and the events they hold. Thanks to MTA for giving us some great info about their events! All of the information about the events talked about here including their metagame breakdown can be found here.
MTA is an organization in China dedicated to hosting large-scale Magic events, founded in 2013. MTA is currently focusing on hosting the domestic Legacy Series and the Pioneer Series.
In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the founding of MTA, we decided to hold a national competition this year.
The MTA competition is divided into two days.
The first day is an open competition. All players can sign up. According to the number of people, the Swiss round will determine the top 8, and the top 8 will be BO3 single elimination.
The second day is the Invitational Tournament. The invitation range covers players who performed well in the previous series and the top 64 players on the first day. According to the number of people, the Swiss round will determine the top 8, and the top 8 will be BO5 single elimination.
The first event held by MTA was their Legacy Open event and it had 103 players in it, which is quite stellar!
Overall this event looked quite good. Quite a bit of variety in the metagame for sure. Let's take a look at the Top 8 of this event.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Death and Taxes | 1st | zhang pingyi |
| Cradle Control | 2nd | gao boran |
| Death's Shadow | 3rd-4th | cao fangshuo |
| Death's Shadow | 3rd-4th | xu yineng |
| Sneak and Show | 5th-8th | shing shing |
| Lands | 5th-8th | chen hongyao |
| Reanimator | 5th-8th | shi jinghao |
| Orzhov Vial | 5th-8th | yan gan |
Fairly solid Top 8 here for sure. Reasonably interesting variety seeing some of these non blue decks rising to the top because they can prey on the tempo decks of the format.
The second event of the weekend was their Invitational event, which had 74 players in it!
Based on looking at the posted metagame of this event, it was very combo-heavy for sure with 31 copies of various combo decks over 28 copies of Tempo/Aggro variants.
Let's also look at the Top 8 of this event.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Orzhov Vial | 1st | Chen Yunyi |
| Red Stompy | 2nd | Chen Hongyao |
| Cradle Control | 3rd-4th | Andy Liang |
| Death's Shadow | 3rd-4th | Li Tianshuo |
| Reanimator | 5th-8th | Liu Yuchen |
| Orzhov Vial | 5th-8th | Yan Gan |
| Lands | 5th-8th | Wang Jianian |
| Cradle Control | 5th-8th | Gao Boran |
Despite the presence of combo in the event, a lot of the decks that really punish combo decks seemed to definitely rise to the top of the event here. Lot of Vial and prison strategies, plus Cradle Control.
Thanks to MTA for providing this information to us!
MOCS Season 2 Champions Showcase
Normally we wouldn't be covering things like the MOCS Champions Showcase, but this past weekend's Showcase event was interesting enough in that it was partially Vintage Cube and partially Legacy for the formats for the event. Usually these events are split format events, but it's very rare for a format like Legacy to be used for these events. This is an invitation only event that is extended to players who do well in various qualifying events of leaderboards.
The eight players in this event were along with the deck the played for the Legacy portion were:
| Deck Name | Qualification | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Reanimator | Pauper Champion | Lukas Jaklovsky |
| Death's Shadow | Legacy Champion | Muhan Yu |
| RUG Cascade | Pioneer Champion | Chris Brackley |
| Red Painter | Open #2 Champion | Tobias Ehrismann |
| Red Stompy | Modern Champion | Pierre Tardy |
| Death and Taxes | Leaderboard | Sam Rolph |
| Lands | Leaderboard | Sebastián Pozzo |
| Dimir Scam | Open #1 Champion | Jesse Hampton |
Such a small event provides some interesting deckbuilding decisions for sure, such as the fact that the Red Stompy list came packing four copies of Pyroblast in the sideboard.
At the end of the weekend it was Lukas Jaklovsky who won overall the $20,000 prize and an invitation to the World Championship in 2024 on Reanimator.
Quite a solid list and a really good pick of a deck to prey on such a small metagame. Reanimator has so many little free wins that it can steal away games that it seems like a really strong deck for this sort of event.
Legacy Challenge 8/26
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the early morning Saturday event. This event 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.
Grixis Delver was the most popular deck of the event, but it's win rate was not great. Death and Taxes did very well here, as did Reanimator.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Death and Taxes | 1st | Oxdizzle |
| 8Cast | 2nd | ItsSwiftyTime |
| Reanimator | 3rd | goyf_daddy89 |
| Jeskai Control | 4th | Oceansoul92 |
| Black Stompy | 5th | The_Great_Slob |
| Boros Stompy | 6th | monsyama |
| Nic Fit | 7th | Koike |
| 4C Uro Control | 8th | TrueHero |
Very interesting Top 8 here. Nice variety. At the end of the event it was Death and Taxes that won.
This deck now having access to cards like Bowmasters and Thoughtseize seems incredibly strong right now and it's definitely showing in its results how powerful this deck is. This is a great way to attack the current format.
In Second Place we had 8Cast.
Patchwork Automaton giving this deck an aggressive stance is pretty cool. It lets the deck push through some of the hate generally leveled at it and lets it aggressively end the game.
Also in this Top 8 we had Jeskai Control.
This version of Jeskai with Forth Eorlingas! is quite cool really. Forth is just incredibly powerful and scales well across the entire game. Definitely digging it.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Nic Fit.
Been a while since I've seen a fun Nic Fit list. Having the Scam package plus the Chain of Smog combo is quite cool for sure. This looks like something I would play.
Legacy Challenge 8/27
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the mid afternoon Sunday event. This event had 84 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.
Grixis Delver was again super popular but its win rate was not so good. Jeskai Control did poorly as well, while D&T continued to have a solid weekend.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Boros Stompy | 1st | CliffBoyardee |
| Death and Taxes | 2nd | TheImmortalSun |
| Cradle Control | 3rd | Testacular |
| RUG Cascade | 4th | roter_Erzengel |
| Reanimator | 5th | goyf_daddy89 |
| Death's Shadow | 6th | Vegetaxx |
| Cephalid Breakfast | 7th | Aigis |
| Grixis Delver | 8th | JPA93 |
Really diverse Top 8 here. At the end of the event it was the Boros Stompy deck that won.
This deck has some really strong plays to it, with both Initiative creatures and also again Forth Eorlingas! being a powerful scaling option for these decks.
In Second Place we had Death and Taxes.
The light splash into red here for Magus of the Moon out of the sideboard is reasonable. There's a lot of decks that Magus hits hard right now and D&T can leverage this well.
Also in this Top 8 we had Cradle Control.
This deck is pretty strong. Fiend Artisan has really proven itself to be a very powerful card in the current format with its toolbox capability.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we had Cephalid Breakfast.
Very solid looking stock list of this deck it seems, but also the Pact of Negation in the main deck is pretty cool for protecting the combo. The backup plan here definitely seems to be Urza's Saga, which is a great backup plan for sure.
Around the Web
- Alex McKinley has a guide on how to Mind's Desire. Check it out here.
- Eternal Durdles continues to try to offer resources for new Legacy players! Check out the latest installment here.
- Eternal Glory Podcast covers cards missing on Magic Online. Check it out here.
- The Legacy Gambit had on Jarvis Yu to discuss deckbuilding! Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 deck lists over here.
Jegantha Lands is quite cool.
Orzhov Stompy with Black Market Connections!
Legacy Paradoxical Outcome?!
STARSCREAM.
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!
