It’s been a little while since the last Legacy Open or similarly-sized Legacy event on the US side of the ocean, and as such, I was happy to see the Season
One Invitational happen last weekend to give us more of an idea where Legacy could be going right now. For all of us in the Eternal crowd, the 7-1 and
better lists are actually more interesting than the top 8 lists – those might have gone as badly as 5-3, after all – but ignoring lists that allowed
players to make it to the top 8 even in a mixed event would be foolhardy anyway.
The other thing to remember is that the Invitational has traditionally lead to rather biased metagames. Fringe decks, combo, and anything that isn’t either
Delver or a blue go-over-the-top-of-Delver midrange strategy, such as Shardless Sultai and the different Stoneblade decks, has usually been significantly
underrepresented in the Invitational events, likely following the same logic Drew suggested as the correct way
to think about your deck selection for the event. If the past is any indication, it’s still the approach the majority of players seem to rely on, even
though, as it happens, I don’t agree with his perspective for a number of reasons.
First, for the argument of “I want a deck that gives me as much play as possible” to make sense at all, you need to expect to outplay most of your
opponents, and Invitationals are, in fact, stacked enough with good players that I have some doubts of how valuable that is for the majority of contestants
compared to having at least a couple of blowout matchups you won’t have to work too hard for – or at least where you’re massively favored if you don’t mess
up to badly – especially given that, from a theoretical point of view, that reasoning should at most hold for the top 50% of contestants no matter the
field.
Second, you’re squandering quite a bit of edge against players that have qualified through Standard play alone – even more likely with the new Open Series
structure – by playing something that essentially plays like a souped up Standard deck when you could be playing something that works differently enough
from standard Magic (the actual word, not the format this time) to force your opponents into unfamiliar situations and thereby force mistakes.
Finally, given the specific kind of metagame we’ve usually seen at Invitationals in the past, it’s very possible to find decks with non-standard play
patterns that are either just as good against the expected field as a fair middle of the road strategy would be, or indeed much better positioned than you
could ever be by joining into the mainstream approach that will lead to a lot of quasi mirror matches. It all depends on picking the correct one and having
the familiarity to play it well.
The Overperformers
Alright, let’s take a look what actually did perform in the end. The first thing deck that jumps out to me like it did back in January is the performance
of Lands. The deck was one of the few keeping up with the Treasure Cruise metagame, and back in January. I mentioned that that probably bodes well for it
moving forward – and man, has the deck delivered. Not only are two of the 7-1 and better decks Lands, there’s another one among the Invitational Top 8
players (with a 6-1-1 record that likely includes an ID), and two of them made it into the top 16 of the Sunday IQ (with another two in 19th and 30th).
Lands (34)
Spells (26)
Sideboard
Lands (35)
Spells (25)
Sideboard
Lands (33)
- 1 Forest
- 4 Wasteland
- 3 Tropical Island
- 1 Savannah
- 1 Bayou
- 1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale
- 1 Karakas
- 2 Windswept Heath
- 3 Maze of Ith
- 4 Rishadan Port
- 1 Ghost Quarter
- 1 Dark Depths
- 1 Academy Ruins
- 1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
- 2 Grove of the Burnwillows
- 2 Tolaria West
- 1 Misty Rainforest
- 1 Bojuka Bog
- 1 Creeping Tar Pit
- 1 Thespian's Stage
Spells (27)
Lands (34)
Spells (26)
Lands (34)
Spells (26)
Lands (34)
Spells (26)
Lands (34)
Spells (26)
These numbers wouldn’t be too impressive if Lands were a majority archetype, something that a ton of people shuffled up on Friday and Sunday. The truth is,
though, between the deck’s somewhat unusual approach to the game, the price of The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale, and it not using Brainstorm, Lands is a
deck that only has a fringe following. I’d be amazed if there were more than five or six Lands players in either the Invitational or the IQ and, on the
contrary, it wouldn’t surprise me if the players whose lists we get to see had been the only ones on Lands in either event. If these assumptions are even
remotely correct, that makes Lands into by far the best performing deck of the weekend.
Some of that is probably down to exactly the kind of phenomenon I alluded to above. Lands is one of those fringe decks that accepts a comparatively weak
combo matchup – you can beat something like Storm especially after sideboard, you likely won’t,* however – in exchange for being awesome
in others. In Lands’ case, the decks it’s designed to pray on are fair and non-basic land-heavy. They mostly win with creatures and maybe some planeswalker
support – aka exactly the kind of thing the “good players” are supposedly bringing to the Invitational. Now that’s the kind of deck I’d love to be packing!
If you haven’t ground those decks down with Life from the Loam, Wasteland, and Punishing Fire while always threatening to make a 20/20 out of nowhere, you
have no idea how utterly unfair Lands can seem at times (unless you’ve run into the Lands player yourself).
Lands isn’t the only archetype that I suspect outperformed its representation over the weekend. Infect and Shardless Sultai are the only archetypes that
have managed to make it into both top 8s and the 7-1 and better performers. Both, like Lands, are also fringe archetypes, though ones that play a lot
closer to actual mainstream decks and generally have at least a somewhat bigger following at this point than Lands (it’s really hard to stress how rare
that deck usually is in my experience), especially since Tom Ross has been tearing it up with Infect for a while now.
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (20)
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (21)
Creatures (14)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (23)
Spells (19)
Shardless Sultai doing reasonably makes sense to me. The deck has a very powerful long-term gameplan of just drowning the opponent in card advantage and
gets to do that uncontested again now that it’s the only deck playing some weird Ancestral Recall lookalike. This super-charged draw engine in particular
is what makes Shardless Sultai the midrange deck to rule other midrange decks. If you can’t mise them with an early aggressive draw or shut down their mana
early in the game, it’s basically impossible for the other fair blue decks to keep up with Shardless’s card advantage engine. Shardless Sultai is what you
should be doing if you want to follow my approach to the Invitational metagame at the same time as Drew’s.
Creatures (12)
Lands (19)
Spells (29)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 1 Forest
- 3 Force of Will
- 3 Daze
- 2 Berserk
- 1 Stifle
- 4 Invigorate
- 1 Crop Rotation
- 1 Ponder
- 2 Spell Pierce
- 3 Vines of Vastwood
- 2 Gitaxian Probe
- 1 Become Immense
- 1 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
Creatures (12)
Lands (20)
Spells (28)
Creatures (12)
Lands (20)
Spells (28)
Infect, on the other hand, might just be the best Delver deck at this point. Yes, yes, I realize the deck doesn’t pack Delver of Secrets. Given the way it
plays, however, it’s basically another incarnation of the fundamental tempo strategy Delver enables so well. Similarly to how Elves is a combo-tribal
hybrid deck, Infect is a combo-tempo hybrid. It trades some of the disruption of typical Delver decks, as well as the removal and threat base (for obvious
reasons), for the ability to combo kill the opponent as early as turn 2. The beautiful thing about the deck is that it isn’t an all-in combo deck at all
(luckily, given that its combo is actually rather terrible in the abstract). While it can threaten the kill very early – and that threat alone is a key
factor in the deck’s success – Infect is actually quite capable of playing a seemingly fair game and just grinding opponents out an infect counter or two
at a time while using its pump spells to recreate protection and removal effects as necessary.
The last deck that I suspect outperformed its metagame share is one that I wouldn’t in a million years list here if this were a European tournament:
Miracles. While there are no copies in the Invitational 7-1 and better list, the overall results of the two players who carried it to an Invitational top 8
indicate that the reason for its absence were likely a couple of intentional draws by Reid Duke and Joe Bass to lock up their top 8.
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (23)
Spells (34)
Creatures (4)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (22)
Spells (31)
Creatures (3)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (14)
Spells (40)
Creatures (2)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (15)
Spells (40)
- 4 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Brainstorm
- 1 Counterspell
- 2 Plains
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Swords to Plowshares
- 4 Island
- 4 Counterbalance
- 4 Ponder
- 2 Entreat the Angels
- 4 Terminus
- 1 Council's Judgment
- 2 Dig Through Time
Sideboard
If Miracles’ numbers in the US were similar to those on my side of the pond, I’d actually think Miracles might have done fine or even slightly
underperformed compared to its metagame share, but given that this is the US, which has (had?) so far largely dodged the popularity burst Miracles has been
experiencing in the old world for a while now… Well, with two more copies in the top 8 of Sunday’s IQ and the number of copies played likely much lower
than that of Delver and Blade strategies in typical US fashion, I’d consider this a rather strong performance for Legacy’s one fully dedicated control
deck.
The Favorites
I suspect you’ve realized at this point that I’ve been talking down the Delver strategies in this one. There’s a reason for that: Delver in its different
incarnations (be it the aggression of U/R and Temur or the slightly more midrangy approach of Jeskai and Sultai) is usually by far the most represented
archetype in American tournaments. And yet, between the Invitational lists and the IQ top 16, we see only six different players actually performing with
the deck.
Creatures (16)
Lands (18)
Spells (26)
Creatures (12)
Lands (18)
Spells (30)
Sideboard
Creatures (14)
Lands (20)
Spells (26)
Creatures (10)
Lands (19)
Spells (31)
Creatures (12)
Lands (18)
Spells (30)
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (20)
Spells (25)
That’s all the Delver archetypes thrown together just matching the results of Lands! That’s a humiliatingly bad result for what was most likely
the most popular archetype of both the Invitational and the IQ. That isn’t to say Delver is necessarily a bad strategy to pick. There’s a reason
Ross Meriam and Jacob Wilson both didn’t lose a Legacy round during the whole Invitational. It does, however, indicate that you either have to play
insanely well or get really lucky (or both) to actually get a winning record with Delver. That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d say about the
obvious best choice deck for an event, does it?
It is somewhat unfair to lump all the different Delver strategies together, and seeing Jacob’s 8-0 as well as two more copies of Temur Delver in
the IQ top 16 might indicate that Sultai simply isn’t where you want to be right now and that it’s time for all the Delver aficionados to go back to the
focused aggression and disruption of what was temporarily considered the dominant archetype in Legacy, Temur Delver, while leaving the midrange shenanigans
to the real midrange decks instead. Or maybe Infect really just is the better Delver deck – the future will tell!
And just to make sure I’m not bashing just Delver too much, I’d talk about the other American stalwart archetype of the past here – Esperblade, be it
Deathblade or not – but the deck hasn’t even put a single player into the 7-1s, Invitational final, or the IQ top 16. Its best result all weekend comes
from Christopher Johnson showing us that the deck isn’t actually dead by grabbing 26th place in the IQ.
The Uniques
Stoneblade isn’t totally out of it, though. There are a couple of decks in these results that I doubt more than a player or two would have brought just
because of popularity reasons. Given that these are so rare, there is little their performance tells us other than the fact that these decks clearly aren’t
terrible and demand more exploration from the Legacy community. And one of those is an oldie but goldie: Korey McDuffie’s U/W Stoneblade list.
Creatures (11)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (19)
Spells (27)
U/W Stoneblade isn’t exactly unknown to the Legacy community. In fact, I can remember a time when this was the favorite fair midrange strategy in
the format. Those days are long gone, however, and new printings and evolution have led to Stoneforge Mystic generally joining hands with either black
discard, red burn (and Delver of Secrets, commonly), or Deathrite Shaman and Abrupt Decay. As it turns out, getting rid of all those techy choices for a
rock solid manabase (like the one that gives so much strength to Miracles) might just be the right call. I can’t imagine having only two Dig Through Time
in that deck can ever be right, though.
Speaking of Dig Through Time, here’s what might be my favorite fringe deck of the tournament:
Creatures (5)
Lands (19)
Spells (36)
Chris Andersen already top 16’ed the Indianapolis Legacy Open back in January with close to the same list and has represented the Thought Scour delve
strategy once again this time around. I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on Thought Scour so far, but given that in a deck like this it’s a lot like a Mana
Vault that cantrips, I do very much see the appeal. Dig Through Time is an incredibly powerful spell and being the best at casting it early and often is a
pretty big thing to have going for you – and seeing how well Chris is doing with a deck that almost nobody else seems to be playing, it also seems to
translate into quite a lot of wins. I haven’t yet gotten over the whole “man, if this stupid Thought Scour was a Ponder, I wouldn’t be missing my land
drop” hitch I keep encountering in testing, but that might be an attitude thing instead of a real flaw in the deck. This deck is definitely something worth
testing and exploring further. I mean, the only Eli Kassis-style Grixis control list in the hands of Eric
English that I’ve seen in these results has also switched over to Thought Scour shenanigans. Maybe this is simply the future and we (well, most of us)
haven’t realized yet?
Finally, there’s a unique deck I want to highlight because a) 28th in a 200+ player event is quite solid and b) simply because I like it quite a bit –
Patrick Reynolds’ Esper Control:
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (28)
By cutting Stoneforge Mystic from the old Esperblade lists for more tempo- and space-efficient threats (and with the help of Dig Through Time), Patrick has
sacrificed the early Stoneforge Mystic blowouts to give the deck the room to play a fully powered control game with the ability to finish fast once he’s
established thanks to Monastery Mentor. I haven’t been too impressed with Stoneforge in a metagame full of cheap removal and discard spells, and the card
is also too slow to represent a reasonable threat against the combo decks, so it’s time in control-ish shells might just be coming to an end. Or maybe not
(see Korey’s list above) and there simply are a ton of differently-focused U/W/x control decks with or without midrange leanings viable in Legacy at this
point, which would be a totally acceptable outcome from where I’m sitting.
The Combo?
That leaves us with one question: What the heck happened to the combo decks? Well, in my opinion, they did neither particularly well nor especially badly
compared to the numbers I’d expect to see. I’m obviously happy to see Storm running up an excellent record in the hands of Ben Wienburg during the Invitational, but given the
combination of how strong the deck is and how few people play it, that’s roughly what I’d expect to see – one experienced pilot tearing through the field.
Similarly, I can’t say I’m surprised to see Reanimator winning the Legacy Premier IQ. The deck is extremely powerful and quite well-positioned given that
people don’t seem particularly paranoid about graveyard hate at this point.
The one interesting thing to observe concerning the combo archetypes are the different performances by Sneak and Show and Omni-Tell. Traditionally, Sneak
and Show is the more popular and more successful of the two, yet between the Invitational and the IQ, Omni-Tell triumphs, whereas Sneak and Show doesn’t.
Omni-Tell made it to 7-1 in the Invitational and had a top 16 in the IQ, while Sneak and Shown “only” managed to place three copies in the top 20. This
might obviously be the result of pure variance, however, it might also be an indicator that the addition of Dig Through Time (or the expected grindy
metagame) has finally pushed the more resilient mono-blue deck ahead of the faster Sneak and Show deck. I’m not really sure if that’s a good thing or a bad
thing – both decks are rather annoying to play against in my opinion, but at least Omni-Tell is much less prone to blow you out on turn 2 – but what I can
say is that I much prefer John Taylor’s list over the traditional list along the lines of Collins Mullen’s:
Creatures (1)
Lands (19)
Spells (40)
Creatures (1)
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (19)
Spells (39)
A single different decision, and yet, a world of difference. Cutting the clunky Enter the Infinites for more library manipulation and the fourth Cunning
Wish forces John to win all games with a hardcast Emrakul, the Aeons Torn that he often will first have to dig into after getting Omniscience into play. It
also means that he is much less prone to be sitting around with a handful of clunky combo pieces waiting for the final piece to get things going and can
instead fully concentrate his (much more impressive) library manipulation towards making things free. Once that happens, the deck goes off in a very
similar way to High Tide’s final combo turn by just chaining cantrips and draw spells until it finds either Cunning Wish (for Eladamri’s Call) or the
Emrakul itself. I expect its fizzle rate is roughly as high as that of High Tide from that point, too (that is to say, quite close to nil). That seems like
a very low cost to pay for getting four dead cards out of your deck.
Conclusions
It doesn’t look like there have been any earth-shattering changes to Legacy since January, in fact, it very much looks like we’re back to what the format
looked like half a year ago with a couple of neat wrenches thrown into the mix. First, Dig Through Time is still working on making its impact felt and is
starting to sneak into more and more lists, filling roles from key player to utility tool, thereby shaking up the established pecking order of combo and
control decks.
At the same time, a possibly optimal build of Lands has emerged and is consistently putting up excellent results, proving that the results we’d seen in the
last couple of months weren’t a fluke. I’m very interested to see what happens now that we have a non-blue archetype with quietly dominant numbers. Are we
going to see it litter top 8s for the time to come? Will The Tabernacle At Pendrell Vale (or rather its price) prove too much of a no-go? Are people too
attached to their Brainstorm and blue midrange decks to switch?
Given the Invitaitonal’s results, Delver and the other blue midrange strategies should only be minor players among many others, and a left-field non-blue
deck might just be the best thing to be doing, while Death and Taxes and Elves are also still doing decently. Is the format going to reflect that or are
there just too many people (like me, admittedly) who can’t leave their fingers off the blue cards even when there’s a good reason they should?
I can’t wait to see where we’re going from here!