The StarCityGames.com Philadelphia Legacy Open occurs this Sunday, June 6th. The preparation will be frantic this week, but knowing what to be ready for is very important. While no one can accurately predict the metagame this Sunday, there is a great deal of information about previous Legacy Opens that should provide a useful starting point. The Atlanta Legacy Open was the most recent tournament and provides the latest glimpse of the Legacy metagame for this type of tournament. While there may be regional differences between the two tournaments, there is no real way to know what those are.
The metagame at Atlanta looked like the following (numbers from Jared Sylva article) –
Reanimator – 11.50%
Merfolk – 10.50%
Zoo – 9.0%
Counter-Top – 7.5%
Goblins – 6.5%
Ad Nauseam – 5.5%
Blue Land – 5.0%
Charbelcher – 4.5%
Dredge – 4.0%
Bant – 2.5%
Enchantress – 2.0%
Jedi Emreka – 2.0%
Other – 29.50%
Total – 100.00%
The first and most important thing to realize is that almost one-third of the metagame was essentially random. I mean random in the sense that these decks cannot be grouped with any of the other decks or with themselves to form any type of group. Preparing for this group of decks is virtually impossible. It is, however, important to realize that any player is more likely to play against a random deck than every other deck in the field. This high number of random decks should prevent any player from trying to beat the most popular decks with overly narrow cards that only work against the best decks. This type of metagaming, which maybe successful against those decks, is likely to lead to disastrous results against this large portion of the metagame.
While one-third of the metagame is mostly a mystery, the rest of it seems to fairly well grouped into large chunks which can give us a sense of what to prepare for. Reanimator, Merfolk, and Zoo were almost one-third of the metagame as well and they seem to be the best place to start for anyone looking to be ready for this weekend. If you only had time to test against three decks, these are probably the ones to play against. Not only were they the three most popular decks in Atlanta, but they represent a broad range of the archetypes in Legacy.
Reanimator is the leading combo deck of the format, and will you give a sense of how your deck deals with a large creature early in the game. This combo deck, unlike others in the format, has access to disruption in the form of Force of Will, Daze, and Thoughtseize. It has a number of tools to fight countermagic and creature removal to protect its reanimated target. Depending on the type of deck you are playing, this may not give you sufficient information about your matchup against Ad Nauseam or Charbelcher decks because these decks maybe harder to race and need to be disrupted in different ways than a deck like Reanimator.
Merfolk is an aggro-control deck which itself is set up to beat other aggro-control. Testing against this deck will give your deck insight into how your deck handles both a reasonably quick clock combined with counterspells. This combination of disruption and aggressive creatures is used by many decks in the format, and testing against one of the most popular ones should yield helpful results. While some Merfolk decks incorporate Tarmogoyf, most of the other aggro-control Legacy decks do play him along with other larger creatures. The testing against Merfolk is useful, but it has its limits as it will not prepare a player to deal with cards like Knight of the Reliquary or Tombstalker. Merfolk may also help determine if certain sideboard cards are useful against other tribal strategies such as Goblins, but the decks are different enough that no definitive conclusions should be drawn from a deck that does well against Merfolk will necessary do as well against Goblins.
Zoo, as the leading aggressive deck, provides a good measure on how to deal with a deck that can have you beat on turn 4 or 5, but unlike combo decks. it’s not easy to disrupt. Its creatures need to be answered, and it can still finish you off with its burn spells if and when you stabilize against it. An opposing deck will have to win before Zoo can or it will need sufficient ways to slow down Zoo. Once the early threats have been answered then slower decks will have a chance to play their more powerful and expensive spells to win the game. Being able to consistently survive the early part of the game against Zoo will tell you whether your deck has the tools to effectively deal with the matchup.
If a player does have time for additional testing, then most the remaining third of the decks are split across a number of different types of decks. Counter-Top, Goblins, Ad Nauseam, Blue Land, Charbelcher, and Dredge together were one-third of the field at Atlanta. These decks are very diverse, and testing time should be used wisely so that it can give a person the most useful information.
Counter-Top, as the most popular of these decks and also a strategy that is different from the others, should be the next deck that should be tested against if it at all possible. These decks are about as close as Legacy gets to control decks but most of them play swift win conditions in the form of Tarmogoyf and Knight of the Reliquary or a combo finish with Natural Order into Progenitus. Testing against this deck will give you a sense of how to deal with a resolved Counterbalance and numerous counterspells as these decks are generally full of answers including creature removal.
While Goblins is the next most popular deck, its popularity fluctuates to a great degree and it may not be the best deck to spend time testing against. It’s hard to know how many people will play it in Philadelphia, but with limited time for testing it should be spent on decks that have a better chance of being there in larger numbers. Testing against both Merfolk as a tribal deck and Zoo as a fast aggressive deck should give a player a good sense of how to deal with these types of situations and testing against Goblins should be considered more a luxury than a necessity.
Playing against Ad Nauseam will give you a sense of how the deck can handle Storm decks that can win as early as turn one. Since Charbelcher is similar deck in that it usually tries to combo on turn one it maybe more than sufficient to test only against Ad Nauseam. Ad Nauseam won Atlanta and it may see an uptick in its popularity for the upcoming tournament. It also tends to be a bit slower than Charbelcher, and it gives decks more of an opportunity to interact with it.
Finally, Blue Land (43 Land) and Dredge are very different decks, but they both rely heavily on their graveyard to accomplish their strategy. If a player has gotten this far in testing and would like to test against either of these decks, then either deck should suffice. To save time, choose one of them and try your deck against that one. Blue Land might be a better choice as it has done better in recent Open tournaments. Against either of these decks, if your deck is significantly behind in game 1 then it might be more useful to test post-board, where graveyard hate cards will be highly relevant to how the matchup would turn out in a real tournament.
The remaining decks from Atlanta including Bant, Enchantress, and Jedi Emreka are so small in number that it would not make sense to test against these decks before testing thoroughly against everything else. These decks may easily join the random category in the following tournament and should not be considered a significant part of the Legacy metagame.
To review the starting point for testing should be the following decks in this order –
Reanimator
Merfolk (with or without Tarmogoyf)
Zoo
If a player has time to do additional testing then the following should be tested in this order –
Counter-Top (with or without Natural Order)
Ad Nauseam
Blue Land
If player has time beyond these decks, then the following can also be tested in this order –
Dredge
Goblins
It is important to know that these conclusions comes from the previous tournament, and if a radical shift takes places between last month and this month then this fact will not be known until the event itself. Another key factor is the random part of the metagame and whether it remain as big as it is or whether its number will shrink or grow. The growth of the random group will make any testing less effective as you will more likely hit decks that you have not played against. If random group gets smaller, it is likely that other already established decks will grow in number and thus making testing more useful. Despite the fluctuations of this group, testing against the major decks will always improve the choice of deck and gameplay against the most popular decks. It is something that should definitely be done in preparation for a tournament like this.