Welcome back for September’s London Legacy Monthly report! We are now in the third month in our new venue and everyone seems to be settling in well.

Yet again we had a few no shows on the day so 42 players for this one. Still waiting to hit the magic 50 on the day! You will notice a lot more decks had multiple players this month and so we had 26 archetypes spread over our player-base. As mentioned in last month’s report this will be a continuing feature of LLM. The ability to play any deck or card really opens up the metagame. A few people did, however, take my advice to play a deck with solid matchups across the board and we had 4 Grixis players, split between Delver and Control. Interestingly it seems that Delver was the better option as both of them made the Top4 while Grixis Control languished outside of the Top16. I think this is down to both the ability to be more aggressive and close out a game even in a close matchup that delver has, and the delver players were both very experienced with their deck. Grixis Control is a great deck but its margins are much finer as its clock is so much slower than a delver deck.

London Legacy Monthly - September Metagame

Deck No. of Players Deck No. of Players RUG Delver 4 Burn 1 Aggro Loam 3 Cephalid Breakfast 1 Miracles 3 Chunderbucket Pile 1 BUG Midrange 2 Dredge 1 BR Reanimator 2 Eldrazi Post 1 Death and Taxes 2 Elves 1 Eldrazi Stompy 2 Enchantress 1 Grixis Control 2 Lands 1 Grixis Delver 2 Punishing Maverick 1 Moon Stompy 2 Sai Artifact Combo 1 Nic Fit 2 Slivers 1 Sneak and Show 2 Slow Depths 1 ANT 1 UW Stoneblade 1

This months most played, and likely worst performing deck was RUG Delver! Considering two months ago I advised people to stop playing this I’m starting to wonder if anyone actually reads this far in my reports! (Click here if you do!) This is a good opportunity to talk about where the Legacy format currently is and how RUG Delver doesn’t really fight well against it. At Septembers LLM you had a 25% chance to sit down opposite a Chalice of the Void player. One person even built and played a deck to try and prove that any pile of cards will work if you can use Chalice as a crutch (more on that later). Having a bad matchup against a quarter of the room is obviously not a place you want to be.

The second problem is that your traditional big boy Tarmogoyf has been outclassed by Gurmag Angler and RUG lists now have to play the 3cmc True-Name Nemesis. While this card is great it doesn’t really fit into the original build of RUG as a deck that can live happily on one or two lands (remember Wasteland is a spell). The third big issue is the tempo mana denial plan that is RUG’s bread and butter has got worse against the field. Baleful Strix, as an example, is a cantrip that immediately stops your aggression. Sure you may have stuck the opponent on two lands for a few turns with a timely Stifle but now you have to waste your burn spell that was going to shorten the clock on a measly 1/1 that has already drawn the opponent a card. The traditional mantra of RUG was that you should plan to end the game as you used your last card in hand. Now you run out of cards and the opponent is still on 6 life…

Aggro decks continue to slide down as a share of the metagame. This is not to say however, that they are bad. Beside RUG’s terrible outing the Top 4 of the whole event were all aggressive decks, so there is still hope for those of you who like to attack in for 3 or 5 rather than 20, 15 or 7 lifelink 😉

The final hopefully useful stat I wanted to mention was that this metagame was 60% Force of Will decks. For those of you thinking of turn 1 combo decks to counter the grindy control and tempo aggro decks that is something worth thinking about. Very roughly, 2/3rds of your games will be against opponents with FOW in their deck, and those players have about a 40% chance to have it in their opening hand.

I usually make a suggestion about what deck to play but to be honest this month is a tough one. There were lots of control decks and the combo decks were spread pretty evenly between stack, graveyard and permanent based which makes it hard to attack. I played Aggro Loam and it felt very strong, but also hard to pilot. Why not play something a bit off the wall like Eureka Nic Fit or Goblins with its new Emrakul killing toy? The other option will be to use Assassin’s Trophy in a BUG control shell (or any other!). I’m sure the two BUG players playing in September were already preparing for next month. Finally, you could use Runaway Steam-Kin in some broken way I suspect. It makes Manamorphose ‘quite interesting’ and is pumped by red spells. That includes creatures. Maybe Goblins want to get on that train?

The swiss rounds were dominated by Eldrazi stompy and Grixis Delver with all of these decks players able to at least single draw into the Top8. However, no one told Joe Baddeley this and so he decided to play on table one, not realising a loss for him might knock him out of contention! Luckily he won and so topped the standings!

For future reference the decklists which we submit to MTG Top8 will be the Top16 who could actually play the elimination rounds rather than the standings at the end of the swiss.

Just before the Top8 and Top16 kicked off we awarded the Spirit of London Legacy Monthly Award. As we didn’t award one last month we decided to give out two this month! The first recipient was one of the contenders for the inaugural award and despite his continued devotion to Reality Smasher we just had to give him the recognition he deserves. Michael Woodleigh comes from pretty far away, helps set up AND is the nicest and most polite player in the room!

Our second winner embodies the Spirit of LLM in a different way. Firstly Joe refused to draw into the Top8 which we as organisers love and like to reward. He also last played Legacy at our last event before we had to move venue and is the perfect example of someone who uses LLM for the reasons we created it. To practice his favourite deck and slowly build up the parts for it while playing it!

The Top8 was a pretty quick affair with both Eldrazi and Grixis Delver decks quickly getting to the Semi Finals. Amar and Michael then Eldrazi smashed their way to the finals leaving the Delver decks finally in their wake. The player higher in the standings got the play and Michael used this to his advantage to win the mirror match. Funnily enough this would have likely been Amar if Joe hadn’t insisted they play in the final round!

Congratulations to our Finalist and Winner, Amar and Michael!

Decklists

1st – Michael Woodleigh

Eldrazi Stompy

2nd – Amar Dattani

Eldrazi Stompy

3rd – Jay Richardson

Grixis Delver

4th – Joe Baddeley

Grixis Delver

5th – Alex Rea

Enchantress

6th – Lauri Achte

Lands

7th – Rory Smith

Sneak and Show

8th – Niklas Ek

Aggro Loam

These results leave our League Table like this!

Well done to Niklas as the only person to Top8 twice so far this season. The field is really open at LLM!

London Legacy Monthly Top Standings - September

Player Name 1st 2nd 3rd-4th 5th-8th Number of Top8s Total Points 1 Francis Cowper 1 1 5 1 Callum Brownson-Smith 1 1 5 1 Michael Woodleigh 1 1 5 4 Enrico Selis 1 1 4 4 Mario Espinosa 1 1 4 4 Niklas Ek 2 2 4 4 Amar Dattani 1 1 4 8 Stavros Denaxas 1 1 3 8 George Moulton 1 1 3 8 Nic Genieis 1 1 3 8 Aston Ramsden 1 1 3 8 Jay Richardson 1 1 3 8 Joe Baddeley 1 1 3 14 James Mills 1 1 2 14 Charlie Bridger 1 1 2 14 Thomas Kellock 1 1 2 14 Matthew Johnson 1 1 2 14 Michael Yearby 1 1 2 14 Diego Massone 1 1 2 14 Juan Carlos Jara 1 1 2 14 Alex Rea 1 1 2 14 Lauri Achte 1 1 2 14 Rory Smith 1 1 2

Patrick’s Spice Corner

Unplayable Chunderbucket Pile

Yeah I know. Pretty spicey! The plan here is to hit a turn one lock piece. Chalice of the Void, Thorn of Amethyst and/or Chancellor of the Annex. Then, while the opponent does nothing, we can win with any random crap wincon we like!

Patrick has chosen cheating in gigantic fatties with Elvish Piper and Champion of Rhonas. The Pacts find us either side of the combo should we need it and the Lightning Greaves help us activate Champion and Piper on the turn they come in, trying to dodge removal. The final parts of the puzzle are the four drop prison creatures we can play because of our sol land and Mox Diamond manabase.

The plan to show how overpowered turn one lock pieces are didn’t quite work out as this deck went 2-4. But I think there are a lot more interesting wincons to try in the prison shell of spheres, chancellor and sol lands and moxen that can interact positively with it. Perhaps in a white deck that can cast the later drawn chancellors or use them for Chrome Mox. Possibly an Angel stompy build. Another nice option here would be Suppression Field!

You can buy your tickets for next month’s LLM here.

Thanks to everyone who came and see you all next month!

Thomas Kellock

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