It was a beautiful spring day in central London at the Clerkenwell Craft Beer Pub for the third London Legacy Monthly. This time Callum had a brain fart and we had 33 registered players! I acted the martyr and dropped so there would be no byes until the later rounds and we had the magic number of 32, so six glorious rounds of Legacy!

The prizes were even more spectacular than last time with a Tropical Island for first, two Force of Wills for Second, a playset of ugly Wastelands or a Scrubland at 3rd and 4th, Jace, the Mindsculptor at 5th and 6th and 7th and 8th both got Snapcaster Mages and some cantrips! Next month we will try to have fewer blue cards in the prize pool…..

Luckily my threat to play Stax from last week paid off and people brought some interesting decks, and showed that in a small event like ours you can do well with nearly anything. This is how the metagame broke down

Deck No. of Players Deck No. of Players UR Delver 3 Burn 1 Miracles 3 Goblins 1 Storm 2 Infect 1 Eldrazi 2 Moon Stompy 1 Death and Taxes 2 Omnishow 1 Elves 2 Turbo Depths 1 BUG Leo 2 UB Reanimator 1 Aluren 1 URW Delver 1 BR Reanimator 1 4C Delver 1 BG Pox 1 4C Midrange 1

Look at that gloriously healthy meta. Spring has sprung and 20 unique decks have come out of hibernation! The reign of Death and Taxes and Grixis Delver has been short lived in London. UR Delver and Miracles are now on top with three pilots each. However the diversity in decks is what really stands out here. Five Delver decks is lower than the seven played last month.

The number of UR lists is due to either people seeing a a weakness to Price of Progress or deck building constraints, resulting in four players trying to shorten the game with burn. There are always people with more greedy three colour manabases that this kind of plan will prey upon.

The plan to attack peoples mana proved extremely potent with Tommasso and his Bloody Stompy deck crushing not just the swiss rounds here but all four previous Tuesdays at Darksphere. Perhaps it is time for people to play a few more basics or decks that don’t crumble to Blood Moon and Chalice. I think it was the eight Moons that did most of the work as the neither of the two other Chalice decks, both Eldrazi, made the Top 8. Eldrazi has a poorer matchup against the Leovold, Emissary of Trest and True-Name Nemesis decks and I can’t imagine it deals well with a card like Smallpox either!

A third of the field was combo decks. However, the variety of decks isn’t much help for those looking to attack the meta. It is nice to see some less well represented decks getting a run out though. Turbo Depths continued to show its strength by dominating the swiss rounds and Aluren and Infect are always welcome additions to the Meta.

Control was again rather under-represented with just three Miracles players, two DNT and a single Goblin player. I think the relaxed nature of the tournaments allow for a very wide field and this makes it harder to be consistent while playing a control list. With 20 different decks in a field of 32 players and only 6 rounds, the time you come across your terrible matchup might very well end your Top8 hopes.

With all this in mind I would suggest a deck with a good general combo matchup that is not weak to Non Basic hate or Chalice. Basically Dragon Stompy. Or if the idea of mulliganing to hell scares you then Death and Taxes!

The event itself was going well until round three when Callum realised mysterious gremlins had set Wizards Event Reporter to run a tournament of only five rounds, not six… This was to be the beginning of the trials that every event organiser has to deal with when WER is involved… Apparently adding the round didn’t work so Callum rebuilt the event from scratch using the results sheets. At this point the software, and my laptop crashed. We still don’t know why as it had been fine for the previous event. A massive thanks to Claude and Lauri for manually pairing round five, please buy them beers at the next event. Lauri then put the results from all five rounds into a new program and round six was paired! Thanks guys!

Back to the tournament. Tommasso and Jon Roads dominated the Swiss rounds finishing as the top seeds with their Moon Stompy and Turbo Depths lists. Also, congratulations should go to Roland and Hamish who both made Top8 again this week! Commiserations to Chris Bull missing out on his second Top8 by 2%.

After the Swiss we had our Top8.

Jon Roads – Turbo Depths

Tommasso – Bloody Stompy

Hamish – UR Delver

James – BG Pox

Tom Hooker – UB Reanimator

Roland – Elves

Diego – UWR Delver

Claude – Storm

In the Quarter finals Tom Hooker’s Reanimator beat Jon Roads’ Turbo Depths while James and his awesome Pox deck took down Diego’s Delver menace! On the other side of the bracket Moon Stompy beat Roland playing Elves and Hamish with UR Delver beat Claude on Storm.

The Semi finals saw the last remaining Delver deck, piloted by Hamish, finally kill off Blood Moon Stompy and in the battle of the black decks, Pox defeated the undead shenanigans of Reanimator.

The finals were an epic back and forth going right down to the wire. After spliting the first two games I will let Hamish take over the story.

‘I had a little bit of early pressure, James dealt with it. A couple of burn spells went to his face to lower the cost for the Bedlam Reveler I had in hand. However before I could play it it was discarded. The Engineered Plague naming human was becoming a real problem at this point so I tried to get enough lands together to cast Sulphuric Vortex but James yet again gets me to discard with Hymn to Tourach and my third lands goes. At this point I cast a second Reveler and get in some damage before it is dealt with. All this time I am getting beaten down by Mishra’s Fatory so I try and Smash to Smithereens it. But my opponent can kill it in response! By now James can effectively rip my hand apart and I am left with a solitary Volcanic Island. Another swing from Factory and I am dead and he is on four life so Bolt won’t be enough.

I draw blind

THUNDEROUS WRATH

!”£%”^£%$^$%”^&@?{}:}>$%@:’

Well done to Hamish and James for a great finals match. I am however sad I can’t use the Smallpox art for this post’s header. Cheers Hamish…

Top 8!

Hamish McIver 1st

UR Delver

James Martens – 2nd

BG Pox

Tom Hooker – 3rd

UB Reanimator

Tommaso De Michele – 4th

Bloody Stompy

Diego Massone – 5th – 8th

Never Jeskai Delver

Claude Schmit – 5th – 8th

Storm

Roland Swingler- 5th – 8th

Elves

Jon Roads – 5th – 8th

Turbo Depths

Thank you to everyone who made the March London Legacy Monthly such a great success. Callum Smith and Tom Brown who organised it with me, and Tom Cadden for providing a great venue. I look forward to seeing you all at the next one in April! Also lots and lots of thanks to Lauri and Claude for helping out when things went all wrong!

And come and say hi at Eternal Weekend in Paris this weekend!

Thomas Kellock

Bonus Decklist

BG Pox - James Martens

No surprises here for anyone who knows me. I absolutely love lists like this. This is a great looking polished list.

Here is a list with the classic Pox win conditions of Nether Spirit and Mishra’s Factory. James has, however, cut some of the cards that are not great right now, like Sinkhole and Cursed Scroll, for an even more controlling lategame and a toolbox of lands afforded by Life from the Loam. The Mox Diamonds allow some great starts and there is little disadvantage to running them with Loam and so many lands. By running these over Dark Ritual we loose the chance for crazy turn one plays like Liliana but gain the advantage of playing Chalice of the Void. Chalice is the reason you see no Thoughtseize or Inquisitions. However the cards you were worried about are now either countered by Chalice or dealt with by Abrupt Decay.

The sideboard is simply a list of some of my favourite hoser cards. Choke, Sphere, Bridge, Bitterblossom, Engineered Plague AND Nether Void. We are only missing The Abyss and Chains of Mephistopheles really. 🙂

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