Welcome back to September’s London Legacy Monthy report! This was Tom Cadden’s last month with us and we sent him off in style! Tom Brown had organised a wonderful hand drawn play mat of his favourite card, Monastery Mentor, drawn by James Griffin. Much lovely beer was consumed and we managed to get great Vintage cube going, thanks to Mikko!

We had 42 players arrive for Legacy. A few people dropped out on the day and I think the pre-release and a hangover from Derby stopped us from selling out this time. Hopefully we will be back up to full capacity next time!

Prizes for this event were great as usual, and if you like our mat please keep an eye on the Facebook Group and we will sort out a big order of them!

London Legacy Monthly - September - Metagame

Decks No. of Players Decks No. of Players Lands 4 Dredge 1 Miracles 4 Eldrazi 1 4C Pile 4 Elves 1 Belcher 2 Enchantress 1 BUG Delver 2 FaeStill 1 Death and Taxes 2 Food Chain 1 RUG Delver 2 Grixis Delver 1 Punishing Maverick 2 Grixis Kess 1 Aggro Loam 1 Infect 1 BUG Control 1 Punishing Theives 1 BUG Lands 1 Sneak and Show 1 Burn 1 Storm 1 Dark Bant 1 UB Delver 1 Deadguy Ale 1 UR Delver 1

The fall of Grixis Delver has been swift and brutal. Eight players last month down to a lonely one this month. Even with eight fewer players than last month we had 28 unique decks this time, only two fewer. Strictly speaking we had four different versions of Miracles played this month. Soothsaying, the standard control shell, Mentor based and a fourth spicy version that is great in the mirror! (Decklist below)

With such a large spread of decks it might be more useful to look at general trends rather than many specific decks.

Control decks were in the ascendancy at our event. 45% of the meta was control and the top three played decks were all control. Combo is still underplayed with only 19% of the meta, eight players, and nearly all of them running a different list. ‘Aggro’ decks always feels like a misnomer in Legacy but for our analysis this includes the seven Delver decks, Death and Taxes and Maverick variants and the more obvious Aggro decks like Eldrazi and Burn. These decks shared 36% of the meta.

Here we can see how this has progressed since June and the start of ’50’ person events. (Definitions taken from MTGTop8)

It seems that while Combo has remained a fairly small part of the metagame Control has established itself as the major force at our events for now. A 20% swing in its favour since last month! I would suggest that this is Grixis Delver players, or those who play the best deck, moving away from the deck and experimenting with versions of 4C Pile. This is a classic example of being able to play the best cards because Legacy can support complex manabases. Double Black for Hymn to Tourach and double Blue for Jace, the Mind Sculptor while still playing Abrupt Decay, Leovold, Emissary of Trest and Lightning Bolt? No problem for Deathrite Shaman, Brainstorm and fetchlands! Once restrictions on mana are alleviated in this way then ‘good stuff’ decks like this can easily flourish. They even play two basic lands! I think the relative ease with which this deck can be picked up combine with the intrinsic power of the cards means we will see more and more of 4C Pile at monthlies in the future.

Succesfully attacking this metagame is going to be hard as the variety of decks is so very wide. While this is a great example of our proxy policy being put to good use by encouraging people to experiment, it does make it harder for those looking for an advantage from metagaming.

When thinking about what to play to attack our meta, there is really only one ‘real’ deck option. Lands. I shudder to recommend my own pet deck not just because you will accuse me of bias but I also don’t want to face a room full of Tsabo’s Webs next month. That being said, Lands has a generally good matchup against the top decks as Punishing Fire gives most control decks problems. The low amount of combo and Blood Moon also helps me recommend the deck. The only truly bad matchups out of the decks played were Storm, Sneak and Show, and Belcher (which oddly enough is the best of these poor matchups). However, there are some caveats. While Lands is good against this wide, combo light field it is rather easy to hate out and so you take a real chance in bringing it. The mirror match can also be quite random as it is based largely around who draws Exploration and Life from the Loam first.

If you want a more off the wall suggestion then Dredge could also be well positioned. It has fits against Lands but people are over relying on Deathrite Shaman and Surgical Extraction as their graveyard hate (to beat Lands and BR Reanimator). Dredge can work around these cards reasonably well, as evidenced by this months top8. However, playing a combo deck comes with its own consistency issues as we shall see later!

Finally, I’m going to take this opportunity to start notating how much Brainstorm and Deathrite Shaman are played at our events. These two cards are the best spell and creature in the format so will obviously be highly played. Some of you may find this data useful. Here is the data from the online events to compare it with.

The six swiss rounds were controlled by myself and Callum as we both managed to go undefeated and double draw into the Top8. This left Diego and Karl to overtake us in the standings as they both had to play and win another match. The other four players, Lauri, Sami, Enrico and Patrick made it a clean cut to top8 with their 4-1-1 records!

Top8

After the Swiss rounds the Top8 looked like this!

Diego Massone – Punishing Dack (Theives) Karl Naylor – DeadGuy Ale Thomas Kellock – Lands Callum Smith – Dredge Lauri Achte – Grixis Delver Sami Sekkoum – 4C Pile Enrico Selis – Miracles Patrick O’Neill – Aggro Loam

On the left hand side of the bracket Diego dispatched Patrick in the battle of Punishing Fire decks. Organiser faced organiser as Lauri, making it straight into top8 after his hiatus from us, sought to stop Callum climbing any further up the leaderboard. Game one was a blowout as Callum put two thirds of his deck into the graveyard and used his flashbacked Cabal Therapies to strip every non land card from Lauri’s hand! Game two was slower but after using a Lion’s Eye Diamond to pay for a life saving Flusterstorm that would give Lauris Deathrite time to take effect, the game was over. On the other side of the bracket Karl lost to Enrico’s resurgant Miracles list while I was defeated in two close games against Sami. Game two was heavily in Lands’ favour as a Molten Vortex and Life from the Loam were making short work of Sami’s life total. An early FOW on Choke had allowed a Tireless Tracker to arrive with a clue token, which, allowed Loam to be protected from the flashbacked Surgical Extraction. However a Lightning Bolt and Snapcaster off the top suddenly dealt enough lethal burn to finish it up.

In the Semi finals Enrico won the battle of the control decks by dispatching Sami. Callum and Diego, in a consecutive top8, had three great games. Diego, while being the higher seed gave Callum the play on the off chance that he was on manaless dredge. This was a horrible mistake as Callum’s turn 1 Therapy took two Deathrites from Diego’s hand. with around 40 power of zombies in play by turn two the game was over.

In game two Diego countered Callums early discard spells and managed to extract two dredgers, Golgari Grave Troll and Stinkweed Imp. After he shot his own Baleful Strix to trigger removing all of Callum’s Bridge from Belows game two was over. Double Leyline from the Void from Callum succesfully shut off Diego’s Punishing Fire recursion. It also dealt with Snapcaster Mage and ensure Bridge could not be removed from his graveyard. Some grindy turns later recursive Prized Amalgams, Ichorids and Zombies got Callum to the finals!

In game one of the finals Enrico’s Monastery Mentor quickly ended things when Callum’s luck started to run out. An opening LED, flashbacked Faithless Looting, with two dredges only putting a Golgari Thug in the graveyard. When this was dredged next upkeep and nothing relevant entered the yard game one was effectively over. Game two was a similar disappointment where Mentor punished the Dredge deck finally fizzling. Enrico managed to win without casting a single Swords to Plowshares, Terminus or Surgical Extraction.

Congratulations to Enrico for winning London Legacy Monthly September!

Top8 Decklists

1st – Enrico Sellis

Miracle

2nd – Callum Smith

Dredge

3rd – Diego Massone

Punishing Theives

4th – Sami Sekkoum

4C Pile

5th – Karl Naylor

DeadGuy Ale

6th – Thomas Kellock

Lands

7th – Lauri Achte

Grixis Delver

8th – Patrick O’Neill

Aggro Loam

Spice Corner

Jay took a new spin on Miracles for this tournament. While I will admit that 61 cards is interesting it isn’t quite ‘Spicy’. What makes his list unique is using Hedron Alignment as the win condition! Having one of these on the board, in hand, in the graveyard and in Exile will win the game on your next upkeep. Getting it onto the board isn’t too hard. You can just cast it. If it gets countered then you have one in the yard instead! Predict can mill it into the graveyard if needs be and Hedron Alignment can be exiled to Force of WIll, just think of the value! If worst comes to worst its pretty easy to use Intuition to get a Hedron in your hand and two in the graveyard. But now how do you get a copy to exile!? Scrabling Claws, Logic Knot and Set Adrift to the rescue!

The last lovely bit of synergy is between the scry ability of Hedron Alignment and Counterbalance. Now with enough mana you have your own Sensi’s Divining Top that also wins you the game!

Hedronicles

I think the Miracles package is so strong that it makes it possible to play a crazy win con like Hedron Alignment but I don’t think it is in any way better than the current Miracles list. Some cards that unexpectedly over-performed for me were: Intuition: to instant speed Tutor for 3 hate cards especially with Snapcaster Mag in the deck was insane and challenging to play when resources/information was limited. Scrabbling Claws: could be Relic but Claws was nice to not nuke my whole graveyard. This card often enough felt like turn 1 Leyline of the Void against several decks, challenged or denied Deathrite Shaman for mana and damage, hated on graveyard targets and provided in instant speed draw for miracles. I think both these cards could be explored in a standard miracles list, although the 61 is already compact as it is.

Bonus Bonus List!

Because you all wanted to see what FaeStill meant 😉

FaeStill

Thank you all for coming to this month’s London Legacy Monthly! Keep an eye on the Facebook Group and the website for when we will announce our next event!

Tom

Bonus Bonus Bonus Pic

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