Legacy Challenges have been one of the greatest things ever to be introduced to Magic Online. With them being around for almost exactly three years by now and having recently won my 5th Legacy Challenge (check out the VOD here), I was wondering what the record number would be. Five felt like a lot but after all there’s also juggernauts like JPA93, who seems to win tournaments whenever he decides to. I crunched some numbers on mtgtop8.com and tcdecks.net with specially latter being super convenient since their output format is perfectly copy/pasteable into Excel. Unfortunately their database doesn’t go back to when they introduced actual Legacy Challenges in June 2016, so I had to manually patch up the rest with the data from mtgtop8.com.

Of course Wizards wouldn’t be Wizards if their naming conventions at some points randomly changed and previously also overlapped with Legacy Daily Events. But I manually sorted those out (as well as that random UK Legacy tournament which also called itself a Legacy Challenge). I initially also wanted to analyze a lot of Top8-related data but since tcdecks only presents data in increments of 100 decks and WotC’s weird naming conventions would require entering hundreds of decks literally by hand, I am limiting this analysis to players and decks with finals appearances. Of course, for some of these stats you can’t draw actual conclusions, while some might be more significant. In the end it’s primarily a historic work of entertainment, so I say enjoy it as such.

Players

First, let’s look at the pilots and while we’re at it, congratulate the most recent winner TheYostWithTheMost who just last weekend became the 100th person to win a Legacy Challenge!

“You have been tied for the lead!” – Quake III Arena announcer

I knew I had a lot of Challenge Wins, but when I started gathering this data I assumed JPA would just be way ahead of everyone else. It’s probably his many wins in the various high end MOCS events we’ve seen over the years that gave me that feeling — as well as him generally destroying me almost every time we face off. With regards to actual Legacy Challenge it looks like JPA93, Mzfroste and I are currently tied at 5, with 10 other players sitting on two wins.

Insane fact: THREE of the players with two wins got them back-to-back! Orim67 (Oct ’18) with Dredge, Koleigh1 (Nov+Dec ’17) with RG Lands and AntzzzOnALog (June ’18) with Grixis Pyromancer. Clashed almost joined them with his Stryfo Pile but had a 1-Challenge gap between his two wins in May ’18. The same is true for JPA93 in Nov ’18 with Sneak Show.

Talk about the right player with the right deck at the right time…

Making it to the finals is already an achievement in itself, considering that these Challenges regularly see over 100 players competing. Still, we’re all rooting for ReneRandrup to finally win his first Challenge after coming incredibly close on three occasions – one time with Burn, which by the way has 4x as many finals appearances as NicFit. But more on that later.

JPA93 and Mzfroste are a house! One of them has made the finals in over 13% of all the Legacy Challenges that have ever happened. They haven’t faced each other in the finals yet, but the mere thought of it makes me regret that we wouldn’t be able to access those replay to re-commentate on later.

Another neat stat: between JPA93, Mzfroste, Gul_Dukat and me, one of us has made the finals of over 22% of every Legacy Challenge (no mirrors.) Please don’t aim for us too much when metagaming for your next Challenge 😉 Also note that these 13 players have put someone in the finals close around 45% of the time. It would certainly be sweet to see how much consistency there is between general Top8 finishes. I remember someone on reddit having such done these numbers at some point in the past. I’m not sure if they also included the tedious-to-collect earlier stats that I had to manually add to this analysis; but if they did, I’d love to see them update things their work!

At this point I was gonna make a joke about how being an Eternal Glory host apparently hurts your ability to perform under pressure; but then I remembered that my Everyday Eternal co-host Bob Huang is 0-2 in Challenge finals, so I rest my case. Way too offend a bunch of people at once. I’m sorry 😉

Decks

Let’s now take a look at the most successful decks in the history of the Legacy Challenge. Altogether 32 different decks have won one of the 122 Legacy Challenges to date. Note that naming conventions primarily follow tcdecks.net nomenclature, with me correcting some minor inconsistencies. As such, Grixis Delver is called Grixis Pyromancer in these statistics. While there could technically be a Grixis Pyromancer deck that doesn’t play Delver of Secrets (as well as a Grixis Delver that doesn’t play Young Pyromancer) they are treated as the same.



“Legacy est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Delver, aliam Chalice, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Miracles, nostra Azorious appellantur.”

— Gaius Iulius Caesar, De Bello Legacico (58-49 BCE)



No surprises at the very top, with Grixis Pyromancer and Miracles dominating the results, having won almost a fifth of all Legacy Challenges to date. Some decks that are doing surprisingly well are Dragon Stompy and Elves, given that they aren’t as widely played as the rest of the decks around the top. A deck that heavily disappoints is Death & Taxes as I would have sworn it was one of the most successful Legacy Challenge decks, at least in absolute numbers. It has a bunch of prolific pilots, including Enevoldsen who’s probably one everyone’s shortlist for the best Legacy player around. Anecdotal evidence tells me he has a bunch of Top8s, but hasn’t been able to close yet. If you are considering supporting your local Flickerwisp, maybe you can help bump up those Death & Taxes numbers.

There have also been a several back-to-back victories for decks, but the only two decks that managed are three-peat are 4c Control (“Czech Pile”) in July+August 2017 and Grixis Pyromancer in June+July 2018.

Fun Halloween fact: while Legacy Challenges have been around for almost exactly three years by now, Dredge has collected all of its three wins over the course of just 21 days: in October 2018 it won 3 out of 4 Challenges — spooky!

Nothing too surprising as the dominance of Grixis Pyromancer and Miracles also shows in the strong number of finals appearances for both decks. An astonishing 50 out of 122 Legacy Challenge Finals have featured one of these two decks (7 finals saw both of them). That is a crazy 39% of all Legacy Challenges, which is the one statistic that really stands out to me in this article. Legacy is a decently diverse format these days, but certainly sees some decks usually gravitate towards the top, which presumably also roughly corresponds with their popularity. Of course there’s also a noteworthy feedback lop between the results a deck puts up and its popularity. Even Treefolk Combo could eventually get a finish if played often enough – and finishes would in turn attract more connoisseurs of fine Treefolk.

We have only seen a total of nine mirror match finals, three of those courtesy of Miracle Control. All other six were one-timers (Elves, Sneak Snow, Grixis Pyromancer, 4c Control, UR Burn and Blade Control). Somewhat unexpectedly the most common finals matchup is actually Miracle Control vs Dredge — all four of which happened in succession over the course of just four weeks in October 2018. Dredge won three of them and then never made it to another final ever again. That month was such a historical statistical anomaly that you shouldn’t have been surprised if a DeLorean had randomly crashed into your front yard.

Of all the decks with at least three cracks at the final, only Merfolk and rogue (note the lower-case “r”) decks haven’t been able to emerge victorious yet. Of the most significant entries, Death and Taxes sticks out, having only been able to convert 4 times on 15 appearances, while Eldrazi has taken down an impressive 9 out of 12 times it made it to the final match. (Word on the street is Bill Belichick has been secretly supplying Eldrazi players with game plans and lists.)

What is interesting is that neither Grixis Pyromancer nor Miracle Control have an exceptional win rate in finals, hovering slightly below 50%. Drawing too many conclusion from just 50 (non-mirror) finals of these decks is something we shouldn’t do, but these stats make me lean towards the decks not being inherently broken but rather very widely played and decent.

This is the graph I was warned of posting. And even though there’s no general consensus about how to classify the Legacy’s decks, it’s nevertheless interesting how these numbers work out given a rather conservative approach to it, using mtgtop8.com’s classification system (only moving 4c Loam from Control to Aggro). What we see is that over the course of the last three years, we got a distribution between deck types (Aggro/Control/Combo) that based on anecdotal evidence more or less mirrors the distribution of deck types generally played in the metagame.

Comparing the Fair/Unfair distribution, Unfair’s 46 Wins (=39%) seem slightly higher than mtgtop8.com’s database floats between 27% and 31% from 2016 to 2019, making me wonder whether Combo decks are just generally played more or actually do over-perform online.

That’s enough number crunching for today. It feels good to have a historic status quo overview of one of the coolest things WotC has ever done for the MTGO community. I strongly believe that these Challenges are a major reason Legacy is still alive and well on Magic Online. Not only do they provide the by far best monetary value for grinders, they also consistently feature a high level of competition as well as a satisfying level of innovation. As you read this Tomas Mar, the original creator of Czech Pile, is currently busy back-to-back Top8ing the last two Challenges with a revived version of his signature deck – but featuring 3 copies of future Legacy all-star Wrenn and Six!

This Sunday one of the most important Legacy events of the MTGO is coming up: the Legacy format playoffs. You do well in those, you will qualify yourself for the January Legacy Format Championships, which sends its winner to the Mythic Championship! If you did well enough in the previous Legacy Challenges and earned at least 35 Legacy format points, I will see you on Sunday!

So long,

Julian

Feature image artwork: Merchant Scroll by Scott Murphy

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