Manaleak.com Birmingham (UK) Spring Vintage & Legacy Challenge Top 8 Decklists

Vintage Top 8 Decklists

Vintage is quite simply Magic’s most powerful and degenerate format. You can fairly often win the game on turn 1 (although admittedly you’d have to get a reasonably lucky combination of cards) and whilst most of the classic Magic deck types exist in this format, all of them are super high in power level. With every single card in Magic’s history legal (apart from ante cards and conspiracy cards), Vintage decks have to be tuned to perfection to stand a chance against the field, making these decks the best of the best! Funnily enough, due to the high concentration of artifacts in the format, Kaladesh and Aether Revolt have brought a number of cards to the table, something which a majority of sets these days fail to do. Foundry Inspector and Inventors’ Fair are seeing some play, but the biggest impacts come from Paradoxical Outcome and Walking Ballista which have basically had brand new decks emerge just to accommodate them.

Vintage has a number of pillars that every player should be aware of:

Mishra’s Workshop decks

Dredge decks

Monastery Mentor decks

Storm decks

Whilst other decks exist, you typically need to be aware that these 4 decks exist. Whilst no dredge decks made our top 8, the mere existence of Bazaar of Baghdad makes the deck scarily powerful and as a result, you’ll notice that the vast majority of decks in vintage will make sure their sideboards contain a LOT of cards just to hate on the deck, because they will not be able to do anything without that option. “Shops” decks based around the absurdly powerful land Mishra’s Workshop are next up and similarly, a lot of decks will pack a good deal of artifact hate cards to deal with this menace. Shops decks will deprive you of the ability to cast spells whilst powering out gigantic artifact creatures to close out the game very quickly and has resulted in the restrictions of Chalice of the Void, Trinisphere and most recently Lodestone Golem. Finally, Mentor decks and Storm decks round off the list as your quintessential blue decks. Ancestral Recall is arguably the most powerful card in the history of the game, so if you aren’t playing Shops or Dredge, you probably should be playing blue.

Have a look at these absurd decks for yourself:

WINNER – Kevin Rodgers, Type2 Shops

Finalist – Jim Brohpy, Ravager Shops

Top 4 – Gordon Andersson, Grixis Thieves

Top 4 – Tommy Hayward, U/W Landstill

Top 8 – Jason Savage, Ravager Shops

Top 8 – Sebastion Davidson, “A Most Ingenious Paradox”

Top 8 – Rod Smith, “Coffee Shops”

Top 8 – Alastair Kennedy, Landstill Queller

Legacy Top 8 Decklists

Rounding out our epic weekend of eternal magic, we have Legacy! It may not quite be on par with Vintage in terms of raw power, but Legacy has some absurd things of its own going on. Cards get banned for a reason and just because those cards become legal in Vintage, doesn’t mean there’s nothing left for Legacy. In fact it means the format is the most diverse one in the whole of Magic with easily 50+ different archetypes that could do well! People may argue that Miracles is the best deck, and there are certainly results to back up that claim, but every deck has a shot at winning if it’s built correctly and that’s what makes Legacy such an incredibly fun format to play. Here’s what came top of our event:

WINNER – Stuart Pullin, Miracles

Finalist – Stuart Taylor, BUG

Top 4 – Steve Walsh, Rakdos Reanimator

Top 4 – Joe Alexander, Metalworker MUD

Top 8 – Sam Stinton, Elves

Top 8 – Mike Binks, Pox

Top 8 – Chris Hartnell, Miracles

Top 8 – Slaine Harris, Miracles

Do you play Legacy? If so then please consider joining us on April 17th for our Legacy Challenge GPT Vegas at Manaleak.com Birmingham!

Spring Vintage & Legacy Challenge Top 8 Decklists, by Andrew Quinn Andrew Quinn

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