Welcome back for July’s London Legacy Monthly report. I can’t quite believe it has been getting on for 10 months since we last had an event! With a lovely new venue all sorted out, prizes carefully sourced after those insane price spikes and the website and webshop dusted down we were ready to bring you the premier event in the Legacy calendar.

First things first the new place has plenty of space, a great bar and even does a good selection of actual food rather than just bar snacks! You can also sneak off and go and watch sports (I saw Italian Football, Darts, and the sport of kings) or play some pool when your tournament goes slightly wrong. OR play Vintage cube 😉

We had 42 slots for the return of LLM which sold out in under five hours. Thanks to all the returning players and those of you who came along for the first time!

Prizes were great as usual. The slight increase in price allowed us to have four duals on offer for this event. We also added a prize for the winner of a second top 8, played among those who finished 9th-16th. We hope this will be a good incentive for newer Legacy players to play out all the rounds and a good stepping stone to a Top8 one day!

Deck No. of Players Deck No. of Players Goblins 4 Depths (BG Slow) 1 Miracles 4 Depths (Pox) 1 RUG Delver 4 Eldrazi 1 Elves 2 Grixis Shadow 1 Lands 2 Merfolk 1 Moon Stompy 2 NicFit 1 Stoneblade 2 Punishing Dack 1 Aggro Loam 1 Reanimator (by Patrick so...) 1 Bant TNN 1 RiP Helm 1 Battle of Wits 1 Shortcake 1 Belcher 1 Storm 1 Birthing Pod 1 UR Delver 1 Burn 1 4C Stuff 1 Deadguy Ale 1 12 Post (Eldrazi) 1 Death and Taxes 1

This is an exciting LLM for two reasons. Obviously the first LLM for a while, but Gitaxian Probe and Deathrite Shaman have just been banned. Interestingly I had just started notating how many decks were running Brainstorm and Deathrite when we had our last event in September. The assumption being that as the year progressed the meta was going to get even more homogeneous.

With the bannings the London crowd have used the opporunity to bring all and sundry to LLM! 29 unique decks from 42 players. 69% of the field. Looks like the Pro Tour could learn something from the LLM players in terms or originality at least!

The most obvious takeaway from our first event back is that everyone has started at level one in the new format. The removal of Deathrite was meant to allow Goblins and RUG Delver back into the format, and lo and behold, there they both are, the most played decks. The loss of Gitaxian Probe should have hampered the combo decks and our players delivered, with only two players on decks affected by that loss. Miracles was the other well represented deck. While RUG and Goblins were historically poorer matchups for Miracles, these days with the addition of Monastery Mentor things have certainly changed. A fast clock means that neither deck can grind in the particular way they used to and now against Goblins at least the Miracles player no longer has the less than useful playset of Counterbalances.

For reference here are our last 4 events and the comback event separated by archetype. (Definitions taken from MTGTop8)

At last Aggro is back! Well, Goblins and RUG make up the lions share of this big swing but it is nice to see that once 4C Pile was banned people reverted to some more interesting lists over the classic Sneak and Show. RUG Delver was the deck that stood out at this event. Unfortunately, because it failed to put any copies in the Top16! With Miracles x2, Goblins x2, Lands x2 and an Elves and Aggro Loam player locking out the prizes spots. I think RUG Delver is likely a known quantity already in Legacy. It has not had any great new cards printed for it over the lean Deathrite winter and people who have played for a while are already well practiced against it. I hope over the coming months RUG players can work out a way of making the deck great again, perhaps going back to Hooting Mandrills over Nimble Mongoose or experimenting further with Bomat Courier? (Maybe not…)

Goblins, on the other hand managed to get all of their players into the Top16! ‘Lackey, Go’ is still a really powerful thing to do.

The two Moon Stompy players didn’t get the memo that with the demise of Deathrite, manabases have become a little more conservative and so if you want to attack the field with Chalice of the Void then either Eldrazi or Steel Stompy is the way to do it. This was on show at the PT with the Moon players not having many 3 colour manabases to ruin, never mind 4 colour and their subsequent poor performance.

As usual the meta at LLM is wide open. Successfully attacking this months meta would have been very hard. There is however some hope for those of you that plan on doing this for next month.

The breakout deck of the PT was UB Shadow, apparently Josh Utter-Leyton went undefeated with it. The Pro Tour is an event that can be slightly incestuous for eternal formats. The close proximity of testing teams and short amount of time since the bans leads to a lot of people playing the same deck. While the format certainly hasn’t been broken by UB Shadow, the list played had an amazing Sideboard for that particular event. In the coming months many more Legacy players will be trying out Death’s Shadow lists and LLM will be no exception. If you are coming in August you will need a plan for this deck. Maze of Ith has always been pretty good against people planning on swinging in for one big attack but I would prefer if people killed the Death’s Shadows whilst also winning. I have no idea if its a good matchup but something about Infect, possibly splashing white for Swords to Plowshares, killing with an Invigorate does it for me. I do think that its time for Infect to make a comeback. A few people played it at the PT and now that every player doesn’t have a 1/2 to block the early chip damage they should have a better time.

There was a clean cut to Top8 and both Francis Cowper and Niklas Ek went undefeated. Oh and Lands had a 100% conversion to Top8. Obviously the best deck.

The Top 16 playoff was won by Marcelo after he and Riccardo split. Well done guys! Good ideas for names for our 9th to 16th play off would be greatly appreciated!

The Top 8

Stavros on Elves vs myself on Lands was an interesting match. After splitting the first two games the third one went on for what seemed like days. After an early Natural Order for 15 or so damage, Stavros could not finish the last point of damage. Hanging on by the skin of my teeth I top decked outs for 5 turns in a row to stay alive until finally the value accrued by Oversold Cemetery managed to push past my defences. As this game took so long I managed to miss watching one of the semi-finals….

Francis defeated Charlie in three great games, showing the power of Mentor once again and George kept the honour of Lands players everywhere intact by beating Nik in the poor Aggro Loam matchup. Knight of the Reliquary is surprisingly hard to beat! Finally the remaining Miracles player defeated the remaining Goblins player as former champ Enrico beat James Mills.

Next up Enrico quickly dispatched Stavros’ Elves while Francis did the same to George’s Lands deck, setting up a Miracles mirror for the finals!

Everyone settled in for what was sure to be a long drawn out affair… Tired eyes turned towards clocks as people thought of their loved ones waiting at home and nervous organisers hastily made plans to finish the finals at a bus stop somewhere after the pub had kicked us out…

Luckily we got to game 3 with 30 mins still remaining before we were playing in the street and we settled in to see who would be crowned champion!

A turn four Jace, the Mindsculptor with Force of Will backup put Francis firmly in the driving seat, but Enrico kept having finding answers. First a Vendilion Clique dealt with the Jace, then a Sulfur Elemental dealt with a Mentor. The problem was the first Jace had put Francis in a commanding position. He had a full grip while Enrico scrabbled to find answers from the top of his deck. Francis could afford to let a second Mentor die as he had a third in hand, and two Force of Wills to back it up while Enrico was out of cards.

Enrico played a Ponder looking for something to do.

‘Come on. Force. I want to concede’

Francis let it resolve and Enrico found nothing after the shuffle, his luck finally out.

‘No cards. Please. Kill me’

Francis played his third Monastery Mentor of the game asking

‘Do you have a Supreme Verdict?’

as Enrico drew his card for the turn.

He did not.

Congratulations to our both Finalists and Winner of July’s London Legacy Monthly, Francis Cowper!

Top 8 Decklists

1st – Francis Cowper

Miracles

2nd – Enrico Selis

Miracles

3rd – Stavros Denaxas

Elves

4th – George Moulton

Lands

5th – James Mills

Goblins

6th – Niklas Ek

Aggro Loam

7th – Charlie Bridger

Goblins

8th – Tom Kellock

RUG Lands

Spirit of London Legacy Monthly

As some of you may know we have started a new prize that we will award to one person every month who embodies the spirit of our events. You can find out more about this here.

This month there were three contenders. Firstly, Claude Schmit, LLM organiser, Storm officiando and general stressed scorekeeper decided to play BUG Battle of Wits. Perfectly embodying the spirit of the event, proxying 250ish cards he was a lock. Until we realised that we couldn’t really give an award to ourselves. Not yet at least…

The second contender was Michael Woodleigh. It was his first event. Perfect. He arrived early and helped set up tables and chairs. Even better! Michael had come all the way from Eastbourne. This man was certainly the people’s hero! He was playing Eldrazi Stompy.

So close…..

Finally we turned to Jamie Hardie. Jamie has made the effort to come to nearly all of the previous LLM events and really embodies why we started them. We have seen him turn away from modern and slowly build up his Death and Taxes deck while still a student. The thing that really pushed him over the edge was the deck he brought.

Tezzerator Pod.

Congratulations to our inaugural Spirit of LLM winner Jamie Hardy!

(I can’t find the pic we took of him holding his prize. If you have one please contact me so I can sort it out. Cheers)

Spice Corner

Jamie Hardie – Tezz Pod

Tezzerator Pod

Well it really couldn’t have been anything else really! (I wasn’t going to type out 250 cards)

Jamie went 3-3 with this list and would recommend the following changes.

Thanks to everyone who came to July’s London Legacy Monthly and made it a great return!

The next event will be held on August 26th with tickets available on the website https://www.londonlegacymonthly.com/

Thomas Kellock

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