Current Legacy Metagame

This article will have little value for any hardcore Legacy players. I suppose it will mostly be for players returning to the game like myself. This is kind of just a test/starting point for me to write some articles, as I haven't really written any about MTG before and this will help me to see how to improve the ones I write in the future.

As I get back into MTG and the Legacy format, I see that while things are in some ways different then a few years ago when I last played, they are still pretty similar in other ways. Unlike Standard, Legacy is an extremely healthy format in terms of deck choice. There are many quality decklists available on the internet, and as proven by recent larger tournaments, the most popular decks aren't necessarily the best decks. Decks like RUG Delver and Maverick easily seem to be the most popular, but that seems to be mostly due to card availability. Not to discount these decks in anyway as Agro-Control decks have always been popular due to their versatility against a wider range of opposing decks, but both of these are probably the most easily built decks by anyone coming over from Standard and Extended to Legacy. If you walk up to most people at a Legacy event who are new to the format, and ask them what deck their playing, the answer will generally be one of these 2 decks, if not "I'm borrowing **** from my friend". But these larger tournaments seem to suggest these decks are just as good/bad as many others that aren't deemed "Top Decks". As usual, the most important factors are the skill of the player piloting a deck, and proper meta-game predictions/luck. But of course a broken deck can tilt the balance of the format beyond those playing as important of a factor.

Griselbrand is a card that has recently been the focus of a lot of players claiming that it's basically going to distort the format in decks like Sneak & Show and Reanimator. And honestly, it very well could. But due to this fear I feel people have prepared enough for it. So for that reason I doubt it's going to be all that people fear it to be. Well, that combined with the availability of a lot of key cards for the decks. I'd say Reanimator is the more popular deck that features it, but most of its key cards are commons, and the few that aren't come from sets that had higher printing runs. Where as Sneak & Show uses cards like Sneak Attack and Show and Tell from Urza's Saga, and Ancient Tomb and City of Traitors from the Tempest block. G.Brands use in S&S has been the major cause for concern as Graveyard hate is more common and easier to plan out. But due to the card availability factor of S&S, the question is if that will be the major player keeping the deck in check. I feel so. But I do feel the deck will be around for awhile yet as, as soon as its not planned for, it will hurt!

M13 just came out, and brought very little to Legacy. Rancor is back in print, a notable card in my favorite deck. As far as it doing anything in Legacy, if anything it might make infect more used by Standard/Extended players having more access to the decks good cards like that. Merfolk got a new lord, and has seemed to already been worked in effectively by a couple decks at the most recent SCG tourney. Merfolk should see a splash of interest in it for a little while, but I doubt it's what that deck needed to make it significantly better. Goblins got a new toy, a Legendary that effectively doubles your horde. But other than the unexpected factor, I doubt it will bump up that deck in anyway either. Other than those, nothing from M13 has shown much of an indication at boosting the power of any real quality established decks. If any decks that don't fit description can get made into decks that now do fit that description by something from M13, only time will tell. I might make some predictions if I had been playing again longer, or more frequently, but I can't atm.

Right now the decks on my personal play radar are Elves, Belcher, and Stephen Menendian's Doomday build. Belcher because I own the deck already, and its been recently making a presence again in a wishless variant. Elves because I used to have a combo elves deck which I designed and loved, always felt the Agro variants weren't competitive, and see the latest builds have a healthy amount of both strategies. And that Doomsday build as it just seems outside the box enough, and seems to reward skill more then luck.

With Belcher, I'm still not certain I'm on board with the wishless strategy. At least all the way. It shows merit in improving resiliency to counter-spell disruption, at the cost of consistency. I don't care what anyone says otherwise, but playing 4 more filler cards compared to the most recent Wish builds does not offset losing 3 main deck kill conditions. But I do agree the wishboard strategy needs to be thinned down, and new ideas need to be tried. I'm hoping to either find a transitional sideboard plan or test and re-tune the older black splash variant to increase the odds of getting a consistent storm count of 10+ to make Tendrils more viable again as an option, increasing the odds of winning now, and at least remove the effectiveness of cards that can attack the Empty the Warrens strategy. I don't necessarily feel this variant would be clearly better, but I feel the deck can benefit from having more build options available. Honestly, this deck can't get much better without getting banned. FoW, Spell Pierce and Daze keep this beast in check. If suddenly the deck could increase its effectiveness at playing around those the format would be in trouble until Charbelcher, EtW, or whatever new tech is banned. A transitional sideboard strategy would be the most effective, but has to be discovered first, and even if it was it might cause the deck to fly into the ban radar just the same.

Back in the days of Urza's block and Academy decks doing their impressive T1-2 tricks, nothing else came close to "going off" in a fashion remotely similar. These were days were I still very much tried to appeal to that little Timmy we all have inside of us, that was in me. While I slowly built my own Academy deck, it's cards quickly got banned and restricted before I could enjoy piloting it in full true form. I was saddened by that, but after a lot of work I came up with my own deck that "went off" in a comparable fashion, and it was even T1.5 (Legacy) Legal! It was not very competitive, but while not so much for my opponents, it was fun for me to play none-the-less. It would probably be now known as "Recycle Elves". It used the many mana elves available at the time to quickly get 6 mana to cast its main card drawn engine, Recycle. And from that it would use Concordant Crossroads to Haste them all, and abused a WL card called Vitalize to reuse the ever growing army of elves to pump mana into absurd overkills. It was semi slow at the time, easy to disrupt, and drawing land would to often clog it's kill turn. The deck design left little room to fix its issues. I mention this cause this was my history with Elves, and I now see Elves back in a similar yet different fashion. Glimpse of Nature is now replacing Recycle, 3 strong newer Elves ditch the need for giving my army haste. Comboing out looks still plenty fun, but not overly absurd. And it has a very viable Agro strategy. And outside of me missing 3 Glimpses, Savanahs and Cradles (DAMN YOU LUCK! After all hundreds of Saga packs I bought back in the day...), the deck seems fairly cheap for me to put together. I feel I could do quite well with this deck considering my past elves experience, and my skill with Agro decks and its ability to go Agro mode. And I would likely have fun with it. I knew about Glimpse the last time I played regularly, but back then things like Heritage Druid, Evlish Visionary, Birchlore Ranger, and Nettle Sentinel didn't exist, so I never deemed the deck viable as by that point I was fully into decks I felt were competitive. So its been a long time coming, and I look forward to getting this deck together!

For the Doomsday deck. Well, despite disagreeing with the authors attempts at monopolizing the decklist to line his pockets, and other sites facilitating that while claiming to be Legacy portals were any deck can be discussed in detail, I've found the deck interesting. The concept behind it seems familiar to me, but also outside the box. And the deck seems to rely more on the pilots skill then his luck unlike most decks. It seems with this deck more then most others, if you think things through more, you win more. In MTG I've always hating losing due to what I feel is bad luck. If I screw up and lose, fine. I can value that as a learning experience of which I find little of anymore. But losing due to mana screw, bad top decks for me, good top decks for my opponent etc. I get little to nothing positive from. I've heard the phase from people before "Better lucky than skilled" or something similar, and every time I want to punch someone. Lol. I've accepted the luck factor of MTG long ago, but by no means does that mean I can/have to enjoy it when it works against me. Any time I can reduce the luck factor with a proper deck choice is something I find very valuable. That all said now, I have a ways to go with this deck. Sadly I don't own Seas or Tops. And I don't have Flooded strands to complete my Onslaught Fetchland set. Beyond that, I'm mostly just missing cheap cards/commons. Heck, to my surprise, I'm even still missing x2 Doomsday itself.

To give this Article more substance, I suppose I can attempt to make some upcoming meta game predictions. There will likely be a surge of tribal decks. Elves, Goblins, and Merfolk. Goblins and Merfolk will die down some. Elves I'm less certain about. It looks like a very fun/competitive deck to me, but may not to others. Just guessing I will say it will have its ups and downs, and not ever be considered a top deck worth planning for. RUG Delver and Maverick players will continue to bore us to death. Reanimator will get hated out from making it to top 8's. S&S might make some top 8's, but mostly due to luck of getting good pairings against people not prepared. Belcher will see a few more top 8's as more people give the deck a try.

I guess that's it! Lets see how close I am!