The 10 Most Significant Cards In Legacy Right Now

First I should clarify what I mean by "Significant". I don't mean the most popular. I don't mean the most expensive. What I mean by this is, the cards that are the most responsible for defining the format as is exits right now. Some of these may very well also be seen on such other lists, so don't be confused by that. The cards on this list are the ones actively making the most impact in the format right now by either holding powerful decks back, or making decks more popular and creating a need to be expecting those decks/cards.

This isn't going to be a top 10 going from least to most significant, as while some cards may seem to easily earn their place on such a ranking, others would be harder to define compared to the rest. And it would just be to highly debatable to make such claims.

A lot of these cards a Legacy veteran would easily expect to see on this list, so don't read this expecting 10 seemingly random cards along with detailed cases made for their claim at being on this list. There will be a few listed though that are more debatable, and may not be as expected.


Force of Will

This is a staple for Legacy. And to many is the card that defines the format the most. Having a "No Button" that's so useable for so many decks and situations is extremely valuable. Any player on the play that plans on casting something the first turn, against a unknown deck in this format, is/should be thinking about this card. A first turn FoW, or lack of one defines the remainder of that match most often.

This is currently being used in almost all the most popular decks. Save for Maverick and Dredge. And it has a home in many of the less popular but quality decks.

This card single-handedly keeps powerful Combo decks from either being viable at all, or placing well in tournaments more often.


Dual Lands (original)

While these make up 10 cards themselves, not lumping them together would make for a very bland list.

These cards like others on this list define the format, and have done so for a long time. In a way they're deceptively simple, and a novice may not understand their power. Without these, the clocks on the average deck would be slower, decks would be less consistent on reaching their goals, and there very well might be a higher number of mono color decks and less tri-color decks contending for viability.


Fetchlands

These, like Dual Lands are lumped together to make this list less bland.

The ability to fetch the format defining Dual Lands, basics when playing around Wasteland, or even tailor what mana you have access to based around your hand, permanents and graveyard, makes these auto included in most decks in the format.

Additionally they're commonly used in combination with Brainstorm and Sensei's Divining Top to help ensure increased odds of drawing the best cards for your situation or game plan.

To some extent their useful to thin your deck as well, removing 1 land from your deck there by increasing your odds of drawing more relevant cards.

You even may on occasion see these fetch a Dryad Arbor as a surprise blocker/attacker, among other tricks.


Wasteland

In a format so defined by Dual Lands, and one with access to so many powerful non-basics in general, this card keeps all of those in check. Without this, there would be almost no reason not to run Dual Lands in mono color decks, giving the player access to the type of cards he wouldn't have access to otherwise.

An unprepared player keeping a Dual Land in opening hand, or fetching one early on could very well wind up locked out of the game for a significant amount of time in which he can't recover from to be able to turn the tide in his favor.


Sensei's Divining Top

With bans placed on a lot of the best tutors that would otherwise be available, the combination of deck manipulation plus shuffle effects form the next best thing. This card in particular provides the manipulation part of that, and does so with re-useability! Additionally this is put to great use with cards like Counterbalance and Delver of Secrets, to create some very significant swings or maintain position in matches. It also helps keep a Miracle on deck for when you need it the most.


Brainstorm

A long time staple of the format, this is another form of deck manipulation to combine with shuffle effects to replace the missing tutors. But this goes beyond that and allows you to replace potentially the 2 most useless cards in your hand with more valuable ones. All at the cost of only a single Blue mana. And at instant speed! This can often be used to make the card feel like your playing 4 Ancestral Recalls!

This like SDT Combos well with Delver of Secrets, and to some extent Counterbalance. And with Miracles, it can get an already drawn and otherwise dead one out of your hand and on top of your deck where and when you want it.


Grisebrand

Finding its home in Reanimator and Sneak and Show decks, this guy has caused a need for decks to be tuned and tooled to be able to deal with this guy or his repercussions when he hits play. In a big tournament you need to expect this guy and these decks, or else you are going to get rolled over and probably issued your walking papers.


Stoneforge Mystic

This card is currently finding it's home in many decks. It's little without the quality selection of equipment it searches for from pre-planned toolboxes. Cards like Batterskull, Umezawa's Jitte, and various "Sword of"'s are what it often finds, can put into play at instant speed, and in the case of Batterskull, at significantly less then its normal cost to play. It creates advantage in almost every possible way you could want with this selection.

Because of all this, this guy often can't be ignored and becomes the target of removal before he can put what he searched for into play. But often, even then the damage may have already been done.


Cavern of Souls

This card has contributed to a resurgence of pure Agro, Agro-Combo, and Tribal decks. Along with that increase, pure Combo is becoming more viable due to it's generally favorable game against such decks. This has caused the format to be the most balanced, open, and unpredictable than it has in a long time.


Scavenging Ooze

The other 9 cards on this list were much easier to decide on. The 10th was not so easy. I landed on this guy because he's multi-faceted. He grows big for just a 2 mana creature, gains life, and picks apart popular graveyard plans. Tarmogoyf was a very popular beast in the format for a long time, and this guy has caused his presence in the format to start diminishing because for the same casing cost he often grows bigger while making the goyf smaller. The ooze also has more use in other situations due to that very same GY hate

Decks that use the graveyard as an asset are common in Legacy, from Dredge, Reanimator, or various decks that use Flashback through either natural means or Snapcaster Mage. Any such deck better be planning on dealing with or playing around the ooze. They have to play around GY hate normally as is. But this guy resides in the main deck a lot making him more important then the cards that come in during game 2.


Notable Mentions That Didn't Make the List:

Swords to Plowshares - Without this, there would still be Path to Exile.

Snapcaster Mage - Only as strong as what it's giving Flashback to. Otherwise it's a 2/1 for 2cc with flash.

Delver of Secrets - A very solid creature, but requires certain decks to be useful, and his absence from the format wouldn't change things THAT much.

Lion's Eye Diamond - Used in many of the formats best combo decks almost to the extent of being a 4 of Black Lotus. But while weakened without it, decks wouldn't be to much different.

Green's Sun Zenith - Used to great effect in several quality deck lists, but just shy of being top 10.

City of Traitors/Ancient Tomb - Very good at what their used for, but what they lead to matters more.


Final Thoughts:

The format is wide open right now. Some decks are still more popular then others, but the lists of viable decks that could be seen winning any given tournament right now is large and varied. The coming months should be interesting to see what may shine above all else.

I don't have much for predictions. Agro-Control decks have proven themselves enough in the past that in the end that's likely were things will wind up again. Any time a Agro or Combo deck starts shining above the rest, it gets hit with a ban. If anything were to go that route, Griselbrand is of course topping that list. But I just don't see that happening with the known decks available right now.

With all decks being so equal, other factors will start mattering more for popularity. Generally money cost. The cheaper/easier to build decks would make more sense as popular choices. In such a wide open format, pure fun could start making it's way into the selection process more. But as people define fun differently, who knows.

For now, keep an eye on Agro and Agro-Combo. It's their time in the spot light!

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!

Introduction

Hello! I'm a Magic The Gathering player that has been playing off and on for almost 20 years now. In that time I've stuck mostly to Legacy and Vintage, gone though phases of pure casual play, or weekly tournaments. I've played many types of decks, and I would even say I've innovated a few.

I've always tried to maintain a minimum amount of money regularly invested in MTG, so I've often had some of the more cheaper decks to build, and to this day lack some of the more staple cards of my favorite Eternal formats like Power 9, Workshops, Drains, and most of the set of Dual Lands. But despite those I do have a pretty sizable collection and can build about 75% of almost any deck at any given time, more of less.

My favorite deck throughout the years has generally been 9 Land Stompy, a deck that while I can not prove it, and it may not be that big of a claim to fame, I invented many years ago. I suppose the reason why I like it so much is in part due to the money cost of the deck being cheap and cheap decks generally being mono color agro decks. I've come to realize over the years that a agro deck in my hands is far more effective then other types. I can now look back on these key points and realize that it all makes sense, in that I would become good with agro based on my collection and investment with the game. The reason why this deck is my favorite might be in part cause I created it and it went on to catch on more then anything else I can lay that claim to, but I think it's mostly because it's surprisingly versatile against a meta in which I prepare it/myself for. Sadly with creatures and other spells that have been introduced for other decks over the past few years, it's strengths have kind of weakened comparatively while it has gained little to nothing to compensate for that, and I doubt it will be as good as it once was. Thankfully I have other decks/cards, and by no means is that the only deck I can play well. I'm no pro. I don't have any desire to invest the time/money it would take to do so. But I'm no scrub either.

As I mentioned, I have played MTG on and off these past 20 years, and I'm just coming back to the game after a 4 year period away from it. The Legacy community in my city was growing and getting pretty healthy despite usually being on life support, until the sole place to play it anymore shifted ownership and the regular Legacy scene was tossed aside by the new owner. Now there still isn't much of a place to play. I live in the Las Vegas area, and even if there was, it's a big city and it's very inconvenient to get to most card shops as they all seem to reside in the most random/obscure parts of town. Recently a old friend has re opened up shop and its the closest thing to me. There's no Legacy community there yet, but I'm hopeful! For now I just go there when I can, and play whatever format I have to/can. In addition to that I play MTGO (mostly Pauper) and Cockatrice.

I don't have a complete idea on what I plan to do with this blog yet. Perhaps I will just post some random articles of my own. While I may not have the accolades of some others who post articles online, I'm certain my insights and opinions will have value to some. And perhaps writing such articles of my own can help me learn and grow more. I've become a blogger/poster by nature, so creating a blog for my MTG thoughts makes sense, and I hope something helpful can come out of it. Maybe this can be used as some sort of launchpad if enough people find value in my words, and I can write for something else. Maybe I can add additional authors and turn this into a place where some of the more average joe's can be heard. Perhaps it can be used as a log of my personal journey of reacquainting myself with the format/game. Or maybe I can come up with some other hook for this blog to keep people coming back. We will see.

Anyway! Welcome to my blog. Good luck on your games! And I hope to see you come back! =)