Metagame Movements

in Legacy –

The Game Changed Indeed

Let there be no doubt, we are now living in a metagame defined by Orcish Bowmasters and to some extent it’s good friend, the fair reanimate package of Grief and Troll of Khazad-dum.

In the recent Showcase Challenge on MTGO, 12 out of the best 16 competitors played Orcish Bowmasters and only 2 of these 12 decks didn’t play Grief and Troll.

Albert Lindblom (Alli on MTGO) compiled Challenge data from the last 4 weeks (thank you so much, Albert!) and here we can see a similar tendency with Grixis Delver and UB leading the pack producing a combined total of 27,6 % of the best performing decks (x-2 or better) and outperforming their overall metagame share which was at a combined 18,3 %.

Other decks that have done well recently are land based strategies in the form of classic Lands and GWx Depths. No surprise here, we are living in a Bowmasters world, and it seems like the best performing decks are either playing on that axis, or are trying to ignore the ground and go big with Marit Lage and friends.

Spellbased combo, Reanimator and 8-Cast gone

Even though we just had an interesting unban of Mind’s Desire and even though Reanimator was one of the most popular and strong decks up until recently, we now have a competitive metagame that doesn’t include these types of decks beyond the fringes. This is not really surprising though, when you consider the hostile environment of Thoughtseize, Grief, Daze, Force of Will and even a high number of main deck Reanimate. Playing either a combo deck that relies on a density of spells with a good mix of fast mana and payoff or relies on reanimating a creature seems almost hopeless at the moment.

Doomsday is the exception with regards to spell based combo being present in the winners metagame and this is my guess as to why that is: Doomsday doesn’t need a lot of spells to go off, so it is naturally more resilient to discard. Doomsday is a tried and true deck with a number of experts running the tables for a long time by now and that matters a lot. 

8 Cast is also pretty much gone from the winners circle. The reason is probably how poorly all of its cantrips line up against Orcish Bowmasters. Can 8 Cast successfully adapt in some way and become more aggressive and less grindy, going in the direction of Affinity?

Where do you go from here?

The metagame found its current shape and form only recently, but it seems that chances are that it will hold for some time. Orcish Bowmasters and friends have such a strong and versatile quality, that makes it hard to go wrong playing them. It seems similar to the latter metagames dominated by UR Delver with either Dreadhorde Arcanist or Expressive Iteration, but now the card advantage is gained through Bowmasters various effects and to some degree Sauron’s Ransom + Mystic Sanctuary and hardcasting Grief in the late game. 

A known metagame should be ripe for your tweaking, teching and sideboarding, but will it be good enough? As it stands, control decks and combo decks seem like bad choices, but maybe this is just due to the fact that we haven’t yet adapted correctly to the Bowmasters metagame. An example of this is how a card like Narset, Parter of Veils was very strong before Bowmasters, but is poor to mediocre now. When both draw spells and planeswalkers are weak in the face of Bowmasters, how does control adapt?

Triumph of Saint Katherine is not on MTGO, but it might be a good way to overpower the black cards in paper play, and how about Stoneforge Mystic? On the one hand it seems strong to have toughness 2 and gaining card advantage without drawing a card, but on the other hand the equipment is weak to discard. A sideboard card I like in theory is Sanctifiers en-Vec, but few decks are capable of producing WW consistently before the late game.

European Legacy Masters and Eternal Weekend

So in short, the metagame is defined but far from solved and we have some great paper tournaments to look forward to, where the best European Legacy players will try to take the upper hand. In only a few days, 4 Seasons in Bologna kicks off and that also means that it is time for the second edition of the European Legacy Masters. More than a 100 qualified players from across Europe will bring their very best and you’ll be able to follow the high level Legacy games on the 4 Seasons stream on Twitch.

Let’s also rejoice that Eternal Weekend is back in Europe, as Wizards announced that Prague will host this major Legacy and Vintage event on the 17-19th of November. 

All in all we have both a thriving Legacy community and an interesting metagame to figure out!

With love from the ELM crew,

Tue Bo-Chassé