Welcome to the first season of Weekly Legacy Recap! Each of these nine articles will consist of two parts. First, a Metagame Recap, where i’m analysing my most recent matchups from the Legacy League on Magic Online. I’m playing fifty matches per week, but we’re mostly going to look at them in the context of the four week metagame, i.e. my 200 most recent matches.

The second part is the What I Played Last Week section, where i’m going to feature a different deck each week. We’re going to talk about my reasoning behind choosing the deck, my expectations, my actual results and the changes i’ve made throughout my league runs with the deck. This week, we’re going to look at Death & Taxes.

Metagame Recap

(google spreadsheet with the complete data)

No better way to kick off the season than with an obvious outlier: Nine matches against Sneak & Show in ten leagues. Of course, you could argue that Delver, overall, ties for first place. I’m actually not quite sure how i want to count them. So far, i track them seperately, but consider Delver as one archetype when it comes to metagame share. In some matchups, the differences between RUG Delver and UB Shadow are negligible. Most of the time, however, they do play out very differently. I recommend you check out the full spreadsheet to inform your decisions here.

Next up is UW Control, comprised of Miracles – with or without actual Miracles – and UW Blade (with the occasional Black splash). Then there’s Grixis / 4C Control; at least one of my 4C opponents played Arcum’s Astrolabe. I feel like UW and Grixis / 4C try to do similar things (they’re blue decks built not to lose to Chalice of the Void), but their approaches are quite different, it can make sense to group them together, but for the purpose of these articles, i do not.

Because i didn’t face enough Griselbrands in my matches against Sneak & Show, i also played against RB Reanimator four times. This is actually somewhat of an outlier as well; i only played against the deck nine times total in my 200 matches so far. I also faced Storm three times, which is roughly what i would have expected. Between those three decks, i faced off against quite a few spell-based combo decks this week.

Griselbrand and Emrakul aren’t the only massive, flying, legendary creatures of course, and it only makes sense that i would also have to fend off several Marit Lage tokens in three matches each against Lands and Hexmage / Depths.

As i mentioned, there were several outliers here and i don’t like overreacting to recent developments and flukes. This is why i started metagaming with my 200 most recent matches in mind rather than just looking at one week worth of data:

If you look at this chart, Delver, specifically UR/x variants, are clearly ruling the format, at 20% if you combine the different versions. If you want to succeed in the current online metagame, your deck shouldn’t just lose to Delver. As i have learned the hard way, Wrenn and Six alone can invalidate some decks’ entire draws if they happen to consist mostly of either nonbasic lands or 1-toughness creatures.

At roughly 10%, UW Control is not quite as prevalent overall, but that doesn’t mean that it’s advisable to not have a plan against Back to Basics. Also at around 10%, we have Ancient Tomb + Chalice decks, half of which are Moon Stompy.

At 8%, Sneak & Show is in fourth place, largely thanks to the big week it had just now. Depths is the only other deck that has been a consistent presence in my four weeks of playing so far.

Just above 5%, we have Storm, Grixis(+Wrenn) control and Dredge / Hogaakbridgevinewhatever decks.

If you’re looking for specific decks or archetypes, this data is useful enough. But i want to see how i can attack this format (and what gets thrown at me), so i started looking for overlaps between these archetypes, taking into account unlisted decks as well (i think it really does pay off to look at the full metagame spreadsheet).

So far, the number of decks utilising cantrips has consistently been almost exactly 60% of my total matches. Just in case you were wondering how good Chalice of the Void, Thalia, Guardian of Thraben and Narset, Parter of Veils are right now. For the record, this number includes RB Reanimator.

Cantrips tend to go with countermagic (with the exception of Storm and the aforementioned RB Reanimator), which has consistently been in just over half the decks i played against.

The next most prevalent aspect of Legacy is nonbasic hate. Between 30-40% of the metagame have had Wasteland each week, to make for a total of 35%. On top of that, i’ve seen roughly 10% Back to Basics and 5% Blood Moon. In total, 99 out of 200 opponents had some form of nonbasic hate. I would say Basic lands are pretty good right now.

Graveyard value in some form is incredibly common as well – 85 out of 200 opponents had Wrenn and Six, Life from the Loam, Snapcaster Mage, Knight of the Reliquary or the like. This number does not include the 22 explicit graveyard-decks (Dredge, Reanimator) i have played against. I would say the latter are the ones that would push you towards Leyline of the Void, while the former make Rest in Peace seem like a great card. This depends on how much you care about the graveyard-fuelled cards, of course.

In my first week of playing, half the decks i played against were heavily susceptible to nonbasic-hate (think 3+ colour Delver decks, Eldrazi decks and Depths / Lands). For weeks two, three and four, the number hovered around 30%, making for a total of 35% over my four weeks of playing.

If you’re wondering how important countermagic is if you don’t just want to lose games on turn two, 20% of the format has been spell-based combo so far. Sneak & Show’s numbers were rather inflated last week though, which put last week at 30% spell-combo in total, while it hovered around 15% the previous weeks.

If you’re just like me and look out for every opportunity to cast Winter Orb, it might be good to know that between 15-20% of the format tend to be Blue Midrange decks.

Finally, the number of Chalices fluctuates heavily – so far, it’s either been 5% or closer to 20%. In total, that puts just over 10% of the metagame on Chalices. So if you’re running countermagic anyway and don’t have any other reason to run artifact-removal, i feel like it wouldn’t be too unreasonable to use those slots for more prevalent matchups.

What I Played Last Week

One of the decks i played in preparation for this series is Eldrazi & Taxes (which i am going to write about next week, by the way). I was quite impressed with the Taxes part of the deck and i wondered how good it would be when not powered by Mox Diamond to deploy Sphere-effects on turn one.

I had never played Death & Taxes before and since Rishadan Port was outrageously expensive online when i still played Legacy regularly, i didn’t really know much about the deck aside from my experience playing against it with Storm and Canadian Threshold… Three years ago.

This meant i had little to go on when picking an initial list – i only browsed through online results, but that was already a lot. I settled on MM_17’s list mainly because it had Tomik, Distinguished Advokist in the maindeck and Cataclysm in the sideboard, two cards i thought were interesting. As a matter of fact, i had already played with Tomik in Bomberman and thought it was very good there.

(Death & Taxes by MM_17)

I played this list for two leagues, a 3-2 and a 4-1. I lost my first match 0-2 against Storm and then punted my way through my tenth match, which was an 0-2 against RUG Delver. I definitely should have won the first game, but i couldn’t stop messing up. In the second game, my opponent’s card just lined up very well against mine.

I didn’t actually learn much from those ten matches (i already knew that Wrenn and Six is crazy good), so i only changed on card in the 75 for my next league, a Giver of Runes for a Palace Jailer:

(deckstats.net link)

Both of my leagues with this list were 3-2 finishes. I went 1-1 against RUG Delver again, picked up a very unfortunate loss against Maverick and a second loss to Eldrazi Stompy. The one that made me actually think about the list though was my loss to Hogaak / Altar of Dementia, where i had a very useless Containment Priest in game three and got destroyed despite seemingly having a hate permanent on the table throughout my opponent’s entire combo turn.

I came to the conclusion that i wanted hard graveyard hate rather than Containment Priest and Grafdigger’s Cage. I also wanted some extra removal in Delver matchups (specifically for Delver of Secrets), didn’t like Cataclysm very much and considered Ethersworn Canonist too narrow. I didn’t change the maindeck, but i reworked the sideboard quite a bit:

(deckstats.net link)

I went 2-3 with this list. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really anything to be learned from this league. My sideboard changes didn’t come up, although i managed to get my revenge on Storm in a three-game nailbiter – having Ethersworn Canonist would have been better than having Thorn here, but i still won.

Overall, UW Blade is the only deck i faced more than once that i had a positive record against – i went 1-1 against Storm, Hexmage Depths and Maverick, 2-2 against RUG Delver (well, plus a 1-0 against Canadian Threshold), while going 0-2 against Eldrazi Stompy.

Both Wrenn and Six and Plague Engineer were massively annoying, but i don’t think it would be fair to say that i really tried solving those problems. In the end, i went 15-10 with Death & Taxes, which isn’t too bad for a deck that i don’t find very intuitive to play and had no prior experience with. I might go back and try the deck again at some point.

If you’re interested in my decision making with the deck, i am going to share some of my opening hands with the deck on twitter throughout the week: @JonLX.

That’s it for today. Thanks for reading!

j