Greetings, Legacy nerds! It’s time to look at the current season of UOL Legacy, and see how the field has transitioned into the top 8.
First up, let’s look at the meta at the start of this season:
| Archetypes | |
| Death & Taxes | 3 |
| Delver | 2 |
| Standstill | 2 |
| Yorion Aluren | 1 |
| 8-Lizard Madness | 1 |
| TES | 1 |
| Bant Yorion Midrange | 1 |
| Lands | 1 |
| Urza Stompy | 1 |
| Ragagaak | 1 |
| Ruby Storm | 1 |
| Punishing Maverick | 1 |
| Deadguy Ale | 1 |
| Eldrazi Stompy | 1 |
| Mana Laundering | 1 |
| BR Reanimator | 1 |
| Golos Cloudpost | 1 |
| Ninjas | 1 |
| Macroarchetypes | Count |
| Combo | 7 |
| Midrange | 6 |
| Control | 4 |
| Aggro/Tempo | 4 |
Looking at the macroarchetypes, we can see an almost perfectly split meta.
Heading up the faster decks, seven combo decks were spread across our users, ranging from the known (TES, Reanimator) to the up-and-coming (Ruby Storm) to the off-the-wall (Mana Laundering). On top of this, we also had four aggro and tempo decks in UR Delver, Eldrazi Stompy, and Ninjas.
On the slower side, the midrange archetype was represented by three Yorion D&T builds: Bant Yorion, Dead Guy Ale, and Punishing Maverick. The control spectrum was headed by two very different Standstill decks (Timeless UW and Bant Saga), two land-based control decks (Golos Post, GR Lands), and our resident Urza Stompy one-trick Viperfang4.
What we see is a metagame that’s rather healthy and has a huge slice of the Legacy pie.
In a split meta, success is all about what you brought preparing for certain decks, and how your luck lines up with that preparation. Your knowledge of your deck will end up being a large factor as well, since eeking out those small percentage points towards victory becomes even more important to back up that preparation.
Let’s see how this shook out in the transition to the top 8 decks.
The Top 8 After Swiss
| Dank_confidant | Golos Post |
| Arsteel | TES |
| UncleFlacco | Yorion Aluren |
| Viperfang4 | Urza Stompy |
| CheeseyPuffey | Bant Yorion |
| The_Hollow_Prophet | UR Delver ft. Delver of Secrets |
| GlassNinja | Bantstill |
| Sefir | Timeless Standstill |
As we can see, the meta is pretty dominated by control decks. This means they prepared really well against the field and came out on top. Perhaps most shocking is that the midrange portion of the field was nearly eliminated. Only CheeseyPuffey’s Bant list made it through to the top 8. Our aggro/tempo portion put up fairly proportional results, while our combo players lost a bit of ground. Let’s look at some of the individual decks themselves and see what they’re packing that led them to success.
Our top seed is the tournament organizer himself. Dank is a very solid player, and his deck was certainly a good pick for this metagame.
If your opponents are trying to go slow, by and large one of the most successful strategies is to be even slower. Golos Post goes over the top of a ton of the late game durdle decks, and there’s not much they can do to stop Emrakul, the Aeons Torn or Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger from eventually coming down and wrecking their faces. His sideboard is suited to beat many of the combo decks you’ll typically see, with 3 Mindbreak Traps for insurance against Storm and Krosan Grip for Aluren.
I think he’s got a great shot at winning the event itself as his first two matches will be against slower decks that he has good matchups against (Timeless Standstill, then Bant Midrange or Urza Stompy). He does need to watch out for match one, though, because Timeless Standstill has some nasty tricks.
The Epic Storm – Arsteel
TES is a great deck, but I’ll leave a lot of this breakdown to Bryant Cook and the boys over at TheEpicStorm.com, as I’m not a Storm expert in general or well versed with TES specifically. I’m not sure how rough of a time Arsteel is bound for with 2 blue decks in his way to the finals, but knowing that team TES regularly crushes fair blue, I wouldn’t put it past him to also crush them.
Yorion Aluren – UncleFlacco
If you want to hear Flacco’s own thoughts about the deck, you can find his Aluren Primer on our site here! I like Flacco’s chances against his first opponent, who’s on UR Delver. Swords to Plowshares and Prismatic Ending are better removal against a deck trying to hit Delirium for Dragon’s Rage Channeler, and Endurance is also great against DRC and Murktide Regent. Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath is a great fair endgame threat, and Aluren is a deadly combo if the Delver deck plays too fairly.
Urza Stompy – Viperfang4
Our first top deck utilizing Urza’s Saga, Viper is a deck specialist and his time has perhaps come with the rise of artifact-centric decks thanks to Urza’s Saga. His main deck is packed with a fantastic toolbox of zero and one drops to fetch with both Urza’s Saga and Trinket Mage. These include Aether Spellbomb, Pacification Array, two Pithing Needles, Tormod’s Crypt, and a card I think more Urza’s Saga decks should be on: Expedition Map.
Karn the Great Creator serves as an additional toolbox card that can grab an even wider array of silver bullets from the sideboard, allowing for a very flexible and reactive deck that can also play proactively with Chalice of the Void. This mixture of elements is perfect for a player like Viper.
Bant Yorion – CheeseyPuffey
This deck had my number in the Swiss, and for good reason. It has a lot of strong cards for the meta in Prismatic Ending/Swords to Plowshares, Uro, Titan of Nature’s Wrath, Endurance, and Green Sun’s Zenith.
I particularly like the elements here that play well with Yorion, Sky Nomad—namely, the four copies of Abundant Growth, which are great for early fixing in a fairly high-pip deck and are also a strict card advantage card late game. The games will slow down to that point more often than not, and when you go late Yorion, Sky Nomad himself also comes online alongside the brutal and inevitable Field of the Dead.
UR Delvered Delver – The_Hollow_Prophet
If you’ve ever played against a Delver pilot, you’ve likely seen this specific list. Our sole representative of Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer in the top 8 brings two copies of the now-fading namesake card Delver of Secrets alongside Dragon’s Rage Channelers and Murktide Regents. Lightning Bolt, Unholy Heat, and Expressive Iteration all play pivotal roles here as late game velocity can help Delver get over the last few critical points of damage.
The best upside of Delver is that it’s the kind of deck that can win through almost any metagame if you pilot it well and draw alright. I’d never count a Delver player out.
Bantstill – GlassNinja
Oh hey, it’s me!
Going into this season, I knew I wanted to leverage the power of two of the three of Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, Endurance, and Urza’s Saga. I settled on the line of thought that, if I played Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, I was settling on it and Urza’s Saga alongside Dragon’s Rage Channeler, and that Endurance was good against that. So, I’d rather be on the side of Endurance, and therefore Endurance + Urza’s Saga.
I knew that Endurance worked best in a slower Bant shell, so I settled into looking at Bant cards to put into the deck. Eventually I realized that in Bant, Urza’s Saga has a great line of play in Urza’s Saga grabbing Expedition Map grabbing Hall of Heliod’s Generosity grabbing back the Urza’s Saga. This recursive threat is slow, but nigh on unbeatable if I could slow down the game to that pace.
Since I was already grabbing back enchantments and taking it slow, I eventually tried out Standstill and quickly fell in love. Urza’s Saga and Standstill are nearly tailor-made to play together, and with my other threats being able to come in under Standstill thanks to Urza’s Saga or having flash to flash in after a Standstill is broken, I felt ready to combat most other decks.
My sideboard is built to be able to switch speeds when need be with more early pressure while also having access to quite a few hate cards.
Despite being somewhat softer to slower decks, I was able to take some wins in my match losses in the Swiss against them, so I wouldn’t count me out either. Overall, I’ve been very pleased with how this deck has been playing out.
Timeless Standstill – Sefir
It’s ironic that the finalists from our last season show up on similar decks as each other and in the last two top 8 slots. Sefir showed up with a similar idea as me, abusing the power of Standstill, but this is their second top 8 in a row with the deck! Compared to my much techier, much less represented build, their version is a clean and classic UWR, basic-heavy deck.
We packed the same tutor suite for Urza’s Saga, with the exception that they’ve got two copies of Retrofitter Foundry to my one. Their main threat under Standstill is still Shark Typhoon, but they also have the ability to Eternalize a Timeless Dragon.
One of the main advantages of the UWR build is the sideboard; Red’s additions of Pyroblast are great in the mirror and From the Ashes is a fantastic way to beat up on heavy nonbasic decks. When Sefir and Dank_confidant fight in round one, From the Ashes will give Sefir a huge edge in the postboard games. However, I still anticipate the mainboard games being rough.
Predictions
So, with all of that in mind, what do I think will happen in each match? Who do I think wins out in this bracket?
I expect Dank_confidant to win in the quarterfinals. His Golos Post list is great at picking at many of Standstill’s weaknesses, and even against a From the Ashes, he should only need to pick up one game of three in the postboard games.
In the Viper vs Cheesey matchup, I think Cheesey has a slight edge. Pithing Needle lacks great targets, while 4 Prismatic Ending will mean that 4 Chalice of the Void are only stopgaps. And even as stopgaps, they don’t stop the many three-drop threats present in Cheesey’s deck.
The third match between Arsteel and me is a coin toss. He has an advantage in the pre-board games, while my sideboard gives me a huge advantage in the later games. If I can steal a win in either pre-board game, I probably win. If not, winning one in three is, again, not impossible by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, Flacco has an advantage over The_Hollow_Prophet. The Bant shells already do well against UR Delver most of the time, and adding in a combo finish that Hollow has to keep aware of and constantly save interaction for is a huge disadvantage for the Delver pilot. If this were a more 2018 style UR Delver packing Chain Lightning and Price of Progress, I could see this axiom flipping. However, the UR Delver pilots leaning more into the graveyard than ever before has actually presented a glaring weakness in the archetype.
I expect to see a finals with Dank_confidant on one side and either Arsteel or me on the other. If it is a matchup of TES vs Golos, I think TES will win out. If I arrive, I expect Golos to be favored against my Bantstill.
If you’d like to participate in a future UOL Legacy League, join our Discord and check out the #legacy-league channel, or see our Legacy page. It’s completely free and takes place on Untap.in, a website similar to Cockatrice where you can play any deck for free. You can read more about the League format here.
