The Eternalist - Eternal Weekend Legacy Championships 2019

Howdy folks! We're here for yet another Eternalist month, and I'm Joe Dyer, the titular Eternalist himself. This month we're going to be talking about the US Eternal Weekend's Legacy Championships event and going over how Legacy looked this weekend. There were around 539 players for the event overall.

One thing was certain from watching the Legacy coverage over the weekend... Wrenn and Six and Oko, Thief of Crowns are pretty much everywhere. Decks playing Delver of Secrets are at the top of the heap between RUG Delver and U/R Delver, so much so that the vast majority of the Top 8 of this event was Delver variants.

Personally for me, this makes for somewhat uninteresting gameplay to watch, and the subgame of who gets to resolve W6 first is quite frankly a little boring. W6 alone has relatively warped the Legacy metagame around its very existence and I'm pretty much convinced this isn't a good thing. Memories of the Deathrite Shaman era come to mind when I see how this metagame is coalescing. Now granted, W6 is not Deathrite by any means, but it does fill a similar role in the homogenization of deckbuilding. I'm not sure what the real answer is, since there was a ton of cards this year printed that have impacted the format beyond W6.

Regardless, Legacy Champs is a great event, and the team this weekend did a bang up job. Big thanks to Mike Noble, Mark Hornung, and Randy Buehler for great coverage. However, the biggest hype of the weekend was getting to see Anuraag Das and Eric Vergo on coverage, and I have to admit they both just absolutely killed it. I would love to see Anuraag come back next year for coverage. He is a tremendous talent and his passion for the format really shows.

Some News About Legacy and SCG

One thing I would like to note before we jump into looking at this event and some of the cool stuff in it. SCG just recently announced that there would be no Legacy as part of the SCG Tour for 2020. You can check the announcement out here.

I'm personally not very shocked about this change. It has seemed that SCG has been dwindling support for the format for some time now, and with the announcement of Pioneer this was just a matter of "when". It's unfortunate, but I believe that if the Legacy community wishes to do so it can continue doing its thing.

Legacy Champs Top 8

The Legacy Top 8 showed us a lot of Delver, but there were some goodies mixed into the Delver as well. Let's take a look. These placings show the final Swiss standings, not the actual Top 8 results.

There is a lot of Delver here, not gonna lie, and the finals ended up being Tom Hertfelder vs Daniel Savage in a Delver mirror, in which Tom was able to claim victory and the championship!

Tom's list is pretty close to a stock list these days, packing powerful threats like Wrenn and Six along with Hooting Mandrills and True-Name Nemesis. In the sideboard, Tom has a veritable access to a wide array of cards, notably from this year being Veil of Summer and Oko, Thief of Crowns.

Daniel Savage on the other hand, piloted U/R Delver, which is a more aggressive Delver variant hinging on the power of cards like Young Pyromancer.

Powerful inclusions into this deck from this year alone include cards like Brazen Borrower and Dreadhorde Arcanist. This deck definitely feels powerful as it has access to a wide array of threatening cards that can take over a game. Dreadhorde Arcanist alone is a very powerful card, as has been seen in Vintage, where it can easily establish a board control presence that also draws cards.

That is, until Oko gets to it.

Also appearing in the Top 8 is the hopeful hero of the weekend, Daniel D'Amato on the people's champion against the Delver Menace... Ad Nauseam Tendrils!

Very close in construction to the lists we've seen out of other notable storm master, Cyrus Corman-Gill, Daniel showed on camera this weekend that he is also no slouch at casting Dark Ritual. One of the other great Storm players of the format, Danny did his best to rally back a win, but ended up getting shut out to place third in the event. Still, this list is pretty great, and it is worth noting how Veil of Summer has impacted this deck as well.

The other non-Delver deck appearing in the Top 8 was none other than BUG Turbo Depths piloted by Jason Murray.

This deck is really sweet. Splashing blue for Brainstorm is a Thomas Hepp/Negator77 special, and Jason sure pulled it off well. The Blue splash also gives you some fun access to cards like FlusterStorm out of the sideboard, which can be really strong when trying to fight certain pieces of removal. Also showing up is notable card Not of This World, which is an impressive way of countering cards like Swords to Plowshares. In addition, new card Elvish Reclaimer shows up here as well, as an additional Crop Rotation type effect in the deck that also occasionally just swings for 3 damage.

Outside of the Top 8

Crossing out of the Top 8, we get to see a little more diversity in decks and a lot less Delver. In fact, some decks that are generally written off in Legacy as of late because of cards like Wrenn and Six and Plague Engineer all placed very well.

One of these lists was a good friend of mine by the name of David Lance on none other than Death and Taxes! David is a fellow member of the group Team Serious, and is a solid player in all respects.

David Lance - D&T | 12th Place Legacy Champs 2019

David's list is constructed heavily to skew towards handling cards like Wrenn and Six and Plague Engineer by playing cards such as Giver of Runes over Mother of Runes and powerful threats like Mirran Crusader and Palace Jailer. Another fun inclusion in this list is Tomik, Distinguished Advokist, which is yet another way of shutting out W6 decks by making Wasteland ineffective.

Huge congrats to David on such a run, this deck is very powerful indeed. So much so that another D&T pilot also placed in 14th!

But... wait. There's more. In 13th place, we have a deck that is everybody's favorite little red idiots.

Christopher Keener - Goblins | 13th Place Legacy Champs 2019

Christopher was kind enough to post a tournament report on Reddit. Go check it out here!

The Best of the Rest

There were some sick decks shown on coverage all day on Saturday, so let's take a look at some of the cooler ones shown on stream.

Bomberman! This is such a cool deck and it's still on my list as probably one of the more powerful decks in the format, but loses a little equity in the face of Oko, Thief of Crowns being able to disable certain cards. Still, this deck is very sweet and powerful, and is a great deck for both Karn, the Great Creator and Mystic Forge to coexist.

Painter is awesome, utilizing the combination of Grindstone and Painter's Servant to mill a player out. The cool thing about this deck is that it received a lot of new cards from this year in the form of things like Goblin Engineer (as an additional Goblin Welder effect), Wishclaw Talisman from Throne of Eldraine, and even Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast. Splashing White in this gives access to cool effects like Enlightened Tutor and Ethersworn Canonist.

A really interesting and varied deck here, hinging on the typical Loam / Lands based strategies that we're accustomed to seeing with Exploration, Crop Rotation, and the like but alsobringing in cards like Wrenn and Six and Oko, Thief of Crowns. One cool inclusion as well is the addition of Field of the Dead which can make for a powerful late game way of closing the game out by generating a field state of Zombie after Zombie after Zombie after... well you get the hint.

The Spice Month

As always we gotta point out whatever spicy lists we find in the League dumps, so we're going to talk about those here.

Our first list is another Painter list, but it has cards like Merchant of the Vale and Stonecoil Serpent in it!

Painter - word030 | 5-0 Legacy League

Next we've got an interesting take on Delver featuring Vantress Gargoyle and Drown in the Loch from Throne of Eldraine!

Vantress Delver - Curseddraygon | 5-0 Legacy League

Our third list this month is an Urza, Lord High Artificer combo deck with Emry, Lurker of the Loch and everyone's favorite Elk-creating Planeswalker Oko, Thief of Crowns.

Urza Combo - Jenara19 | 5-0 Legacy League

Finally we've got a really interesting 4C list that utilizes the card Sevinne's Reclamation along with a mess of 3 CMC Planeswalkers and board control effects, along with Arcum's Astrolabe and Wrenn and Six.

4C Planeswalkers - ziggy_stardust | 5-0 Legacy League

Some cool lists this month, for sure. If there are lists you would like to submit for this section, please feel free to reach out to me! I'd love to publish them!

Wrapping Up

That's all the time we have for this month! Eternal Weekend was an interesting weekend in all regards, and there's a lot to grok from this information on this weekend. Is Delver truly the baddest of the bad? Is Wrenn and Six truly breaking things? Time will tell as we continue keeping tabs on the format.

As always, you can hit me up Twitter, Twitch, and Patreon! I'm also always around the Cardsphere Discord server if you'd like to reach out and ask questions!

Until next time, MAY ALL YOUR MAGIC BE ETERNAL!