Hello everyone, today I am going to talk about my favourite format: LEGACY.

I’ve been playing legacy for a long time now, but as I now play almost exclusively competitive tournaments, I do not have as much time to play Legacy as I would like.  However, with the recent announcement of a Legacy Grand Prix in England next year, I am excited to be able to play the format at a competitive level so close to home.  I first started playing Legacy with Canadian Threshold and since then I have been changing and editing my deck all the while retaining an important card; Delver of Secrets.  I swap and change depending on the meta and right now I think that Grixis is the best version and potentially the best deck in legacy right now.

Grixis Delver-Patxi, MTGO Legacy Challenge top4 16/7/2017

Maindeck

I’m going to quickly explain the configuration that I chose for this event and how I sideboard based on the archetypes that you can find most prevalent in Legacy currently.

Lands

I play 18 lands, because you don’t really need more than 2-3 per game.

There are 6 actual lands that produce mana, with the rest being a combination of fetches and utility lands.  The main colour of the deck is blue and we have Dazes in our deck, so all of the duals must be blue.  Alongside this are a number of blue fetches and 4 Wastelands, this acts as half land, half spell, we are trying to tempo our opponents out and Wasteland can essentially time walk our opponent and let us win  a lot of games almost by themselves.

Creatures

This deck is full of the most cheap and efficient creatures you can find; Delver of Secrets, Deathrite Shamans and Young Pyromancers form the base of the deck.  Your game plan is to get these creatures into play as soon as possible, while retaining countermagic such as Force of Will or Daze, then, towards the end of the game you follow these small creatures with the large Gurmag Anglers, which are a perfect addition to the deck, as they are very hard to kill.

Spells

The blue core that every blue Legacy deck has involving Brainstorm, Force of Will and Ponder, means this deck is consistent and in this deck particular we have the nice synergy of Gitaxian Probe + Cabal Therapy combined with Young Pyromancer is going to allow us to disrupt our opponent’s hand very fast, making the combo matchups very good. 4 Lightning Bolts + 1 Fatal Push provide cheap removal while also having the option to bolt face.  Looking back, I feel I should have played 1 Forked Bolt instead of the Push, in order to have the opportunity to 2 for 1 my delver opponents.

Sideboard

This is one of the hardest parts while building a Legacy deck, because the field is so open and you only have 15 slots to try to react to everything, so I like to play versatile cards that can be good in a big spectrum of match ups such as Pithing Needle, Vendillion Clique or Flusterstorm. Then 2 Pyroblast for the Blue mirrors and more removal for the creatures match ups.  All in all I believe this is a well rounded sideboard that can be easily adapted to your local meta.

How to Sideboard

Against CONTROL or MIDRANGE like the mirror, the games are going to be long, so cards like Daze or Force of Will are bad. The plan is to take out the 8 countermagic and bring in good cards for the grindy game.  However, if we are on the play we have the option to leave the Dazes in and try to play a fast game.

Against COMBO we are going to take out the Bolts, the Fatal Push and Anglers because it’s the slower threat and bring all the disruptive cards, we can cut also 1 Young Pyromancer if we need it.

The part I most like about this deck is the flexibility you have to adapt your game depending on the matchup, you can be a fast tempo deck with a lot of disruption or you can be a midrange with powerful creatures and removal spells.  A good pilot of the deck knows when to adapt and how to play the deck in the right way at the right time.

I shall leave you with one of my highlights from the tournament last week where I got a bit lucky; I played Surgical Extraction on my opponent’s Ancient Tomb in order to see his hand and name a card with Cabal Therapy and DING! Jackpot!

I hope you enjoyed and this has encouraged you to play more Legacy!