Legacy Swiss Rounds Recap

A somewhat modest number of 12 players showed up to sling some of the the most powerful cards in Magic's history - or at least proxies of some of the most powerful cards in Magic's history. After a long delay due to several people failing to correctly operate alarm clocks, printers, and scissors, we finally began our venture into the vast domain of the Legacy format.

After testing a mono-blue High Tide combo deck all week, I decided on Friday night to switch to Dark Horizons, Legacy's Rock deck that is named after a one-of, Horizon Canopy. It seemed like a good switch after a fairly uneventful 2-0 win, while Emile, who was borrowing the High Tide deck, only scraped out a draw against Skye's Standard-legal Kuldotha Red deck. Jordan also picked up a first round win in the days first episode of Dragons vs. Hydra, where his Dragonstorm combo deck proved to be faster than Carney's Natural Order/Progenitus combo.

My good start came to a startling halt, however, after narrowly losing to Hunter's Goblin Welder/Metalworker deck due to some sort of fusion of me being a bad player and being unable to understand Goblin Welder's obnoxious Oracle text, which sounds like it was written in a courtroom. Michael Smith also quietly moved to 2-0 with his red/blue/green Counterburn deck, which seemed to be well-suited against the combo-heavy metagame.

A couple players emerged from the middle of the pack in round 3 to reach 2-1, including Joe Hammond, who was piloting some sort of hybrid concoction between Ad Nauseam Tendrils and Imperial Painter, the deck which took him to the top 4 in the previous Legacy event. Smith became the lone 3-0 player after a close match against Hunter. Another player, Noah, had also moved to 2-1 after beating me with a nearly identical Metalworker list, setting up an interesting mirror match in the final round of Swiss.

In round 4, Hunter narrowly edged out the Metalworker mirror, winning a tense third game where he drew the land he needed just before Noah could find the finisher his mana-heavy draw lacked. Carney won an equally tense match with Joe that you can read about below. Michael Smith remained undefeated after a win against Jordan's storm deck, but by solidifying Jordan's tiebreakers in the process, little did he know that he would be in for quite the Gruesome Encore in the top 4, which was used instead of top 8 due to the fairly low number of players...