His justification is that it has the same problems as the intimidate mechanic, where its color-based evasion made it very “swingy.” Mark Rosewater confirmed that it was retired on his blog back in 2017. Landwalk has fallen out of favor with R&D. Honorable Mentions: The Zodiac Creatures.Also a part of me still think it’s unreal that my pet deck became so popular after that many years.

I think Cephalid Breakfast is currently the strongest combo deck in the format. Delver matchup, the card being banned favors control heavily.

However, I don’t think that necessarily means control is dead as 《Expressive Iteration》 wasn’t as good there as it was in Delver, and in the Control vs. These Mono Black decks have been traditionally quite weak at playing fair grindy games, but I think we might be now in a situation where that’s not necessarily true anymore.Īs we said above, most of the other decks were simpy unaffected by the bans, with the exception being 4 color control with 《Expressive Iteration》. We can see a Mono Black Initiative deck that is already very well equipped to face the graveyard combo strategies. It was an OK deck that was able to get Top 8s here and there and now they got a card that plays very well with 《Dark Ritual》. White Red and Green can easily pair with each other, but 《Ravenloft Adventurer》 has a lot of potential in these Mono Black decks we have been seeing lurking around Tier 3. Initiative decks are still very alive and they will likely be a relevant player going forward.Īll of these four cards saw relevant play in the tournament and I think they will see the play, even if in different decks. We also had an Initiative deck in the top 4 of the Showcase Challenge: Whether 《Sylvan Library》 is good enough to be a maindeck card is not clear yet, but it will still be impressive against both control and combo decks. They also don’t necessarily fight for a spot with 《Tarmogoyf》, as a split is likely better across the matchups. 《Sylvan Library》 and potentially 《Life from the Loam》 are decent ways to get cardboard advantage that are worth a splash. This decklist Top4’ed the showcase as well and it is probably where I would look at next if I had a Legacy Event. It’s hard to tell where will the Delver decks go, but there are many options. However, particularly once we 《Force of Will》 exiling a blue card from our hand, we will often have problems playing grindy games with Delver going forward. This is still a Delver deck with a low land count and therefore given the same amount of cards, it will likely have more spells than most opponents.

The card advantage will come from being more efficient and having less lands, which historically was the way that Delver had to get ahead on spell quantity. This deck looks like the ones we had many years ago! It does have a different selection of threats but the overall core is the same, and because 《Expressive Iteration》 is gone now the deck doesn’t have any kind of direct card advantage effect. The following decklist won the tournament: Luckily for us, we had a Showcase Challenge just after the bans to see a little bit where the format might be heading to. However, which decks will remain at the top is unclear yet. Decks like Reanimator or 8-Cast will be a relevant part of the metagame. It’s not like Doomsday lost any card, so I would not expect the tier 2/tier 3 decks to change much. However, that leaves us without a clear best deck going forward, and that is very interesting in terms of deck building!įirst of all, most of the other Legacy decks remained untouched. Once again, Wizards of the Coast went with the philosophy of banning cards enough to make a deck weaker but not enough so the deck is completely unplayable.īoth cards were certainly critical in their respective decks and influenced how they would play the games, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Delver or initiative decks are completely unplayable from a competitive point of view. This time they didn’t decide which two of the two most played and most powerful decks would take a hit they went for both. 《Expressive Iteration》 and 《White Plume Adventurer》 are banned.

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