On August 1st, the July MOCs occurred. I was unable to qualify due to a shortage of time caused by an additional child in the family, so I guess I made out pretty well. There was a lot of speculation going into the tournament about how many people would play, what decks would do well and do badly, and if there was a secret deck to play to solve the format.
Various Blue-based counterspell decks had been wreaking havoc upon Legacy MTGO until a Blue-based counterspell deck that is at least sort of Green, Aluren, in the hands of SorryMsJackson seemed to provide a new solution to both the Blue-based decks (which hate Cabal Therapy) and the creature decks (which hate "Aluren, Imperial Recruiter, Imperial Recruiter, Imperial Recruiter, Dream Stalker, Cavern Harpy, Dream Stalker, and the finisher of your choice, but most recently Parasitic Strix.) With both of these ways to fight decks, and Force of Will and (again) Cabal Therapy to fight combo decks, Aluren looked like a possible winner in the MOCS.
Starting at 4AM EST (eww... at least it was on a Saturday night, I suppose), the tournament took TEN HOURS to reach the Top Eight. That is just stupid, but what can you do? As the Top Eight began, I gathered the results from the Top 32 decks. I may be off by a deck or two, but I did check all the matches twice, and hopefully didn't miss anything.
The basic results break down like this:
Top Eight decks:
UBgw ANT
Enchantress (What!)
Zoo
Deedstill
New Horizons
UBW Faeries (...)
Hypergenesis/Show and Tell mashup
BGWR Survival/Natural Order
An interesting T8 to say the least!
The rest of the T32 looked like this:
Aluren, two GW Poop decks, three Goblins, a couple of NoPro builds, three Dredge, Burn, Merfolk times five, a Death and Taxes, UWRG Control (Firespout, Swords, Goyf, Jace, and such), and a Dream Halls/Show and Tell combination. What does all of this tell us? Zoo was massively under-represented. I went back to early rounds to see if it showed up. It did not. There may have been five copies, but I didn't see them other than the build in the T8. Needless to say, this is silly. Out of 113 players who showed up, 1 copy of Zoo in the T32 indicates not that the deck isn't great, but that the people who joined weren't wise in picking decks out. I saw too many "names" running Burn (and failing with it) that I know had at least a decent chunk of Zoo in their collection and would have been better served to bum 1 Taiga and 1 Plateau off of friends or acquaintances, and even running a slightly sub-optimal build would have done great.
Goblins, GW Poop, Burn, Merfolk, DnT, and some of the other decks that did finish well do not do well when faced with a wisely built Zoo deck. The Zoo players may have needed slightly unconventional builds, such as Oblivion Rings or Firebolt in the sideboard or maindeck, or a heavier reliance on a card like Gaddock Teeg, to be "tournament-winning", but the deck just runs a higher caliber of card than decks such as Merfolk.
The Top 8 was very match-up dependent, as T8s tend towards. In the first round, Deedstill beat New Horizons 2-0, 4C Sur beat out Zoo, and Ad Nauseum, on the strength of main-deck Dark Confidant, took out UBW Faeries, and Enchantress took care of Hypergenesis by always having the needed Oblivion Ring to answer Iona and Emrakrul. The surprising result was ANT taking out Faeries by throwing repeated Silences, Orim's Chant, and Dark Confidant, just needing one to slip past a counter to set up a kill. It was surprisingly effective.
In the T4, Enchantress got smoked by combo, which is the obvious result. Deedstill got hammered by a grind-it-out game from The Rock... err, Survival, which abused an apparently lack of graveyard hate to recur Eternal Witness with Genesis, Genesis in general, and Natural Order to fetch Progenitus... twice as the finisher of choice.
So, Merfolk was the top deck in terms of appearances, but did bumpkiss for getting into the T8. After that, we saw that UGW strategies as a whole performed fairly well, and combo was garbage... except for Archer.'s win! Oh, and the Hypergenesis/Show and Tell hybrid in the T8. Finally, slow control decks, like Enchantress and Survival, did well in a field of slower control decks since they broke the rules (Enchantress with a combo finish and Survival with... a combo finish).
Some of the Top Eight decks are pretty self-explanatory, but some require a little look. Zoo was Zoo. It had Price of Progress and won a lot of games that Zoo wins, and lost to the slow control decks the way that Zoo (usually) does. With some innovation, such as Duergar Hedge-Mage or the previously seen Oblivion Rings, it may or may not have gone farther. Survival is just a Bad Matchup in this case.
Enchantress seemed to take advantage of the low number of Krosan Grips, Qasali Pridemages, and similar hate cards, combined with good play and solid draws to beat up on the decks that normally have a decent match-up against them. The lessening of Zoo especially was key to this. While Zoo should be a huge dog to Enchantress, the printing of cards like Pridemage, Ethersworn Canonist, and other good weenie dudes that go into this archetype gives Zoo the edge most of the time. Without a deck that maindecks a beater that can clear out trouble-cards, Enchantress rocked the house.
Deedstill is a beast, but this tournament did reveal a big weakness of Deedstill, previous highlighted by JXClaytor's run with Aluren. Deedstill does not like to see a semi-offensive long-term deck that can beat down and still recur all sorts of irritating cards like Cabal Therapy. While Deedstill can beat these decks, it requires sufficient graveyard hate, which means that they have to find room in their sideboard for this hate, which stretches them thinner and makes them more vulnerable to every deck. Also, if Aluren sticks around, mere graveyard hate becomes insufficient, as the Aluren builds do not rely on the graveyard as much as The Rock build that was rockin' today. Deedstill going forward may need to think about a heavier load of graveyard hate, but then again, people may not be taking Survival as a big deck to play, seeing as it lost convincingly to combo, and probably would continue to do so.
New Horizons would have been better positioned if Zoo showed up as expected, but given decks like Deedstill, Survival, and Faeries, it isn't exactly in a great spot. The high number of Merfolk, Burn, and Goblins probably helped NH, and UGW decks in general, but it wasn't the world-beater that it appeared it might be a month or two ago.
Faeries is pretty much Merfolk, but with greedier mana and Bitterblossom. A solid choice, but higher power due to splashing for three colors, which you rarely see Merf do.
The Hypergenesis/Show and Tell hybrid was really interesting. Basically, the deck tried to get to three mana on turn two and cheat a fatty into play. It seemed to be Emrakul and Iona that were chosen, but Iona was kind of unexciting to me. I'd rather have the Kamigawa-clone or something like Sundering Titan myself. Still, the deck did well, and Iona does tend to put a lot of decks in a terrible way.
Meanwhile at Columbus, Ohio, a Legacy Grand Prix was occurring. The high number of Pros in attendance helped account for the relatively low number of competitors at the MOCS event. After the cut to Top Eight, Tomoharu Saito, with Ub Merfolk, splashing for black removal in his sideboard, was the overall leader. After him was Tom Martell, running No-Black Counterbalance, Jason Ford with Sickx7's Deedstill list, Brad Nelson with a BGW brew (courtesy of Brian Kowal) after my own heart, Corey Age with a hilarious Show and Tell/Sneak Attack deck, using Woodfall Primus to special effect, Christopher Gossellin using Doomsday and Shelldock Isle for various abuses, but mostly Emrakrul and Shared Fate kills, Bryant Cook with an AnT deck without Bobs, which I don't like, myself, and Caleb Durward with a 2004-update on Madness, mostly just adding Vengevine for potential combo kills out of no-where.
I'd like to highlight the last list for the wonderfulness of it.
You can see the wonderfulness that would be casting Survival, discarding a string of Vengevines to get 4 in the GY, then fetching up two Basking Rootwalla to kill someone. I hope you enjoyed this knee-jerk coverage of the two big Legacy events this weekend! Thanks for reading.
PS: A big shout out to SorryMsJackson (Joshua Claytor) for running Hivemind of all decks and doing fairly well with it until sleep deprivation set in!
