Exploring Legacy: Insights from Secrets of Strixhaven

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, and this week we're taking a first look at Secrets of Strixhaven and what cards from this set could see play in Legacy. In addition, we've got some Challenges from last week, our weekly recap, and a Showcase Qualifier to look at!

We're going back to school to the university of card-ref:Strixhaven with the release of Secrets of Strixhaven! While we don't have the full spoilers just yet, there's certainly enough cards we've seen so far that look to be interesting. This set has some new mechanics and some old ones (Flashback for example). One major new mechanic is permanents with prepared spells. This mechanic says as long as the permanent is prepared, a copy of the spell on the card (which looks just like Adventures/Omen frames) exists in exile and can be cast. Once the spell is cast, the creature becomes unprepared, and has to be prepared again in order to repeat that cycle. Among that there's just a bunch of keyword mechanics that look at some specific things.

Let's take a look at some of the cards that look interesting in Legacy.

card-ref:Erode is a really strong piece of removal, since it not only deals with creatures but also Planeswalkers for one mana. One upside here in Legacy is that very few decks tend to play a ton of basics, and if they are playing basics they tend to fetch them out quickly to beat card-ref:Wasteland. Being able to remove a threat at instant speed for one mana is something special always, and this seems like a really good answer for a wide variety of things. Being able to deal with Kaito for one mana is solid for sure.

Flow State seems definitely like something people are going to try. It does not seem too difficult to get two cards off of this in Legacy. Getting an instant/sorcery in the graveyard seems very much like what a lot of decks are already doing, especially tempo strategies. Definitely getting vibes of Expressive Iteration from this one. I have to imagine that this thing does see play, and is potentially really good.

card-ref:Flashback giving Flashback is pretty sweet. I do think this could possibly see play somewhere in some form of weird combo list. One mana grant flashback is pretty groovy.

Colossus of the Blood Age does a thing when it dies, making it interesting. The three damage adds up a lot more than two, which usually means less clicks on a platform like MTGO. The other part is the dies trigger, which can be useful outside of the combo, where you can pitch cards from hand you need in the graveyard and also draw to what you need to win the game.

Ral Zarek, Guest Lecturer is intriguing as a three mana Planeswalker in black, possibly castable via Dark Ritual. It has reasonable abilities on the front end, but the ultimate doesn't seem like a big deal.

Grave Researcher has a Reanimate effect on a creature, but I doubt this guy is any good, as he has to fulfill the condition of his upkeep trigger to actually become prepared.

Emeritus of Ideation has a card that's just not legal in Legacy, i.e. Ancestral Recall. Five mana seems like quite a lot for a creature like this, and it seems pretty easy to get rid of before they could actually get a payoff.

Witherbloom Charm seems pretty good in Nic Fit, allowing you to sac your Veteran Explorer for lands, draw two cards, and potentially gain life or destroy smaller permanents.

Mana Sculpt is interesting but the decks it goes to don’t have a solid payoff for the mana unless they move to play cards like The One Ring.

The Dawning Archaic has to attack to get its trigger, making it easy to deal with especially with card-ref:Karakas around.

Expansion Algorithm is probably worse than card-ref:Radstorm, but could theoretically be fetched with Burning Wish.

Immoral Bargain seems amusing for Nic Fit, sacrificing creatures for permanent destruction.

Prismari, the Inspiration suggests a potential Show and Tell Storm deck.

We had a fairly normal week this past week, with just the regular Challenge events in addition to the Showcase Qualifier from the end of the Premier Play Season. Overall we had close to 300 deck entries for the week, which is pretty reasonable for a normal-ish week. Dimir Tempo was the most played deck of the week at around 42 copies, with a non-mirror win rate of about 50.3%. Oops was the second most played deck with a 55.5% non-mirror win rate, and Tron decks were third with a solid 56.5% non-mirror win rate. The Mardu Energy deck had a 48.8% non-mirror win rate, showing that while it had good results, it also faced challenges.