Like many of you, I woke up to some rather unexpected news this past Monday. For the first time since Dig Through Time, Legacy has received a major shakeup, and the pieces of the format are all in disarray. Let’s talk about why the Top banning happened, and then dive into where Legacy goes from here.

Why Ban Sensei’s Divining Top?

Ever since the printing of Counterbalance in 2006, Sensei's Divining Top has gone from a cheap, color-agnostic card advantage engine to a critical piece of an unfun lock that ends the game for many decks on the spot. Its earliest (and in my eyes, still the best) adoption in Legacy, of course, was in a deck that would look silly by today’s standards, the off-the-charts busted Flash Hulk deck, which took down Grand Prix Columbus in 2007 in the hands of Steve Sadin.

Hulk Flash! ? Legacy | Steve Sadin, GP Columbus 2007

• Creatures (12)
• 1 Body Snatcher
• 1 Carrion Feeder
• 1 Karmic Guide
• 1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
• 4 Dark Confidant
• 4 Protean Hulk

• Instants (21)
• 1 Echoing Truth
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Daze
• 4 Flash
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Mystical Tutor

• Sorceries (1)
• 1 Massacre

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Counterbalance

• Artifacts (8)
• 4 Chrome Mox
• 4 Sensei's Divining Top

• Lands (14)
• 1 Swamp
• 3 Island
• 1 Tropical Island
• 1 Tundra
• 1 Underground Sea
• 3 Flooded Strand
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 3 Massacre
• 4 Quirion Dryad
• 1 Reverent Silence
• 3 Swords to Plowshares

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Mystical Tutor, Counter-Top, Force of Will, and Daze, and a potential turn-one win? A sideboard juke ready to switch game plans when opponents show up with combo hate? We won’t spend too much time on this monster, but let me tell you, when Counterbalance and Sensei's Divining Top are just a tertiary game plan, you’re doing something that might raise eyebrows at Wizards of the Coast. A full twelve of these cards are now banned in Legacy, which shows you just how far the format has come in the last ten years.

After the banning of Flash, though, Counter-Top took a fairly quiet role among strategies in Legacy. It was a part of Four-Color good stuff decks, like Gabriel Nassif’s Grand Prix Chicago winner, seen here:

Four-Color Good Stuff ? Legacy| Gabriel Nassif, 1st GP Chicago

• Creatures (12)
• 2 Sower of Temptation
• 2 Trygon Predator
• 4 Dark Confidant
• 4 Tarmogoyf

• Instants (16)
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 3 Daze
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (2)
• 2 Ponder

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Counterbalance

• Artifacts (6)
• 2 Vedalken Shackles
• 4 Sensei's Divining Top

• Lands (20)
• 2 Island
• 3 Tropical Island
• 3 Tundra
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 4 Underground Sea

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Relic of Progenitus
• 1 Tormod's Crypt
• 1 Burrenton Forge-Tender
• 1 Energy Flux
• 1 Engineered Plague
• 1 Planar Void
• 1 Threads of Disloyalty
• 1 Blue Elemental Blast
• 1 Darkblast
• 1 Enlightened Tutor
• 1 Hydroblast
• 1 Krosan Grip
• 1 Umezawa's Jitte
• 1 Kataki, War's Wage
• 1 Perish

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What I’m getting at, in essence, is that a string of overpowered cards kept Sensei's Divining Top in the background for portions of Legacy’s existence, and before the printing of Terminus and Entreat the Angels in 2012, Counter-Top was more of a side package than the main attraction. Stoneforge Mystic and Batterskull were the inseparable partners in crime for -based control decks, and for a short period of time, Miracles shared the top spot with Stoneblade decks in the Legacy metagame. Hell, Threshold/Delver decks did a stellar job of keeping Miracles players honest, and the decks were still all underdeveloped and imperfect. In the early days of the SCG Open circuit, Miracles was just another competitor in a sea of uncertainty, where the preferences of some individual players made such an impact on the metagame that they were able to keep Miracles from being the clear best deck. In all honesty, if every one of the perennially successful Legacy aficionados had picked up Miracles from the start, we would have seen a Top ban years ago.

So, Monastery Mentor helped push Miracles up a level in terms of the consistency with which it could finish a locked-out opponent, but Wizards printed the Eldrazi, Leovold, Emissary of Trest, Sanctum Prelate, Palace Jailer, and True-Name Nemesis as stellar creatures that put Miracles players in a squeeze from a number of different archetypes. Leovold singlehandedly revived Aluren, Four-Color Pile, and Food Chain, all of which sported middling-to-good Miracles matchups, and Sanctum Prelate and Palace Jailer gave Death and Taxes players a lot of leverage in a formerly bad matchup. The Eldrazi creatures spawned an archetype of their own, Colorless Eldrazi, which sported a generally positive Miracles matchup, and was initially thought to be the best solution to a Miracles-infested metagame. Unfortunately, the uptick in Baleful Strix archetypes (again, Aluren, Shardless , Food Chain, Four-Color Czech Pile) started to pick away at the playability of Eldrazi, to the point where it was no longer a real contender in the format. This, of course, let Miracles players focus on beating the other Blue midrange decks, as well as Delver, combo, and Death and Taxes. The solution?

Predict took Miracles back from a Mentor-driven archetype (one that was particularly vulnerable to Abrupt Decay midrange decks) and turned it into a card advantage machine, a deck with sixteen card selection or card advantage spells, that could not truly be ground out by other midrange decks while still maintaining a strong matchup against the creature and combo decks of the format. Predict Miracles was the final evolution of the archetype (Joe Lossett concoctions notwithstanding) and the lack of a scapegoat meant that this time, it couldn’t escape the wary eye of Wizards’ Development team.

There are those who would suggest that Terminus was the card to ban, as it would have killed Miracles as we know it and possibly portended the resurgence of Stoneblade, but I understand the rationale behind the Top ban. Not only did it provide peerless card selection over the course of a game, but it contributed to immense slowdown in tournament logistics, so a ban would be warranted on the same grounds as Modern’s Second Sunrise banning. Aside from the logistics issue, the Counter-Top lock would still be present in the format with a Terminus ban, and Wizards would much rather nip that potential problem in the bud right now than have the possibility of a future Counter-Top deck dominating the format again and meriting another ban. Though there were a few decks that sported Sensei's Divining Top in a non-oppressive way, the format opens up a lot in the absence of its apex predator. I predict a more dynamic and interesting format in the wake of this banning, and I’m excited to see how it develops.

Where Do We Go Now?

The first is a deck that was uniquely vulnerable to both Terminus and Counterbalance. That’s right, we are about to see an explosion of Elves with its greatest predator out of the picture. Elves dominates midrange Blue decks, with a high density of must-answer threats, a peerless card advantage engine in Wirewood Symbiote + Elvish Visionary, and the constant threat of a Natural Order kill out of nowhere. Additionally, Elves leverages one of the single most powerful cards in the Legacy format, Gaea's Cradle, to its absolute maximum potential. It’s going to be a Green summer, folks, so grab your Grim Lavamancers, your Umezawa's Jittes, your Fire Covenants, your Toxic Deluges, Engineered Explosives, Marsh Casualties, and your Containment Priests. Hell, even Darkblast may make its presence known again!

But let’s say you’re interested in playing the other card in Legacy with the highest raw power. You don’t want to cast one- and two-mana Green creatures, you want to cast one- and two-mana Black and Blue instants and sorceries! Your payoff cards are Lion's Eye Diamond and Infernal Tutor, not Gaea's Cradle and Natural Order, and you’re playing the deck that gains the most from Counter-Top leaving the format. Storm is extremely well-positioned in Miracles’ absence, with a good matchup against midrange Blue decks with a slow clock, and a good matchup against all Non-Blue decks by virtue of its raw speed and non-interactivity. I expect an uptick in Mindbreak Traps, Flusterstorms, Ethersworn Canonists, and possibly Chalice of the Void in order to combat this new menace, because you’re simply not going to beat Storm consistently without a fast clock and a mess of interaction. If you choose to play Storm, of course, that would be a very wise decision as well. With Miracles gone, it’s going to rekindle its role as the fun police of the format.

Now, despite these three obvious candidates for new powerhouse decks in a Miracles-free metagame, I know that many enfranchised Legacy players will revert back to the other best Brainstorm archetype, Grixis Delver. Why Grixis now? Two reasons. The first is that Abrupt Decay is way less necessary now that you don’t need to break up the Counter-Top lock. The second is that in the absence of Swords to Plowshares (and it will be way less represented with only Death and Taxes and occasional Stoneblade decks including it) Gurmag Angler and Tombstalker become premier threats. Additionally, Grixis Delver may be our best hope of combating Storm, which might otherwise grow to dominate the format in an unhealthy way. There are a few directions for Grixis Delver to take, including Young Pyromancer/Stifle, Thought Scour/Gurmag Angler, and True-Name Nemesis/Snapcaster Mage. The packages can be mixed and matched, although they lend themselves to different general gameplans and different play styles. My first inclination is to work with a few Thought Scours and Gurmag Anglers, with only the lightest possible splashes of Red and Green for maindeck Lightning Bolts and Deathrite Shaman’s ability. I’d like to make double-Black mana consistent enough to include Marsh Casualties and possibly Tombstalker, as Casualties is great against Elves, True-Name Nemesis, Young Pyromancer, and Death and Taxes. Hell, you can even kick it to sweep opposing Deathrite Shamans!

Knowing this, though, it behooves us to consider including a Murderous Cut or a Dismember or two as answers to opposing Gurmag Anglers. At this point, we see the beginnings of a level-two metagame shaping up. If everyone is packing Gurmag Anglers, it’s possible that Swords to Plowshares is yet again the card we want to play to cleanly answer all of these threats. If that’s the case, then . . . do I dare? I want to bring back Bant Deathblade, because my Stoneforge Mystics have been sitting in my binder for so long. I don’t love Death and Taxes now, as I have reservations about both the Storm and Elves matchups, but I love Stoneforge Mystic and Snapcaster Mage more than almost any other cards in the game. My first explorations in the format, then, will be with Stoneblade shells of various types, and I look forward to tinkering with the mana base and the sideboard to combat the obvious enemies that stand to proliferate in this bold new metagame. It’s a brewer’s paradise, and you know there’s reason to celebrate when all the formerly not-good-enough decks are back in the picture. I’m excited enough to go shirtless at my next Legacy tournament, to celebrate our new Topless metagame!