Vintage isn’t the only format that players gather to support during Eternal Weekend. Legacy is also a very deep, diverse, and popular format. This is one of the first large Legacy events that we’ve had since the banning of Sensei's Divining Top, so this was an exciting opportunity to see how the metagame shakes out in the wake of Miracles getting taken down a peg. Most players knew that Miracles was the primary force keeping Delver of Secrets in check, but I don’t know that many people would have guessed the degree to which that was the case. In a Top 8 with five Delver variants, Hanni Alnimer was one of the few players who brought something a little less stock to the table:

Esper Deathblade - Legacy | Hanni Alnimer, Top 8 Eternal Weekend

• Creatures (12)
• 4 Deathrite Shaman
• 4 Monastery Mentor
• 4 Stoneforge Mystic

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

• Instants (14)
• 2 Spell Pierce
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Swords to Plowshares

• Sorceries (12)
• 4 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Ponder

• Artifacts (2)
• 1 Batterskull
• 1 Umezawa's Jitte

• Lands (18)
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 1 Marsh Flats
• 1 Scrubland
• 1 Tropical Island
• 1 Underground Sea
• 2 Tundra
• 4 Flooded Strand
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Back to Basics
• 1 Council's Judgment
• 1 Disenchant
• 2 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Flusterstorm
• 3 Meddling Mage
• 1 Pithing Needle
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 1 Toxic Deluge
• 1 Zealous Persecution

Buy This Deck

The gameplan is relatively straightforward. If you play enough cheap interaction in the form of Cabal Therapy, Force of Will, and Swords to Plowshares, you’ll have time to start resolving your powerful threats. Pound for pound, Stoneforge Mystic into Batterskull and Monastery Mentor backed up by Gitaxian Probe and Cabal Therapy are much more powerful than Nimble Mongoose - as long as you get time to cast your spells.

You give up some points against combo decks, since your Swords to Plowshares are typically less effective than Lightning Bolts and your threats cost two and three mana rather than one, but the tradeoff is that your threats close games more quickly once they’re on the board. You only need one or two turns to deal twenty with Monastery Mentor, so once you’ve resolved your disruption, you can turn the corner very quickly.

All in all, if you’re looking for a deck that plays the densest combination of the most powerful and ubiquitous cards in Legacy, this is a great place to start. You have enough disruption to keep pace with anything in the format, as well as some of the most individually powerful cards backed by all the great Blue cantrips, and plenty of flexible slots in the 75 to adjust to your particular metagame.