Welcome back readers and speculators! Today I'll be delving (pun intended) into my favorite format, Legacy. Most of my MTG friends and the local player group know me to be an avid fan of the format and I have several decks built at any given time. Heck, the reason I speculate is to keep my Legacy habit in check.

I've previously done a tournament report (where sadly I missed Top 8), but I described the importance of determining your metagame before an event. The reason is quite simple--the format itself is incredibly powerful and very wide open. This means that in a large tournament you'll likely see a lot of different decks. We typically want to keep our deck sizes to 60 and our sideboard can only be 15 cards, thus we can't account for all possible contingencies.

This means that proper tournament preparation is critical. Of that preparation, one of the more challenging things is analyzing the metagame as it stands. Luckily, you have me for that. So here's a breakdown of all the Top 8's and decks that made them so far this year (this includes all SCG Legacy Opens and GP Paris).

That is a lot of decks. Unfortunately all those one-of deck lists really clog up the data, and while you may see them reappear, they aren't nearly as likely as the major contenders. To cut down on our data points let's hide all the decks with less than five Top 8's this year. This looks a bit more manageable (and now it's sorted in descending order from most Top 8's to least).

If we were to turn this data into a pie chart it would look like this:

As you can see, a solid 42% of the field is comprised of Delver variants. So you really want to run a deck that has solutions to powerful evasive threats backed with counter magic.

The bad news is that these decks are very good at sticking a singular threat and protecting/riding it to victory. They prey on the greedy mana bases and reduced land count that many Legacy decks run.

The good news is that if you can blank their threat (or eliminate the first one or two threats) you can often give yourself a bit of breathing room to build up a good board presence. While these decks are powerful and consistent (which is a big reason you see them in the Top 8 all the time) they are usually not the fastest, and opponents often get a decent number of turns before they are just dead.

This is why you see U/W/r Miracles making up a solid 13% of the metagame. They possess efficient removal spells also backed by counter magic and a much stronger mid- and endgame than the Delver variants. Most run the Counterbalance/Top combo that happens to form a pretty hard lock on all these tempo style decks.

Following Miracles we have Sneak and Show at around 9%. When your deck is full of counterspells, cantrips, and ridiculously powerful creatures, you can just try to overpower the aggro-control decks. After all, this deck really only needs to resolve one spell to win the game, so when your opponent is just chipping away at your life, all you're trying to do is play your lands (to pay through taxing counterspells) and build up a counterspell defense of your own.

Next up is Esper Deathblade. Esper Deathblade plays more like a midrange control deck with hand disruption, mana acceleration, graveyard hate in the form of Deathrite Shaman, and powerful planeswalkers, all backed up with a nice 4/4 vigilance lifelinker to protect them.

This deck tends to prey on the combo decks (most of which did not make it onto the pie chart, but definitely exist). The fact that they can counter your spell when you cast it, or force you to discard it while you're waiting for counter backup typically gives any deck relying on a few key cards fits. They can also go turn two Liliana into turn three JTMS (playing the second and then most powerful planeswalkers back to back is a one-two punch that many decks just can't handle).

Tied with Esper Deathblade we have Elves. This deck has really started to pick up steam lately with six of it's Top 8's coming in June alone. Elves works so well in the current metagame because it's a creature-based combo deck that can just take the aggro route when necessary (similar to how the various Pod decks of Modern work). The fact that it can generate tons of mana also blanks the "taxing" counterspells often preferred by the tempo decks (which we already saw make up a large percentage of the field).

This deck also has one of the few ways outside of planeswalkers to gain true card advantage in the format (being able to draw repeatedly by bouncing one's Elvish Visionary or casting Glimpse of Nature). Ironically, when you look at almost all the other decklists making up this chart, very few have actual flat out card advantage; most simply use cantrips to sculpt their hand, but they are still trading cards one for one. Remember Brainstorm is a "virtual" Ancestral Recall, only when you have dead cards in your hand, but casting Glimpse of Nature and then three creatures is straight up +2 cards.

Next up is Death and Taxes, which has remained relatively consistent the last few months as a deck that can get there (but usually relies heavily on pilot skill and knowledge). Though it too has seen a recent resurgence lately with almost half of its Top 8's so far coming from the month of June alone.

Death and Taxes is a grindy midrange deck, which similar to the tempo decks punishes greedy mana bases. It uses Aether Vial to cheat in powerful, efficient creatures through a wall of counterspells, while it uses its lands to disrupt opponents' mana base. The deck also plays a lot of basic Plains, thus making it far less weak to opposing Stifle/Wasteland strategies.

Now we have Shardless BUG (the exception to my previous statement about most decks lacking actual card advantage) which uses Shardless Agent and the cascade mechanic to give itself actual card advantage (including hitting the occasional Ancestral Vision to drawing three cards). This deck runs the same planeswalker suite as Esper Deathblade and has the ability to go turn two Liliana into turn three JTMS as well as the same hand disruption (though typically less of it).

Painted Stone has been out of the limelight the past month and a half, but it's a very powerful combo that also runs without many fetchlands (reducing its weakness to getting stifled out of the game). Most versions also run maindeck Red Elemental Blast and/or Pyroblast (as Painter's Servant turns all their cards blue), thus giving the Painter player maindeck hard counters to a lot of spells played in the format, as well as acting as one-mana Vindicates when necessary.

Last but not least we have U/G Infect--or really Tom Ross and JD Nir beating the hell out of people with a hyper aggressive infect deck backed with cheap and/or free counterspells. Tom has repeatedly caught people with their pants down playing this deck and it's an awesome choice when people start cutting back on targeted creature removal.

This is probably the most "all-in" deck listed as it relies heavily on a small collection of infect threats surviving. The trick to beating this deck is to make sure you have removal for their creature and to try and kill the creature on your turn, making them waste pump spells on the turn they can't attack you.