Why is delver so good

Early on in this Legacy Guide, I covered some of the best and most defining cards in the Legacy format. You can even pitch it to Force of Will! Specifically, having Brainstorm and the other cantrips allow the Delver decks to function as well-oiled machines.

The cantrips also allow you to build your deck with a low land count often only fifteen sources of colored mana , because you can comfortably keep one-land opening hands so long as they contain a Brainstorm or Ponder. Additionally, having control over the top of your library allows you to shuffle away extra lands when you draw too many, facilitating an extremely efficient deck filled with one- and two-mana spells, that rarely runs out of gas.

Blue also has the most effective disruption in Legacy, with all-purpose permission spells that are good against a wide variety of strategies. In a format as wide open as Legacy, this is extremely valuable. This is something that makes them much different from the single-minded beatdown decks of Standard and Pioneer. Delver players diversify their gameplans with lots of one- and two-of sideboard cards that allow them to attack from new angles, dismantle combo decks, and punish opponents that overdo it on creature removal spells.

To me, no deck encapsulates the spirit of the Legacy format like Temur Delver. This deck takes the concept of efficiency to an extreme with the lowest possible land count, and the highest possible concentration of cheap spells. Temur Delver is designed to play the leanest game of Magic possible, and forces the opponent to play that game with them. Wasteland , Stifle , Lightning Bolt , and cheap permission spells allow Temur Delver to trade off resources at a blistering pace until both players are whittled down to nearly nothing.

From that point, the deck with the ability to operate on one or two lands—and the ability to shuffle away excess lands via Brainstorm and Ponder —is almost always going to beat the deck with the more complex, ambitious gameplan.

Sultai Delver leans a little more into the midrange category. Other folks have talked at length about a ban of this nature and Daze has come up in plenty of conversations. Some have said that the bannings should be targeted at the newer cards making the problem worse such as Expressive Iteration , some have suggested Delver itself a notion that has sort of gotten a little worse given that we were just given two other one mana threats that are very good , and of course the eternal conversations about hitting something like Ponder.

Even being targeted, Delver has a solid way of getting around things it has always seemed. My long term expectation is that eventually Delver will work its way back into a position of strength in the format, even with the format really gunning for it. That being said, even I believe it is still too early to really tell whether we need anything to address these new printings as players are slowly figuring out what is good and what isn't in the post Modern Horizons 2 world.

There's plenty to explore still with this set and Week One is generally always going to be Delver capitalizing on the fact that everyone is trying out new cards. Let's take a deep breath and consider going forward what changes could need to be made if any once we get there and not be too hasty. This set gave a lot of archetypes some real aggressive threats and flexibile answers. Cards like Prismatic Ending and Endurance are very strong for fighting Delver's current axis of low to the ground threats.

We have some further cards coming in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms in the form of things like Portable Hole which are great at answering these cards. I've always been of the mind of let's wait and see, and while I do believe that Delver is an issue systemic of the format to address and a hard one to really fully address I do think that because of the massive influx in cards that there might be a bigger picture to seeing how this set will long term shape Legacy.

And maybe at the end of the day something does need to be touched inside the Delver shell. I do hope that something is likely Daze because a lot of the other options seem a lot less likely and a lot more costly overall to the format, and the newer cards here don't seem like they're bannable cards either.

Regardless, we should have more data and a better understanding once we're a solid month into the new normal of Legacy, and that is data I'll be continuing to promote and push so we can make more informed decisions on the state of the format.

We're now week two in of Challenge events with Modern Horizons 2 and the first event of the weekend is the Saturday Challenge. This event, thanks to the efforts of the Legacy Data Collection project, had just 64 players in it which is the current minimum number of players for an event. In fact, it looked possibly like the event might not have fired if not for the real hero of a person who queued into it with a 56 Swamp 4 Urza's Saga deck just so the event could fire.

This is on the low end at best of these events as they're typically at around players on average. Hopefully this isn't a trend for the Saturday events. You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the data sheet for this event here. As we've continued to see, UR Delver and Delver as a whole is really well represented in these events as it is definitely a popular strategy.

When you're the most popular strategy in a format, people come gunning for you though, and this week flipped the conversation on its head as players fought to metagame Delver, and well, they actually succeeded. One Delver pilot scraped their way into this Top 8, but it was the streak and success of the Bant Control deck at the top by Matt Vook Ozymandias17 that really took our breath away.

Matt stated on Twitter that he built to approach the UR Delver matchup for this event, so things like main deck three copies of Endurance and also Engineered Explosives in lieu of Terminus are really pushing that angle.

Prismatic Ending is a four-of in the entire 75 here, and it's easy to see why because of how strong the card really is. Again we see some Endurance action, the card really is that strong after all, but also we've got some Urza's Saga in the mix as well with a main deck Retrofitter Foundry as a fetch target for it.

It's super interesting seeing Retrofitter in so many lists when before it was a mainly Ninjas staple card. The card is insanely strong though so I'm happy to see it see more play. Ragavan joining the team with Sneak and Show is not quite what I expected, but I totally get it.

Put a threat into play that needs to be dealt with and accelerate your mana for your Show and Tell or Sneak Attack at the same time?

Seems grand. I love this card and my limited experience with it so far is that it is really strong. I'm excited to see it make it into an Elves list. Seems really powerful there as a way of adding to creature count for Gaea's Cradle and also Wirewood Symbiote is an Insect! Also seems great for killing opposing creatures like Emrakul, etc. Definitely a solid list. I'm a big fan of Sudden Edict here. Miracles had that dominant effect on Legacy.

It is harder to make huge changes to something that kind of works. Miracles needed to go, but the unknown was also scary. What if the format had fallen into complete chaos? The deck achieves positive EV in the meta simply by never having too many terrible matchups. The devil is in the details. Delver is the kind of deck that people enjoy. More importantly, it is the kind of best deck that people gravitate toward. And understandably so.

They have great threats, removal, card filtering, and permission. Both are viable decks full of cards that kill and counter opposing cards and finish the game with great threats. Legacy Delver has a slightly higher metagame share than Shadow. It might also have a slightly better overall win percentage. Nonetheless, it is similar.

Along these lines, there is a lot of chatter about the fate of Deathrite Shaman. There are a lot of factors that determine how the metagame is formed and not all of it is purely related to wins and losses, but wins and losses are important.

Once a deck gets the reputation for being the best deck, it has an obvious advantage in terms of popularity. When people believe it is good, they will play it more. They gain percentage against the field by doing so.

Deathrite Shaman may be in a lot of decks and be a very strong card, but the format as a whole is diverse and has balance. I also believe that the cost of entry to Legacy plays a large part in shaping the format. Unlike Modern, Legacy has reserve list cards that are extremely expensive.

Lands is a predatory strategy for Grixis Delver that is underrepresented because of cost. I know, I know… people hate when I say that Modern is cheap to play.

But relatively speaking, and as an avid Eternal player who has dealt with the effects of the reserve list for over a decade, it is much easier to switch decks or build a second deck for Modern than an Eternal format from a cost perspective. I also think that we are at the tail-end of a period in Magic that has been rife with bannings, which makes banning talk feel more normal.

Magic has undergone some serious changes in the past three years and the effects of those changes are still being sorted out.

When I look at the metagame data for Legacy, it reflects a healthy format. There are a lot of decks, and nothing is running away with the format. The best decks play a lot of cards to interact with opposing cards, which create the kind of games that people tend to enjoy and a format that people want to play.

All things considered, Legacy might well be in the best place it has ever been. Blue decks with Brainstorm and Force of Will will always light the way for Legacy, but remember that is a necessary safeguard against how fast and focused the possible linear decks can be.

I really like Modern, which has a poorly defined best deck at best. I enjoy Legacy where it is clear what the best strategies are. More than anything, I enjoy formats that feel impossibly large and unsolvable.