What was the best Legacy deck of all time? We asked the community to vote for one deck from every year since 2004, ran a tournament with all 21 of them, and now bring you each match of the Top 8 playoffs. Join us on our quest for the best Legacy deck in Magic history!
Whether it's something very old like , something more recent like , or something unspeakable like , the Legacy format has always gathered some of the most powerful gameplay elements known to Magic, and it has often banned them later. Let's take a trip down memory lane and figure out which was actually the most powerful of them all.
Followers of our YouTube channel selected one deck for each year, going back to 2004 and all the way up to 2024. We then entered these 21 decks into a Swiss-style tournament to determine our Top 8. Modified Swiss, one might say, because someone (Carl) had the idea that playing a whopping seven rounds would yield the most accurate representation. This means the tournament saw a lot more pairing up and down and weird byes than you'd find at your local FNM. It also means we weren't able to capture details of those 70 matches.
On the plus side, we have 70 match results, which you can find immediately below. The table lists all decks and their results in the order of their appearance, that is, by year, and you can click any deck name to jump to the corresponding list. You can also jump to the standings before the playoffs and to the Top 8 playoffs themselves. The latter were played on camera in the Cardmarket studio and are published on YouTube between August 29 and October 10.
As you can see below, every deck down to twelfth place won at least four matches. And with these many bonus rounds, it's no surprise either that two of them sport the same first tiebreaker (their opponents' match win percentage). So in the end, it all came down to the second tiebreaker, where 4-Color-Control missed out on the Top 8 due to its abysmal game win percentage.
