Exploring the Impact of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Legacy

Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of This Week in Legacy! I'm your host, and this week we're going to be discussing the impact of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in Legacy! In addition to that, I'm going to try one of the approaches for how to handle weekly Challenge coverage and see how I like it and how the readers like it. So be sure to give some feedback in the comments! We do have a Legacy RC Qualifier to cover as well.

Without further ado, let's dive right in!

Totally Tubular Turtle Impact, Man#

It's our first week of a new Standard set with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and it seems like this set definitely is going to have an impact on Legacy than just what we had determined already on the obvious cards like card-ref:Skateboard. I do enjoy when Standard sets have something for Legacy because in general it always feels like it's a little more natural of an effect than when we get sets like Modern Horizons based sets.

Right off the bat let's talk about the Shredder in the room, with a look at Super Shredder. Super Shredder is incredibly intriguing because I did not realize initially that the card said "another permanent", and it does not care if that permanent is yours or not. It also triggers individually for each individual permanent, so for example if you use card-ref:Wasteland on an opponent's nonbasic land, that's two +1/+1 counters worth of action being lumped onto the Super Shredder.

However, it's also just incredibly noteworthy to say that what really makes this deck work with Super Shredder is the fact that we have a critical mass of cards like card-ref:Moonshadow and Super Shredder that both grow really big and also both have strong evasive keywords. Menace is insanely difficult for a lot of decks to deal with when they are used to only having one or two threats out, and you have multiple creatures with Menace in play. I've been playing a lot of this deck myself (see the "What I'm Playing This Week" section for more) and my raw experience has been that the deck is incredibly strong versus things like Dimir Tempo. The card-ref:Daze package looks a little weird in paper (and I've seen people actually say "the blue splash looks unnecessary" in comments) but my direct experience is that card-ref:Daze is actually sort of nuts in this deck and it does quite a lot for you. You get to really leverage those moments where card-ref:Daze accelerates your tempo into closing the game out, and it actually synergizes with Super Shredder (bouncing an Island counts as a permanent leaving the battlefield).

I am a big fan of the card and of this deck, and it looks like it might be super fun and will stick around for a bit. As long as Dimir Tempo is popular, I think this deck will continue to have a good shot because the matchup seems very good in the Shredder deck's favor a lot of the time.

The other major card of the week was of course, Sewer-veillance Cam. I think we had a good idea that this card was going to be good for decks like Painter. The way this card works is that you get this card, another artifact that does something you want it to, and Goblin Welder together. When you sacrifice this guy to return another artifact, you get to untap Goblin Welder, which means you can then do the exchange again with whatever artifact you picked and get this back to play, which then untaps Welder again. You just get to wash, rinse, repeat with whatever you want. Here's some of the goofiness you can do with this:

• Tap all of your opponent's permanents with card-ref:Skateboard
• Infinitely damage your opponent with Legion Extruder to win the game
• Destroy all of your opponent's nonland permanents with Chaos Defiler
• Remove all of your opponent's cards from their graveyard with Agatha's Soul Cauldron
• Draw your entire deck with Melded Moxite so it no longer matters what you get to do at that point
• Make infinite mana with Mox Opal

This I think is just the tip of the iceberg with a card like this and a combo like this presents. What's even more amusing is that you can very often go off at instant speed with this combo by kicking things off in response to a removal spell or something like Orcish Bowmasters. It makes the entire thing overall seem very interesting and very fun.

Finally, we did expect some card-ref:Skateboard as the Urza's Saga target and I think it is safe to say that this definitely replaces Lavaspur Boots in decks that played that, including both Affinity, Painter, and Lands.

In short, I think the overall impact of this set is probably not as crazy as other sets have been (like Lorwyn Eclipsed giving us Hexing Squelcher and card-ref:Moonshadow), but the impact is direct in a number of non-hyper popular archetypes which helps a lot. I am more excited to play around with the Super Shredder deck and seeing how the Sewer-Cam decks evolve over time.

Weekly MTGO Recap#

This was more than an average week for MTGO events, because we had the added aspect of a Legacy RC Qualifier event, which adds a lot of players typically to the overall weekly data set. As an experiment this week I am going to do the Weekly Recap of events, and then only cover those events that have something interesting going on in them. Again, this is a bit of a trial to see how well people like the shift, so let me know in the comments if this works for you or not.

Overall we had around 373 total players over the course of the past week, which is not too bad. Yes, some of these will overlap and doesn't represent unique players, but it does give us a nice amount of deck data to consider. Let's look at the graphical data for the week.

Overall the most popular decks of the entire format from a macro archetype standpoint were Spell Combo based decks, despite how popular certain decks were. Overall Spell Combo made up roughly 24% of the metagame, with Tempo being around 17-18% and below that Stompy and Fair Land Based decks.

The most popular deck of the past week has been of course, Dimir Tempo at around 48 copies which is close to 13% of this past week's metagame. However, its overall win rate is just right around 50.6% non-mirror, which seems rather reasonable. I think in general Dimir is in a position where its popularity outweighs the fact that the deck is kind of just okay. I don't think it really is the best deck in the format at the moment, but it is certainly the most popular deck and that brings a lot of people to it.

Last week, Dimir was around 53.1% non-mirror so a dip with a larger event does make some sense, especially with people trying new decks that use new cards and all.

Sneak and Show was the most popular deck after Dimir Tempo at 33 copies. It also is currently in the area of 50.3% in terms of non-mirror win rate. Sneak and Show's popularity is largely because of how good Hexing Squelcher is in the deck, and how straightforward the deck's matchups are. Sneak and Show is a deck that largely needs to not care about what its opponent is doing, it just needs to execute its game plan. And Squelcher lets it do that without having to really further care about matchups that often seem pretty difficult to win.

The win rate of Sneak this past week however does tell me that players are still well prepared to deal with the deck. The week prior it did exceedingly well, which also tells me that players came prepared to deal with it this week.

Oops was popular as well here, but overall its win rate was also around 50.7% non-mirror. I do think this still means that Oops is in a position where its popular due to its price point and perceived "good" deck that it is, that players continue to be prepared for its existence and are able to hate it out effectively. I don't fully believe that Oops is in a position week to week to need to make any changes to. Last week Oops had a much better week at a 56.8% non-mirror win rate, so a drop of this nature at more copies (last week was 20 copies, this week was 27) says a lot about how players are handling the deck.

Lands was also in line at around 18 copies (little less than 5% of the metagame), but its overall win rate was actually fairly atrocious at around 46.4% non-mirror. Lands did get a new card out of the TMNT mix in card-ref:Skateboard but it seems like a lot of those decks simply couldn't convert and make it great. I suspect much of this is because of many decks that Lands has trouble dealing with like Sneak and Show. Lands has a pretty rough time versus Sneak, so it being very popular means a lot.

Still, this is an improvement from last week's performance at around 29.7% non-mirror with just 5 copies of the deck. card-ref:Skateboard is good at improving the play rate, as players will naturally decide to play more of the deck because of new cards.

Finally, big on our list for this past week is the advent of Boros Energy having 16 copies. This deck is sitting at around a 59% non-mirror win rate, and I think the biggest boon to this deck has been the addition of new cards from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.