Despite its vast pool of extremely powerful cards from MTG’s past, Legacy’s metagame continues to experience ebbs and flows. With the constant influx of new designs from both main sets and Commander products, keeping up with this format’s ever-changing environment isn’t easy. Luckily, we’ve come to narrow down the top five best Legacy decks to get you started.
5 | Boros Energy
While Boros Energy is most known for its continued dominance in Modern, the deck has been picking up steam in Legacy, too. The core of Guide of Souls, Ocelot Pride, and Ajani, Nacatl Pariah is simply strong enough to appear even in a more powerful format.
Even though Legacy Energy is very similar to its Modern counterpart, it does get access to some sweet upgrades. In the two-drop department, both Amped Raptor and Sand Scout generate solid value, giving the deck some extra resiliency against removal. You then get to utilize the all-powerful Swords to Plowshares and Karakas to keep legends like Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student in check.
With these factors in mind, Boros Energy thrives against the fairer decks of the format. This archetype features tons of redundancy, which makes it line up well against Thoughtseize and Force of Will out of Dimir Tempo. Unfortunately, without counter magic of its own, Boros Energy does suffer against fast kills from opposing combo decks like Doomsday.
4 | Aluren
Since the printing of Acererak the Archlich, Aluren decks in Legacy have taken on a new form and become significantly more popular. With the namesake enchantment in play and Acererak in hand, you’re set up to repeatedly cast the Zombie and return it to hand infinite times. By Venturing into the Lost Mine of Phandelver Dungeon each time, you’ll be able to drain your opponent of all their life thanks to the third middle room.
While Aluren does rely on assembling a two-card combo, card selection spells like Brainstorm and Stock Up make your gameplan very consistent. This deck also features a secondary plan revolving around Show and Tell, Omniscience, and Atraxa, Grand Unifier that opponents need to watch out for. With Lotus Petal and Ancient Tomb in the mix, winning turn one is very realistic.
Beyond just its speed, however, Aluren gets a lot of its power from its resiliency. The combination of Force of Will and Veil of Summer make it easy to navigate around disruption from Dimir Tempo. With the help of sideboard Carpet of Flowers, beating soft permission like Daze is also trivial. The only thing preventing Aluren from being higher on the list is its weakness to decks like Reanimator that feature tons of discard and a super fast kill.
3 | Azorius Tempo
The primary engine behind the Azorius Tempo shell is Quantum Riddler, whose Warp ability is easily abusable. By either blinking a Warped Riddler with Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd or using Stifle to counter its delayed trigger, you can get your 4/6 monster into play extremely early.
The rest of the deck is primarily made up of interaction to keep opponents off-balance. Force of Will and Daze mess with problematic spells, while Swords to Plowshares removes any creature that slips through the cracks. All the while, Quantum Riddler and Tamiyo, Inquisitive Student provide a steady stream of cards to keep you ahead.
Thanks to Quantum Riddler’s beefy stat line, Azorius Tempo tends to do a solid job halting pressure from Izzet Delver and similar decks with small creatures. As grindy as Azorius Tempo is, though, it does have trouble closing games in a short time frame. As such, big mana decks like Tron that can go way over the top of your incremental advantages make for tough matchups. Nonetheless, this deck lines up nicely against a lot of Legacy’s top current archetypes.
2 | Reanimator
Despite losing Entomb to a ban last year, Reanimator continues to thrive. The goal behind the deck remains the same: get a huge threat like Griselbrand or Atraxa, Grand Unifier into the graveyard and cheat it into play with one of your many reanimation effects. Thanks to this deck’s array of discard spells like Thoughtseize and Unmask, getting bombs into the graveyard is still an easy task.
Of course, these cards also function as hand disruption against your opponent, clearing the way to make sure your reanimation plays go off without a hitch. This also makes refueling your hand with Griselbrand or Atraxa more powerful, with Unmask generally castable for free. As such, this deck has an extremely high game one win percentage against most decks.
Where Reanimator struggles is versus graveyard hate pieces, including Surgical Extraction and Leyline of the Void. With this in mind, many Reanimator decks feature sideboard strategies designed to sidestep hate cards. Some players lean on Show and Tell as a cheating effect that doesn’t use the graveyard, while others utilize the Witherbloom Apprentice and Chain of Smog combo. These alternate angles of attack make the deck quite resilient.
1 | Dimir Tempo
As strong as some other archetypes are in Legacy, Dimir Tempo remains the cream of the crop. This deck gets a big edge due to its volume of free disruption, including Daze and Snuff Out. When backed up by pressure from efficient threats like Nethergoyf and Orcish Bowmasters, your opponents risk falling behind very early.
Yet, despite being a tempo deck at heart, this deck can also grind opponents into dust thanks to Bilbo, Thief in the Night. In conjunction with cantrips and Mishra’s Bauble, it isn’t hard to generate card advantage with every attack. Given Bilbo’s similarities to Dreadhorde Arcanist, many think that card may even get banned eventually.
This level of versatility gives Dimir Tempo game against basically every deck in the format, which is a big reason for its popularity. With game against a vast majority of Legacy’s archetypes, Dimir Tempo is the most consistent deck that this format has to offer.
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