Why is delver good

I missed Delver of Secrets and its ability to put a clock on the opponent while disruption worked its magic. Opponents can typically recover from disruption if given enough time, and Delver of Secrets makes sure they don't get it. A deck like Grixis Control makes sure they don't recover by just never running out of disruption, but I've found that is a taller order than killing them, especially because all disruption isn't made equal, as Eye of Ugin showed my Grixis deck in testing.

There's also a certain "free win" factor that I find is important in powerful formats like Modern and Legacy, the ability for your deck to have busted draws and beat just about anything the opponent has, and that requires the ability to be proactive.

For decks with Delver of Secrets , I find its most common version of the "free win" is simply draws with multiple Delver of Secrets , and it's rare I lose games when I play two in the first two turns.

So the question is, what is the best Delver of Secrets deck to play? It's not a simple question to answer because Delver of Secrets decks come in different shapes and styles.

Yes, they all play Delver of Secrets and a high spell count to support it, which includes all the typical staples like the card selection of Brainstorm and Ponder and the free Counterspell s Force of Will and Daze , but from there things get interesting.

There are variety of ways to fill out the rest of the deck, and a look at the current metagame shows that a few different styles are viable. Today I am going to go over the different Delver of Secrets decks in Legacy and how they operate to help inform the decision of which version to play this weekend or beyond. The most classic and arguably basic version of the Delver of Secrets deck is Temur Delver, which has its roots in Legacy's first Threshold decks that played a similar style before Delver of Secrets was printed.

The distinguishing feature of Temur Delver decks is the green cards — which provides a holdover from the threshold era in Nimble Mongoose — which is notable for having shroud and thus being very difficult to kill. Tarmogoyf and sometimes Hooting Mandrills gives the deck a large battlefield presence and is also relatively hard to kill in a metagame where the most popular removal spell is Lightning Bolt.

Temur is also notable for typically including Stifle, which aimed at fetch lands supports the mana denial plan of Wasteland while supporting Daze and Spell Pierce. This sort of catch-all disruption is great against a large portion of the field and has some extra value for countering various abilities besides lands.

It makes the deck more capable of free wins and blowing out the opponent, but it's also more volatile since it's a poor draw against some decks and late in the game.

The current metagame is one where Temur Delver is being pushed from the top. Some possible reasons include the fact that Tarmogoyf is weak against the Fatal Push and especially Snuff Out of the Death's Shadow deck and doesn't match up well against Death's Shadow itself either. It's also poor against Baleful Strix from Grixis Control.

There has also been an increase in the Swords to Plowshares-wielding Death and Taxes deck. It seems that there are better Delver options than Temur at the moment, but it's definitely still competitive. Young Pyromancer works well with the high spell count of Delver decks, especially the free counters.

Compared to something like Tarmogoyf , it's rather flimsy against removal, but in practice it's very robust against removal because of its ability to generate tokens in play to be left after it has died, so it's a form of card advantage.

It's absolutely incredible stuff. I love everything about this. Tide Shaper is such a great card in this deck, being able to shut off various lands in the format. In addition, Thassa's Oracle with Paradigm Shift in the sideboard is a groovy way of being a transformational kill. A copy of Wish! Super interesting to see this finally showing up in some lists. Ruby Storm is a powerful deck and definitely can make use of the extra mana.

Our second Challenge event of the weekend was the mid afternoon Sunday event, which had 68 players overall in it. Quite a bit of tempo in the event as always, with most of that being tied up between the Jeskai Ragavan deck and UR Delver, both of which had solid performances in the event.

Definitely a wildly interesting Top 8 here with plenty of combo and fair going on. At the end of the event it was the Jeskai deck again that took it down. This particular variant isn't as much of a "Saga" deck as it completely cut Urza's Saga for cards like Young Pyromancer and Narset as well as Expressive Iteration.

This has become more of a lean tempo deck than the amalgam that the Jeskai deck typically is. Paradox Engine in this deck is super sweet. Untapping all your mana rocks and Forges is pretty solid. Michael is well known for playing many of these artifact prison heavy variants so it's great to see him back at what he loves. Returning to the list this time is Orim's Chant , a card that hasn't seen much play at all in Legacy as of late not really since the advent of Underworld Breach.

Also working its way into the list is Prismatic Ending which just seems like truly flexible removal for a deck like this that can make all five colors. Super neat deck here, playing off the aspects of having either the quick Reanimator game or the Turbo Depths style game play.

Also as always digging Archon of Cruelty in these lists. Esper Affinity with main deck four copies of Portable Hole?! That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for continuing to support the column and join us next week as we continue our journey into Legacy!

Red Deck got a ton of new toys to play with and TheAsianAvenger sees if he can go under all the extra turn decks! What sweet brews did viewers send in this week? Let's find out! What if your Commander deck could only play mythics?

That's what the crew will find out this week on Commander Clash! This Week in Legacy Delver. More on MTGGoldfish Nov 14 by SaffronOlive. Nov 13 by TheAsianAvenger. Creature 12 1. Sorcery 4 4.

Instant 23 4. Land 18 2. Sideboard 15 2. Creature 14 2. Sorcery 8 2. Instant 19 4. Land 19 1. Planeswalker 2 2. Creature 10 2. Sorcery 8 4. Instant 20 2. Land 20 1. Sideboard 15 1.