Wow. I haven’t written anything here in quite a while (2014!).

Since Zaiem asked, here’s the Dredge list I played at the CFB Game Center today. I went 3-1, up against Miracles (w), Lands (l), Dredge (w), and Miracles (w).

The deck

4 Golgari Grave-Troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
4 Golgari Thug
4 Ichorid
4 Careful Study
4 Breakthrough
4 Putrid Imp
2 Hapless Researcher
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Narcomoeba
4 Bridge from Below
2 Dread Return
1 Ashen Rider
1 Flame-Kin Zealot

4 Cephalid Coliseum
4 Mana Confluence
4 Gemstone Mine
2 City of Brass

Sideboard:

4 Chain of Vapor
4 Faerie Macabra
1 Realm Razer
1 Ancestor’s Chosen
1 Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite
3 Ashen Rider
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria

Notes

Yup, no copies of Lions Eye Diamond. Not a strategic choice – I just didn’t feel like buying them. The deck seems to do quite well without them. I suppose it makes it slower, but I think it ends up being more resilient. I beat a LED-ed Dredge deck in the mirror. Hapless Researcher was fun there, de-Bridging my opponent at least once.

The mana base is actually needlessly hurty right now, since I have no actual need to cast other than blue or black spells. That would change if I bothered to pick up copies of Firestorm for the sideboard, which I’ve been considering.

The Realm Razer almost got me my second win against Lands today. It freaked out the Lands player, who’d boarded out all his removal and had to board it back in when he saw me flip the Razer in game two (sadly, it got Bogged out of existence before I could use it).

I like having one Ashen Rider in the main because it lets me clear out problematic locks in game one, and it’s a good backup plan to just outright killing them with Flame-Kin. Dread Return the Rider, make zombies, exile their threat or a land, Cabal Therapy off of Rider, make more zombies, screw up their hand and exile another permanent.

So, given an SCG Open Series top sixteen that was heavily laden with both Mental Misstep and Stoneforge Mystic, is Legacy being snowed under by these two cards?
Well, I was curious about that, too. So here’s some information from the top sixteens for all the SCG Legacy Open events since June.
First, copies of Stoneforge Mystic and Mental Misstep in the top sixteens (listed as the percentage of the theoretical “maximum” of 64 copies across the top 16 decks).

Second, decks featuring Stoneforge Mystic and Mental Misstep (again, as a percentage of the maximum 16 copies in the top 16). Note that a deck is a “Mystic” or “Misstep” deck if it has even one copy of the card in question.

There aren’t enough data points to actually make anything of the apparent “upswing” caused by the results from today’s event, so I’d pay more attention to the averages in each case.
That works out to:
Stoneforge Mystic card percentage – 23.2%
Mental Misstep card percentage – 58.3%
Stoneforge Mystic deck percentage – 28.6%
Mental Misstep deck percentage – 63.4%
So, call it a quarter of the top sixteen decks, on average, featuring Stoneforge Mystic, and approaching two thirds featuring Misstep.
So far, I’d say I’m okay with that Stoneforge Mystic tally – for a card that forces the game to occur on the battlefield, that seems like a fine percentage.
On the other hand, I’m not sure if that Misstep tally is particularly “good” – but I don’t know that it’s “bad” either. It’s just kind of meh, like the prevalence of Force of Will. It’s a core element of the format, at least for now…and that seems okay to me, if not particularly interesting.
What do you think? Good sign? Bad? Let me know. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next Legacy Open brings.

As I was replying to comments on my latest article over at ChannelFireball, I put together this back-of-the-envelope estimate of just how many dual lands exist in the world:
From Alpha through Revised, about 550 million cards were printed.
This means about 36.7 million rares.
That