Trial of Knowledge

Delver of Secrets was released ten years ago and has defined Legacy ever since. In roughly ever other iteration of Legacy since 2011, some form of Delver deck has been either one of the best decks or the best deck by such a large margin that something eventually had to be banned. Modern Horizons 2 propelled Delver to broken deck status once again - with so many busted threats that Delver itself is optional now - and the inevitable ban conversation is in full force with heated disagreement over who the real culprit is.  The most common target is Ragavan, with some arguments for banning other threats like Murktide Regent instead or as well - Matthew Vook lays out a case for banning just Ragavan here while addressing some broader issues and Anuraag Das makes his own case here. Beyond Ragavan specifically, the common 'ban the threats' argument goes as follows: Legacy, and Delver's role in it, were mostly fine before the power creep of the FIRE/2019-2020 era (starting with War

The Showcase events on Magic Online, especially at the end of a season, display a strange tension. On the one hand they have higher stakes and stiffer competition than almost any other open (or QP-gated) event on the platform; on the other, they are essentially free if your QPs are about to expire and your mind buys into whatever that fallacy is called.  Thus I found myself playing a Vintage Showcase that I absolutely would not have ponied up 30 Tix or 300 Play Points for if it was a regular Challenge, with a deck I built on the fly after looking at recent lists for inspiration, to qualify for another event that threatened a scheduling conflict that would have stopped me from playing the Showcase at all if I had been aware of it. Naturally I found myself in the Top 8, kicking off a bizarre month that saw me Top 8 Vintage events on four consecutive weekends - the Showcase, a weekend Challenge, the Showcase Playoff, and the ManaTraders Monthly Series - and make my peace with the format.

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1376307467383103490 After some success in the Standard Challenges with Sultimatum and 4c Doom, I wanted to see if I could build a deck that kept the elements I liked from each while avoiding the weaknesses (namely, Ultimatum's clunkiness in a format increasingly moving towards RUG Adventures with a lot of cheap interaction as well as Mono-Red and Rogues, and Doom's need to play cards like Omen of the Sun or Elspeth's Nightmare to fuel Doom and Yorion).  I had worked with Kyle Boggemes on his list of 4c Doom that had Esika's Chariot over Archon of Sun's Grace - at that point, the only white cards were Omen and Doom Foretold so cutting the fourth colour seemed like a less radical step. The basic formula I knew I wanted was: - 4 Heartless Act + 4 Eliminate along with 4 Extinction Event. The two-mana removal is necessary for keeping up with Mono-Red (or Cycling, or aggressive starts from Rogues) as well as stopping RUG from pl