The Legacy Pit's Deck Building Challenge: Entry Showcase
The Legacy Pit has built a reputation as a meeting point for players who still love the deepest non-rotating format in Magic: The Gathering, and its Deck Building Challenge is shaping up to be one of the most interesting community projects on the site this year. Entries have rolled in from across the globe, and the editorial team is now ready to spotlight the builds that caught their attention for creativity, technical execution, and the way they interact with the current Legacy metagame.
What makes the challenge different from a generic deck contest is the focus on process rather than just a list. Builders share their reasoning, sideboard logic, and the matchups they were trying to solve, which gives the rest of the community something to learn from even if they never sleeve the deck themselves. The showcase also feeds into The Legacy Pit's library of more than fifty prebuilt decklists, so winning entries get a permanent home alongside the site's other resources.
What the Deck Building Challenge Is
The challenge is an open call for original Legacy decklists that fit within a rotating set of constraints announced at the start of each entry window. Past themes have included mono-coloured brews, budget caps measured in Australian dollars, and the requirement that every card in the seventy-five be printed before a specific year. These constraints force builders to think laterally, which is exactly what the editorial team wants to see.
Submissions are public, so anyone reading the forum can watch a list evolve from a rough draft to a polished version over several weeks. That transparency has turned the challenge into something closer to a workshop than a competition. Players from Melbourne, Brisbane, and Perth have all posted work-in-progress decklists, and the comment threads often produce better ideas than the original entry.
Submission Guidelines and Judging
Every entry needs a written breakdown covering the manabase, win conditions, and the most difficult matchups the pilot expects to face. Builders are encouraged to include sideboard guides, brief matchup notes, and any testing results from local games. Submissions that skip the writing portion are filtered out, because the showcase is about sharing knowledge as much as the list itself.
A complete entry typically includes:
- A 75-card decklist in standard format
- A written breakdown of at least 500 words
- A sideboard guide with matchup notes
Judging is handled by a rotating panel that includes members of The Legacy Pit's content team and guest reviewers from the broader Legacy scene. Scoring is broken into four weighted categories: deck coherence, metagame positioning, sideboard design, and clarity of the written explanation. Each entry receives written feedback regardless of placement, which is rare in a community contest and one reason the challenge has built up a loyal following.
Spotlight on Standout Builds
Three entries in the current cycle have generated the most discussion. The first is a mono-red Painter list that uses Grindstone plus Painter's Servant to mill opponents before they stabilise. The second is a UW control deck that splashes red for sideboard options, a build several readers said reminded them of classic Sydney meta decks from the early 2010s. The third is an aggressive Merfolk variant that cuts the usual Vial package for a mana-denial shell, a bold choice that has sparked healthy debate about the role of tempo in the current format.
The Goblins entry, in particular, deserves attention for how it tackles the format's most-played fair decks. Anyone interested in this archetype will find a thorough write-up in the site's legacy primer the goblins archetype guide, which covers the history, the key creatures, and the role of the chieftain in different metagames. The challenge entry builds on that primer with a more streamlined sideboard tested against Delver in local Adelaide game stores.
Building on a Budget Down Under
One of the most common questions raised by Australian entrants is how to build a competitive Legacy deck without taking out a second mortgage. The Legacy Pit acknowledges this by including a budget-friendly category in every challenge cycle, with caps adjusted for the local market. The current cycle's cap sits at 800 AUD for the main deck, generous enough to include most fair strategies and a handful of combo shells.
Players looking for practical advice often point to a few simple rules:
- Keep the manabase modest by leaning on fetch and shock combinations rather than premium dual lands
- Prioritise versatile sideboard cards that can be swapped between archetypes
- Remember that paper Legacy in Australia is largely a weekend hobby, so spending more than a thousand dollars on a single deck is rarely worth it when travel costs to events in Sydney or Brisbane already eat into the budget
A trimmed list you actually get to play is more valuable than a top-tier deck that stays in a binder.
The Australian Legacy Meta and How It Shapes Entries
The Legacy scene in Australia has its own character, shaped by smaller card pools at local stores, recurring paper events, and a strong online component that connects players from Hobart to Darwin. Entrants frequently mention the decks they face at monthly tournaments in their home city, and that data feeds into the lists they submit. A deck tuned for the Melbourne meta, for example, looks very different from one built for the smaller but well-organised scene in Perth.
The comparison below shows some of the common archetypes Australian pilots lean on, and where each one tends to perform across the country's main Legacy hubs. The figures are drawn from recent store-level events, the ANZ MTG community Discord, and the Legacy Pit's own tournament reports.
| Archetype | Style | Strength in Sydney | Strength in Melbourne | Strength in Perth | Budget Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UW Control | Fair | High | High | Medium | High |
| Delver Tempo | Tempo | Medium | High | High | Medium |
| Goblins | Aggro | High | Medium | Medium | Low |
| Reanimator | Combo | Medium | Medium | High | Medium |
| Death and Taxes | Hatebears | High | High | Low | Medium |
Players in regional centres often face narrower metagames, which is why the challenge's flexibility appeals to so many Australian pilots. You can build for the field you actually play against, not just the lists that win online.
Tuning Your Deck for Local Metagames
Once a list is locked, the next step is to test it against the decks you are most likely to face. In most Australian cities, that means Delver, UW Control, and a combo deck or two. Sideboard slots that look smart on paper but only address fringe strategies are usually the first to be cut when pilots start logging real games. Builders in the current challenge have been posting their sideboard changes after each local event, and the pattern is clear: flexibility wins.
A useful exercise is to write down the three decks you lost to most often in your last month of Legacy play, then check whether your sideboard has a clean plan against each of them. If it does not, that is the first place to revisit. The data you collect at your local store is far more useful than any online aggregate.
Joining the Next Round of the Challenge
Entries for the next cycle close at the end of the quarter, and the editorial team has hinted that the theme will lean into artifact strategies. Anyone who missed the current showcase can browse every published entry through the deck library, which is searchable by archetype, colour combination, and budget. The library now sits at well over fifty prebuilt decklists, and several challenge entries have been promoted to permanent fixtures on the site.
The community side of the project is just as active. Builders share progress on the Legacy Pit Discord, post test games on the Twitch stream, and occasionally record podcasts about their entries. For players who want to deepen their knowledge of the format beyond the basics, the discussion threads attached to each showcase entry are some of the richest reading the site has to offer. Anyone interested in the kind of analytical thinking that underpins competitive Magic will also find a useful parallel in other resource-managed games, where thoughtful rotation planning makes a real difference; this Dragonknight rotation guide explores a similar mindset in a different context.
If a deck you have been refining fits the next theme, consider polishing the write-up, double-checking the sideboard guide, and submitting through the form on The Legacy Pit's main page. The Legacy Pit keeps growing because players like you put in the work, and the Deck Building Challenge is one of the most rewarding ways to share that work with the rest of the format. Pull up a chair, queue up a stream, and start tuning.