Report: 6-2 with Iggy for 14th place at the legacy championship

Coming into Gencon I was somewhat unprepared, I hadn't played much magic all summer and the last prep work I had done was before GP Columbus. I scouted out the Legacy prelim on thursday without playing and saw a field full of Thresh and other aggro control decks as well as some combo control decks like Cephalid Breakfast and Alluren. This made me very anxious about playing Iggy the next day and even lead to some discussion with Roland about playing UG madness the next day instead, but I finally settled on just playing what I know best.

My decklist for Friday was:

4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
2 Swamp
1 Island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Scrubland
1 Tundra
4 LED
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Mystical Tutor
4 Infernal Tutor
4 Brainstorm
3 Intuition
4 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Tendrils of Agony
1 Empty the Warrens
1 Orim's Chant
1 Echoing Truth

Sideboard:
2 Empty the Warrens
3 Orim's Chant
4 Dark Confidant(didn't like this guy)
2 Wipe Away
3 Chain of Vapor
1 Tendrils of Agony

I apologize ahead of time for not remembering my opponents names, Gencon is always a blur and I usually meet 20 new people a year at these things.

Round 1 vs Stifle Dreadnought

This is a bad matchup for me seeing as they run eight maindeck stifle effects plus force and daze

I don't remember a whole lot of this match except for getting triple dazed game one and losing then winning because of a play error on his side game two then losing game three very quickly.

Not a good start, I talk to a lot of teammates and friends and all the good players seem to have lost round one so I don't feel so bad.

Round 2: mono red burn

If you know what you are doing with iggy this matchup is 90 percent in your favor. I went 2-0 here and Orim's chant definitely proved its worth by shutting down his red blasts and fireblast recursion during the iggy loop.

Round 3: Solidarity

game 1 I open with Leyline and iggy on turn two, he almost recovers but he needed another turn

game two is similar except I win with goblin tokens instead of tendrils.

Solidarity is usually a terrible matchup for iggy but Leyline broke its back, as it would continue to do the rest of the day.

Round 4: mono black Sui variant

game one I combo out pretty quickly with little trouble because he kept a disruption light hand.

game two is really close he opens with double leyline puts pressure on with sarcomancy tokens and hymms while I try to build up enough for a tutor chain win, mid game I tutor up echoing truth and hit his sarcomancy tokens wich brings him down to three before he drops one of the flying zombie knights which finishes me off.

Game three I win quickly with the classic play out your artifacts strategy that works so well against discard.

round 5: Threshold

Another bad matchup that I win on the back of leyline.

I can't remember game one but it involved the a second turn mind twist with me winning a few turns later.

game 2 I mulled to five cards they were 2x lotus petal, dark ritual, empty the warrens and leyline, he doesn't have the force and my team of goblins beats up his puny 1/1 non threshold guys for the win.

Round 6: Alix Hatfield playing Cephalid breakfast

This seems like it would be a bad matchup for me but it turns out leyline pretty much destroys this deck. I got leyline in my opening seven both games and pulled some chant tricks and went in with goblins, I can't remember the details but it was very one sided in my favor. I'm sure it plays out differently without the leylines but again they were incredible

Round 7: Theshold

I could have either been matched against this or the ichorid deck that made top eight, so as luck would have it I get paired against another thresh instead of a crazy easy matchup like ichorid.

This match I see no leylines and my hands are mediocre without much protection, he takes me down quickly in two games, I'm now out of contention for top 8 but I play the last round anyway.

Round 8: blue white homebrew aggro control

This match went to three games and chant ended up being pretty important for my win as well as leyline I don't really remember it very well other than I had to play around force while facing a team of really big flying dudes. I end up winning.

So I went 6-2 having played against zero goblins and only two decks that didn't run a full package of blue control, so while I did not top 8 like last year I'm almost happier about this year because I feel I proved that iggy can be resilient in the face of a meta full of decks that are usually considered very bad matchups.

I also think that anyone playing an iggy variant that doesn't run Leyline main is playing a sub-optimal deck. Leyline is just sick in the format and in my mind has cemented its place in the main deck.