It’s finally March! And as you may remember, in the spirit of the NCAA March Madness, I created a Legacy March Madness last year where we had people vote on 64 of the top performing Legacy cards. In the end, Legacy favorite Brainstorm won out, beating other Legacy favorite Force of Will in the finals. Each of them dominated their side of the bracket.
I had a lot of fun running it and am looking forward to another year of it – now that Dig Through Time has been banned and the Eldrazi are now running rampant on Legacy, Legacy has been shaken up a bit since last year, so the seeding and matchups should be a bit different this time around.
View The 2016 Bracket Image Here (load time may be long)
Google Doc – Overall Bracket and Overall Seeds
Play-In Round (AKA the first first round)
If you weren’t there for last year, I basically went to MTGTop8.com’s “Most Played Cards” for the past 2 months and took the first 64 cards that were not fetchlands, basic lands, or dual lands, and seeded them accordingly. The top four most played cards were given the #1 seed in each region, top 5-8 cards most played cards were given the #2 seed in each region, etc. Each round featured a voting range of about one day, and the ones with the most votes moved on until we determined a winner. This year is largely the same.
If you’ve seen the 2016 Bracket Image, you may be wondering what the “???” in the 16th seed slot may be. This year’s first couple rounds will be the Play-In Round. Last year, people expressed a disappointment that some highly favorited cards did not even make the tournament, so this year we are putting the 16 seeds in each region up for grabs. The Play-In Rounds will feature the would-be 16th seed versus the Play-In cards.
I’ve selected the next thirty-two cards on the MTGTop8.com’s “Most Played Cards” (again, excluding fetchlands, basic lands, or dual lands), and put them to a vote. The top 4 most voted cards (will be referred to from now on as Wildcards) will make the Play-In Round, to be pit against the 61st-64th seeded cards.
- The top voted Wildcard will face the 61st seed (16th seed in the Tarkir Region).
- The second top voted Wildcard will face the 62nd seed (16th seed in the Zendikar Region).
- The third top voted Wildcard will face the 63rd seed (16th seed in the Mirrodin Region).
- The fourth top voted Wildcard will face the 64th seed (16th seed in the Dominaria Region).
View the Voting Link Here. Voting will be open until March 2nd, at 7pm Mountain Time. You may vote for up to four cards.
Fantasy Bracket
Once the wildcards have been determined, I’ll try provide a downloadable Excel and/or Google Doc for people to fill out. This part is just for fun and no real prizes on the line officially, but I suggest competing with your other Legacy friends to see who wins! I would encourage you to post your brackets here too when I release them!
Methodology and Tournament Notes
Since I’m a sucker for tournament design, I’m going to explain a couple of minor things here.
Yes, Brainstorm and Force of Will are both removed from the tournament. Pretty easy to see that Brainstorm should be removed as it won, but Force of Will being removed from the tournament might raise some questions. Basically to put it in (somehwat ironic) WotC terms, “In the interest of competitive diversity, Splinter Twin Force of Will is banned from Modern Legacy March Madness”. While it was fun to see, say, Lightning Bolt make the Final Four and win its bracket, both Brainstorm and Force of Will dominated their brackets to the point of it being a very predictable finals. Removing Force of Will, in my humble opinion, makes it for a much more interesting tournament.
The two winning regions in the finals (Dominaria and Mirrodin) have stayed while I’ve rotated the other two regions into the two most recent blocks. Besides, returning to Zendikar is appropriate, given the rise of the Eldrazi.
I’m going to try and use Survey Monkey for this tournament (instead of Google Docs last year). It should be a lot easier for me and should also provide transparency since everyone can see the results at the time they voted – if you don’t, please let me know so I can try to troubleshoot. A disadvantage is that the free version only allows 10 questions per survey so the Round of 64 and 32 will have multiple surveys. It also does not require a Google log-in which is a plus. I tried Challonge but with the voting system requiring a Challonge login and the seeding not allowing regions, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Tiebreaker Policy
We didn’t really have a tiebreaker policy last year so I’ll just go ahead and state the policy: If there is a tie between two or more cards in any round when polls close, the higher overall seed advances (linked above in the Google Doc).
If you want to discuss this on Twitter or wherever else and need a hashtag, I’ll be using #LegacyMM.
Hope to see you all participating!