The first order of business for Legacy Masters is to make it like Modern Masters, a paper and digital set. This means we need to be keenly aware of what cannot be reprinted because it is in the reserved reprint list. That means the original dual lands are not in Legacy Masters. But we can reprint the allied fetch lands from Onslaught, and the Zendikar fetch lands (yay!).
Onslaught fetch lands
Flooded Strand (White/Blue)
Polluted Delta (Blue/Black)
Bloodstained Mire (Black/Red)
Wooded Foothills (Red/Green)
Windswept Heath (Green/White)
Zendikar fetch lands
Misty Rainforest (Green/Blue)
Verdant Catacombs (Black/Green)
Marsh Flats (White/Black)
Arid Mesa (Red/White)
Scalding Tarn (Blue/Red)
The Onslaught Avatars
Doubtless One (White: Clerics)
Nameless One (Blue: Wizards)
Soulless One (Black: Zombies)
Reckless One (Red: Goblins)
Heedless One (Green: Elves)
But very quickly in my design experiment I am running into many cards that are competitive in Legacy and that cannot be reprinted on paper. That means Legacy Masters can only be a digital product, and that allows us to include the ten limited edition alpha/beta duals.
Tundra (White/Blue)
Underground Sea (Blue/Black)
Badlands (Black/Red)
Taiga (Red/Green)
Savannah (Green/White)
Scrubland (White/Black)
Volcanic Island (Blue/Red)
Bayou (Black/Green)
Plateau (Red/White)
Tropical Island (Green/Blue)
But then we immediately run into an issue: people just came off getting their duals, Force of Will, Jace the Mind Sculptor and a few other goodies like Lion's Eye Diamond out of Vintage Masters. Scratch that, then, no Legacy Masters, instead a bridge product similar to Conspiracy that includes "everything that is expensive in Legacy that we did not already re-issue in Vintage Masters," AND we can go back to paper and digital.... yeah, that's the win here. Fetchlands are in, original duals are out, and we have a paper and digital product, call it "Legacy Bridge Set." OK, that's what I am calling it for this exercise from now on and I am renaming this post to take out Legacy Masters and put instead my working title for this set.
Now let's look at the top competitive cards in the format and check-off what needs to be in this set. Here are the easy/obvious ones that do not really need to be reprinted or are fetchlands.
This is 226 cards for the Fetchlands reprinted in a Bridge set, or 8.1 percent of the 2,579 cards in this 24 deck competitive sample (three days from the most recent dailies online). The remaining 879 cards don't need to be redistributed online. This is 1105 cards from the sample, or 42.8 of these cards, and so far all we have added to the Bridge set are the ten fetchlands.
Going further down the list to cards used 8-of or more, here are the ones that are fairly accessible.
And here is the first list of 'needs a reprint' candidates.
Going down to cards that got as many as 4 in this sample we have:
And here is another batch of candidates. The choice of 'you can find them now' and 'please reprint' is not exact, and can be revisited once I lay out the major decks that need to be supported in limited.
And here is the final batch from this sample. These are very much optional since they are not in every single deck for their specific deck type and also have a high probability of being sideboard cards.
There are lots of candidates in this final list.
Things to look into:
Mirrodin Artifact Lands: Affinity is super broken but also a lot of fun, and it will always be a viable strategy, even if at worst it is a casual strategy.
A complete cycle of man lands for Creeping Tar Pit.
Celestial Colonnade (White/Blue)
Creeping Tar Pit (Blue/Black)
Lavaclaw Reaches (Black/Red)
Raging Ravine (Red/Green)
Stirring Wildwood (Green/White)
Re-evaluations of Infect and Kicker.
The Mirrodin Talismans.
The Ravnica Signets.
Complete the cycle of Odyssey filter lands.
Skycloud Expanse
Darkwater Catacombs
Shadowblood Ridge
Mossfire Valley
Sungrass Prairie
Based on this work, a Legacy Bridge Set will have to be digital-only to help competitive Legacy. Legacy has a small number of staples on the 'no reprint' list, and that means that paper Legacy is as much of a dead format long-term (for as long as there is a 'no reprint' list) as Vintage is.
August 31 update: With Onslaught Fetchlands in Khans of Tarkir, and the enemy color Fetchlands in the KTK block, the likelihood of a Legacy Masters diminishes. The original duals are already in VMA and the Fetchlands will be in standard. This makes it a lot more likely that the product to boost Legacy play will be a supplementary product like Conspiracy or Commander.
September 27 update: Vintage Masters was announced October 21 of last year (2013). Will a Legacy product be announced approximately a month from now? It can not be a paper product like Conspiracy or Commander because there are several key Legacy staples that cannot be reprinted on paper. That means that a Legacy-boosting product must be digital-only like Vintage Masters. The out-of-the-box solution is to introduce a new set of lands that are even better than the Vintage/Legacy duals: tri-colored lands that come into the battlefield untapped. If that does not happen, I don't see much sense in re-issuing the Vintage/Legacy duals in yet another digital set one year after VMA, and the same applies to Force of Will and JTMS.
[link to next article in expectation of a Legacy product]
