Hello, receive greetings from the heart of Mexico City on this, the first day of the year. Here the whole Magic Community is small, about 200 regular players.
Seventy percent of those players are exclusively interested in Standard and the other 20%-25% usually plays Extended.

The best MTG format is played competitively among some costumers of a store located here, in downtown. We, a core of five-six players, have been supporting our store´s policy of organizing legacy tournaments every three weeks. Starting on august, we held six small events (12-16 participants).

Our Legacy environment is, however small, filled with many competitive decklists. Eva Green, Dreadstill, Ugbw Countertop, White Stax, Ichorid (and New Level Dredge), The Rock, Merfolks, Vial Goblins, Combo Elves, Canadian and other thresh variants dominate the local metagame.

The problem here is that this core of players tends to monopolize the format staples and builds. We are almost the same players, piloting something different, who usually get into the top 4. It is not (that) uncommon, among people of our team, to have 8 – 12 Force of Will or Tarmogoyf so that’s why, on a context in which people refuses to play against well suited (complete) competitive decks, the format is somehow stagnated in Mexico.

We try to solve this by constructing competitive decks just to borrow them to other players (all this under the store administration). We supposed that this was a way to get more people interested on the format, a way to promote legacy. Time showed up that it was healthier to borrow those decks, as a personal decision, exclusively to friends and not to random costumers.

Then we changed the approach. Some of us started to sell cards to the store and directly to other players in order to create incentives for deckbuilding. It wasn´t a pleasing thing to watch them just sell the cards back for unfair (much higher) amounts of money to collectors that are not interested in organized play. But well, we all know how this world engine works. It was not a bad balance after all, since in the move I completed my personal collection.

With the proximity of the GP of Madrid we start the testing work just to notice that the local metagame was not evolving in the worldwide tendency, this because the metagame here is virtually artificial and near to inexistent. It was not possible, in this first attempt, to create a stronger environment to play and prepare ourselves for the February big event in Europe.

Of course, we have the alternative plan: compete and practice inside this petit core of players. Or we could simply proceed to the MWS…

But this is not what we want in the mid-long term. We are struggling to generate the conditions for a developed organized and competitive legacy bund here on one of the biggest cities of the world.


We would be glad to know your experiences in improving the format level there where it is small and undeveloped.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your help.