Ever since Legacy became a three-deck format, it’s been a constant struggle to create a deck that can beat two prongs of the RUG Delver / Maverick / Esper Stoneblade metagame. There are very few aggressive decks that can beat a Batterskull, Lingering Souls, and flashbacked Swords to Plowshares. On the other side of the coin, it’s very hard to brew a control deck that survives a constant onslaught of Green Sun’s Zeniths, Wastelands, and oddball cards like Sylvan Library or Aven Mindcensor.
Let’s not even get into combo decks that can come close to beating RUG Delver with Spell Pierces…
The inspiration for this deck comes from one Chris Andersen. The real question that control decks have struggled to answer over the last few weeks and months is, "What removal spell kills a Nimble Mongoose, Delver of Secrets, Tarmogoyf, and Knight of the Reliquary?" It’s actually not an easy question to answer.
Engineered Explosives is passable at fighting Geese, better but still not great against Delver, and awful against Tarmogoyf and Knight.
Lingering Souls is decent at fighting the one-drops and can race the other cards, but it got too popular so now people play Sulfur Elemental. Having a card exist in the metagame that completely dominates your stabilizing card/finisher is not very good for your capacity to succeed. Small wonder that Esper Stoneblade has not put up great results as of late—it can’t beat a Sulfur Elemental, it’s pretty soft to a Wasteland, and when it’s not soft to a Wasteland it’s soft to a Choke. Both of the other sides of the triangle are favored against it. Not the place to be right now, but getting closer.
Counterbalance is very strong against RUG and the combo decks, but only under a very specific set of conditions. Since Wasteland’s popularity is near an all-time high for the format, it’s impossible to play a four-color Martell-style Counterbalance deck with Tarmogoyfs and Firespouts. You need to more-or-less never get Wastelanded or Stifled in this deck if you want to beat RUG.
The "just play more lands" doctrine that Gerry Thompson espoused late last year might have worked fine then, but RUG then is very different from RUG now. It’s pretty hard to outwait RUG nowadays. If you let them cast their spells and trade with you on their terms, you’re going to lose. Basics, then, are the order of the day.
It’s more complex than that, though. A "good" Counterbalance curve has changed. There are a number of very important threes—Lingering Souls, Knight of the Reliquary, Show and Tell, Intuition—that it’s important to have an answer for. It might be the case that Counterbalance isn’t the way to answer these cards, but then you need another way to solve them. Absent those other answers, you have to play a more diverse curve of cards to cover three casting costs instead of two.
Enter Chrandersen. He’s been known to be a Legacy aficionado from time to time. We had a conversation recently in which he pointed out that Meekstone is a particularly strong card right now.
The reason that Meekstone is so good is that you get to play Counterbalance without also being an attrition deck. The core problem with a lot of Counterbalance decks is that they try to also attrition people out instead of lock them out, which is really awkward when you’re playing do-nothings like Counterbalance and Top in your deck that presumably needs every card to be live.
If you’re looking to lock people out, that’s fine. Your combination of Sensei’s Divining Top + Counterbalance is worth much more than two cards, so it’s okay to spend a lot of resources to set it up. The problem is that you also need to cast it on a stabilized board or stabilize the board after your Counterbalance resolves, which is a goal that also takes resources to achieve. If you want to stabilize the board with Counterbalance in play, you can’t really lean on certain cards to do it for you.
Engineered Explosives won’t kill a Tarmogoyf for you and you’ll have to flip your Top before it resolves if you need to kill a Goose. It doesn’t interact well at all with a board of Insectile Aberration, Nimble Mongoose, and Tarmogoyf, which is another problem with the card. Firespout doesn’t kill Tarmogoyf or Knight and Wrath of God is way too expensive against the blue decks.
If you think that loading up on more spot removal is the right plan, then why play Counterbalance when you could just play hard card drawing and more planeswalkers like Nick Spagnolo and Lewis Laskin do on a regular basis? Even with all their spot removal, they’re still not a lock to beat a Nimble Mongoose.
Meekstone fits the style of a lock deck perfectly. It doesn’t care how many Geese and Goyfs they have, only whether you have the life to take a hit from each creature. So what does this deck look like? Glad you asked.
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (21)
Spells (36)
There are a lot of little things that are important about this deck, so let’s start picking it apart.
The Mana Base
Basics are awesome right now. Wasteland is better today than it has ever been in Legacy. Why? Because it fills any tiny tempo gap with the meaningful part of a Time Walk. If RUG Delver or Maverick doesn’t have something to do with their land drop for a turn and they have a Wasteland, they get to cast a resource-egalitarian Time Walk.
Maverick is even better at this—they have Noble Hierarch and Green Sun’s Zenith to maximize mana use, so it’s very possible for them to play in such a way as to fit a Wasteland activation into a given turn. If they get Knight of the Reliquary active and your mana base is too greedy, you might just get Wastelanded four turns in a row, too.
In a deck with only 21 lands, getting Wastelanded is pretty crippling. I really wanted to cut the second Tundra, but it’s fairly necessary. The Arid Mesa is there over the fourth generic blue dual because it gets the basic Plains, which does a lot of work in this deck.
By playing this mana base, you’re leaving a fair few utility lands on the cutting-room floor. You don’t get Karakas, which is nice but unnecessary in a format when you have Jaces and the U/R combo decks have switched fatties from Emrakul to Progenitus to dodge things like Karakas and a -1 Unsummon. Reanimator might be a concern, but the way to fight that is to add more counters, not play a non-basic Plains. "Mise" is not the best strategy you can come up with to fight a combo deck, so why rely on it?
Seat of the Synod is another notable absence. It’s possible that this one is a mistake, though, as sometimes you want to Enlightened Tutor for a land to cast your Jace and you don’t want to throw away another card to your Chrome Mox. Other times, you’ll need an artifact to sacrifice to Thopter Foundry to get your Sword of the Meek back from the trash. Those are the upsides. The downside is getting Wastelanded. Seriously, getting Wastelanded in this deck is a miserable experience. Try not to let it happen too much.
Academy Ruins, on the other hand, is too good to not play. Having the capacity to rebuy your Thopter Foundry a few times is invaluable against decks like RUG, especially if they keep playing Stifle over Spell Pierce. Since a lot of people just want to rely on sniping your Foundries with their counters and letting everything else resolve, it’s nice to have a way to get back one of your best cards on a land even if that land is colorless.
Volcanic Island is there as a way to EE for three and, should you want them, play a few Red Elemental Blasts in the sideboard. This deck probably needs the help against Hive Mind anyway. It’s also worth considering playing an Underground Sea instead so that you have more lands that make Thopter Foundry’s off-color. If you do that, you’re more likely to want a Dark Confidant / Stoneforge Mystic man plan sideboard. More on that later.
The Enlightened Tutor Slots
Playing the right one-ofs in an Enlightened Tutor deck is always challenging. The basic litmus test for a bullet, though, can be phrased as follows: "How often will I want to get this over a Top, Counterbalance, Foundry, or Sword?" Those four cards are your default best four artifacts and enchantments. They are the core of your deck. So what do you want to get that’s better than these?
Cursed Totem: For those of you that don’t want to click, it’s Linvala’s ability on a two-mana artifact. It shuts down everything from Noble Hierarch to Mother of Runes to—most importantly—Qasali Pridemage. In a world where we’re not realistically going to be able to stop Green Sun’s Zenith, it’s important to be able to protect our Thopter Foundry in other ways.
Grafdigger’s Cage was a consideration, but the problem is that Maverick can just, you know, draw a Qasali Pridemage and then use it. We don’t always have Counterbalance in play and we don’t always have a two on top, so it’s possible that we get whammied sometimes. Totem is gas against pretty much their entire deck, so it’s worth the slot.
Oblivion Ring: For when you can’t kill something. You know, an Elspeth or a Night of Souls’ Betrayal or an opposing Jace or whatever else. It’s good to have a catchall.
Engineered Explosives: A second catchall that does enough differently from Oblivion Ring that it’s worth playing. It’s very possible that it’s not worth warping the mana base to accommodate it and that it could just be a different lock piece that covers a different angle—Grafdigger’s Cage, Back to Basics, Crucible of Worlds—but it feels like the deck wants another answer.
I can see this deck losing to something weird like Sword of Fire and Ice plus Choke. That said it’s also possible that this should just be a second Oblivion Ring. Since EE gets recurred by Academy Ruins, it’s worth playing. If EE gets cut, Academy Ruins might not be worth the trouble; it also might, but it’s worth evaluating every piece of the deck in light of what else is and isn’t there.
Chrome Mox: Jumping ahead a turn on mana is a powerful thing to be able to do, especially in a deck where some cards have diminishing returns. Most of the time, it’s going to be a land that lets you ditch a Force of Will or a spare Counterbalance. If you draw it early, though, it enables things like turn 3 Jace, a turn 2 Daze proof Counterbalance, or a turn 3 Thopter Foundry + Sword of the Meek. Since mana is where this deck bottlenecks so often, it’s worth spending a card to jump ahead a turn. Also, you know, Chrome Mox doesn’t get Wastelanded or Choked, for what that’s worth.
3 Meekstone: The real reason to consider playing this deck. It locks down thresholded Mongeese, flipped Delvers, any Knight of the Reliquary ever, any creature with an equipment on it, Progenitus, Emrakul, and every creature in Reanimator except Sphinx of the Steel Wind. There isn’t another card in Legacy that does this, although Gerry would have you think that Propaganda is a passable replacement.
You want three of them because although they have diminishing returns, you definitely need one in play to win most games and people will try to blow them up. Since you don’t want to draw three a game, however, it makes sense to play only three copies.
Meekstone also lets you play a different Counterbalance curve. As mentioned earlier, you don’t need to play a bunch of three-drops if you can approximate locking out the relevant threes of the format anyway. Since you don’t really care about Knight of the Reliquary or Lingering Souls and you have a sideboard to deal with Reanimator and Hive Mind, Meekstone lets you lock out the RUG decks more consistently instead of trying to spread yourself out to fight the Maverick and Esper decks.
Cards That Didn’t Quite Make It…
…but it would be really fun to play anyway. These were all in the deck at some point or another:
Zur’s Weirding: The original inspiration for this deck was Patrick Sullivan wondering if Zur’s Weirding could see play in Legacy. If there’s any home for the card, it’s in this deck. He also wondered the same thing about The Abyss half a year ago. I don’t know if it’s something about four-mana enchantments that catches him or what, but the man does like his weird symmetrical enchantments. Still—sorry Patrick. I tried. It wasn’t quite good enough. I really did try, though.
The Abyss: It targets, Mother of Runes is played, and Nimble Mongoose has shroud. Not good enough.
Ancestral Vision: The deck is slow and ponderous enough as is. Waiting four turns for more cards isn’t really what the deck wants to do, especially since the value of any given card is very polar on any given turn.
Thirst for Knowledge: This would be the 61st card in the deck. It still might be worth cutting a Counterbalance for one. This deck is just that thirsty.
Crucible of Worlds: You’re not getting Wastelanded enough and you don’t want to Wasteland people. There are enough do-nothing artifacts in the deck already.
More counterspells: I would love a few counterspells in here. Not sure that anything is really threatening enough, though. I’d rather just use all my mana efficiently every turn.
Stoneforge Mystic: Letting them cast removal spells is the worst. I don’t want a Batterskull in my hand. What am I supposed to do with that? Five Spirits gain me more life and block more things.
Snapcaster Mage: Flashing back a Tutor seems really nice, but the deck doesn’t care one bit about the 2/1 body, making this a pretty meh Call to Mind.
Sideboard Options
There are two basic options for sideboarding with this deck. Either you keep it fundamentally the same—maybe sideboard some removal spells and a Moat or Humility for creatures, sideboard Back to Basics against the decks with greedy mana bases, and sideboard a few Disenchant equivalents to beat Choke—or you transform. First, I’ll give you a list of cards that I would consider sideboarding in this deck in some quantity if I were to keep it "the same":
Back to Basics
Moat
Humility
Crucible of Worlds
Pithing Needle
Seal of Cleansing
Disenchant
Red Elemental Blast
Tormod’s Crypt
Grafdigger’s Cage
Ethersworn Canonist
Red Elemental Blast
Blue Elemental Blast
There are plenty of other worthwhile considerations, but those are a good starting point. If you’ve ever seen me write about a creatureless deck before, though, you’ll know that I’m a fan of at least considering playing creatures in the sideboard. The beauty of playing creatures in a deck like this is that it’s really, really awful to keep in spot removal against this deck. It’s very reasonable to bring in Red Elemental Blasts, but it’s not at all reasonable to keep in Lightning Bolt or Forked Bolt or Swords to Plowshares. All of them get Counterbalanced and they’re dead against the maindeck configuration.
So what does a transformational sideboard look like? Something like this:
4 Dark Confidant
4 Stoneforge Mystic
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Spell Pierce
The beauty of this plan is that your creatures don’t get Red Blasted, they provide huge advantages, and they help beat problematic matchups in a different way. You could focus on beating Maverick by locking them down with Cursed Totem and then making a bunch of Thopters, but you could also beat them by casting a Stoneforge Mystic on turn 2, getting an Umezawa’s Jitte, and then activating it on their third turn’s end step. Chrome Mox also shines here, since the power of both your potential sideboard creatures skyrockets if you can play them on turn 1.
The reason to play Sword of Feast and Famine over any other Sword is that you need a way to beat a Choke. Either you have to play Seal of Cleansings in a traditional sideboard or you have to play Sword of Feast and Famine in a transformational sideboard, but the real point is that you need a way to beat a Choke.
Spell Pierce takes up the last four slots in the transformational sideboard because you want something to do with all of your Islands. You can’t lean on a single Underground Sea too hard by also boarding in stuff like Thoughtseize, since having eight dead cards if they Wasteland your Sea is pretty ugly. Spell Pierce serves a valuable role by slowing down low-curve and high-curve decks alike, letting your creatures take over the game and eventually allowing you to set up a Counterbalance lock.
If anyone is looking to play this at SCG Open Series: Providence, I’d be happy to help you brainstorm either here or on Twitter. I don’t believe that this deck really wants anything that Avacyn Restored is bringing us (sorry Pete!), but I’m writing a Legacy set review for Avacyn Restored with plenty of sweet decklists and ideas so you have some off-the-wall options to considering playing in Providence.
Enjoy the Prerelease!
@drewlevin on Twitter