Whether or not you want to believe the hype, Snapcaster Mage is the real deal. If blue control is ever well-positioned in Standard again, you better believe that Snapcaster is going to be front-lining. In Legacy, where blue is king, Snapcaster is even better.
A comparison to Eternal Witness is very fair, and oftentimes, Snapcaster is better than Eternal Witness. Not only is it cheaper, but it’s in a better color and far more abusable. Most Eternal Witness decks were blue to begin with anyway. Some Witness decks even played Crystal Shard for recursion, but Riptide Laboratory is so much better since it takes up a land slot instead of a spell slot. It’s zero mana to cast and does stuff other than just turn on your engine.
In Legacy, control decks typically have a tough time beating aggro decks like Zoo or Merfolk. In Standard, the aggro vs. control matchups are close because control manages to fit eight removal spells into their deck, several of which are sweepers. Sweepers just aren’t that effective in Legacy since most decks plan on playing one large guy, like a Tarmogoyf or Knight of the Reliquary, and killing you with that. Sweepers aren’t effective against decks with Wasteland, against decks with Aether Vial, and most fall short of killing little guys and big guys at the same time.
Control decks just don’t have that luxury, since otherwise they’d lose to combo decks. With Snapcaster Mage, you get to play a virtual eight removal spells without automatically losing your combo matchups. That alone is very impressive, but being able to rebuy Snapcaster Mage with Unearth, Reanimate, Riptide Laboratory, or Jace, the Mind Sculptor is what really puts it over the top.
Snapcaster Mage tends to be more of a controlling card. It can be used aggressively with Stifle, but for the most part, it encourages you to drag the game out in order to fully abuse it, and it wants you to make all your land drops. I prefer to be on the control side of things anyway.
Counterbalance and Sensei’s Divining Top are both very powerful, but I don’t want to use either with Snapcaster. The strategy with most Countertop decks is assemble the soft lock at the first chance you get and clean up whatever resolved first with spot removal. Snapcaster, on the other hand, wants you to stop threats as they enter play and then continue to deal with their threats as they present them.
Additionally, Counterbalance and Top are very mana intensive, as is Snapcaster Mage. Top also wants you to keep your fetchlands uncracked until your opponent gives you a reason to go digging, whereas Snapcaster wants you to use your mana every turn. Overall, Countertop and Snapcaster Mage are both powerful strategies, but they don’t mesh well together.
They vie for the same slots in your maindeck and are two separate ways of accomplishing the same goal. It’s like trying to mill your opponent out while simultaneously burning them out. Both could win you the game, but when you start trying to do both, you spread yourself thin and distract from your overall game plan. Just pick one.
That’s probably one of the most overlooked aspects of Magic deckbuilding. Most people see nothing wrong with taking a couple of great cards and putting them in the same deck. While you most likely won’t be punished for it, you could always do a better job of forming a more coherent strategy and sticking to it.
That’s what I did last weekend, and it worked out well enough.
My thought process was roughly:
Do I want to win? Yes, so I’m playing blue.
Do I want to be aggressive or controlling? Controlling, so no Stifles and probably no Wastelands.
Do I want to play Counterbalance or Snapcaster Mage? Counterbalance.
What win condition do I want? Tarmogoyf.
Delver isn’t my style, but Punishing Fire is, and conveniently beats the tar out of the Delver decks. I was sold.
Creatures (9)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (24)
- 4 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Brainstorm
- 1 Counterspell
- 3 Force of Will
- 3 Spell Snare
- 4 Counterbalance
- 3 Punishing Fire
- 2 Dismember
Sideboard
Tarmogoyf: This is still the best win condition around—don’t be fooled by Stoneforge Mystic’s shiny bag of tricks. If Stoneforge dies, and it does, easily, you have a crappy equipment in your hand. Tarmogoyf hardly ever dies because he’s HUGE. It’s like he comes pre-equipped already.
Vendilion Clique: Oftentimes the best card in these types of decks, but not this one. Punishing Fire adds a unique aspect where nickel and diming them out with Vendilion and Tarmogoyf doesn’t really matter. With Punishing Fire, you have true inevitability against almost everyone. I’d rather my Cliques were Trinket Mages.
Top without Counterbalance is strong, but Counterbalance without Top is a little loose. That’s why I wanted Trinket Mages for the most part, but it’s also a three-drop for Counterbalance, and the trinkets you can search are actually pretty good right now.
Grim Lavamancer: In theory, insane against Merfolk and Delver decks and can team up with Punishing Fire to kill their Goyf. In practice, it died a lot. I wish these were anything else.
Sensei’s Divining Top: I thought people were going to undervalue this against me, but my Merfolk opponent Spell Pierced it, and my New Horizons opponent Forced it. Apparently people still remember how good it is. I wouldn’t play a Counterbalance deck without four and even want Trinket Mages so that I can have it more often.
Counterbalance: Not the best against most opponents but can straight up win you the game vs. some. There’s a little variance included, but for how good it is, I don’t mind. If you have a Counterbalance, you should be incredibly patient with your Brainstorms, even more so than you were already.
Punishing Fire: The best card in my deck by a country mile. I probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as I did without it. Legacy is just so weak to this card right now that it wouldn’t be out of the question to play four and some Life from the Loams.
Spell Snare: This is about the only deck that should get away without playing the full amount of these. Snare is great pre-Counterbalance but redundant post. Granted, the goal of the deck is to assemble the soft lock, and Snare keeps their board clear in the meantime, but you don’t want to get Snare flooded.
Force of Will: Similarly, I didn’t want to get FOW flooded. However, cutting a Force is likely wrong in Counterbalance decks. You can afford the card disadvantage because you’ll recoup it through virtual card advantage from Counterbalance.
I’m more than fine with three Force of Wills in any other blue deck, but in a Counterbalance deck, it should probably stay at four.
Dismember: A very clever card for Counterbalance decks, as it kills problematic creatures and is a three-drop.
The manabase: Twenty-four lands seems mandatory. Four Groves is obvious, and the Cascade Bluffs is make blue from the Groves. It doesn’t really matter if the filter is U/R or U/G, but late game, you want all the red you can get for Punishing Fire.
The Underground Sea was just for sideboard graveyard hate, although I do have Dismember as well.
Thrun, the Last Troll: He was a LAST-minute addition to the sideboard, and he was insane. I never drew him in the blue mirrors, but he would have been unbeatable every time.
Flusterstorm: I wanted a couple extra cheap counterspells for fighting combo, and chose these over Spell Pierce. In BUG, I’d board in Spell Pierce in the mirror-ish matches or against decks with crazy artifacts or enchantments. With Counterbalance, I’m looking specifically to hate on combo and am not too worried about those other things, so Flusterstorm seems better.
Nihil Spellbomb: I knew that with Top and Brainstorm in my deck, I wanted to be able to dig for my hate, so Leyline was out of the question. I could have played Surgical Extraction over this and not played the Underground Sea. Without Snapcaster Mage, Surgical Extraction gets a lot worse.
I also wanted something that could be boarded in against Knight and Snapcaster decks. Punishing Fire-ing and then Tormod’s Crypt-ing them isn’t nearly as fun as doing the same thing while drawing a card.
If you have no fear of the Dredges or Reanimators of the world, you could use these slots for something else. I wanted to be able to beat anyone, and a lone Underground Sea didn’t seem like it would hurt me too often.
I made a couple deckbuilding errors. For one, I underestimated how often I would be out-Tarmogoyfed. Initially, I had a sixteen-card sideboard with two Lightning Bolts and decided that was the least important card. Those Bolts almost certainly should have been Submerges. I felt like I could deal with Tarmogoyf, and Knight of the Reliquary was basically unbeatable.
The second was kind of awkward. I played Counterbalance to a finals finish in San Jose, and afterward, I cut the Vendilions for Trinket Mages. I should have done the same here.
The third mistake was playing Krosan Grip instead of something like Beast Within, which was something Conley Woods suggested. The Beast drawback is manageable and would give me another sideboard card against Knights and Goyfs. It would also make my Grips more versatile. If they drew Goyfs instead of Counterbalances, I’d still be able to win.
After playing out some of the blue mirrors, I’d really like a Hydroblast to counter their Pyroblasts. I played Pyros and Hydros instead of Elemental Blasts because either can target Phantasmal Image, and I had Grim Lavamancer. AJ advised me to do that, and he was right, but I could see splitting them. Everyone was siding in Surgical Extraction against me anyway, and if I didn’t have any Punishing Fires, they’d probably aim them at my Blasts next.
Onto the report!
Round One: U/W Stoneblade
Game one is going kind of long, and neither of us have action, but then I peel a Punishing Fire. I’m careful not to expose it to a Vendilion Clique, and there’s no way he can get through it.
Second game, he mulligans to four or something, and I get aggressive.
Round Two: Merfolk
I Punishing Fire his guy on turn three, and he says, “That’s not good for me.” I play a Grove turn four, and the game goes on for a while longer, but I feel in control the whole time.
Second game is easier because he draws an Aether Vial and Forces my Lavamancer. My plan against them is kill all of their guys. Because of that, I actively like it when they draw Aether Vial. It’s basically like they mulliganed most of the time.
Kira is the main thing to worry about against Merfolk, but still isn’t that good against a late-game Punishing Fire. If he ever played it on any of those turns I was trying to stabilize, it would have been trouble.
Round Three: New Horizons
He mulligans a lot and is short on land. He keeps trying to mana screw me, but I’ve got 24 land!
Round Four: Hive Mind
I am not quite sure what he is playing until he discards an Emrakul during cleanup. He is stalled on lands, and I am getting aggro, but am not quite sure how the game is going to look. When I get to five land, I think I might be fine because I can pay for every single Pact! Niiiiice Underground Sea.
He bricks for another turn; I attacked him to five, and he double Pact combos. Thankfully, Lavamancer and Punishing Fire are able to burn him out in my upkeep.
Second game, he hard-casts Hive Mind. I think it might be awkward, because I am playing Flusterstorm instead of Spell Pierce and could have Pierced his Hive Mind. Still, Flusterstorm makes it easy for me to counter my copies of Pact, so it probably doesn’t matter which counter it was.
We play draw-go for a while, and I make a plan. I play out a second Counterbalance and Pyroblast his Hive Mind. If he tries to combo me, I have enough land to pay for two Pacts and both Flusterstorms to counter two more.
He tries to assemble Show and Tell plus Emrakul, but I am floating Dismember on top, which I keep in exactly for that situation.
Round Five: RUG Tempo
I annihilated Dave Thomas on camera. His deck just didn’t match up well against mine, which was the whole reason I built my deck the way I did. We talked a bit about his sideboard strategy, which I think helped him when we played later.
Round Six: Burn
I am pretty surprised to see Burn make it this far, but he gives me my first game, and match, loss. He can’t really beat an active Counterbalance, but I never get a chance to assemble it. Instead, I am all in on Tarmogoyfs and Force of Wills.
Game one I mulligan to five and might have won had I chumped with a Grim Lavamancer. Instead, I am handed my first game loss. Second game I crush him, and game three, I should have known his last card was exactly Fireblast. Instead, I play a little too quickly and cast a Jace that I should have held to pitch to Force of Will.
Round Seven: Goblins
Round three I am paired against this guy and am not very happy. Thankfully, there is a re-pair, but it only delays the inevitable. Goblins used to be a fine matchup when I had three Firespouts. Punishing Fire is a fine replacement, but not when my Groves are going to get Wasted on sight. This is definitely going to be my toughest match all day.
I deal with his Goblin Lackey, and thankfully he doesn’t have a Vial. I am able to keep his creature count low, assemble Counterbalance and Top, and then Goyf and Jace. I Unsummon his Goblin Warchief with Jace, counter it with Counterbalance, and he concedes.
Aether Vial crushes me game two. Game three, I get aggressive with Tarmogoyf, and then Thrun. He doesn’t have a one-drop, and despite him seeing some sideboard cards, it is pretty easy.
Round Eight: ID with Bant
Top Eight: RUG Delver/Counterbalance
We split the first two games, but game three I have Punishing Fire and stop his Goyfs. It’s as easy as that.
Top Four: RUG Tempo
He out Goyfs me game one and game two. Maybe I could have Brainstormed better; maybe I could have double Punishing Fired his first Goyf in game two. I’m not sure. I was very tired and almost certainly wasn’t playing my best.
Oh well. I think I’m tied for Player of the Year right now, and Edgar is a few points behind me, so I was satisfied with the weekend overall. I won’t be going to Las Vegas (most likely), but I’m ready to make a run at the last few events!
If you want to beat up on the current Legacy metagame and have some patience, you should play my Counterbalance deck. There’s nothing else that has a huge edge over everything, so why wouldn’t you?