July has been a good month, aside from me once again being unable to celebrate Bastille Day, and with it, an excuse to eat a lot of Napoleons. July has also been good to Legacy. We’ve had three big events this month so far, and with GenCon looming on the horizon, Legacy is once again gathering steam after the Grand Prix. Today, we’ll be looking at the results from Top 8s, exploring everyone’s favorite 1G creature, and looking at some cards to watch out for.
Legacy’s top decks are hard to pin down these days. The format reminds me of Extended in this past season, in that everything is playable. It differs a bit from Extended because there isn’t the volume of tournaments that make one deck hot for two weeks until people adjust to it. Legacy seems to be driven a lot on theory at the moment, but we are fortunate enough to have had several large events in the recent past that, I think, illustrate the wide-open nature of the format.
On 7/14, we saw an excellent 44-person tournament in Hadley, Mass. The Top 8 from the tournament is amazingly varied. Check it out:
1.U/W Trinket Angel Stompy
2. Vial Affinity
3-4. Relic Barrier/Winter Orb Lock-down deck
3-4. R/G Goblins
5-8. Suicide Black
5-8. U/G Madness
5-8. Faerie Stompy
5-8. R/G Goblins
(Thanks to KillemallCFH for the list.)
There’s a lot to learn from this Top 8; for example, Goblins seems to be, unshockingly, still doing quite well. However, it’s been a long time since Goblins brought back the gold medal. Goblins seems like a good deck for making the Top 8 with, but it has a hard time winning the whole thing these days. It’s a lot like Ichorid in Vintage, which is a ridiculously strong deck, but hits Yixlid Jailers and Leylines of the Void in the Top 8, and can’t just lose a match and continue like it could in the Swiss portion. Stephen Menendian blogged about this idea and its relation to baseball this week on TheManaDrain.com, and it’s worth checking out.
It’s hard to draw concrete conclusions about this event without seeing the breakdown of every match in the Top 8, but we can see a general trend in the decks that placed higher than the Goblins decks did. Vial Affinity has an even-to-favorable match with Goblins, depending on if it has Engineered Plague on the sideboard or not (this list had them). The Trinket Angel list, which we’ll look at more in a moment, packs Silver Knights and both Umezawa’s Jitte and Sword of Fire and Ice. Though the player didn’t face Goblins at any point in the event, I think it’s safe to say that it would be winning the match. From this, I draw the conclusion that Goblins is a fine deck to get into the Top 8 with; its strength will let a player power through a lot of decks in the Swiss. However, Goblins will be meeting up with more focused hate, even if it is from objectively less powerful decks, when it reaches the playoffs. Additionally, Green seems to be the strongest splash in Goblins.
The rest of the Top 8 is Roguey Roguesville. Perennial dark-horse Faerie Stompy and U/G Madness have both seen Top 8s before, and Suicide Black occasionally pops up. The Relic Barrier deck used Propaganda and The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale along with Winter Orb to form a surprisingly strong anti-aggro strategy. The Tabernacle also works well against Empty the Warrens tokens, sending the little goblins to church and giving the deck added outs against R/G Belcher.
Here’s the deck that won the whole thing:
Creatures (18)
Lands (22)
Spells (20)
The sideboard isn’t published, which is unfortunate. I hope Mr. Robinson will help out the community by letting us in on what he was running. He has said that he had at least 3 Pariahs on the sideboard, which seems to be a strong beating against aggro when one puts it on opposing creatures, and a particularly strong Goblins beating when you drop it on your own Silver Knight.
Looking at this deck, you can tell someone has lovingly tuned it. There’s Ancient Den but no Seat of the Synod; there’s an interesting number of Flagstones. Two doesn’t seem like enough to get that juicy double-Flagstones search, so I am guessing that they are there to counteract cards like Wasteland. Check out Cataclysm as well; it’s the card that, like Armageddon in White Weenie, qualifies as the late-game bomb. It’s a card that rewards subtle tricks like saving Ancient Den as an artifact to have two lands on the board post-Cataclysm. Cataclysm is much like Balance in that, while it looks fair, the deck that’s built to work with it will always come out on top when the spell resolves. TAS will end up with an annoying creature, probably with Equipment on it, putting devastated opponents in a bind.
Our next tournament comes from the Bazaar of Wonders tournament in Germany, with a 76-person turnout. Here’s the Top 8:
1. Aggro Loam
2. CRET Belcher
3. U/W/B/g Good Stuff
4. Red Threshold
5. U/W/b Landstill
6. White Threshold
7. Devastating Dreams / Life From The Loam Elves / Staff of Domination (somewhere, Kevin Binswanger is crying)
It’s interesting to see Belcher make it to the finals of such a big tournament, as the general feeling is that it gets hated out, much like Goblins does. I’m impressed that it made it that far and I think it speaks to the resiliency of the deck. There’s also a Threshold deck of both flavors; the combination of counterspells, cantrips and undercosted creatures comes through again for the deck, showcasing its adaptability and power.
The Europeans here are making good use of Life from the Loam, something that hasn’t seen much play over here. The winning Aggro Loam deck skips Devastating Dreams and cuts to the chase, using Loam to power up Wild Mongrel, Terravore and Seismic Assault. This gives it a lot of strength going into the long game, and recursive Wastelands are sure to give a lot of decks fits. The 7th place deck is optimized for full Loaming action, with Devastating Dreams to blow out, well, everything, and Gamble and Recoup to augment Loam’s dredging. Check out the Last Rites on the sideboard too! I wonder if that was ever wished for to take someone out. Last Rites and Life From The Loam seems like a pretty solid combination.
I made up the name for the third place list because honestly, it’s hard to come up with a descriptive name for the deck. Check it out yourself:
Creatures (15)
Lands (16)
Spells (30)
- 2 Sensei's Divining Top
- 4 Brainstorm
- 4 Force of Will
- 3 Swords to Plowshares
- 3 Serum Visions
- 4 Daze
- 3 Vedalken Shackles
- 1 Ghastly Demise
- 3 Chrome Mox
- 3 Counterbalance
Sideboard
It suffers from the European problem of 61-card lists, but check out what he crammed into the deck! Steve Sadin proved how good Counterbalance could be in Legacy at the last GP, and Hering makes full use of it here. He combines invitational winners Emo Jon, Mascara Bobby, and Chris Pikula (haven’t come up with a silly nickname for that card yet) to generate a lot of early disruption and card advantage. He fits in seven cantrips to help out Counterbalance along with Divining Tops. A strong anti-creature suite comes with Vedalken Shackles, Swords to Plowshares and Ghastly DeMISE. And the buttercream frosting on this delicious cake is splashed-for Tarmogoyfs and a Tombstalker to get the job done! Hering apparently lives without fear of Wasteland, allowing him to put a seriously impressive amount of really good cards in his deck. This is worth further review.
Our final event comes from Germany, drawing out 74 players for an impressive prize total of 225 boosters! Unfortunately, I only have the top 3 decks. Here they are:
1. Dredge
2. R/W/G Goblins
3. R/W Goblins
The winning deck is here:
Creatures (25)
- 1 Wonder
- 4 Putrid Imp
- 4 Ichorid
- 1 Cephalid Sage
- 1 Flame-Kin Zealot
- 4 Golgari Grave-Troll
- 2 Golgari Thug
- 4 Stinkweed Imp
- 4 Narcomoeba
Lands (13)
Spells (22)
Sideboard
This is clearly modeled on the Ichorid decks doing significant damage in other formats. It is most like the Vintage deck, and utilizes Lion’s Eye Diamond to make up for the loss of Bazaar of Baghdad. LED is a powerful card in Ichorid, even if you don’t have any use for the mana. My team runs a single copy in our Vintage list, as a free One With Nothing that Lightning Bolts you is, curiously, really strong in the deck. Here, it can actually be used to turn on Cephalid Coliseum and Deep Analysis.
The concise strategy for the deck is to Dredge a lot, Dread Return up Cephalid Sage and dredge most of the rest of the deck away, and then Dread Return Flame-Kin Zealot to turn your Night of the Living Dead zombies into hyper 28 Days Later zombies and eat you some planeswalker brains.
Dredge looks like a potentially strong deck because there’s not as much graveyard hate in Legacy as there probably should be. This list uses Pithing Needles from the sideboard to stop Tormod’s Crypt and other hosers. If Leyline of the Void becomes popular, it can run Reverent Silence and Dryad Arbors to cast it. Dredge is a particularly scary deck because it doesn’t have to actually resolve any spells to win the game. It can simply make a bunch of zombies and Ichorids and get in there.
The message I take from these results is that your can probably play just about anything and win. There doesn’t seem to be a “best deck” in Legacy, which makes it nice for rogue deckbuilders and somewhat frustrating for people who want to metagame and plan their sideboard. The best advice I can give is to play something that you are familiar with that has a bit of inherent power in it. Pure control decks haven’t been doing well at all, so it’s better to have something that’s proactive over reactive at this time. Sideboard generally instead of specifically (think Hail Storm over Tivadar’s Crusade) and test against a wide variety of archetypal decks. This isn’t a format where you can test against four decks and be comfortable with all your matches going into an event.
On a different topic, Tarmogoyf has already taken its place at Legacy tables. We see it in the Aggro Loam deck, the Good Stuff list, and the Threshold decks popping up. Like Serra Avenger, it gives a lot of power with a small casting cost, allowing aggro-control decks to spend mana on drawing or controlling while still playing a significant threat. We’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg on what Tarmogoyf can do. I imagine that it would be strong in a R/G Beats-style deck or something similar to U/G Madness, using giant undercosted creatures and lots of counters. It’s a big enough creature that it dodges a lot of the format’s removal, like Lightning Bolt and Gempalm Incinerator. I also see Jotun Grunt’s stock rising to counteract Tarmogoyf. However, it’ll only be played in decks that don’t also run Tarmogoyf, which is going to be a narrower subset. We already know that Tarmogoyf is powerful, it just remains to be seen how powerful it is. With light color requirements and great finishing power, I see it as a staple in Legacy. Hopefully its price will come down one of these days…
Counterbalance is also on the rise. It’s popping up in a lot of European lists as players adapt it into Threshold and similar decks. I’m surprised that the Trinket Angel list doesn’t have Counterbalance somewhere; Trinket-Tog had a successful Extended run this past year with a very similar strategy. Counterbalance preys on low casting costs in the format and is a really good reusable counterspell for not actually ever costing a card to counter anything. Neat! It’s a smart idea to pick up Counterbalances now, as you’ll no doubt be using them in the near future.
While you’re at it, stock up on a set of Fire Imps. They’re tragically undercosted for what they do and they’ll be played in something. They’re already appearing on Vintage sideboards to kill Dark Confidants and Meddling Mages, and they’re worth a lot more than the twenty-five cents they usually go for these days. Flametongue Kavu is only a mana more, but that one mana can be a struggle to get to sometimes. In any case, it’s not like Fire Imps at this point will ever go down in price. A worthy investment.
With the fear of Wasteland diminishing, it seems like time for my favorite pet card ever, Price of Progress, to rear up again. It has the potential to do obscene amounts of damage for 1R against just about everything in the format. With a little adjustment of the manabase towards basics, the Aggro Loam deck discussed earlier could support these, stealing games left and right. It’s just about the most amazing late-game topdeck ever, since players have this weird tendency to play out every land that they draw. Obviously it doesn’t do much versus mono-colored decks, but those are rarer and rarer these days. While Wasteland is diminishing in value as cards with lower mana costs pop up, Price of Progress remains steady as a card that can reliably do eight damage for two mana.
This past month also saw the un-erratum of Phyrexian Dreadnought, so that its ability now functions as a comes-into-play ability. This means that you can Stifle it, keeping it in play, or if you have two coming into play at the same time (through Aether Vial, Protean Hulk, etc.), you can keep at least one around. It’s also usable in the worse-than-Replenish combo of Pandemonium plus something like Reanimate.
Dreadnought dies to just about everything in the format, but it IS a 12/12 trampler for the princely sum of one mana. The low cost makes it possible where Eater of Days and Leveler failed. You can also Trinket Mage for it. Ultimately, I think the hype around Dreadnought is unwarranted. It’s easily handled by removal or even worse, it is stolen with Threads of Disloyalty. That said, if your deck already has Trinket Mages and Stifles in it, I could see running a single Dreadnought for a power play.
With Dreadnought’s un-erratum, we should be looking forward to other power cards being broken again. While I’m sure their fixing will coincide with them being banned in the format, it might be worthwhile to stock up on Lotus Vales and Scorched Ruins (I want to call that card Blasted Landscape every time I think about it). Both cards are relatively easy to find now at good prices, and once they are good again, you’ll see them at exorbitant prices. If they are never fixed, at least the cards are so below the radar now that their price is a true reflection of their value and not hype and you won’t lose out on the investment. I mean come on, think about Scorched Ruins in Belcher!
Next month brings us GenCon and a whole new crop of killer Legacy decks. See you then!
And since apparently all the other writers have been doing it, I’ve been listening to these lately:
Pavement – “Conduit for Sale!”
Neutral Milk Hotel – “Ghost”
Beulah – “I’ve Been Broken (I’ve Been Fixed)”
THE APPLES In Stereo – “Rainfall” (What can I say, I like Elephant 6)
PAS/CAL – “I Want To Take You Out In Your Holiday Sweater”
Doug Linn
Team Meandeck
Hi-Val on the Interwebs
Special thanks to the fine folks on themanadrain.com, mtgthesource.com and germagic.de