Aluren has been around the fringes of Legacy for a while now, and if you play the format regularly, you’re likely familiar with the mechanics of the deck:
Step 1) Resolve Aluren.
Step 2) Cast Imperial Recruiter, find Dream Stalker.
Step 3) Use Dream Stalker to recast Imperial Recruiter to find Cavern Harpy.
Step 4) Use Cavern Harpy to reuse Dream Stalker to reuse Imperial Recruiter to find Parasitic Strix.
Step 5) Loop Cavern Harpy and Parasitic Strix until your opponent is dead.
It’s a complicated loop on paper that gets easier with practice and reduces Aluren to a two-card combo, which is a vast improvement on what the deck had to do years ago. With four Imperial Recruiter, you can trim back to a single Cavern Harpy and Parasitic Strix alongside two Dream Stalkers so you can combo through a spot removal spell. But what if it isn’t the best way? Stripping yourself to singletons can leave you vulnerable to discard and Extract effects, and the deck wants to fall back on a mediocre aggro plan with Shardless Agent and Deathrite Shaman, which Imperial Recruiter gets in the way of.
This list just plays four of the best creatures while going up to two copies of Parasitic Strix, which you should be able to find by looping Cavern Harpy with either Baleful Strix, Coiling Oracle, or Shardless Agent once you land an Aluren. It’s similar to how the old Omni-Tell decks didn’t need Enter the Infinite because their density of cantrips alongside four Dig Through Time would be enough to set up a kill often enough to outweigh to downside of drawing weak individual cards.
You do lose the ability to use Imperial Recruiter as a toolbox to find something like Reclamation Sage, but given how Legacy looks right now, the value of that toolbox was more in the peace of mind it gave you than in effectiveness, and if there’s one lesson developing Magic players need to learn, it’s that peace of mind is rarely worth the cost.
The redundancy in this list lets you grind out opponents fairly easily, using Cavern Harpy and your cantrip creatures in the same way that Elves uses Elvish Visionary and Wirewood Symbiote. Suffice it to say I’m a fan.
And for those of you who think this may just be a budget build of the deck, note that it was played online where Imperial Recruiters go for about fifteen tickets each. This was a conscious choice in deckbuilding and one that Legacy players should seriously consider.
Creatures (22)
Lands (20)
Spells (18)
