I am an addict.
I don’t mean that in the literal sense. I don’t do drugs. But honestly, there are a lot of substances that are commonly referred to as drugs that I do use. Caffeine, for instance, is considered a drug, and there are plenty of people who are addicted to it.
The problem is when you use these things too much. You get reliant on them to function in everyday life. I know a lot of people who couldn’t go more than a day—or even a morning—without coffee. The same is true of nicotine and many other common drugs. My family has a history of abuse with many substances, and I know that I have an addictive personality, so it’s difficult for me to control these wants from day to day.
Like most people, I enjoy doing things that make me feel good. This is different than doing things that make me feel better. I am quite happy with my life, and everything seems to be looking up. What I mean is that, in general, we are all addicted to happiness. This is just biological, but it’s also a more recent adaption of human behavior to advanced culture. We’re baited constantly by companies to buy products that taste great, make us feel better about how we look, or even just give us a few minutes of enjoyment.
We are a consumer driven culture.
It’s hard to admit, but I am addicted to many things. I don’t live a healthy lifestyle. I don’t work out every day. I don’t eat healthy foods. I just do what makes me feel good, and that’s a slippery slope to go down. Once you fall into that hole, crawling back out is much harder than going in. And the sooner you realize that something you’re doing is bad for you, the easier it will be to crawl back up that slope.
But it drains you.
Physically. Mentally. Socially. These addictions, no matter how harmless you think they are, will take their toll on your life. Sometimes these addictions don’t affect your day-to-day, but they will hurt you in the long run. Caffeine is one of the hardest addictions to break, and I am no stranger to it. Suddenly, it becomes harder to get out of bed in the morning without your coffee. You realize that it has been exactly three hours and fifteen minutes since your last Diet Coke—and you can’t help but think about it.
Until your brain starts to boil.
And you scratch that itch. That irritating feeling of wanting something that you know you probably shouldn’t have. That drug that drives you. Compels you to do something that may not be in your best interest. This feeling is the definition of addiction, and I know it all too well.
When I first started playing Magic, it was a lot of fun for me. It still is. It makes you feel good when you’re winning. That’s basically the same for every human being because winning is generally associated with pleasure. Winning releases endorphins into your brain and gives you a generic feeling of happiness. It is a carnal instinct we all share and not something one can easily turn off. Despite how long I’ve bee playing, I still get that same feeling of enjoyment when I win a match or a tournament. The rush of blood through your body. Fingers tingling. And you want it more than anything.
This is where that slippery slope comes in because Magic is the same as any other game, sport, or competition. Winning can function just like a drug. You want to win because winning makes you feel better about yourself. When you don’t already feel good about yourself, this may lead to instances of playing Magic too much or even letting it consume you completely.
I played Magic a lot growing up because I had a lot of problems at home. While other people around me turned to substance abuse to try to escape reality, I was basically doing the same thing—but with a card game. You could argue that my body was taking just as much abuse as theirs from all the pepperoni pizza and Vanilla Coke, but I was building up my mind while they were breaking theirs down. Sometimes addictions aren’t all downsides. People regularly confuse addiction with passion, but the two are remarkably similar in how they affect those around you.
I always thought I was a smart kid. I did well in school. I got accepted to college on a full scholarship. But I’ve never really felt like I’ve grown up. I still don’t feel like an adult. As I get older, I’m thankful that I have a wife who loves me and helps give me direction. Without her, I would have definitely ended up much worse off than I am now. And now I realize that she is the smart one.
I was lucky.
I’m passionate about Magic. I play to win, and I win a decent amount. I just so happen to love writing articles about Magic and also love trying to teach others to do the same. I fell into this job at StarCityGames.com because of my passion, drive to get better, and relatively capable functionality. I know that this isn’t a job that will sustain me for the rest of my life, but I love doing it and am going to keep doing it until someone makes me stop.
But just writing the ending to the previous sentence should be a red flag.
I don’t have a college degree. I don’t have a plan for "after Magic" should it ever fail, but sometimes you just have to gamble on a good thing. I have no fallback plan, and I just bought a house with my wife. She also works in the Magic industry, so if it goes under we’re in a lot of trouble. At the moment, Magic is stronger than ever, and we’re banking on it only getting better. At the moment, we’re happy, and that is as much as anyone can ask for in life.
…
This past weekend at the StarCityGames.com Open Series in Baltimore, I won the Legacy Open. It has been quite a while since I made Top 8 of an event, let alone won. To finally break through that ice was exhilarating, and taking home the trophy didn’t hurt too much either. The deck I played was Esper Deathblade, which some of you may know as the newest iteration of U/W Stoneblade.
If you read my article last week, you’ll know that I was contemplating the strengths and weaknesses of G/W/x Maverick, a deck primarily focused on utility creatures that all generate significant disruption for the opponent. While the deck has always seemed pretty awesome to me, I just couldn’t bring myself to play without Brainstorm. One of the most powerful cards in Legacy, there is basically no time in a game where Brainstorm is bad. If you are flooded with lands, having access to Brainstorm alongside a fetchland like Marsh Flats can be the same as casting Ancestral Recall.
The raw card advantage element isn’t there, but raw card advantage doesn’t matter nearly as much when every card in your deck does something powerful. You will be able to pick and choose what you’re doing every turn of the game if you give yourself enough ways to dig through your deck. This is why so many of the predominantly blue decks in Legacy play spells like Ponder and Preordain.
Some decks in Legacy don’t play Brainstorm because they are going in completely opposite directions. There are all-in combo decks like Belcher and grindy midrange decks like Jund and Maverick. They all have their strengths and weaknesses, but you will almost always see the best players in the room casting Brainstorm.
Brainstorm is a card very similar to Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Every turn you have approximately a billion different options, from when to use your Brainstorm to what cards to put back. If your opponent’s deck is full of discard spells like Thoughtseize, should you wait to cast Brainstorm until they use this kind of effect or should you aggressively Brainstorm in order to dig into more spells to cast on your own turn? Do you Brainstorm when you don’t have access to a shuffle effect to "reset" the two cars you put back on top?
Decisions create interaction. Interaction leads to advantages for people who are prepared for those interactions. Decisions force mistakes from people who are not exactly sure how to play against a certain deck or even a certain card. Good players love interaction and love decisions because the combination of the two of them helps you get a leg up on the competition.
Legacy, when the metagame is healthy, is the pinnacle of interaction. Most combo decks have protection spells, disruptive elements, or other ways to take down the shields of their opponents. Even Wasteland, a card that leads to some "unfun" games, is a powerful interaction with the opponent. Wasteland puts constraints on how you build your deck, how you fetch your lands, what lands you fetch, and more. Every card that forces you to make decisions and interact with the opponent will ultimately give you an advantage if you know what you’re doing more so than the opponent.
This is one of the reasons why I love Legacy.
For last weekend, I settled on Esper Deathblade for a lot of reasons that I’ll get to in just a moment. But first, the decklist!
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (3)
Lands (24)
Spells (18)
As you can see, this list is pretty similar to the one Lauren Nolen used a few weeks ago to win SCG Legacy Open: Nashville. There are a lot of key differences between his list and the one Brian Braun-Duin used in SCG Invitational: Atlanta earlier this year. Here is the "OG" list:
Creatures (15)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (23)
Spells (17)
I think the main difference between the two is Force of Will in the maindeck versus the sideboard. It can be tricky to determine just how useful Force of Will is in Legacy at any given time since the metagame fluctuates heavily by region and results. Sometimes combo decks are rampant and you’ll just lose if all you have access to is a little discard. Other times you can’t beat an opponent by discarding two of your best spells just to hit one of their best.
For the Invitational, I think Brian was spot-on. Invitationals are notoriously heavy on fair decks since a lot of the people playing in them love playing Delver of Secrets and Stoneforge Mystic. I’m no exception, as I have had my fair share of success with both. However, for regular Legacy Opens, I think that it is safe to assume you’ll play against combo at least twice in the tournament. Without Force of Will, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to a multitude of strategies that you can’t really interact with too well. Sure, Thoughtseize and Inquisition of Kozilek are good cards, but they don’t always get the job done.
While discard effects can be powerful, Legacy is not the same format as Modern or Standard. I think that cards in the range of Thoughtseize would be far too overpowered in Standard because there just isn’t enough card selection and so many spells do unique things. Decks in Standard tend to rely on some flashy late-game spell to save them from certain doom against aggressive decks, and a timely Thoughtseize will just end them on the spot. This is one of the reasons why control decks have such a hard time beating Sin Collector.
In Legacy, a lot of decks have multiple cards that do the same type of thing. If you take their Brainstorm, they will just cast Ponder or Sensei’s Divining Top. If you take their Show and Tell, they can just dig into their other copies of Show and Tell or potentially even Sneak Attack. If you take their Force of Will, then you aren’t really affecting their combo all that much.
You get the idea.
With so much card selection as well as redundant combo pieces, it feels like many Legacy decks beat you with same couple of cards every time. This is because with that card selection their game plan is always the same: dig, dig, dig.
While this is fine for Legacy, it is one of the main reasons why Ponder and Preordain are banned in Modern. They are just too good since they allow combo decks to find whatever they need regardless of how many disruptive discard spells the opponent plays. This is also the reason why Thoughtseize is so powerful in Modern right now. Jund definitely had its day in the sun before the banning of Bloodbraid Elf, and Thoughtseize was one of the main reasons for it. Taking away a combo piece from an opponent in Modern is just devastating because they don’t have that much time or powerful dig spells to find what they are looking for.
Before #SCGBALT, I knew I wanted to play Force of Will because I expected a reasonable amount of combo. Whenever I play Force of Will in a deck, I generally do a count of how many blue cards I have to make sure that I have enough. When you play four copies, you want about eighteen-to-twenty blue spells minimum. With three copies, I’m satisfied with around fifteen or so.
When the tournament was about to start, I had twelve.
I let Gerry Thompson look at my deck on a whim, and the first thing he pointed out was that I only had twelve blue cards. So I panicked!
I looked at my decklist and tried to cut anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary for the deck to function. I even briefly considered cutting Umezawa’s Jitte, but I settled on moving a Liliana of the Veil and a Thoughtseize to the sideboard in favor of a Ponder and Vendilion Clique.
And both cards were simply outstanding.
Not only did I add another couple of blue cards (just fourteen!), but they were actively good when I needed them to be. Ponder helped me dig for lands quite often, and Vendilion Clique was doing God’s work. I knew I had made the right decision when I used both to great effect to win the very first game of the day against a Smallpox deck.
Other than that, the deck ran smoothly. I wasn’t all that impressed with the discard effects, but they were useful. I assume they had more of an impact on the games than I could see at the time because I was able to preemptively shut down a lot of the early threats from various opponents. Along with troublesome creatures like Dark Confidant, I put them in some awkward positions early on in the games.
The best card in my deck by a long shot was Geist of Saint Traft out of the sideboard. It was absolutely phenomenal when I needed it to be, but I don’t think it needs a maindeck slot. There are so many matchups that rely on Swords to Plowshares or Lightning Bolt to kill your creatures, and having the ability to remove all of their blockers with Swords to Plowshares of your own is incredibly powerful. Geist of Saint Traft is also one of the better clocks you can have against a combo opponent. When you lead with an early discard spell and follow it up with a Geist of Saint Traft, you don’t really need to do a whole lot else. Sure, additional disruptive spells are great, but Geist kills them faster than most cards in the format—including Tarmogoyf.
One card I want to incorporate somewhere is Detention Sphere. I am deathly afraid of Lingering Souls, and it’s a blue spell for Force of Will on top of being one of the best answers you can have for Show and Tell. Omniscience and Dream Halls are both pretty big game that Detention Sphere shuts down due to most of their spells being sorcery speed. It’s also another way to interact favorably with the wide range of cards that people will throw at you in Legacy.
While it does fold to Abrupt Decay, Detention Sphere is a great card with a lot of versatility. I would recommend having some in the sideboard for matchups where you need to kill planeswalkers, various artifacts/enchantments, and Show and Tell.
Deathrite Shaman is the main reason to play this version of the deck, but don’t be afraid to side it out. It isn’t that good against Rest in Peace Miracle decks and is pretty mediocre against most combo decks that don’t have graveyard interaction. I regularly sided out Deathrite Shaman in matchups where it didn’t do much other than act as a Birds of Paradise, which isn’t something you need when your goal is to cast Thoughtseize into threat into Force of Will.
But Deathrite Shaman is absolutely key in helping you get an advantage against other fair decks. This is especially true against decks that rely on their graveyard for things like Nimble Mongoose and Tarmogoyf. Deathrite Shaman can help you cast multiple spells in a turn, shut off their Daze or Spell Pierce, and give you a leg up when you need a boost in life. The singleton Tropical Island was pretty loose sometimes—especially when combined with a basic Island—but it is definitely necessary in matchups where you need Deathrite Shaman to gain you those precious few points of life, like when you’re facing RUG Delver.
Meddling Mage was a sweet one that I didn’t get to use all that much, but I like it in theory. There are only a few cards that matter coming from the combo decks, and shutting down half or more of their ways to actually kill you is insane. They rarely have more than a few ways to deal with it, so an early Meddling Mage can buy you a lot of precious time.
Surgical Extraction was something I liked in theory to combine with Deathrite Shaman against the graveyard-based combo decks, but I didn’t face many. I often see people siding it in against random midrange or aggressive decks, but that isn’t where you want it. Much like Slaughter Games in Standard, people sideboard it in much more often than they need to and end up spending precious resources and time casting a spell that doesn’t do much of anything. I will likely keep playing Surgical Extraction in some number because it functions well with Snapcaster Mage.
As for Snapcaster Mage, it is a great card, but I cast it as Ambush Viper more than I got to flash anything back. I can definitely see why the deck only wants a couple, but it does tend to get much better after sideboard when you bring in various hate cards that are cheap and powerful. Snapcaster Mage has obviously proven its worth across multiple formats, but I don’t think it’s actually that good unless you can get a lot of value out of it early in the game. This is why it was so powerful in Standard alongside cards like Gitaxian Probe and Gut Shot since it was a threat that mattered early and gave you a significant boost to card and tempo advantage.
I’m really happy with my performance in the tournament and feel like I played well. There were some obvious small mistakes that I caught immediately after making them, like tapping my mana wrong to cast a Stoneforge Mystic and not leaving up my Swamp to play Deathrite Shaman, but those kinds of things just happen from time to time. In Legacy, you have to devote so much brainpower to making correct decisions over the course of the game that you often forget small things. This is something that you can work on over time, but you just have to shrug it off and focus on the big picture in the moment.
The deck is incredibly strong, but it does have a few glaring weaknesses. Leyline of Sanctity was a huge problem for me since most of the ways I interact with combo decks is through Thoughtseize. Without that ability to interact with them, I felt helpless against a lot of their draws. I recommend playing some number of Flusterstorm or Spell Pierce in the sideboard in order to combat this problem and focusing less on adding more discard spells to the mix.
This coming weekend I will be attending Grand Prix Providence, a Team Sealed event, with Jonathan Job and Tannon Grace. I haven’t played in a ton of team events, so this should definitely be a great experience. Look for my column next week and read all about it!
Thanks for reading.
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