Round 1: Deathblade
Round 2: Painter
Round 3: Storm
Round 4: Death and Taxes
Creatures (13)
Planeswalkers (5)
Lands (22)
Spells (20)
This deck is a blast to play. It almost never gets screwed or flooded, mulligans well, and topdecks well, and the sideboarded games are a delight to play. The slot-oriented sideboard construction approach can be applied to literally any metagame.
Having a versatile arsenal of answers in a powerful midrange deck with a lot of card selection makes for great games where you can play to a number of different outs, many of them cards that your opponent can’t reasonably expect you to have. After all, what mono-white player is going to play around Massacre? What about a followup Nature’s Claim?
The Esper Deathblade match was exactly how I envisioned the deck playing out, so it’s nice to be able to show how the deck can handle a Stoneforge Mystic + True-Name Nemesis midrange deck. Dark Confidant and Liliana are both quite powerful in those situations.
The Painted Stone match was a good old-fashioned beating in all three games. Getting turn 1 Blood Mooned on the play is unbeatable for most decks in Legacy, as even the decks with basic lands tend to require the opportunity for a fetch land activation first. Our opponent had their other nut draw (Grindstone, Painter, kill you) in the third game, and that’s Legacy for you.
The Storm match left me wondering about the Thoughtseize choice and the Liliana of the Veil +1 in game 3. I saw Ponder, Duress, Tendrils of Agony, and Infernal Tutor with Thoughtseize, so I felt pretty safe from a fast kill. I didn’t have anything worth taking with Duress, and our opponent wasn’t going to natural Tendrils us, so those were both out. Between Ponder and Infernal Tutor, are you just supposed to take Infernal Tutor? Ponder lets them even their draw out, whereas Infernal Tutor requires a lot of mana spells that they didn’t have (and access to which I was trying to cut off by taking Ponder). I’m very open to Infernal having been the right call though.
The Liliana of the Veil +1 feels more correct to me than it did to my opponent. In two draw steps, my opponent needed to be able to produce five extra mana. Only a two-card combination of Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, and Lion’s Eye Diamond in two cards makes that activation wrong, whereas another Liliana +1 and a Wasteland followup lets us nearly slam the door on them if we get the turn back. Unfortunately, our opponent ran pretty well after we Thoughtseized them, and we lost.
The Death and Taxes game went well, but our opponent ran real bad on drawing Mother of Runes, which is their best card against us. Meanwhile, we have a bunch of sweepers in our sideboard coming from all different angles, so it’s tough for them to set up a board position against us in games 2 and 3. I didn’t love the Engineered Explosives, so that’s worth replacing. Given how varied Legacy’s threat costs are nowadays, you’re less likely to get a two-for-one with an Engineered Explosives activation. It’s very likely that this slot should become another anti-combo slot. I leave that decision as an exercise to the reader.
For next week, I’m going to try something a little different. The Facebook likes metric gets too little applied use, and I want to experiment with that. When this article goes live, you’ll note that it already has five comments. If a color mentioned in a comment gets more than 50% of the likes that the article does, it’ll be in the deck I discuss next week. If all five colors get more than 50% of the article’s likes, I’ve got my work cut out for me. If none of them do? Guess I’m playing with artifacts and lands.
I can’t wait to see how this one turns out . . .