With Legacy taking a backseat to Modern in how often it sees competitive play, #GPLouisville this weekend takes on somewhat of a different feel than previous Legacy Grand Prix. Many of us in Magic’s mainstream haven’t seen Legacy in months outside of the Players’ Championship, so I wanted to offer everyone a reminder of just how crazy Legacy can be.
Control decks in Legacy begin and end with Miracles, but this deck has a lot of things going for it. Chalice of the Void has always been a powerful card for decks that can use it well, and Mox Diamond and Ancient Tomb let this deck skip the first spot on the curve in favor of higher impact cards.
You have a bunch of planeswalkers to provide card advantage in the long games that Chalice of the Void and Ensnaring Bridge create, and I would bet most of your opponents will have to read Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast. I certainly did.
Speaking of reading, Breya, Etherium Shaper is going to create even more puzzled looks. Both of them bog down the battlefield, which is what you want in this deck, allowing you more time to leverage your planeswalkers while your opponent draws more cards that Chalice of the Void or Ensnaring Bridge invalidate.
And just what are you building toward with these measures? Thopter-Sword combo and/or a gigantic Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas ultimate, both of which end the game very quickly. Notably, the Thopter tokens aren’t invalidated by Ensnaring Bridge since you can hold your card from your draw step each turn until after combat, so winning with 1/1s is ideal.
Maybe it’s inappropriate to call this a control deck because you’re not often interacting directly with your opponent’s cards, but the Legacy format is so vast and you have to have more of a prison element to play a longer game against disparate archetypes. Miracles has Counterbalance-Top combo to invalidate large swaths of cards at once, so the trend is merely holding here.
But Miracles has been so good for so long in the format that it’s time for a change of pace. And rather than tediously rearranging your top cards ad infinitum with this deck you get to draw a bunch of cards and activate a bunch of planeswalkers. It’s hard to go wrong there.
Creatures (6)
Planeswalkers (8)
Lands (21)
Spells (25)
