For the last few months, as Thalia, Heretic Cathar made its way into various Collected Company builds, more and more players learned the hard way how much worse Evolving Wilds became when you have to wait a full two turns for your land to add mana. A single effective Stone Rain was often enough to swing the tempo of the game. So you can imagine what happens when facing a Thalia, Heretic Cathar with your manabase of eight to ten fetchlands in Legacy.
Sure, you can find some basics with it, but many decks are trying to find dual lands, leading your Polluted Delta to look strangely like Evolving Wilds. In a format as fast as Legacy, that kind of mana denial is game-changing, but when the effect only comes down on turn 3, you can reasonably get underneath it. Heck, plenty of decks in Legacy kill you before turn 3.
Fortunately, Legacy offers plenty of mana acceleration to get your Thalia, Heretic Cathar onto the battlefield on turns 1 and 2, maximizing its impact on the game, especially when reinforced by Wasteland, which can now regularly destroy fetchlands.
The result is Eldrazi and Taxes, an aggressive hybrid of Colorless Eldrazi and Death and Taxes. The deck plays a ton of mana sources and few sources of card advantage, so you’re going to want to end the game before your opponent can draw out of their mana screw.
Fortunately, Thalia, Heretic Cathar also makes your creatures more effective by forcing your opponent’s blockers to enter the battlefield tapped. Eldrazi Displacer exacerbates this issue for your opponents while also giving you a much-needed mana sink. In most games, much like Colorless Eldrazi, you will render your opponent helpless, unable to generate enough resources to keep up in the early-game and simply hoping that you don’t have the tools to end the game before they can catch up.
I’m particularly partial to the Winter Orb in the sideboard, which is great with your Mox Diamonds and especially effective against Miracles, a deck whose high basic land count gives them a natural resilience to Thalia, Heretic Cathar. I would consider adding more of them for both the Miracles and Lands matchups.
After a brief surge in popularity, Colorless Eldrazi seems to be waning in popularity. The metagame has adapted to its presence and reached a new equilibrium, which is the perfect time to redesign the deck and once again take advantage of unprepared opponents.
Creatures (21)
- 4 Stoneforge Mystic
- 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 4 Eldrazi Displacer
- 1 Reality Smasher
- 4 Thought-Knot Seer
- 4 Thalia, Heretic Cathar
Lands (17)
Spells (22)
