In Legacy, you can often tune your deck to beat whatever you want. Sometimes you might have a deck that is well-positioned versus the field, but maybe you want to make it a little better against the top decks while weakening your matchups against decks you don’t expect to face. At the semi-recent Grand Prix Kyoto, Akio Chiba did just that.
Miracles tends to be solid against various Delver decks, but what happens when you add Punishing Fire into the mix? You end up being a little worse against Tarmogoyf, but Engineered Explosives can pick up the slack there. Once you have Punishing Fire, Dack Fayden can be a reasonable engine. Not only are you actually drawing cards when you’re discarding Punishing Fires, it’s also quite good at helping with card selection in tandem with Sensei’s Divining Top. You can sift through Pyroblasts in matchups where they’re dead and find those all-important Brainstorms to put copies of Terminus back on top of your deck.
His build was a metagame gamble and it mostly paid off, as he finished in 30th place after playing against a sea of blue decks. While he did play against some non-blue decks, those decks happened to be artifact-heavy, making his copies of Dack Fayden incredibly potent!
Note that Chiba finished with 35 points, which means he had two (presumably) unintentional draws. If you plan on playing this deck, pick up the pace! For more information, you can read about his “Dack Tech” here.
Planeswalkers (6)
Lands (18)
Spells (36)
