I don’t play a lot of Legacy. Living on the west coast, I’m unfortunately unable to attend very many Open Series events. That leaves me with only a Grand
Prix here and an Invitational there to really get my competitive Legacy fix, which just isn’t enough to keep me engaged in the format year round. When I do
end up with a Legacy event on the horizon, I generally find myself in the position of having to play catch-up very quickly.
I suspect that there are quite a few of you who are in a similar spot. While Legacy is clearly a popular format, as we’ve seen from the size of the
upcoming Grand Prix New Jersey through preregistrations alone, it’s not a format that most players have an opportunity to play competitively very often.
I’m not Drew Levin. I’m not going to be able to give you an exhaustive look at corner-case scenarios that might come up in the format. Nor am I Joe
Lossett, or Ross Merriam, or Patrick Sullivan, or any of the other single-deck Legacy specialists who might be able to teach you the ins and outs of a
particular strategy from countless games worth of experience. Who I am is someone who has been in the situation of having to choose a deck to play in a
format in which I am not nearly as experienced as I might like, and I can tell you what has worked – and not worked – for me in the past.
I’ve written about this before
– in the same context of preparing for a Legacy tournament – but I felt like it was a good time for a refresher, since while the lessons may be the same,
the conclusions and the context has changed.
So let’s jump in, shall we?
Do Your Research
This is the single most important element of preparing for any tournament, but it’s particularly important when your personal experience in the format is
limited. You need to study up on the decks you should expect to see in the event and what cards you need to keep in mind while you’re facing them.
Legacy in particular is a format known for relative stability, but Khans of Tarkir has turned the format on its head. Treasure Cruise has completely warped
how decks are constructed, leading to fewer expensive or situational cards and more cheap, proactive spells that get to the graveyard quickly.
Take a look at this list:
Creatures (12)
Lands (16)
Spells (32)
U/R has largely supplanted Temur as the Delver build of choice, leaning on the raw card draw of Treasure Cruise and the Young Pyromancer engine rather than
tempo oriented cards like Nimble Mongoose, Tarmogoyf, and Stifle.
This is an important mental switch to flip. Many players with a passing familiarity with Legacy may have trained themselves to be wary of Stifle, since it
was once a very popular card in many of the top Delver lists. Nowadays though, Stifle is too reactive. You don’t want to risk having cards that might end
up stuck in your hand when you’re looking to power out a quick Treasure Cruise. Force of Will and Daze are the only exceptions that get more than
single-copy treatment, since they’re not only backbreaking tempo plays, but can also be cast against an opponent who literally casts any spell, whereas
Stifle requires you to hold up mana and catch your opponent trying to resolve some kind of triggered or activated effect that’s worth countering. Great if
you’re playing a tempo game with Tarmogoyf and Wasteland, but much worse if you’re trying to go on a Treasure Cruise.
Speaking of which – did you notice what else is conspicuously missing here? That’s right – the enemy of fun itself, Wasteland. While this has not been a
universally adopted adaptation among Delver decks, cutting Wasteland seems more common than playing it these days.
That doesn’t mean you can go ahead and cut all of your basic lands, or play a deck chock full of expensive spells. You’re still going to run into opponents
who are playing Wasteland, even if the popular Delver decks have cut them. But if you see a Monastery Swiftspear and Gitaxian Probe out of your opponent,
you may be able to play a little more recklessly when it comes to exposing your nonbasic lands.
Which brings me quite handily to my next point.
Don’t Overmetagame
This is another good piece of advice in general, but it’s particularly relevant when you’re choosing a deck with limited playtesting. It’s easy to look at
the top decks from the Open Series and see U/R Delver, Jeskai Stoneblade, and Elves everywhere and think that’s all you’re going to run into throughout the
tournament. Because it’s not.
Legacy is a huge format. Let’s just take a look at the list of decks that have finished in the Top 16 of a Legacy Open in the past month.
U/R Delver
Jeskai Stoneblade
Elves
Dredge
Sultai Delver
Ad Nauseum Tendrils
Miracles
Goblins
Sneak and Show
Lands
12Post
Grixis Delver
Temur Delver
Bant
Tin Fins
Slivers (!!!!!!!!!)
U/R Painter
Storm
Reanimator
Omni-Tell
U/W Counterbalance
Mono-Red Moggcatcher
Imperial Painter
Shardless Sultai
Esper Deathblade
Burn
U/W Stoneblade
Death and Taxes
Mono-Black Pox
That’s nearly thirty different decks that have posted top finishes in competitive Legacy events in the last month. Thirty! And while Delver
variants certainly make up the bulk of the lot, both in terms of number and quality of finishes, they’re not such a huge part of the field that you can
realistically expect to play against them every round. In fact, any given round you’re more likely to play against a deck without Delver than one playing
the bothersome bug.
Even outside of that, Grand Prix New Jersey is going to be huge. It’s already one of the biggest tournaments ever, and that’s from preregistrations alone!
There simply aren’t that many people within reasonable traveling distance of New Jersey who have the Force of Wills and Volcanic Islands to actually build
a Delver deck!
Once tournaments start getting as big as this one is going to be, you start seeing more people who are less entrenched in the tournament scene coming out
of the woodwork. I would not be surprised to see more inexpensive decks like Burn be overrepresented given the sheer size of the tournament and the fact
that it’s a deck that someone can cobble together from a Fire and Lightning boxed set.
Don’t rely on guessing the metagame. You can’t do it. You might be able to broadly guess what decks might do well, but heavily biasing your deck based on
what you expect to play against is likely to be an exercise in futility. Back at Grand Prix Providence a few years ago, I played against Mono-Black Infect
with Tangle Wire and Cranial Plating. That certainly wasn’t something I was expecting to run into! Of course, I actually lost to damage when my Dark
Confidant did nothing but flip expensive spells all game anyway, so it didn’t matter very much how prepared I was for his deck, but that’s somewhat beside
the point.
The point, rather, is what I like to call The Number One Rule.
Be Powerful and Proactive
This is the single guiding principle of all of my deckbuilding, but it’s the absolute most important in a wide open and explosive format like Legacy. You
need to be playing a deck that is fundamentally working to do something powerful and proactive. You need to have a solid plan that you are building toward
each game.
What’s your plan? If you’re U/R Delver, you’re looking to apply pressure with early creatures, disrupt your opponent with free countermagic, and close out
the game with card advantage from Treasure Cruise. If you’re Elves, you’re trying to win by generating incremental advantages from your combo pieces until
you can go off or just grind your opponent out by attacking. Death and Taxes? You’re using creature and land based disruption to restrict your opponent’s
options while you kill them with those same creatures.
Even control decks in Legacy are proactive. Stoneblade decks are built around resolving and abusing their namesake card – Stoneforge Mystic. Miracles is
built around assembling a Counterbalance + Sensei’s Divining Top lock and winning with Entreat the Angels or Planeswalkers.
One of the biggest mistakes players make in deckbuilding is trying to have an answer to everything. They end up with decks full of reactive cards, and
while they might draw the right combination of them to keep themselves from losing a game, they aren’t focused on what’s more important – actually winning.
People tend to make this mistake most often when they’re caught up in the last issue we talked about – overmetagaming – and try to play some deck full of
“answers” to the field they expect. When they run into matchups where those answers aren’t effective, or they draw the wrong answers at the wrong time,
their deck simply can’t perform.
Stick to What You Know
If you’re picking a deck for a tournament at the eleventh hour, it’s best to stick to something you’re familiar with. No matter how good a deck like Storm,
or Elves, or High Tide might be in Legacy, there isn’t a chance that I would show up in New Jersey this weekend playing one of them without getting a ton
of playtest games under my belt. And it’s not just combo decks either. I wouldn’t want to play something like Miracles, or Reanimator, or Dredge, or really
anything I hadn’t played before.
While there’s clearly value in playing an objectively powerful deck, it’s more important to consider what gives *you* the best chance of winning. There’s a
reason why players like Joe Lossett succeed so often with the same deck. Experience is very valuable. Legacy is a format with lots of tricky interactions,
and it’s important to know the ones that might come up with your own deck!
I’ve only played a handful of different decks over the years in Legacy. With the exception of one ill-fated foray into the world of Esper Deathblade, all
of my experience in Legacy comes from playing disruptive creature decks like Maverick, Death and Taxes, and Bant. I know the ins and outs of cards like
Aether Vial, Mother of Runes, and certainly Knight of the Reliquary, so I feel like my best chance going into Grand Prix New Jersey would be to play
something in that wheelhouse.
Something like this:
Creatures (26)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 2 Gaddock Teeg
- 2 Flickerwisp
- 4 Stoneforge Mystic
- 1 Mirran Crusader
- 2 Phyrexian Revoker
- 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 3 Judge's Familiar
- 1 Brimaz, King of Oreskos
- 2 Spirit of the Labyrinth
- 2 Containment Priest
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
This is a list I found from looking over the recent Legacy Open results. I like what’s going on here, and a lot of elements of this deck make sense to me.
Death and Taxes (even though I hate that name…) is a solid strategy that was among the top decks in the format for a while, but got pushed out after the
rise of True-Name Nemesis.
Nemesis itself wasn’t a particularly big issue for the deck, but many of the cards people played to beat it happened to be quite powerful against Death and
Taxes as well. Cards like Toxic Deluge, Massacre, and Golgari Charm aren’t fun to play against on regular basis with a deck full of small white creatures.
Not only that, but Death and Taxes became something of a victim of its own success. The last time I played the deck, I ran into multiple Sulfur Elementals
out of Temur Delver opponents, which were pretty tough to beat.
The biggest difference between this deck and most Death and Taxes lists is simple – the second color. One of the biggest strengths of Death and Taxes has
always been its mono-color manabase, which offers tremendous resilience to Wasteland and Stifle. But with both of those cards on the decline – Stifle in
particular – Blake Kettle decided to branch out to play green off of two Savannahs, four Horizon Canopies, and a couple of Windswept Heaths.
The only green cards in the maindeck are two copies of Gaddock Teeg. Teeg may not be the best card against U/R Delver, but he’s an absolute killer in other
matchups, locking out everything from Dread Return and Terminus to Green Sun’s Zenith and Tendrils of Agony. Gaddock Teeg backed up by a Mother of Runes is
virtually lights out for many decks, so it’s not surprising to see the Kithkin Advisor making an appearance once you decide to play the extra color.
The sideboard has not only a third copy of Gaddock Teeg, but also a Qasali Pridemage and two copies of one of my absolute favorite cards – Choke. Choke is
absolutely devastating against the many Island-heavy decks in Legacy, from U/R Delver to Stoneblade to Sneak and Show. It was one of my favorite sideboard
cards in the format when I was playing Maverick, and it’s even one of my favorite sideboard cards in Modern, so I’m a big fan of Blake’s choice to play it
here.
I’m less convinced by some of his other choices. The Mirran Crusader and the Tower of the Magistrate in the maindeck are particularly suspect to me, and I
have to raise an eyebrow at the maindeck Containment Priests. They’re great against cards like Show and Tell or Green Sun’s Zenith, but work very poorly
with your own Aether Vials, and do nothing against Delver decks. My feeling is that they may belong in the sideboard, though one may be nice as a surprise.
I do like Blake’s choice to play Judge’s Familars, which are great flying creatures to carry equipment that provide excellent disruption against combo and
tempo decks, but certainly not at the expense of any copies of Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, who I think is one of the foremost reasons to play this deck.
And while I think it’s important not to overmetagame, I do think I’d want to pay a bit more heed to possible sideboard cards against U/R Delver, which I
would expect to run into an inordinate amount if I were doing well. I like the idea of playing at least a few copies of Kor Firewalker, which also has a
ton of overlap value against Burn, which is likely to be similarly overrepresented.
If I were playing in Grand Prix New Jersey this weekend, it would probably be with something like this:
Creatures (26)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 3 Gaddock Teeg
- 2 Flickerwisp
- 4 Stoneforge Mystic
- 2 Phyrexian Revoker
- 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 3 Judge's Familiar
- 1 Brimaz, King of Oreskos
- 2 Spirit of the Labyrinth
- 1 Containment Priest
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
I make no claims that this is the best version of this deck available, but I think it’s a good place to start, and I certainly would feel comfortable
taking it into battle.
What do you think? Am I missing anything? What are you taking to Grand Prix New Jersey?