As the SCG Invitational in Indianapolis approaches, several people have sent me messages asking what they should consider playing for the Legacy portion of the tournament. Most of these questions are framed as, "Is [insert deck X] a real deck?" or "I just want to play a real deck, what should I play?"
Today’s article is a list of decks I would consider playing, along with a few that I believe are traps for inexperienced Legacy players. I’ll lay out the important cards in each deck, what decks they’re good against, and give a quick rundown of the more popular sideboard options. Let’s start with the new menace on the block: Sneak and Show.
Sneak and Show
Creatures (8)
Lands (19)
Spells (33)
Jonathan’s maindeck is very strong. I like that he has four basic lands. Many other Sneak and Show lists have two or three basic along with the full set of Volcanic Islands, but Jonathan knew better than that. The easiest way for Sneak and Show to lose to RUG Delver is by letting them Wasteland you. If that never happens, Sneak and Show is a strong favorite in the matchup.
When I played against Jonathan, our games went very similarly—he cast cantrips on turns 1 and 2, then played a Sol land to go from two to four mana, cast Show and Tell with Daze protection, and had a counter for my Spell Pierce or Force of Will. This is a fairly reasonable thing to do with Sneak Attack, but his sequencing is important to note here: at no point did he expose his two-mana land to a Wasteland.
Griselbrand is the reason why this deck has exploded in popularity. It is trivial to protect Griselbrand with seven pieces of pitch countermagic (four Force of Will, three Misdirection) and an ability reminiscent of Yawgmoth’s Bargain. Coming as a surprise to no one, you can generally expect to find a seven-outer in the top fourteen cards of your deck.
Once you’ve protected Griselbrand from their removal spell, you will also happen to have around fifteen cards in hand. After you discard down to seven cards, you should be able to resolve another Show and Tell or Sneak Attack next turn.
If you happened to Show and Tell a Sneak Attack and your Griselbrand has haste, your objective is typically to find a Lotus Petal + Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in the top fourteen cards of your library, at which point you can Sneak your 15/15 into play as well, attack for 22, and end the game that turn. Powerful, straightforward, and blue, this deck is everything that people new to the format want to play in the SCG Invitational.
As an aside before we get to sideboarding, I want to talk about Griselbrand and the ubiquitous b-word:
Cedric Phillips went so far as to call for Griselbrand’s banning on air at SCG Open Series: Columbus this past weekend. We live in an era where people are very comfortable calling for bannings in Standard (Vapor Snag, really?), so it’s only natural to expect that attitude to carry over to Legacy.
Let’s be very clear though: Griselbrand is not going to get banned. If anything gets banned, it will be Show and Tell.
When Vengevine Survival took over the format, Survival of the Fittest got the axe. Vengevine currently sees no play.
When ANT and Reanimator were the two biggest decks of the format, Mystical Tutor got the axe. Storm and Reanimator are still decent decks, but they aren’t the tier 1 powerhouses they were with Mystical Tutor.
If Sneak and Show takes over the format, Show and Tell will get the axe.
The philosophy here is very simple and consistent: always ban the card that enables the most degenerate interactions. If you ban the new card and not the old card, you will have to dance around printing quirky new cards that interact too strongly with a powerful old card.
Wizards wants to keep printing Griselbrands and Emrakuls. Those cards are good for the game. Players like those cards. The reason they’re unfair is because several older cards exist that cheat their prohibitive mana costs. Banning Griselbrand would do nothing but send Show and Tell into remission. If Show and Tell’s time is now, so be it. Let’s not pretend the problem is anything other than a card that casts another card for free.
Potential bans aside, let’s talk about Sneak and Show sideboarding. As with any compact combo deck, sideboarding is harder than usual. Jonathan went with a lot of Leylines to maximize his ability to overpower an opponent.
I’m not sure why he has four Leyline of the Void instead of four Grafdigger’s Cage. The two cards are similarly powerful against Dredge and Reanimator, although I suppose it’s possible for a graveyard deck to Therapy, Thoughtseize, or Duress away a Cage on turn 1 but be dead to a turn 0 Leyline of the Void. Given how much disruption the Sneak and Show deck packs, however, the game will go past turn 2. Having Grafdigger’s Cage will be useful, while having the nearly uncastable Leyline of the Void will be far less useful.
Leyline of Sanctity, on the other hand, is an excellent choice for the sideboard. It covers burn, discard, and other spell-based combo decks looking to kill with Tendrils of Agony or Blue Sun’s Zenith. Again, nigh uncastable if you draw it, but this Leyline is powerful enough for that to be an acceptable drawback.
The rest of the sideboard is a mix of bounce, extra countermagic, and a spicy two-of for the mirror: Through the Breach. Sometimes you want to bounce a Blazing Archon or Ensnaring Bridge or twelve Zombie tokens, sometimes you need to counter a Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and sometimes you don’t want to cast Show and Tell. Given the unfortunately symmetrical nature of Show and Tell, it’s important to have a way to beat the mirror. Jonathan chose Through the Breach.
That certainly isn’t the only way to go about winning the mirror, though. Chris Cornwall-Shiel used to play Jace, the Mind Sculptor in his Sneak and show deck. After all, people can’t just let an opposing Jace resolve! Against the mirror, it allows you to sit back on your countermagic and Brainstorm every turn, eventually letting you resolve a Show and Tell for a Sneak Attack then put both legends into play to kill your opponent in the same turn.
If you’re particularly worried about three-color control strategies ruining your day, you could turn to Blood Moon. Both RUG and BUG have very few outs to a resolved Blood Moon, while you can fetch your basic Islands beforehand to ensure that your cantrips and Show and Tells remain castable.
Leyline of Sanctity does a lot of work against BUG’s targeted discard plan and Jonathan has said that he believes RUG to be a fine matchup. Still, the option is there if you’re worried about other non-basics; say, Karakas-heavy Maverick builds?
Maverick
Creatures (25)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 2 Aven Mindcensor
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 3 Qasali Pridemage
- 2 Scavenging Ooze
- 3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
- 1 Ulvenwald Tracker
Planeswalkers (1)
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
Todd Anderson may have gone over to the dark side for the SCG Legacy Open in Columbus, but there isn’t a better fair deck than Maverick in Legacy. I’ve written a fairly extensive primer on the deck here, but, as always, things have changed in the past three months. How would I recommend building Maverick nowadays?
Your top two enemies are RUG and Sneak and Show. Both decks are weak to Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, so any reasonable list starts with four of her. So much of Maverick’s game plan revolves around stymying spell-heavy decks, making Thalia a natural fit.
You’re weak to Sneak and Show on a tactical level—you have no countermagic, they have a bunch of cantrips, their kill condition is unaffected by Gaddock Teeg—so I originally wanted to play two Karakas main and two more in the sideboard along with three Qasali Pridemage main and the fourth in the sideboard.
Karakas is the one card that answers both Griselbrand and Emrakul regardless of whether or not they have haste. Since Sneak and Show currently has no answers to Karakas—they play Echoing Truth over Wipe Away as their bounce spell—you only really need to get one Karakas into play. If they have a Sneak Attack, you need only Pridemage their Sneak Attack then Karakas their legendary creature.
Todd was kind enough to recommend a better sideboard plan given Karakas’ safety in the matchup. He agreed with playing two Karakas maindeck, but he wanted to play two Crop Rotation in the sideboard. His rationale was that Crop Rotation lets you play two more virtual Bojuka Bogs against Dredge while also playing an effective four Karakas against Sneak Attack.
Altogether, my ideal list looks like this:
Creatures (24)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 1 Aven Mindcensor
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 3 Qasali Pridemage
- 1 Fauna Shaman
- 1 Scavenging Ooze
- 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
Planeswalkers (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (11)
Sideboarding with Maverick is fairly straightforward, although the wealth of options and Tutors may dazzle you.
Gideon and Linvala are primarily for the mirror.
Crop Rotation goes with Bojuka Bog and Karakas as redundancy against Dredge and Sneak and Show.
Harmonic Sliver is your fifth Qasali Pridemage but also comes in against RUG, where you can’t really beat a Cursed Totem otherwise.
Maze of Ith is for decks that will try to race you.
Spike Feeder is a better Kitchen Finks, since no self-respecting red mage will ever let Kitchen Finks trigger twice. It also kills Bridge from Below for no cost at instant speed.
Path to Exile is for RUG Delver. Don’t get fooled—it’s fine in the mirror, but it’s not as good as you think it is. You need it against RUG, though, since you lose to Insectile Aberration an inordinate amount of the time.
Scavenging Ooze is a solid midrange creature with obvious applications against Snapcaster Mage and Putrid Imp.
Feel free to ask how to sideboard with the deck, but please try to come up with a plan first. I’m happy to help, but I’m less interested in helping those that don’t want to put in any work of their own. I promise I’ll respond to a post that explains your thought process and rationales behind your tentative sideboarding decisions.
If you want to play a very consistent, decision-heavy blue deck, look no further than the format’s boogeyman: RUG Delver.
RUG Delver
Creatures (12)
Lands (19)
Spells (29)
Last weekend’s winning decklist is all over the place. I have to admit that I don’t understand a lot of the decisions behind it. The mana base is a solid nineteen land, but Eric is playing a basic Island and a Taiga with three Wooded Foothills and only five of the eight blue Zendikar fetchlands. Given the presence of Scavenging Ooze in the maindeck and the presence of a Kitchen Finks in the sideboard, I would have liked to see a fourth green source somewhere in the deck.
I’m not entirely sure why Eric wanted a Fire / Ice over a second Forked Bolt; I understand that they’re different cards, but the deck wants Fire a lot more than it wants Ice. Furthermore, Forked Bolt is important because it costs one—the relevance of its ability to deal with summoning sick Mother of Runes cannot be overstated.
I’m also not going to get into his sideboard, as I can only assume that Eric won a bet by winning the tournament with those fifteen cards. Congratulations to Eric on both that and his SCG Legacy Open victory.
I actually like Stifle in RUG Delver at this point. The rise of Griselbrand and Dredge (think Narcomoeba and Cephalid Coliseum) has given Stifle enough targets in enough top decks to warrant its inclusion.
With that said, Spell Snare is pretty awful. How many relevant two-mana cards are there nowadays? Stoneforge Mystic has almost entirely disappeared. Scavenging Ooze arrives via Green Sun’s Zenith more than half of the time anyway. Tarmogoyf is a bona fide threat, but that only exists in RUG Delver. Combo decks have no two-drops anymore. Everything costs either one or three mana.
I would be fine cutting Spell Snare from RUG Delver entirely for the SCG Invitational, replacing it with a mix of Spell Pierces and Chain Lightnings. You still need to be able to kill a Scavenging Ooze and Stoneforge Mystic before they go active, so upping the red spell count is necessary. Spell Pierce is also still the bee’s knees in Legacy, but you knew that already.
I still think Thought Scour is entirely necessary if you’re playing Nimble Mongoose. The card doesn’t do enough without Thought Scour, and your clock isn’t fast enough to beat today’s combo decks if you aren’t opening with a reasonable clock. "Nimble Mongoose, go," is not a reasonable clock.
If you don’t want to durdle around with Nimble Mongoose but you do want to flip Delver of Secrets on turn 2, may I suggest playing U/R Delver?
U/R Delver
Creatures (14)
Lands (18)
Spells (28)
When Glenn Jones isn’t covering the SCG Open Series, he can often be found at the top tables of a tournament. He’s a solid player, a solid thinker, and one of the top players in WoW TCG, a game that shares a lot of similarities with Magic. When he does well, his list is generally well thought out. This one is no exception.
The reason to play U/R Delver is to be a faster version of RUG Delver. You are the aggressive version of the RUG aggro-control deck. You typically present a fast clock and back it with both burn and countermagic, giving a combo deck far less time to mess around perfecting their hand.
The creature suite is fairly standard—eight one-drops that are all respectable clocks against a combo deck is the first departure from RUG, where you only want Delver of Secrets on your first turn against an Ancient Tomb deck. Snapcaster Mage means that this deck values all of its lands, leading the deck toward basics and more fetchlands instead of Wastelands and more dual lands.
The counter suite—two Daze, three Spell Pierce, four Force of Will—indicates that Glenn is planning on holding mana up for most of the game. This plays into his Snapcaster Mage dynamic appropriately. Spell Pierce is also a much more desirable Snapcaster Mage target than Daze, leading me to wonder why he decided to split his counters 3/2 instead of 4/1. Force of Will is correct in this deck as a four-of, as U/R Delver can recoup lost card advantage with Snapcaster Mage into Ponder or Brainstorm.
The burn suite—two Forked Bolt, three Chain Lightning, four Lightning Bolt, one Price of Progress, and one Fireblast—tells another story. Glenn understands that he may have to point early burn spells at opposing creatures, so he’s playing a pair of Forked Bolts to try and get some value out of burning an early x/1 out of Maverick.
He’s also playing a pair of top-end burn spells that he’ll want to deal the final four damage. Since Price of Progress wants to be cast as late as possible, a second copy can rot in your hand. Furthermore, when Price of Progress is bad it’s really bad. Having a second copy when the first copy is a dead card is game losing.
In a similar vein, a second Fireblast is rarely going to be castable in a deck with eighteen lands and six actual Mountains, only two of which are basics. Both cards are fine finishers, but their respective drawbacks make splitting them a smart decision.
Glenn’s sideboard is fairly straightforward: Gilded Drake is a strong anti-Show and Tell card that will likely see more play in the next few weeks. It’s superior to Sower of Temptation, not just because it costs half as much off the top but because you can basically "evoke" it against Dredge just to get their Bridges. Not great, but not awful.
He has four pieces of graveyard hate, including three Surgical Extractions that are correct for a deck that plays four Snapcaster Mage.
Sulfur Elemental and Submerge are old hats against Maverick at this point. Given U/R Delver’s more aggressive bent, Cursed Totem would not be correct over Sulfur Elemental here as Sulfur Elemental furthers the deck’s plan of "getting them dead ASAP" whereas RUG Delver has a more robust long game.
Generally speaking, sideboarding decisions should be made with the deck’s overall plan in mind. Since the overall plan of U/R Delver is to get them dead as fast as possible, playing a two-mana card that doesn’t replace itself and doesn’t deal damage at any point in the game is a poor choice for inclusion. Since RUG Delver operates differently, Cursed Totem is fine there.
TL;DR: Think about it before calling it good. Or bad.
A deck that I would never play but plenty of people probably will anyway…
…is any and every Stoneforge Mystic deck. Despite being terribly positioned against both Nimble Mongoose and Show and Tell, people love their Tundras and will play Stoneforge Mystic into Batterskull anyway. Don’t be that guy. Stoneblade was a fine choice at the SCG Invitational in Baltimore but that was months ago, and Lingering Souls and Stoneforge Mystic haven’t gotten any better since then.
Really, what happens if they light up your turn 2 Mystic? You’re this awkward deck with a bunch of threes, fours, and fives. Good luck against the deck with Wastelands, Dazes, Spell Pierces, and Stifles.
Another deck that I think is pretty terrible but plenty of people love…
…is that adorable U/W Miracles deck. It has the same weakness to Show and Tell as U/W Stoneblade without the potential to actually clock them with any regularity. What do you do against a Sneak Attack? What about a Griselbrand? Do you think your Terminus is going to resolve? That Banishing Stroke is cute, but what happens when the stars don’t align perfectly?
What about when your Terminus’ miracle trigger gets Stifled? You’re just dead to their Delver + Mongoose, right?
Entreat the Angels is kind of like Decree of Justice, but Decree of Justice hasn’t been good since 2007.
Temporal Mastery is still a bad Explore in a 20-land deck. You were going to win the game anyway if you’re untapping with Jace in play.
If you want to attack the format from a different angle…
…start with Vendilion Clique. It can’t be Spell Pierced, it can’t be Misdirected, it trades with Nimble Mongoose and Delver of Secrets, and it goes in a lot of decks. Want to win the Sneak and Show mirror? This might be your card.
Good luck in Worcester!
@drewlevin on Twitter