It will take some time to unpack and understand the results of Grand Prix: Philadelphia. Two Goblins decks, one Lion’s Eye Diamond/Auriok Salvagers combo, three aggro-control Threshold decks, a Black/White disruption deck, and a Lightning Rift cycling deck is a Top 8 that nobody could have predicted. The only deck that most people forecast of those decks into the Top 8 was Goblins. To the passing observer, the Top 8 decklists will suggest a metagame and an environment that did not exist.
I polled the StarCityGames.com community on what people expected to Top 8. Not in the wildest imagination could someone have constructed such a unique and bizarre Top 8. The fact of the matter is that in a tournament of 500 and 14 rounds, the cream does rise to the top. In a tournament this massive with such a strong filter for separating the best of the best from the second-best, this Top 8 should neither be underestimated nor assumed to mirror the underlying metagame. There were probably fewer than a dozen threshold decks in the tournament. Certainly, I did not see any and I took a great deal of pleasure walking around observing what people were playing during the course of the event.
In this article, I am going to talk generally about Legacy, the metagame, and then discuss the Flame Vault deck and its multiple incarnations in some detail.
The rumor around the hall on Saturday of the Grand Prix was that Wizards was very disappointed in the turnout. I honestly expected somewhere between 250-400 people at the tournament. Wizards, evidently, forecast around 1000 tournament participants. [Considering just how few people showed up at the Extended GPs the week before, I’m reasonably certain that no sensible person at Wizards expected anywhere near 1000 people. – Knut, who does this stuff all the time] The Grand Prix trial astonished me with a turnout of nearly a hundred players. I would have thought that a tournament of 450+ players in a format with many expensive staples would be a commendable success. I hope Wizards does not construe the turnout as a disaster, because what was experienced in that hall last weekend can only be described as triumphal, in every single respect.
I hesitate to make a claim this bold, but my conviction of its validity grows as I reflect upon it further: Legacy, as it stood at Grand Prix: Philadelphia, appears to be one of the finest Constructed formats I have ever seen. The format is a very vibrant mix of archetypes. Rarely do you see such a deep and diverse mix of aggro, control, and combo – with each counting for a large portion of the metagame.
Some time ago, Ken Krouner wrote an article on metagames. One of the metagames he lauded was the “best deck” metagame. Legacy may well be a “best deck” metagame, where Goblins is the acknowledged and respected best deck. This may well be a good thing, as Ken suggests it can be. A format centered around Red aggro deck has a lot of flexibility and maneuverability. The cutoff appears to be whether decks can compete with Goblins. Unlike many aggro decks, Goblins sets the bar high because it is so fast and powerful.
Everyone I talked to had one overriding, fundamental, baseline criteria for the deck they chose to play: it had to beat Goblins. And yet everyone knew, or should have known, that even piloting a deck that had a “guaranteed” win against Goblins was no guarantee of beating Goblins. By the end of the tournament, only a couple or, at most, three Goblin decks were still in contention out of a field in which a full 25% of the decks were composed of the red men. The decks that made Top 8 were decks that not only beat Goblins, but that were strong enough to handle a diverse mix of control and combo strategies as well. The fact that Goblins still won, despite all of the hate, is certainly testament to its power, but I would caution against inferences that Goblins is therefore problematic. A metagame built around Goblins has a number of things going for it.
Wizards really did a good job in selecting the banned list for Legacy. I can’t imagine there were many people who did not have a good time playing Legacy. Some players were surely frustrated by the Time Vault combo deck – but none really performed so well as to suggest a dominant or even troublesome deck. Many players even had Pithing Needle to help disrupt it. Aggro decks were competing full bore with decks like Iggy Pop.
I watched Nassim Ketita, piloting Iggy Pop, play a round seven or round eight match against Mikey Pustinik who was playing Secret Force. It was game three and in the first two turns, the Iggy Pop player had done nothing more than play two lands and an Impulse. In his three turns, Mike Pustinick had managed to get a Verdant Force into play and had already generated a token on the Iggy Pop player’s third turn. That was the last turn of the match, as the Iggy Pop player comboed out a turn or two before Mike could finish him off. Mike P did the math one more time and twitched in frustration before congratulating his opponent and extending a handshake.
David Gearhart, creator of Solidarity, narrowly missed a Top 8 berth with his deck – a deck that surely would have shaped a different Top 8 result. On the whole, these combo decks appear sane and mild compared to the potential disaster that might have awaited given the depth of the card pool.
The format is highly interactive, appropriately fast, and oodles of fun.
In one of the late matches in Day One, I watched Antonino De Rosa playing his Landstill Enlightened Tutor toolbox variant against a poor Goblins player while Antonino had in play: Moat, Crucible of Worlds, six or seven lands, one of which was Faerie Conclave, and a handful of countermagic and draw spells. His opponent was meekly sitting there trying to Vial out enough men to do something despite being locked under Moat. De Rosa and some other pros apparently found that abusing Enlightened Tutor in a format with cards like Pithing Needle, Moat, and Humility as effective silver bullet strategies was a powerful way to take Landstill. I agree.
Perhaps the most astonishing deck of all was Chris Pikula deck. Before the tournament there was a sense that Black was, by far, the worst color in the format. Despite having amazing cards like Dark Ritual available to them, when I polled about it, many felt that the best, if not the only viable black card in the format, was Cabal Therapy. Clearly this was a bit of an exaggeration as Ill-Gotten Gains certainly got some credit on the weekend. But Chris Pikula deck represents a deck that I don’t think anyone anticipated nor expected to perform. Relying on hand and land destruction in a format where turn one Mountain, Goblin Lackey is the norm is a strategy many write off from the get-go. Chris Pikula deserves all the accolades he can get.
Despite the power level, aggro decks proliferated. I would not be surprised if in the final analysis, non-control and non-combo decks constituted over two-thirds of the field. Following Red, Green was a color that could not be avoided. From Secret Force, to Survival, to Wild Mongrels, to support for Kird Ape, Green was often found doing quite well at the higher tables.
Going in, I think it was expected that we would see a mix of everything. We did, and more. The only deck I expected to see someone play, that I did not see at all, was Life. I saw Gadiel playing Affinity. Plenty of players chose Solidarity, including recent Pro Tour semi-finalist Star Wars Kid. Every mix of aggro configurations you can imagine. I saw plenty of Survival of the Fittest. I enjoyed watching Peter Olszewki play a homebrew Prison variant using Propagandas, Winter Orb, and even Icy Manipulator. I saw numerous Flame Vault variants: B/r, U/r and Stax. I personally faced two burn decks in the first half of Day 1. Lava Spike and Chain Lightning saw plenty of play. People were competing for good money, playing with old favorites, and having a blast doing it. What is not to love about this format?
Flame Vault
With the discovery of the Time Vault + Flame Fusillade combo, my preference was heavily tilted in favor of playing Flame Vault in some variant. I already owned a Time Vault, and once I picked up three more at the time the combo was leaked to me, I was set on using them. I derive great enjoyment from playing cards that from Alpha and Unlimited.
In my last article on Legacy, I introduced one unconventional approach to Flame Vault: situating it within a Stax shell in order to create as many synergies with Time Vault as possible instead of playing it as a simple two card combo.
Now, I’ll show you what I ended up with:
Flame Vault Stax
Stephen Menendian
4 Trinisphere
4 Smokestack
4 Tangle Wire
4 Brainstorm
4 Crucible of Worlds
4 Burning Wish
4 Time Vault
3 Flame Fusillade
4 Volcanic Island
1 Mountain
4 Mox Diamond
2 Bloodstain Mire
2 Wooded Foothills
4 Crystal Vein
4 Ancient Tomb
4 City of Traitors
4 Wasteland
Sideboard:
3 Chalice of the Void
3 Defense Grid
4 Pyroclasm
3 Phyrexian Furnace
1 Boiling Seas
1 Flame Fusillade
The more I tested the deck, the clearer the importance Mox Diamond became. After awhile, Mox Diamond was the one card I always wanted to see in my opening hand. This became true because of how drastically I retooled the mana base. After a great deal of testing and tuning, I discovered that the biggest trick with this deck was learning which lands to play and when. This deck is perfectly willing to destroy its own mana base to secure board advantage. For example:
Turn 1:
Crystal Vien
Turn 2:
City of Traitors. Sacrifice the Crystal Vein to drop Smokestack
Turn 3:
Add a counter to Smokestack.
Tap the City of Traitors. Play Volcanic Island, sacrificing the City, to play Crucible of Worlds becomes a hard lock against many decks.
With twelve lands that provide two mana, many of which you do not want as multiples, Mox Diamond becomes a strong and stable source of mana. There are few plays as strong as turn 1 Trinisphere.
The addition of Brainstorm is what made me feel confident in this deck.
In round one of the Friday night Trial, I sat down against a DredgeMadness/Tog deck, a deck I would play if Time Vault didn’t work out for me. Game One, my opponent mulliganed to six and then played Mox Diamond, Forest, Wild Mongrel.
I dropped Mox Diamond and played Brainstorm. I originally held a mediocre hand with extraneous combo pieces, but the Brainstorm enabled me to play the right mix of cards immediately. I dropped Ancient Tomb and another Mox Diamond to play Trinisphere putting the Vault combo on top of my library. Unfortunately, in response to Trinisphere, my opponent added two Basking Rootwallas to the board. However, I was still able to combo out shortly thereafter.
There are two things that make Brainstorm critical to the Stax deck. The first is the fact that Stax often draws multiple, redundant lock parts. Having an opening hand with more than one Trinisphere is a forced mulligan. The need for an early Trinisphere forces you to run four, increasing the risk of seeing multiples in an opening hand. Likewise, Crucible of the Worlds is not a card you need to see in multiples. Brainstorm + Fetchlands help you fix your opponent hand so you can immediately lock down the game. A deck like Stax has to seal up the game as quickly as possible. Letting your opponent have even a turn of relief can provide a critical opening from which Stax cannot recover. Therefore, it is critical that you maximize your impact on the game as quickly as possible. The second thing that makes Brainstorm so important is the problems inherent in a deck like this in terms of consistency. About one in eight hands is going to look really bad. You may have a one-land hand full of three-mana artifacts. Or, it could be a hand that has all lands and no threats. Brainstorm can fix both hands, and frequently does. Therefore, Brainstorm makes the deck more consistent as well as more powerful.
One of the most important skills with this deck is knowing how to operate Smokestack. It is not a simple matter of just ramping Stack all the time. Ramping it too much too fast is as risky as not ramping sufficiently fast. Here is an example:
In the same match against DredgeAtog, game three, I was on the play. My hand had: Volcanic Island, Volcanic Island, City of Traitors, Trinisphere, Trinisphere, Smokestack and some other card. Here is how that game played out:
Turn One:
I dropped Volcanic Island.
My opponent dropped a Forest and passed.
Turn Two:
I played City of Traitors and then Trinisphere, confident that my opponent would not recover this game.
I felt extremely confident when my opponent missed his second land drop and discarded a card.
Turn Three:
At this point, I have both Trinisphere and Smokestack in hand. Since my opponent missed his second land drop, I decided that dropping the second Trinisphere would be the best play so that I would have another permanent in play to sacrifice once I took the Smokestack active.
My opponent top decked a land and played it.
Turn Four:
I drew another Volcanic Island. So I tapped the City of Traitors, played a Volcanic Island, and dropped Smokestack.
My opponent drew his third land and played it. He then dropped Psychatog.
Turn Five:
I ramped my Smokestack to one soot counter and I played another land and dropped Time Vault.
My opponent untapped, sacrificed a land to the Smokestack. Still on his upkeep, he discarded Golgari Grave-Troll to the Psychatog. He then used the Dredge ability in his draw step to flip six cards into his graveyard, returning the Troll to his hand in the process. Psychatog was now 2/3.
He swung in for two points of damage.
Turn Six:
At this point I looked at his graveyard and counted up his hand, I knew I was dead unless I topdecked Tangle Wire.
If I ramp the Smokestack, it gives him one more half point of damage to use with the Psychatog. I drew nothing relevant and that was game.
I was killed by an opponent on turn 6, with an active Smokestack, turn 2 Trinisphere, and my opponent missed a land drop. In addition, he played a grand total of one spell the whole game.
The point? The point is that it is extremely difficult to know when to start using Smokestack. If I had played the Smokestack on turn three and ramped it on turn four, I would have won. But he missed a land drop and I drew the next land the following turn. How was I supposed to know that a single spell could murder me? I would never have expected that even if he could play a spell, he would only need to play one spell to kill me.
If you ramp Smokestack too fast, you risk having to sacrifice most of your board, giving your opponent an opportunity to start fresh and recover before you do. If you don’t ramp Smokestack fast enough, you may give your opponent a narrow window of opportunity they need to overwhelm you. This is particularly true against Goblins, which can win out of nowhere. It is hard to say whether I made the right play or not. If I had played the Smokestack, I may well have been unable to play the 2nd Trinisphere for several turns, being stuck on two lands. This match put me off on the wrong foot and a bad start, as I was then 0-1 in the trial, losing a match I was certain I was going to win. I only intended to use the Trial as a testing ground to tune my sideboard (which I did).
However, the deck I gave to Paul Mastriano was undefeated and, after round five, locked into Top 8. Here is Paul’s deck.
The week before, Paul and I tested both the Stax Flame Vault variant and the control variant that he ended up playing. I favored the Stax version and he favored the Control list. I felt that the control list was powerful, but lacked the necessary synergies to make the deck much more than a tutor deck. Neither Time Vault nor Flame Fusillade is useful by itself. I was also concerned that this deck may have a poor control match in addition to being more vulnerable to Pithing Needle than the Stax version, which has Smokestack as well as Burning Wishes to remove the Needle. Paul smashed Goblins twice and Landstill, persuading me that the control list probably has the better Goblins match.
While Paul had two rounds of drawing before the Top 8, Rich Shay, myself and Paul sat down to talk about how to tune and fix the Control Vault list. We decided that together we could do better than keeping our lists secret. Rich had two critical pieces of technology: Deep Analysis as the draw engine and Stasis as a way to take advantage of Time Vault. I’ll explain both in turn.
The problem with Accumulated Knowledge in the control match is that it becomes important to find a way to protect your Accumulated Knowledge. Deep Analysis not only draws more cards, but it does not require countermagic protection. Intuition for three Deep Analysis sees you eight cards over the course of a few turns. Moreover, you can Burning Wish for Deep Analysis, another potent synergy.
Stasis was something I had tested in the Stax variant, but I was skeptical of its utility in the control version. The basic point about Stasis is that with Time Vault in play, you can skip a turn, then let Stasis go away, and use the Time Vault to untap fresh. You can also drop Stasis after your opponent has made a big play, and then while they are tapped down, pay for it for a while, buying time. At the worst, Stasis with Time Vault in play becomes Time Walk – which no one has said is a poor card. And at best, it gives you enough time to find the combo parts so that when Stasis goes away, you tap the Time Vault, take another turn, and win on the spot.
Rich Shay, in turn, borrowed our suggested mana base. I pointed out that without Counterspell or an equivalent UU counterspell, there was no need to use such a heavy blue mana base. I suggested that two maindeck Mountains would be very helpful and they would come up a lot under the Brainstorm/Fetchland draw engine. I eventually persuaded Paul to run three mountains, and I ran four myself. We all agreed that the fundamental goal was to make the deck Wasteland proof. Therefore, Paul and I settled on this mana base:
3 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Bloodstain Mire
8 Island
3 Mountain
2 Volcanic Island
4 Chrome Mox
1 Ancient Tomb
Rich was also persuaded of the utility of Chrome Mox, having previously used just two Lotus Petals.
Rich and I played five games of the mirror at around 2am and after we felt that we had a good feel for it, I headed to bed. Rich noted that he really enjoyed those five games and I added that the deck had a really strong feel to it – as if it was something you would expect to see finish highly in a major event.
Paul also explained that we should expect to see Pithing Needle every round. As a result, he suggested that we sideboard in at least two Echoing Ruin/Meltdown every match as Intuition targets. Rich and I both agreed and found that to be a strong part our board plan.
The rest of the deck that Paul and I ran was as follows:
4 Intuition
4 Time Vault
3 Flame Fusillade
4 Force of Will
3 Fire/Ice
1 Pyroclasm
3 Deep Analysis
4 Brainstorm
4 Impulse
4 Burning Wish
Although I had done extensive testing with the Stax variant, I audibled into the Control version at the last minute based solely on the strength of what I felt was a superior Goblins match. My inexperience with the deck proved fatal, along with the fact that I only had a single bye. I made a critical error in my first match against Goblins that cost me game two and game three (relating to the current wording on Goblin King). After my second match loss (to Mono Red Burn), I dropped from the tournament. I should have stuck with my original deck choice simply because I knew it inside and out, and moreover, I enjoyed playing it much more than the Control list. I probably would not have performed significantly better, but I would have had a better time playing it.
In the end, I think both Vault lists are extremely powerful strategies against a wide range of decks. Unfortunately, Goblins is so strong, that the Stax list can’t do much better than split and the control list probably needs Stasis to put it over the top. Paul went 6-2 on Day 1, earning him 65th place on tiebreakers. Ironically, both of his match losses were to decks with Kird Ape, which he could not remove with Pyroclasm.
In the end, I think that Vault proved that it was fair. The highest placing Flame Vault list of which I am aware was Rich Shay, who managed to get 20th place. I think his Stasis technology (combined with Chain of Vapor) proved to be the superior route with the control Vault list.
Vault was certainly present. The dealers were stocked with Vaults, but they weren’t moving very many. People who wanted to play Flame Vault could acquire them. In the end though, the deck doesn’t appear to be a problem. A good number of Vault players tried the deck and came up short. That doesn’t mean Vault won’t make improvements and be a problem in the future, but for now, it appears to be perfectly fair.