Why is Landstill so fearsome?
In Vintage, Landstill is at best a tier three deck. Although it seems to be a favorite of Vintage Supercomputer Phil Stanton, it rarely places well and is certainly not considered as the cutting edge of Type I. Why is it that in Legacy, the deck is such a strong contender?
Before we embark on that question, I want to thank and praise StarCityGames for sponsoring their “Duel for the Duals” Legacy event back in September. It’s great that they are willing to support the format with such a huge payout – 100 dual lands were given out as prizes so it’s a little shocking that more people didn’t show up. There were almost twice as many duals given out as participants. I guess those of you attending Grand Prix: Philly can only hope for such a low attendance.
On top of that, I want to personally thank them for making the event on Sunday. I know that may be really inconvenient for many of you, but for those of us with beanies (that really can’t play on Saturdays), it’s a huge opportunity for us.
Anywho, back to business: Steve Menendian has allegedly stated that he believes Landstill is unworthy of its current Legacy crown, or at least that it’s not as good as it seems. If it is actually true that he claimed that, I see it perhaps tainted by his perception of Legacy as a stripped-down Vintage and/or a format unexplored, but he is certainly entitled to believe whatever misperception he may have. Personally, I know enough to say that Landstill is definitely a strong Legacy deck, and for obvious reasons. I also feel pretty confident that Smennen doesn’t really think Landstill is a bad deck, although his recent article on Illusions/Donate in Legacy implies that he may not be fully aware of its potency.
It’s all about the building blocks. (Queue the “Benjamins” music…) As a well-versed Vintage player, Steve comes from a world where the basic building blocks of Vintage are the restricted list, plus the standard Blue spells that make up the base for every new deck in Vintage:
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
4 Accumulated Knowledge
3 Intuition
2 Cunning Wish
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
Yes, I’m exaggerating – not every deck uses the above; but if you think about it, the dominance of Blue in Type I means that you are most likely going to draw from the list above to build your deck. If you aren’t, then you’re probably playing Goblins, piloting Stax, or doing something wrong.
In Legacy, it’s not that simple. Since the format lacks the game-swingy bombs on the Vintage restricted list, it has to fall back on more cohesive collections of cards to build from. This means that Legacy deck construction hinges more on “building blocks” rather than individual broken cards. It also means that despite the huge card pool, there is actually a very restricted range of available tools (read: good cards) to use, many of which are highly conditional.
In an effort to clarify, let me provide an example. Often, Vintage players debate which draw engine they should use in their decks. Intuition/AK? Thirst for Knowledge? Skeletal Scrying? Merchant Scroll for Ancestral Recall or Gifts Ungiven? Cunning Wish for Fact or Fiction? In this way, these draw engines are the building blocks of modern Vintage.
Legacy has its own building blocks, but even more so. As an environment that relies less on game-ending turns a la Meandeck Gifts and more on solidified, cohesive strategies; Legacy’s building blocks are actually narrower than those in Vintage due to the lack of power. For example, Merchant Scroll doesn’t really pack the same punch when you can’t pull up Ancestral, and while Intuition/AK is still strong, it lacks Mana Drain to fuel it. You don’t have Vampiric Tutor in the sideboard that lets a Cunning Wish grab anything in your deck. As a result, some of the dynamics change, and Legacy has its own distinct flavors and considerations when determining the various packages and engines available.
Without game-swinging, power-dripping cards, it is a lot harder to break the cost-to-benefit ratio that exists in current Legacy staples. Since any card that helps reap more benefit from Yawgmoth’s Will has a place in Vintage, there is a larger framework to explore new options. That’s why Burning Wish, for example, is restricted in Vintage; but can fit four slots in a Legacy deck – there’s nothing uber-busted to find with it – or rather there probably wasn’t until Flame Fusillade anyway, but that’s an article for another time. [Some pundits have mentioned privately that they think Burning Wish may be the best card in Legacy right now, but I’m not sure they’d feel as strongly without Fusillade around. – Knut]
As a whole, Legacy decks can’t afford to branch out or deviate from the standard selection of spells because the end of the chain may not bring as much benefit. In Vintage, you can just fetch some restricted brokenness and play that to make up for all of the invested effort, in Legacy, that’s not always a realistic possibility. An example would be playing Academy Rector in Rector Tendrils. As a four-mana 1/2 White creature, it saw Type 1 play because it could fetch Yawgmoth’s Bargain. It didn’t matter that in any other Vintage context, Rector would be considered too expensive. Since it gets Bargain, it was played. It was worth sinking four mana into it, setting up Cabal Therapy, and dodging graveyard hate; since if it worked, you won. The benefit of putting Bargain into play far exceeded the cost. Legacy doesn’t have too many of these scenarios.
So unlike Vintage, there is a lot more reliance on engines/packages for the whole deck, not just one component. Whereas Vintage may be able to substitute a removal suite with Wish-for-Answer-X and a gajillion ways to find the Wish, Legacy can’t really afford to take that same approach. It tends to rely on deck space for answers, rather than taking a find-the-singleton response. In Vintage, we hear things like, “I maindeck a Rebuild to combat Stax,” or “I should have had a Chain of Vapor maindeck to address XYZ.” That would never fly in Legacy. There simply isn’t enough raw draw power in the format cheap enough to make a singleton be consistent enough. (For more on this subject, Mark “Beautiful Struggle” Young weighed in here. Sorry Mark, but you chose the series title; not me.)
As a result, Legacy decks are forced to look at whole packages to fulfill needs for a given environment – and that takes up a lot more deck space. Unsurprisingly, decks in Legacy are actually quite tight – there is little wiggle room to add novelties without compromising deck integrity. For that reason, draw engines, removal suites, discard packages, and permission bundles play an even more important component to deck construction in Legacy than they do in Vintage.
With that in mind, let’s review the various building blocks available to Legacy, and discuss them where appropriate. In the process, we’ll look at Kyle Boggeme’s successful Landstill deck as a means of illustration. When perusing the lists, you’ll notice that they clearly fall into four major categories:
- mainstream engines
- situational yet effective mechanisms
- debated or niche alternatives
- rogue choices that have not yet proven themselves but may possibly be worth looking at, under the right conditions.
By all means, none of the lists will be exhaustive, but serve as a pretty solid framework for understanding what tools are available. If you stray too far from the mainstream choices, you risk sacrificing efficiency and efficacy; so you often have no choice but to work with the most common choices.
Draw Engines; or “Ma, Look! I’ve got a full hand and bad jokes!”
Mainstream:
Brainstorm, Fact or Fiction, Intuition/Accumulated Knowledge, Skeletal Scrying
Situational:
Standstill, Kiki-Jiki/Goblin Recruiter/Goblin Matron, Thoughtcast, Weathered Wayfarer, Thirst for Knowledge, Survival of the Fittest/Squee
Alternative:
Night’s Whisper, Serum Visions/Sleight of Hand, Mask of Memory, Breakthrough/Mental Note, Gamble/Spoils of the Vault, Opt/Impulse/Meditate, Control of the Court/Goblin Lore, Scroll Rack
Rogue:
Phyrexian Arena, Graveborn Muse, Wirewood Symbiote/Multani Acolyte/Fierce Empath/Wirewood Herald, Gifts Ungiven, Cycling
I should note that my classification of “draw engine” is purposely vague. For clarity, I will simply say that I classify an engine as a set of cards that provide a deck enough card advantage to do its job. As a relatively amorphous description, it aptly precludes every tutor and cantrip ever printed from being included while not restricting the list from those individual cards that may stand on their own.
It should be immediately apparent that the mainstream draw engines are all instants that see several cards, and reside in blue or black. The established situational cards are also played heavily in their namesake decks; Landstill, Goblins, Survival, etc. Only Thirst for Knowledge hasn’t really found a perfect home yet, but as a powerful Blue instant-speed draw spell, it is always on the radar when a deck can actually use it.
The alternatives are found in a variety of decks that have specific needs. These make the alternative or niche choices suit them better than the established ones. Some of these decks are quite viable, but most of the choices here are probably not worth looking at outside of those decks.
For example: Black decks that rely on threshold or stocking their graveyards (e.g. Reanimator), or W/B decks running Samurai of the Pale Curtain may not be able to utilize Scrying, so they can lean on Night’s Whisper instead. The suite of sorcery-speed Blue one-mana cantrips are acceptable in decks like Gro; Mental Note and Breakthrough are good for decks like Reanimator and Threshhold/Not Quite Gro; but not much else. The one-mana “risky tutors” package is suited for certain combo builds like Belcher or Doomsday, but would never really be played elsewhere. Finally, since Solidarity can only play Reset on the opponent’s turn, the instant-speed cantrips Opt and Impulse are often used. Occasionally, Solidarity runs Meditate as well. Mask of Memory is often considered as an inclusion in critter decks.
(Note that I am including relatively unsuccessful decks like Belcher. Even though they may be awful, they still demonstrate how the “engines” like Spoils/Gamble can be used in a deck. You would be hard pressed to find anything better than those eight one-mana tutors in a deck like Belcher, so even though the deck may be terrible, the “engine” is still worth looking at if the deck ever gets new tools that make it viable.)
The only unproven contenders in that category are the “Red Brainstorm” from the soon-to-be legalized Portal sets, Goblin Lore and Control of the Court. For two mana, they draw four cards; so even if they may force you to discard three cards at random, they have enough draw power to be worthy of exploration. Any deck that likes cards in the graveyard should probably test it out, and a deck like Burning Tog might find it particularly powerful. Since it stocks the graveyard, a Psychatog could remove it from the game once played to be re-fetched for use again; all in an effort to simply feed Dr. Teeth. If you wanted to stay on-color, Sarcatog is a possibility, too. (Don’t think I’m crazy – the Italian Vintage players sometimes ran Sarcatog as a win condition in their Type I decks. It’s not a new idea.)
As for the “rouge” choices, all of these engines have not yet proven successful in Legacy. Some of them have some potential -the bouncing elves combo has been used nicely in Food Chain Elves (a.k.a. Darwin’s Revenge), that uses Fierce Empath to fetch Myojin of Life’s Web and the like, and dump huge fatties onto the table with alarming consistency. Graveborn Muse can draw huge quantities of cards in the right deck while serving as a sizable threat, but I haven’t seen a good build that can take advantage of him. Gifts Ungiven has yet to be broken in Legacy, despite proving its worth in Vintage and Block. (Kind of odd that it hit the two extremes of card pool size and nothing in the middle yet, huh?) Phyrexian Arena seems like it could be used, but I have never seen it employed successfully. Cycling decks that run Lightning Rift have also shown some promise, although they are still considered rogue.
A word about Scroll Rack: despite all of the potential removal that could hit Scroll Rack, when combined with fetchlands and/or Survival of the Fittest, or even tutors like Sakura-Tribe Elder; it can be quite good. I have yet to see anyone on the scene really advocate it heavily, but there is a possibility that it is underutilized. (Kudos to Mike from H&F in SAT, who brought it up to me.)
Hey Romeo: perhaps it would make a nice challenge for a Right Field Legacy deck? Because you know I’m really shameless about promoting the format. Since you posted that G/w deck in one of your recent articles, I figured I might be able to recruit you for some goods. (Wait! Keep reading, Chris, there are more potshots and jibjabs for you later.)
There are obviously many, many other rogue methods of draw that could be employed; but I chose to restrict my list to those most likely to be used. Note that White and Green are basically absent on these lists; whereas Red, the color that is thematically opposed to card advantage through draw, is significantly represented. (R&D, you hear that? You hear that, punk? …Just kidding.)
After surveying the available draw engines, it should be clear that Landstill has a very effective draw package, perhaps the most efficient in the format. Here’s a build that placed in the Top 8 of the 2005 Legacy Championship:
Lands (25)
Spells (35)
- 4 Brainstorm
- 3 Nevinyrral's Disk
- 4 Counterspell
- 2 Wrath of God
- 4 Force of Will
- 4 Swords to Plowshares
- 2 Disenchant
- 2 Mana Leak
- 4 Standstill
- 2 Decree of Justice
- 2 Crucible of Worlds
- 2 Fact or Fiction
Sideboard
There are twelve cards in this deck that draw cards. If we push aside the two Decree of Justice (which are intended as a win condition rather than a supplemental draw engine), the deck runs 4 Brainstorm, 4 Standstill, and 2 Fact or Fiction. (Notably, some builds interchange Eternal Dragon with DoJ, which can provide even more card advantage over the long haul.)
Brainstorm is sort of an auto-include for the obvious reasons; it lets you see three new cards and gives you a card quality that helps you dig for the card you need. Combined with fetchlands, it’s clearly a very powerful fixer. Standstill, though, is what helps make Landstill so formidable. It is without a doubt one of the most mana-efficient draw spells in the format – two mana for three cards – and as a result, it is a huge boon to the deck despite the fact it’s not an instant.
There few other cards in the format that will consistently net as much pure-draw CA as they cost in mana. Think about the analogues: The only comparisons are Thoughtcast, which is basically a one-mana sorcery that results in +1 CA (i.e. draws two cards, for those of you have trouble with math); the four-mana Goblin Ringleader, which occasionally reveals four goblins for +4 CA (alternatively, it costs three due to Warchief and reveals three gobbos on average); and Meditate, which nets you +3 CA for three mana.
These comparisons are not minor – Affinity has always been a major contender outside of the Eternal formats, Goblins has been a premiere aggro deck in just about every format known to magekind (albeit even those formats that could not abuse the Ringleader), and Meditate is sometimes used in Solidarity (the only known successful Legacy combo deck) and comes with quite a hefty drawback. As far as I know, only Ancestral Recall gets more pure-draw CA than it costs (one-mana for +2 CA). The only exceptions to all of the above are Accumulated Knowledge and Mind’s Desire, which can technically exceed the CA-CC threshold, but do not do so without some significant setup beforehand. So you can see how strong Landstill can be. (For the record: most often, Intuition/AK is 7 mana for 7 cards at the cost of two cards = +5 CA; so if not viewed in a vacuum, it’s generally not as technically efficient as Standstill; but still overwhelmingly strong.)
After Standstill and Brainstorm, a pair of undeniably potent Fact or Fiction rounds out the remaining slots of the deck’s draw engine. Fact or Fiction needs no introduction; it is widely accepted to be one of the most powerful draw spells ever printed and can bury an opponent in CA. What do you do when Landstill turns over Swords, FoW, Standstill, Crucible, and Mana Leak? How do you even begin to pull yourself out from under whatever combination of cards your opponent takes? At four mana, FoF is expensive and thus probably not well suited as a playset, but with Brainstorms and Standstills, it doesn’t take long to find it. Once you do, your opponent has to dig his or her way out, and by the time they do, it can be too late.
Draw, however, is not the only thing that makes Landstill a strong deck. It packs a hefty removal suite, too, which means that the deck is well prepared against the field. Before we get too detailed in our analysis, let’s explore the removal options in Legacy.
Removal Suites: Spot Removal
Mainstream:
Swords to Plowshares, Lightning Bolt, Magma Jet, Fire/Ice;
Situational:
REB/Pyroblast, BEB/Hydroblast, Lava Dart, Seal of Cleansing
Alternative:
Diabolic Edict, Smother, Gilded Drake;
Viridian Shaman, Gorilla Shaman;
Innocent Blood, Chainer’s Edict
Rogue:
Contagion, Sickening Shoal, Shining Shoal, Sinkhole, Submerge, Vindicate, Chain of Vapor, Spark Spray, Death Spark
Removal Suites: Mass Removal
Mainstream:
Nevinyrral’s Disk, Pernicious Deed;
Situational:
Powder Keg, Engineered Explosives, Wrath of God
Alternative:
Akroma’s Vengeance, Pox
Rogue:
Mutilate, Infest, Hideous Laughter, Massacre;
Starstorm, Oblivion Stone, Rebuild, Hurkyl’s Recall
Without even remotely considering all of the rogue options, the lists above summarize the basic removal suite available in Legacy. As expected, the usual suspects are ubiquitous, and for good reason. The mainstream choices for spot removal are all versatile and/or efficient, and the situational bombs sit in many sideboards.
Among the alternatives, the impressive array of black utility would probably get better attention if Black was actually a popular Legacy color. Among the selection of black removal, Smother is probably the best; it hits almost anything. As an instant, it is certainly better than the sorcery-speed Edicts that will never amount to much against Landstill, and unlike Diabolic Edict it hits the creature of your choice. The only popular creatures it doesn’t hit are Kiki-Jiki and Siege-Gang Commander, two cards that most likely wouldn’t be removed by Edicts anyway; even though both are killed by all of the mainstream creature removal listed above (barring Goblin King or other exceptions).
Speaking of Goblin King…
public void rant() throws com.starcitygames.njx.WTF_Exception { /*
Allow the technogeek in me to engage in a little side rant on the Ninth Edition errata: What The Heck Were They Thinking?! Assume you have Goblin Warchief on the table – look what Ninth’s new errata did:
BEFORE
Goblin King, 1RR, 2/2
All of your Goblins gain +1/+1 and mountainwalk.
“King Nothing? Who am I? How did I get here?”
AFTER
Goblin King, RR, 2/2 Haste
All of your other Goblins gains +1/+1 and mountainwalk; including other Goblin Kings.
When Goblin Lackey hits an opponent, you may dump Goblin King on the table.
If you played Goblin Matron, feel free to pluck this card and plop it into your grip.
Goblin Recruiter’s triggered ability lets you draw this card.
1R, Sacrifice Goblin King: Deal 2 damage to target creature or player. Use this ability only if you control a Siege-Gang Commander.
Goblin King may even be sacrificed for Goblin Grenade.
[blah blah more goblin synergy blah blah]
“I summon all of our brethren everywhere, from the descendants of Ib Halfheart to those who guard Kookus. I am the great Nabob, Moggskirk Flargakkimons Krarkkyren. Fear me like you have feared no goblin before.”
How is that not a stupid broken errata? Yeah, I know it should have been a Goblin from the get-go, but let me tell you that is not just some “flavor change.” That is more like, “Gee, how can we make some dollar rare from Alpha become the most broken tribal leader ever? Let’s piss off every collector who ever owned a set of Beta Goblin Kings by errata-ing them so that their value doubles right after they sold them!”
Dude, I’m sorry, but King is now officially “friggin’ psycho.” That’s F – R – I – G – {Bearl} – I – {Bearl}; P – S – {Bearl} – C – {Bearl} – O, for the Minnesotans who can’t seem to get rid of that really absurd lingo.
I hope Tivadar’s Crusade is reprinted in the Ravnica block. Heck, I hope Tivadar himself finds its way into my boosters at the prerelease. (And no, I have no knowledge of him seeing print; it’s just wishful thinking.)
*/ } //end rant()
Among the remainder of the spot removal alternatives, Firebolt is nice because it is cheap burn that can be fetched via Burning Wish, and then flashbacked so that the next wish can grab it. Chain Lightning was a former staple now replaced by Magma Jet, since so many people are now running mountains of their own it might come back and bite you in the face; and as a sorcery it was less than helpful against Landstill.
Gilded Drake works well in conjunction with Waterfront Bouncer and is essentially the cheapest creature removal for mono-Blue decks. However, since it’s so easy to splash for Swords to Plowshares, it probably isn’t worth running Gilded Drake without some way to abuse it. The Shamans are both worth considering when the manabase supports them, although Gorilla Shaman is much less useful in an environment that doesn’t run many moxen. It can eat Pithing Needles and Aether Vials though.
As for the rogue selection, it’s all available, but I don’t foresee any of them becoming staples any time soon, although Vindicate would probably be more commonplace if it had a good home. The only reason I include Sinkhole here is because of the prevalence of manlands.
As enchantment and artifact removal, there’s not much to talk about. You generally run one of the White or Green Disenchant variants. Since it’s not uncommon to be splashing white for Swords anyway, Disenchant usually makes the cut. If you aren’t running white or green and for some reason can’t afford to splash, you generally run blue for Echoing Truth.
Unlike in Vintage, where Seal of Cleansing is generally preferred, Legacy decks tend to run Disenchant so that it can also be wished for in the board if necessary, or more often because the surprise value is more important. When playing against Landstill, a Seal of Cleansing will just sit there, because your opponent will know not to activate their Mishra’s Factory. With Disenchant, the surprise value will allow you to stunt the Landstill player’s manabase by unexpectedly blowing up the Factory when he or she activates it. (Yes, “he or she.” My wife insists.) The Legacy decks that run Seal of Cleansing are those that generally prefer enchantments, such as those decks that also run Enlightened Tutor.
When it comes to mass removal, Legacy has quite a lot to choose from. The most common forms of mass removal are Disk and Deed, which address all types of nonland permanents and even deal with manlands and artifact lands. Decks with a heavy white component like Landstill tend to lean on Wrath and the occasional Akroma’s Vengeance. Cheap sideboarded bombs like Energy Flux and Serenity deal with artifact heavy decks, the latter serving well against enchantments, too. Powder Keg and Engineered Explosives are also worthy tools in the right decks.
Historically, Black Legacy decks occasionally ran Pox for its disruptive qualities, but it fits this niche too so I listed it here as well. Since Wrath and Pyroclasm see play, it’s not out of the question to think that Infest and Mutilate could be used if black ever starts posting better numbers. (I think it will, but as of now it still lags behind.) Starstorm cycles, which makes it worthy of consideration or even a possible wish target in unusual circumstances. Spark Spray cycles as well, and there are a lot of X/1s in the format; which is why Death Spark might be useful. It seems to me that Death Spark in particular could be a mirror match bomb in Goblins, where there would be no shortage of ways to recur it.
Surveying the above build of Landstill, it shouldn’t surprise you that again, it utilizes some of the best elements of the list. The real secret, though, is the sheer volume of answers it has.
With a full set of S2P, three Disks, a pair of Wraths and two Disenchants; the Landstill build above contains a total of eleven removal spells. Nine of those removal spells deal with creatures. Five of them deal with enchantments and artifacts. These statistics even err on the side of caution, as Disenchants can kill opposing Factories and Wastelands address manlands as well. So there’s even more “creature” kill than you may have initially assumed.
From the sideboard, Landstill can bring in another pair of artichantment kill and two more Divine Retributions, upping the total removal count to seventeen; with eleven aimed at scrapping critters and seven capable of obliterating other stuff. On top of that, red decks will have to face a full set of BEBs, which ups the removal count even more. With a total of four Swords, four Wraths, four BEBs, and three Disks; Goblin decks have trouble with Landstill even without Sphere of Law or COP: Red in the board. More than 25% of the postboard deck can be goblin removal; and that’s not even including the counterspells.
Eight of those spells in the Goblin matchup can cost only a single mana – so like its draw package, Landstill packs very efficient answers. On top of that, no other deck in the field currently runs nearly as much removal. Combined with the overwhelmingly strong draw engine, it’s not surprising that Landstill is quite the contender.
Removal and draw, however, are not the only important building blocks that make up your average Legacy decks. Another critical component is disruption. As an abstract, disruption comes in several forms; but the principal methods are discard, permission, and mana denial. Other forms of disruption exist as well (graveyard hate, for example) but are not as important.
Studying the available list of disruptive tools also provides a huge insight into why Eternal formats in general are so badly skewed: There is virtually no disruption in Green; which really only has “antidisruption.” Green stops counterspells via Xantid Swarm, and cards like Troll Ascetic render targeted removal useless; but Green generally can’t disrupt the opponent’s game plan, only prevent the answers from coming. There’s tons of primary disruption (discard, permission, etc.) in Black and Blue, but little in the other colors.
Speaking of skewed, I have a return shout-out for Chris “Super Mario” Romeo. Chris, we need some more diversity here. Share the love – those Swedish models are taking too much of it. We need to get some more cultural exposure – more Tyra Banks and Halle Berry, more Parminder Nagra and Aishwarya Rai, along with more Ming Na and Kaori Manabe. Especially more Kaori Manabe. (She apparently even plays Type I.) And FrummyChick wants equal-opportunity cheesecake links of Denzel, and Sheila McDougal agrees. (Hey – I’m just the messenger here. I do want dinner tonight, ya know.)
Also, Chris, everyone I know thinks you should start naming your decks after supermodels. I think you should be a good man and follow suit, calling all of your decks “Luanne 1,” “Luanne 2,” etc. (That will make sure you get dinner. Of course, your wife seems to be a lot more lenient about the cheesecake than mine. Although FrummyChick does bake a mean cheesecake…) Thanks for hearing us all out; peace out, Luigi.
As Mark Young would say, back to work.
Disruption Packages
Mainstream:
Force of Will, Counterspell, Mana Leak, Orim’s Chant;
Duress, Cabal Therapy, Wasteland;
Situational:
REB/Pyroblast, BEB/Hydroblast, Stifle, Abeyance;
Xantid Swarm, Pyrostatic Pillar, Arcane Laboratory, Rule of Law;
Propaganda, Elephant Grass, Chill, Energy Flux;
COP: Red, Sphere of Law
Alternative:
Distress, Wrench Mind, Misdirection, Daze, Forbid, Dissipate;
Null Rod, Cursed Totem; Kataki, War’s Wage; Ghostly Prison, Moat, Humility;
Crucible of Worlds, Sphere of Resistance, Tangle Wire, Winter Orb, Tsabo’s Web;
Vindicate, Blood Moon, Back to Basics, Pox, Nether Void, Choke, Compost;
True Believer, Ivory Mask, Solitary Confinement;
Samurai of the Pale Curtain, Phyrexian Furnace;
Rogue:
Sinkhole, Hymn to Tourach, The Abyss, Reverence;
Trinisphere, Static Orb, Stasis, Root Maze, Withered Wretch;
Drop of Honey, Disrupting Shoal
Disruption generally falls into two categories, “proactive” and “reactive,” for lack of better terms. “Proactive” strategies disrupt an opponent long-term by interfering with a core strategy through a permanent. The permanent can be removed, alleviating the problem, but the damage can be hard to overcome. “Reactive” strategies (again, for lack of a better term) involve pinpoint, one-shot uses that slow down an opponent. Once resolved, the disruption ceases to have any other impact and cannot be rectified. A proactive example would be a card like Null Rod in Vintage. As long as it sits in play, it hampers an opponent’s manabase by shutting off their Moxen. Force of Will, on the other hand, is reactive; it stops one threat and that’s it. Both types have their distinct advantages and disadvantages.
The mainstream options shouldn’t surprise anyone, although Duress is probably not as good as Cabal Therapy with so many Goblin decks running around. The ubiquitous FoW should be a given and it’s pretty safe to say that the Legacy Time Walk, Orim’s Chant, should be considered a potent disruptive tool for white decks that use it.
Similarly, it shouldn’t be a shocker that the situational disruption is perfect sideboard material. PyroPillar, Arcane Lab and Ja Rule of Law are combo killers along with Abeyance, which does double duty with Xantid Bug to fight permission. The blast packages provide extra Red vs. Blue counters, and Stifle can be used in a variety ways. Propaganda and Elephant Grass slow down the bum rushes and Energy Flux is for artifact-heavy decks if necessary. The graveyard hate comes in three main forms – free (Tormod’s Crypt), wishable (Coffin Purge), or attached to a threat (Pale Curtain/Withered Wretch).
As for the acceptable alternatives, they obviously suit whatever type of deck and matchup you plan to face and have less broad applications than the mainstream choices. The rogue choices are basically the components of rogue decks, since it’s highly unlikely that you will use any of them over the more established choices unless you’re playing something that requires them, or they require that the deck be built around them.
I should note that the reason Hymn to Tourach is so out of style is because unlike Distress and Wrench Mind, it can be Misdirected back at you. (Not fun.) While Wrench Mind isn’t exactly a great card, it’s at least an acceptable choice against Burn, where it is actually quite effective. In general, if you need more than Duress/Cabal Therapy, you’ll probably lean on Distress; but eight discard spells is already quite a lot.
When viewed in this light, Boggeme’s Landstill has quite a lot of (non-removal) disruption. It packs a hefty ten maindeck counterspells, with a set of BEB and a pair of Stifles in the board, which can also deny fetchlands. It also runs Wastelands, and Crucible of Worlds compliments its disruptive manabase. Kyle’s list also runs three Tormod’s Crypts for graveyard kill. Added up, Landstill has at least fourteen disruptive spells in game one alone. After boarding, it can up the count to as much as twenty-three (in theory, anyway).
So where does that put us? Landstill runs a sizable disruption base – around ten counterspells – backed up with ten or more removal spells, and ten or more draw spells. That’s half of the deck allocated to pure building blocks! When you think of Crucible of Worlds as a prison element when combined with the deck’s Wastelands, Boggeme’s deck leaves only two slots – win conditions – not devoted to either the manabase or standard deck components. Most often, those win conditions are Decree of Justice and/or Eternal Dragon, two cards that can generate card advantage all by themselves. With its manabase serving as an additional win condition due to manlands, and the Crucible/Fetchland combo to insure steady land drops each turn, it’s no wonder Landstill is a force to be reckoned with. Every single slot in the deck is oozing with utility.
Few decks in Legacy can dedicate as many slots to each component as Landstill. A deck like Solidarity, for example, can only afford to run Force of Will as mainboard disruption, since it needs so many more slots dedicated to drawing and comboing out. A deck like ATS or Survival Advantage needs enough creatures to fuel it, and therefore can’t dedicate absurd quantities of slots to pure draw, disruption, and removal. Instead, it’s forced to take a silver bullet approach or use the Squee/Suvival engine, which requires setup and can be more easily disrupted.
As a theoretical deduction, you would need to invalidate sections the deck’s components in order to be competitive against it. The two well-known ways of tackling Landstill involve this very concept. One is to play a tempo deck so fast and swift that Landstill doesn’t have time to play its removal or draw into extra disruption. The other is to play a deck that runs nothing to remove; thus rendering most of the Landstill’s removal components dead draws.
As a result, Vial Goblins – which can nearly match it in CA and certainly out-tempo it – can beat it, although the matchup wavers both ways. Similarly, Burn Sligh is a rough match for Landstill because it doesn’t have enough counters to stop it, and all of the removal is dead weight. Consider a cheap, basic burn deck like the following:
Burn, by njx
//Spells: 37
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Chain Lightning
4 Lava Spike
4 Shock
4 Magma Jet
4 Price of Progress
4 Browbeat
4 Fireblast
3 Fork
2 Lava Dart
//Mana: 23
4 Wasteland
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Barbarian Ring
9 Mountain
//Sideboard:
4 Flaring Pain
4 Red Elemental Blast
4 Flames of the Blood Hand
3 Molten Rain
(For those of you not up on the Legacy tech, Flames of the Blood Hand bypasses COP: Red and Sphere of Law.)
A deck like this is a nightmare-and-a-half for Landstill, because it can deal almost a hundred points of damage through burn spells alone. There is no way Landstill can counter all that; and Landstill’s Wraths and Disks are all useless. (Although they can Swords their own creatures to keep themselves alive.) Post-boarding, it has better options, but it’s still not a fun match for the Landstill pilot. While the burn deck above isn’t refined in its current form, and has significant problems against Solidarity (which will probably just combo out against it), it illustrates how the no-permanent strategy can dodge a lot of Landstill’s answers.
As a pile of answers, Landstill is not very easy to hate on without exposing yourself to the mercies of Goblins and Solidarity. (Although notably, Solidarity is probably not as good as most seem, since it has historically not put up enough T8s to justify it as a top deck.) Those who mistakenly think little of Landstill probably don’t realize that its Vintage analogue is actually something more along the lines of Control Slaver or Meandeck Gifts.
Gifts, for example, can pull any series of answers from its deck in a ridiculous number of possible permutations; allowing it to find the right answer for a given situation. Sometimes, that means winning on the spot; sometimes, it means pulling up four lands or four counters or four draw spells, sometimes it means taking an extra turn and playing Yawgmoth’s Will to put you so far ahead your opponent is forced to concede. Whatever the case, Landstill is the Legacy analogue: it is a deck filled with answers to almost every possible thing you can throw at it. It is also remarkably adept at adapting to the metagame; as a white and blue control deck, it has answers available to just about every possible scenario.
So Landstill will probably be around for a while, and even if it wavers, it will be a strong contender for quite some time. If you are planning on going to the Duel for Duals or the Legacy GPs, testing heavily against Landstill is a good idea.
Whew… I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted. Hope to see you at the Duel for Duals, if I can make it!
Cheers!
-Nathan J
Props: Kosher Krispy Kreme donuts. FullMetal Alchemist.
Slops: 9,247 calories and 469 grams of fat per donut. Show times at 1 AM.
(Special thanks to Chris Romeo and Mark Young, who put up with me.)
This article comes to you courtesy of My Boring Job in the IT Industry, where we ask you to train people in India to do your job for one tenth the price. And no, this is not a serious tag line. Derf.