So a guy dressed up in an Aaron Forsythe suit walks up to you. He hands you 4 Lotus Petal, 4 Mox Diamond, 4 Chrome Mox, 4 Lion’s Eye Diamond and then tells you to the build the best deck you can. You’re playing combo, right? You’re going to use all that fast mana to accelerate your way into turn 2 kills! Since Burning Wish and Lion’s Eye Diamond (LED) are both unrestricted, we’re going to make Long.dec! It will be the return of Long, and it will rock all the Legacy tournaments until Wizards sends the deck back to the Banned List. Not quite.
This is the exact response that practically everyone that follows the format had, even before it got named Legacy. We were in the midst of a combo winter that would require bannings of all the fast mana and most likely other cards as well. Fortunately or unfortunately it’s turning out to be a mild winter.
First, Long.dec:
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Burning Wish
4 Duress
2 Mystical Tutor
4 Meditate
4 Brainstorm
2 Fact or Fiction
4 Diminishing Returns
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Dark Ritual
2 Glimmervoid
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
4 Mox Diamond
4 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
Sideboard
1 Temporal Cascade
1 Hull Breach
1 Simplify
1 Primitive Justice
1 Regrowth
4 Xantid Swarm
1 Vindicate
1 Tendrils of Agony
4 Other
Format breaking it isn’t. It simply doesn’t have the incredible acceleration or brokenness that Vintage Long had (read: Yawgmoth’s Will is not in Legacy). Any Long-esque deck that has to rely on Diminishing Returns is in trouble. The last time anyone heard from the Long forum, it was October 16th, 2004. After 15 and a half weeks, I’m proclaiming Long dead.
The reason the original Long was good was insane mana acceleration fueled by cheap and powerful draw spells like Wheel of Fortune and Timetwister. Diminishing Returns and Fact or Fiction don’t even come close. Yes Fact or Fiction is insane in this format, but playing combo you’ll too often find yourself denied the card you need. Even if Fact or Fiction were good card draw for Combo, it’s certainly not as good as the original Draw 7s, which are cheaper than both Fact or Fiction and Diminshing Returns. The acceleration in Legacy just can’t continually pay four mana for cards. The manabase can’t keep up with heavy Red, Black and Blue mana requirements. Sadly, this just isn’t a good deck.
I’ve done my best to improve the deck after my experiences with DeathLong – I tried changing the spells and manabase to make the deck only U/B deck. I swapped Burning Wish for Death Wish, and swapped out Elvish Spirit Guides for Cabal Rituals. This helps a lot, but not enough. The problems are threefold: manabase, draw and engine.
Even with a straight Blue/Black manabase, you often end up stuck with lots of Black mana from Dark/Cabal Ritual and no way to generate Blue mana to draw cards. Long’s best play to generate mana, breaking Lion’s Eye Diamonds in response to draw spells, is tragically bad here. The draw spells do not carry the guarantee of a win enough to let you float three mana. You run the serious risk of fizzling, taking three manaburn and losing the game.
The reason why breaking an LED in response to a draw spell is so bad is because Legacy Long’s draw spells are not any good. Most of them cost so much that you can’t cast one off an LED. Not only are you liable to fizzle, but unlike the original Long, once you fizzle, you lose. The original Long has such brokeness that it can topdeck a draw7 and win. Good luck doing that with a Fact or Fiction. Besides that, Diminishing Returns runs the risk of removing your win conditions. Worse than that, fizzling off a Meditate will lose you the game. Meditate is only good if you can guarantee you will win that turn, and this deck can’t do that. Without good draw, it’s difficult to get the card quantity to build a lethal storm count.
All that would be trivial if the deck had access to either Yawgmoth’s Will or Mind’s Desire. It has neither. The reason the original Long was so strong was because it could cast three spells, wish for Yawgmoth’s Will, replay some spells, wish for a Tendrils of Agony and win. Yawgmoth’s Will said, “It’s okay if you counter my spells. I’ll win eventually.” This deck says, “I have no way to win.”
I goldfished the deck for a while, and I don’t think I made a lethal kill once. Without an enabler, something that generates lots of spells or mana, the deck just isn’t viable. For reference, here’s my final list if you want to try and make something of it:
2 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
4 Forbidden Orchard
4 Death Wish
2 Tendrils of Agony
4 Duress
2 Mystical Tutor
4 Meditate
4 Brainstorm
3 Fact or Fiction
3 Diminishing Returns
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Mox Diamond
4 Chrome Mox
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
Sideboard
1 Gemstone Mine
1 Diminishing Returns
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Temporal Cascade
1 Hull Breach
1 Simplify
1 Primitive Justice
1 Regrowth
4 Xantid Swarm
1 Vindicate
Okay, that was depressing – let’s look at a deck that’s slightly better. For a StarCityGames Power 9 tournament, Team Meandeck came out with Doomsday. This deck kills by casting Doomsday and setting up a lethal five-card stack that will kill your opponent without allowing any interacting. To pull this off, they used two different stacks and kill mechanisms – one powered by Yawgmoth’s Will and one powered by Mind’s Desire, neither of which are playable in Legacy. Still, because the engine comes to Legacy intact, the deck is worth considering.
To do this, I turn to a kill mechanism considered and discarded by Team Meandeck: Conjurer’s Bauble + Disciple of the Vault + Helm of Awakening. It’s bad, I know it, but I don’t know anything better. Anyway, here’s how it plays out –
Cast Doomsday for:
Meditate
Helm of Awakening
Disciple of the Vault
Conjurer’s Bauble
Conjurer’s Bauble
1) Cast Meditate, drawing the other four spells
2) Cast everything
3) Sac Conjurer’s Bauble A, putting Meditate on the top of your library and drawing Meditate. Sac Conjurer’s Bauble B, putting Conjurer’s Bauble A on the top of your library, drawing it. Cast Conjurer’s Bauble A, putting, Conjurer’s Bauble B on the top of your library, drawing it. Don’t forget Disciple damage. Rinse and repeat.
Total Mana cost: BBB + 2U + 2 + B = 4UBBBB.
If you have either Disciple of the Vault or Helm of Awakening on the board when you go off, you can put a Dark Ritual into that spot instead and lower the manacost.
Alternately, if you have at least one of the pieces on the board already, you can use Night’s Whisper:
Cast Doomsday for two Night’s Whispers and whatever components (2 Conjurer’s Bauble, Helm of Awakening, Disciple of the Vault) you don’t have. This is more life and Black mana intensive, but it doesn’t require any Blue mana.
Here’s the list:
1 Island
4 Polluted Delta
2 Swamp
4 Underground Sea
2 Disciple of the Vault
4 Brainstorm
4 Cabal Ritual
2 Chromatic Sphere
4 Conjurer’s Bauble
4 Dark Ritual
4 Doomsday
4 Duress
2 Helm of Awakening
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
2 Lotus Petal
1 Meditate
4 Mystical Tutor
4 Night’s Whisper
4 Unmask
Sideboard
4 Brain Freeze
11 ?
The Brain Freeze is in the board because it’s a worse kill because it doesn’t kill immediately. It costs U under Helm of Awakening instead of the easier to produce B, but it may save you against a Swords to Plowshares or Lightning Bolt. I’m packing an extra copy of all the components (Conjurer’s Bauble, Disciple of the Vault, Helm of Awakening) so as to increase the chances you draw one before you go off, reducing the cost of the Doomsday stack.
That list is clunky, slow, and bad in a lot of ways. However, there are some slight improvements to make it the list better, like using Sensei’s Diving Top. It’s really only included for historical reasons, because that’s the starting point for all the Doomsday lists. The real breakthrough came when Cooldude254 on The Source came up with the following stack:
Predict
Auriok Salvagers
LED
Pyrite Spellbomb
Reanimate
The kill:
Cast Predict, naming Auriok Salvagers. Draw Pyrite Spellbomb and Lion’s Eye Diamond. Cast Lion’s Eye Diamond. Cast Pyrite Spellbomb. Sacrifice Lion’s Eye Diamond for WWW. Pay W, sacrifice Pyrite Spellbomb to draw Reanimate. Cast Reanimate on Auriok Salvagers. Recur LED for infinite mana, then recur Pyrite Spellbomb for infinite damage.
It only costs 1U + 1 + B = 2UB to go off, which means the deck can power out a Dark Ritual and tap an Island to go off. This makes it much faster and consistent.
This deck is also powerful in a different way. I played a couple of games against a Green beats deck with no disruption. I kept a bad hand game 2, and was about to die when I realize I had Salvagers in hand, and LED and Lotus Petal on the table. I set up a Mystical Tutor for Dark Ritual, cast the Salvagers, and won handily with 2 Chromatic Spheres in the graveyard to draw through my deck looking for Pyrite Spellbomb. The next game, I had Reanimate, Auriok Salvagers and Chromatic Sphere in hand. I was on the draw, and topdecked an LED. I played nothing, and discarded the Auriok Salvagers. Turn 2 I drew, played a Swamp, Reanimated the Salvagers, went infinite and killed him.
Here’s the list so far:
1 Island
4 Polluted Delta
2 Swamp
4 Underground Sea
2 Auriok Salvagers
4 Brainstorm
4 Night’s Whisper
1 Serum Visions
4 Doomsday
4 Mystical Tutor
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Duress
3 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
4 Unmask
1 Predict
1 Pyrite Spellbomb
1 Reanimate
Sideboard: Unsure. It’s very hard to go about replacing components of the deck and still be effective.
Let Me Just Address A Few Questions About The Deck
2 Auriok Salvagers (Why not just one?): You don’t want to be caught with none in the deck. There’s a second one so if you can’t put one back with Brainstorm, you don’t just lose. I’ve never had both in hand in 30 recorded games and more unrecorded games.
3 Lion’s Eye Diamond (Why not four?): This card actually sucks. The only time you ever want it is when you’re casting Doomsday. Then you really only want one, because you can’t use extra.
Also, unlike other stacks, this one can use a Lion’s Eye Diamond even if you pass the turn without going off:
1) Upkeep: Sac Lion’s Eye Diamond for UUU, float the mana into your draw phase. 2) Draw Predict, cast Predict, naming Auriok Salvagers. Burn 1.
3) Main Phase: Cast LED and Pyrite Spellbomb. Tap a land, cast the Pyrite Spellbomb. Sac LED for WWW. Use W to sac Pyrite Spellbomb, draw Reanimate. Tap another land, cast Reanimate. Then recur the LED infinite times, then recur Pyrite Spellbomb infinite times and burn your opponent out.
If you’re used to Vintage Doomsday, you need to abandon that mentality. Most of the time, it’s going to be very hard to find the Brainstorm/Conjurer’s Bauble/Serum Visions needed to go off the turn you cast Doomsday. You will have to spend a lot of your time just searching for enough mana (because going off all on the same turn costs 2UBBBB). Your first few turns you’ll use the draw and search spells to assemble whatever components you don’t need. You have Duress and Unmask to protect the combo, and a second copy of Auriok Salvagers to make sure you have one in your library when you Doomsday. Unfortunately, the deck has a slow goldfish, and not enough disruption elements. Here are the statistics:
No fizzles were recorded, games were carried out until a kill
Salvagers Kill: 10% (3 games). Games that were won with Auriok Salvagers + Reanimate + Lion’s Eye Diamond + Pyrite Spellbomb outside of a Doomsday
Duress Rate: 57% (17 games). Games in which Doomsday (or the Reanimate outside of a Doomsday) was cast under protection of a Duress
Mulligan Rate: 37% (11 games). The number of games where I mulliganed at least once
Same Turn Kill Rate: 37% (11 games). The number of games where Doomsday was followed up by the kill that turn (or the Salvagers kill happened).
Average Doomsday Turn: 4
Average Kill Turn: 4.5
Doomsday was cast on turn 1: 1 time, 3%
Doomsday was cast on turn 2: 4 times, 13%, combined %: 17%*
Doomsday was cast on turn 3: 8 times, 27%, combined %: 43%
Doomsday was cast on turn 4: 6 times, 20%, combined %: 63%
Doomsday was cast on turn 5: 8 times, 27%, combined %: 90%
Doomsday was cast on turn 6: 1 time, 3%, combined %: 93%
Doomsday was cast on turn 7: 0 times
Doomsday was cast on turn 8: 1 time, 3%, combined %: 97%
Doomsday was cast on turn 9: 1 time, 3%, combined %: 100%
The kill occurred on turn 1: 0 times
The kill occurred on turn 2: 2 times, 7%
The kill occurred on turn 3: 6 times, 20%, combined %: 27%
The kill occurred on turn 4: 8 times, 27%, combined %: 53%
The kill occurred on turn 5: 9 times, 30%, combined %: 83%
The kill occurred on turn 6: 3 times, 10%, combined %: 93%
The kill occurred on turn 7: 0 times
The kill occurred on turn 8: 0 times
The kill occurred on turn 9: 2 times, 7%, combined %: 100%
*: A note on combined percentage. This number represents the percentage that an event occurs by that time. This is the total % that it is cast that turn added to the percentage for all the turns before it. For instance, the combined % for Doomsday being cast on turn 2 is the % of Doomsday being cast on that turn and being cast on turn 1.
The deck wins turn 4 53% of the time, and that increases greatly with extra turns. However for combo, turn 4 is slow. The deck has no backup plan (excluding the straight-up Salvagers kill), and I don’t blame its critics for calling the deck unviable. There might be some sort of change to push it over the top, but no one has come up with it yet.
Well, look on the bright side. Legacy has two combo decks that are generally regarded, if not good, as at least “viable”. The first is Belcher.
This is The Source’s afro- (Jay Palmer) who T8ed with this build at Amrod’s on January 8th. It’s a 2-land Belcher build for increased stability. The goal is similar to Vintage builds of Belcher, but it often spends turn 1 setting up for a turn 2 kill.
Creatures
4 Birds of Paradise
3 Goblin Welder
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
4 Tinder Wall
Spells
4 Goblin Charbelcher
4 Spoils of the Vault
3 Plunge into Darkness
4 Duress
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Dark Ritual
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Chrome Mox
4 Land Grant
Sideboard
4 Defense Grid
4 Oxidize
4 Tormod’s Crypt
3 Naturalize
I goldfished a total of 40 games, and got the following results:
Loss Rate: 25% (10 games). This number represents all the hands that I threw back as probably unable to win, where a Spoils of the Vault killed me, where Plunge into Darkness didn’t pull the card I needed, or where a Belcher activation did not go lethal, and did not go lethal the next turn either.
Nonlethal Belcher Rate: 3% (1 game)
The rest of the statistics are not counting losses, but just the 30 winning games
Duress Rate: 20% (6 games). The number of games where I went off under protection of Duress
Mulligan Rate: 23% (7 games). The number of games where I mulliganed at least once
Same Turn Kill Rate: 37% (11 games). The number of games where the Belcher was cast and activated on the same turn
Average Belcher Turn: 1.9
Average Belcher Activation Turn: 2.53
Belcher was cast on turn 1: 9 times, 30%
Belcher was cast on turn 2: 16 times, 53%, combined %: 83%
Belcher was cast on turn 3: 4 times, 13%, combined %: 97%
Belcher was cast on turn 4: 1 time, 3%, combined %: 100%
Belcher was activated on turn 1: 4 times, 13%
Belcher was activated on turn 2: 13 times, 43%, combined %: 57%
Belcher was activated on turn 3: 8 times, 27%, combined %: 83%
Belcher was activated on turn 4: 3 times, 10%, combined %: 93%
Belcher was activated on turn 5: 2 times, 7%, combined %: 100%
Thus we can say that this build of Belcher was a turn 2 kill percentage of greater than 50% (actually, it’s 57%)**. However, it really rolls over to disruption at those speeds. Yes, sometimes it cast Duress and would have been able to pull out the counterspell on the way to winning. But sometimes that Duress was powered by a Dark Ritual, and if that Dark Ritual is countered, Belcher was to wait a turn or two. Sometimes Belcher has enough mana acceleration to bait with a Dark Ritual, then wait a turn and go off for real if the first is countered. On the whole though, both from goldfishing and playing versus Belcher, I’ve found it is very vulnerable to countermagic and disruption. The deck practically scoops to Chalice of the Void set at 0 or 1.
** With a sample size of 30, the margin of error is slightly less than 18% with 95% confidence level. We could then say that the true turn 2 win percentage is somewhere between 39-75% with methods that are correct 95% of the time. It is enough for this to show that it’s a very fast and very powerful deck that rolls over to Force of Will.
Finally, that brings us to Solidarity, the hottest and best combo deck in Legacy. I’ll give you the list so you can look at it while I explain.
Lands (20)
3 Thawing Glaciers
13 Island
4 Polluted Delta
Mana Producers (11)
4 Reset
4 High Tide
3 Turnabout
Search and Draw (19)
4 Cunning Wish
4 Impulse
4 Brainstorm
3 Meditate
3 Mystical Tutor
1 Flash of Insight
Win (6)
3 Brain Freeze
1 Stroke of Genius
2 Words of Wisdom
Don’t Lose (4)
4 Force of Will
Sideboard
1 Meditate
1 Brain Freeze
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Words of Wisdom
1 Turnabout
1 Flash of Insight
1 Stroke of Genius
1 Rushing River
1 Echoing Truth
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Misdirection
1 Evacuation
1 Hydroblast
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Tolarian Winds
This deck goes off by casting lots of spells and generating lots of mana, then winning by decking your opponent, either by Brain Freeze and Words of Wisdom or Stroke of Genius. It does this entirely on your opponent’s turn.
First thing’s first. The deck is entirely instants and land. The deck is designed so it can go off during the opponent’s turn (and really it has to: Reset can only be played on the opponent’s turn). This also means that the entire sideboard is Cunning Wish-able.
So how do you play the deck? The first few turns are spent playing land. If you can help it, wait to use Thawing Glaciers. You want to have a Thawing Glaciers down while going off. The deck absolutely hates to draw land while it’s going off (because they are dead cards) and the extra lands are really helpful.
You really don’t need to try and go off until you’re staring down near-imminent death. In order to go off, you also some mana producers and card draw in hand. Going off is hard to explain but very easy to do. You use a combination of Reset, Turnabout and High Tide to generate lots of mana, and you use the 19 card draw spells to increase your storm count and chain into more spells. Thawing Glaciers is great here, because each Turnabout or Reset draws an extra Island out of your library, and puts the land into play to be used on the next untap effect.
The deck actually fights through hate very well. Against aggro, the deck has the option of playing lands and waiting, optimizing its hand until the absolute last minute to go off. Also, the deck has the option to go off in response to lethal damage. It looks like the deck would roll over to Chalice of the Void for 3, but the deck can go off in response to Chalice of the Void. Counterspells? Solidarity thanks you for the storm count, and either keeps going with the counterspell on the stack, or uses its own Force of Will, pitching a worthless card.
Let me reinforce the point: the deck does not have to go off before disruption, so you can wait until you have to go off. Few control decks put a real clock on the board, which means Solidarity has a long time to optimize its hand and get the perfect set of seven cards. The main problem for the control deck is knowing which cards to counter. The Solidarity deck has a full hand of 7, and leads on your turn with High Tide. Do you counter? If so, they could have a second High Tide, a Reset, or both. If so, you’ve wasted your counterspell when it could have been more useful later. That’s the problem with Solidarity. You might also think that a Stifle would win out, but you can’t count on it. You need your four Stifles to match up evenly against Solidarity’s four Brain Freezes, when over the course of the game they will outdraw you. Even if you manage to hold and cast four Stifles, Solidarity has access to two Stroke of Genius and can generate enough mana to deck you completely. There is no silver bullet to shut down Solidarity’s game plan (maybe other than an early Chill/Arcane Laboratory where Solidarity doesn’t have the Force of Will). In order to beat it, you either need to kill fast (Goblin Sligh is sometimes fast enough to race Solidarity) or use lots of hate and countermagic.
At this point, something needs to be said about Meandeck Tendrils. Despite the fact that it seems to die to its own Spoils of the Vault, lots of Legacy players are eager to try and convert it to Legacy. Personally I attempted a port and gave up; the cantrips are just as powerful but the acceleration is not enough. Meandeck Tendrils just barely ekes out on its available mana sometimes, and our Moxen just don’t compare to Vintage. Some members of The Source have made a better port, or so they claim – it’s team secrecy until they break it out at Amrod’s on February 19, in Syracuse. However I’ve talked to players who have a copy of the deck. This may be bullsh** and it may not, but what I’ve heard that it isn’t as consistent or as powerful as Belcher (and that’s saying something). It just doesn’t have enough mana or enough ways to replay its spells to up the storm count (a la Yawgmoth’s Will for Long or Rebuild for TPS). However it may pay to keep the deck in mind.
As a conclusion I’d like to just post the showings of combo decks since the new format:
9/24/04 NY: #3: 2 land Belcher
10/2/04 OR: #1: 2 land Belcher
10/5/04 MA: #4: Belcher
10/15/04: AZ: #2: Belcher
10/15/04: NY: #4: 2 land Belcher
11/7/04: NY: Top4: Solidarity
11/14/04: NY: Top2: Solidarity
11/19/04: CA: #3: 2 land Belcher
11/20/04: VA: Top 2: Solidarity
11/26/04: AZ: #1: Solidarity
12/4/04: VA: Top8: Solidarity, Top4: Solidarity
12/11/04: VA: Top2: Solidarity
12/16/04: Bremen, Germany: #3: 2 land Belcher
12/18/04: VA: T8: Solidarity
12/10/04: CA: #8: 2 land Belcher
12/19/04: NJ: #8: Monoblue Belcher
12/26/04: NJ: #2: Doomsday, #3: Doomsday, #4: Salvagers
12/31/04: #1: Solidarity
1/2/05: NJ: #1: Doomsday, #3: Doomsday, #6: Doomsday
1/7/05: NY: #1: U/B Belcher, #2: U/B Belcher
1/8/05: NY: Top8: Monoblue Belcher
1/14/05: NY: Top4: UW Belcher
1/20/05: VA: Top4: Solidarity
1/12/05: NY: Top4: UW Belcher
1/23/05: NY: #2: Monoblue Belcher
An explanation: Mono-Blue/UW Belcher are control decks that have a combo finish – Mana Severance + Goblin Charblecher. However they are control decks at heart and are not included for that reason. Salvagers makes one appearance. That deck is the Auriok Salvagers + Lion’s Eye Diamond combo from Salvagers Doomsday, but using a different draw engine (the best mentioned seems to be Living Wish + Trinket Mage). It has only made one appearance, and the Doomsday list is far superior. One last thing: Don’t count combo out.
Kevin Binswanger
Anusien on The Source, The Mana Drain
[email protected]