Legacy Unlocked – Continued Explorations of Tier 1.5

Welcome to my thirteenth article for StarCityGames.com! In addition to giving

triskaidekaphobes a cause for panic, this is also my first article as column writer for this

site. While exciting, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous too. Article

feedback in a largely anonymous, quasi-social environment with minimal personal accountability

for being a jackass has a tendency to bring out the worst in people. Maybe I’m being

naïve, but I ask that you give me honest feedback on this column and what you’d like

to see in future installments. Alright, let’s get on with things.

Since there’s been a bit of gap between now and the first of these articles, a brief

recap is in order.

In Part I of this

series, then called the “Legacy Metagame” before the fancy name change, we looked

at the cumulative tournament history of Legacy’s 50+ player tournaments in the U.S. and

noted that Goblins, Threshold and Solidarity (Reset High Tide)

were overwhelming the most popular decks making the cut to the Top 8. In fact, and with only

two exceptions, each of these major tournaments were only won by these three decks. They are,

as they say, the “Decks to Beat,” which you should not necessarily confuse with

being the “Decks to Play.” While Goblins, Threshold and Solidarity are a mainstay

in local metagames far and wide, they are by no means the only viable decks in

a format as wily and unexplored as Legacy.

In Part II of this

series, I showed that “Big Three” actually constitute a minority of the overall

field and that there are many other fine and competitive decks available, even if they are

underplayed. Another theme in Part II was the nature of

randomness as a hallmark of the format and the tendency for decks to hybridize to gain

stability in an inherently unpredictable field. As such, the decks covered in that particular

article were of my favorite brand of sixty-card piles: aggro-control.

Today, we shall continue to explore Legacy’s Tier 1.5 and Tier 2 decks, but will

shift the focus away from hybrids to decks focused on executing a particular strategy with a

more single-minded means of winning.

Before I go on, I need to own up to a certain bias in my mode of approaching the Legacy

format. With the exception of Grand Prix-level events, I am primarily focusing on U.S.-based

tournament results and the general U.S. metagame (which is really all over the place). This

isn’t because I’m some jingoistic flag-waving cowboy. Hardly. It’s more a

matter of necessity, the lack of consistent data outside U.S. borders, and my desire to

specialize in something that I can get a handle on.

I. BHWC

Landstill

For those who have been following the format since its inception (September, 2004),

Landstill was acknowledged to be one of the early kings of the format. Everyone played the

deck. It was a very surreal time. Also bolstering the popularity and persistence of this

lumbering control brute was Zvi Mowshowitz 8,000 word coverage of the 2005 Legacy World

Championship at GenCon, wherein he extolled the virtues of Landstill at great length.

It was late in 2005 when the tide turned against Landstill and the word was out: “Do

not play this deck.” Goblins could overrun it; four-mana answers in a slow control shell

are not reliable in a field hostile to Tundra and its friends. High Tide / Solidarity, not

being under any meaningful board pressure, could sculpt a truly vicious hand and initiate a

massive end of turn counter-war that would culminate in a library-gobbling Brain Freeze.

Threshold / Gro could leverage its tempo by deploying cheap untargettable herpestinae and

blood-thirty lycanthropic ursine druids to overwhelm Landstill with more threats than it could

answer. The printing of Pithing Needle and its adoption by Threshold did not help matters.

Sooner or later, by which I mean six or so months later, Landstill had been relegated to a

minor Legacy footnote. Or had it?

Seemingly under the radar in sunny and overpriced San Diego, a Wrath-less four-color

version of Landstill enjoyed quiet success. Developed by Mike Torrisi (SpikeyMikey), Jason Jaco

(JACO), Nick Trudeau (nickvo$), and unnamed others, BHWC* Landstill (a.k.a. 4c Landstill)

eschewed red and its Fire / Ice and Pyroclasms to add Green and exploit the raw power of

Pernicious Deed.

(* No, I cannot tell you what this stands for – this being a family site and all.)

BHWC Landstill achieved notoriety one year after Zvi piloted U/W Landstill to a Top 8 at

GenCon 2005, when Nick Trudeau made Top 8 at GenCon 2006, losing to Roland Chang’s U/G

Madness in the semifinals.

Whilst in the middle of writing this article, Trudeau was kind enough to post an excellent

primer on the deck that you can see here.

Nick then went on to make Top 8 at StarCityGames.com Duel for Duals IV (October 7,

2006) with the following change:

-1 Plains
+1 Island

BHWC Landstill retains much of the strategic development of traditional U/W and U/W/r

Landstill by playing a load of land, trading its cards one-for-one against menacing threats,

rebuilding its hand with Standstill and Fact or Fiction, gaining card advantage while

stabilizing the board with mass removal, getting the occasional lock-out with Wasteland plus

Crucible and eventually winning with its uncounterable and recurring manlands when things are

under control.

BHWC Landstill derives surprising power with the use of Green in its control shell. Instead

of Wraths, BHWC Landstill runs Pernicious Deed, which is a truly brutal weapon in the wilds of

Legacy. The addition of Green also cuts Landstill’s traditionally slow clock in half by

running the underrated Nantuko Monastery. The Monastery helps immensely in trumping

Threshold’s Mongeese with greater power/toughness, and Werebears with first strike.

Probably the strongest aspect of 4c Landstill is the raw power of its cards. Fact or

Fiction, Pernicious Deed, Crucible of Worlds, Standstill, Swords to Plowshares, and Force of

Will, with sets of Engineered Plague and Meddling Mage in the sideboard, give the deck a

fighting chance against almost anything.

Weaknesses.
Even though BHWC Landstill is running stronger cards than its predecessors, it still shares

some of its forebears’ shortcomings. For instance, 4c Landstill still has an abysmal

first game against combo decks such as Solidarity and IGGy Pop. Maindeck Stifle helps, but good

combo players can work around that. Nick Trudeau goes so far as to say that if you’re

paired against storm-based combo, you should concede game 1 within the first 7-8 minutes, so

that you’ll have enough time to win the round. Post-board, 4c Landstill removes its

useless board control package for the combo-busting goodness of Meddling Mage and Duress.

Thereafter, the match becomes far fairer.

Furthermore, the deck also has to manage its complex mana demands – having its counters and

draw in Blue and its removal in White, Black and Green. When you throw ten colorless mana

sources into its manabase, well, you’re flirting with disaster. Lastly, Pithing Needle is

still unkind to the deck and excellent targets abound: Pernicious Deed, two kinds of manlands

and Wasteland.

Again, storm-based combo is no friend to Landstill, which leads us to…

II. Ill-Gotten Gains

Storm Combo (“IGGy Pop”)

In a PM to me earlier this week: “What would I play if I had to play Legacy

today? Probably IGGy Pop, with Infernal Tutor.” – Pat Chapin

Of all of the decks in Legacy, IGGy Pop strikes me as the most “fully-powered,”

a sort of forlorn refugee from Vintage. And if you’ve ever sat twiddling your thumbs

while the deck runs through its Ill-Gotten Gains loops, you know what I’m talking about.

That was my original introductory sentence for this portion of my article. Luckily, you can

thank Stephen Menendian for getting to this deck before

me. For one, Stephen knows what he’s talking about when we writes about combo,

unlike myself. I mean, there’s a good reason why the Solidarity write-up in Part One of this series was

the shortest of any deck I’ve covered thus far. I enjoy combo decks in so far as I enjoy

beating them.

Since Stephen’s article was premium and my column is addressed to the SCG

proletariat, I’ll at least post the most recent version of this deck, played by the

deck’s creator, Michael Bomholt (bomholmm), to a first place finish at the first Meandeck

Open, late last year.

Instead of tossing away all of the content I wrote prior to the Menendian article,

I’ll leave what I wrote. When I write these articles, I tend to jump all over the place.

For me, writing is not a linear process. In the case of the IGGy Pop content, it looks as

though I only wrote up the “Weaknesses” section, which does not surprise me in the

least, given my combo-loathing ways.

Weaknesses.
Excluding pilot error, a serious liability to all combo decks, two of IGGy Pop’s greatest

threats are Solidarity and decks that run Meddling Mage with an aggressive clock. Since

IGGy’s kill card is a sorcery, it can only win on its own turn and since Reset can only

be played on its opponent’s turn, it will usually choose to do so then, especially as

IGGy Pop does most of Solidarity’s dirty work for it (i.e. fatal storm-count).

Consequently, game one is barely winnable. Post-board, IGGy Pop brings in Orim’s Chant to

execute its combination without fear of reprisal and Defense Grid for the same reason.

As for all combo decks, Meddling Mage poses another serious problem in being an answer to

IGGy Pop’s coup de grace and a threat built into one card. Accordingly, a deck

like U/G/w Threshold is a nightmare match. While Meddling Mage can be answered, its presence

demands that IGGy Pop devote resources away from its combo, and when it’s forced to do so

under lethal board pressure with Threshold’s aggressive clock, well, this isn’t an

easy match. However, Leyline of the Void, the anti-Control sideboard cards, and the highly

annoying split second instants in the latest version of this deck, give it game against the

aggro-control decks that previous incarnations of IGGy Pop struggled against.

Some people may want to use Meddling Mage as they do against Solidarity, by naming the

engine card (High Tide). But note that IGGy has four kinds of acceleration: Lion’s Eye Diamond

(LED), Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual and Lotus Petal. Accordingly, if you have your Meddling Mage

chanting against LED, IGGy Pop will just go off with Rituals and vice versa if you have your

Mage chanting against Dark or Cabal Ritual. Intuition and Ill-Gotten Gains are other juicy Mage

targets, but IGGy can just hit its opponent with multiple mini-Tendrils, making a projected

three turn clock (Nimble Mongoose and Werebear, for instance) far longer. With the split second

cards now a part of the puzzle, I would probably set surplus Meddling Magi to Wipe Away or

perhaps set another one to Tendrils of Agony again, since Mike’s decks have recently

dropped Echoing Truth.

That’s as far as I got. Of all of the combo decks in Legacy, IGGy Pop is my favorite.

It’s reasonably inexpensive to build, has an exceptionally solid manabase and recent

innovations in the card pool and the deck’s design give it a far better game against the

decks that used to prey on it. Hell, it even comes with Pat Chapin’s endorsement. Do I

need to draw you a map?

If you’re familiar with TEPS in Extended or Long-variants in Vintage, IGGy Pop is a

good “Gateway Deck” to get you into Legacy.

III. Angel Stompy

Since we’ve covered a control and combo deck in this article so far, for aesthetic

balance let’s wrap up with one of the more aggressive decks in Legacy. However, doing

some research for this article, I discovered that pure aggro decks are a rare breed indeed.

This came as a surprise.

As mentioned in my previous articles, given the vagaries of the field, the ease of

splashing support colors (Onslaught fetchlands and A/B/U/R duals), and the extraordinary depth

of those colors, most players have discovered that hybrid strategies are more effective in

beating their opponents than with a single-minded aggro, control or combo strategy. So choosing

a token aggro Legacy deck was not easy.

My choices came down to Affinity (about which quite enough has already been

said), some kind of dodgy mono-Green aggro deck or Red Death (a B/r Suicide

variant). But at the end of the day, I knew I’d find myself writing about a deck

I’ve lost to more times than I care to admit, Patrick Maeder’s (GodzillA) Angel

Stompy.

In the spirit of equanimity, I decided to hop over the fence of a website that Patrick owns

and administrates, a place known to most Legacy enthusiasts as The Source. I found Pat in the lavish Legacy

Adept Lounge, chain-smoking Winstons and playing a game of chess with a monocle’d monkey

in a top hat. Tenacious D played loudly above.

At the full service bar in the Adept Lounge, I ordered a Glenfiddich on ice with a beer

chaser from a midget wearing a tuxedo. After which I pulled out my tape recorder and made

myself comfortable in a faux-leather couch.

Patrick was gracious during our interview, giving pause and thought to each question.

Bardo: Hi Pat, thanks for having me over to discuss your deck.
Zilla: It’s my pleasure, Dan. Can I get you anything before we get started?

Bardo: No, I’m fine. Let’s get to it–I’m double-parked outside.

In the preface to this interview, I categorized Angel Stompy as an aggro deck. Is that

accurate?
Zilla: Well, more so than most other decks in the format, yes, although recently my own

iterations of the deck have it evolved towards a more controlling strategy with the addition of

Cataclysm and other elements which have synergy with that card. [pauses, thinks.]

In my mind, pure aggro is defined by a couple things: first, the obvious, an overtly

aggressive strategy with only a few controlling cards – decks like Affinity, Friggorid, Goblins

– they all come to mind. Second, a focus on redundancy over card draw and / or tutors, which is

certainly the case with Angel Stompy [cough]. Really, this is less out of choice than

necessity, because the most aggressive colors in the game – Red, Green, White – have the least

available options as far as efficient draw is concerned. So yes, I think it’s correct to call

it an aggro deck, although it does have some powerful control elements as well.

Bardo: So, where did the idea for Angel Stompy come from anyway?
Zilla: I originally created the deck in summer of 2003, before the banned and restricted lists

were separated between Vintage and what used to be called Type 1.5. It was inspired by J.P.

Meyers’ White Lightning

deck. I designed it as a foil to another of my decks, Zilla Stompy [Bardo’s note:

Zilla Stompy is a mid-range R/G Beatdown deck], which itself was originally designed as a

foil to Landstill, which at the time, along with Food Chain Goblins and Dragon, was completely

dominating the old format.

Zilla Stompy had become so popular in my local metagame that I wanted a deck that would crush

it utterly. Heavy mana acceleration into Exalted Angel, Skullclamp, and Decree of Justice,

backed by Silver Knight to stall on the ground proved an extremely successful strategy to that

end. Myself and Max McCall [Bardo’s note: Frogboy on The Source] took identical

copies of the deck to a local tournament. We faced Dragon, Welder MUD, Landstill, Zilla Stompy,

and Food Chain Goblins. Max took fourth, and I took first, winning a Mana Drain in the process

[pauses].

Less than a month later, the banned and restricted lists were separated, and everyone, wrongly

[laughs] assumed that combo would become the dominant archetype in Legacy, given the

availability of so much artifact acceleration. Because of Angel Stompy’s relative weakness to

combo, and because of the loss of Skullclamp as a draw engine, the deck was shelved.
Months later, when it became clear that the format would not be dominated by combo but would

instead be teeming with aggro, I returned my attention to the deck, retooled it completely, and

released a list which closely resembles the commonly accepted lists you see today. Jitte and

Isamaru were later additions, but the overall concept is pretty much the same.

Bardo: And where do you see Angel Stompy’s position in the metagame

today?
Zilla: I see it as having a fantastic game against Goblins, even more so with the recent

changes I’ve made. It has a solid game against Thresh; again, even more so now. It still has

difficulty with storm-based combo, but it can win with the right sideboard and a little luck.

Perhaps most importantly, it tends to do very well against randomness.

Basically, I feel that it’s a very good choice for an unknown metagame, particularly if its

sideboard is stacked with combo hate. It’s consistent, has positive match-ups against two of

the three most prominent decks in the format, and excels against randomness.

Bardo: Yeah, the ability to stand up to random odd-ball kinds of decks is pretty

much a necessity in this format. It’s all over the place. Anyway, to give my readers a

sample of what this deck looks like, I’m using the list you gave LegoArmyMan for

Kadilak’s Dual Land Draft. [Bardo hands Zilla a piece of filigree stationary with

the following inscribed.]

Bardo: Now that it’s several months later, what changes would you make to

this list?
Zilla: Some pretty major ones, actually, but they’re all still in testing. As I mentioned, my

newer lists are based heavily on Cataclysm as a central control element, because it punishes

Goblins for over-committing their guys to the board, yet is still very useful in the Thresh and

Solidarity match-ups, unlike Parallax Wave, which is the card it replaces. Most changes to the

deck pertain to synergy with and exploitation of Cataclysm. The sideboard has been heavily

retooled to provide better game against combo as well. I’ll have a new list out very

soon. [At this point, Bardo fumbles with the tape recorder a little bit, orders another

drink.]

Bardo: Finally, with Grand Prix Columbus on the horizon, would you recommend people

register Angel Stompy? Also, should they go the mono-White route or run the splash colors like

Phil Stolze’s version with Dark Confidant, Duress and Meddling Mage?
Zilla: I know of a couple people that plan to take Angel Stompy to Columbus. They’re privy to

my newer lists and have been helping me test them. As I said earlier, I think the modernized

list is a good choice for an unknown field, in fact… [noise from the music makes this

section of the tape unintelligible.]

As for Phil’s W/u/b build, it has more maindecked answers to control and combo, but sacrifices

some of its strength against aggro. Part of the reason he’s been so successful with it, aside

from his skill with the deck, is that he constantly updates his list to account for changes in

the metagame.

Bardo: Okay, Pat. Thanks for your time.
Zilla: Anytime, brotha. And don’t worry, the drinks are on the house.

And that was that. Before I was off, I tipped the midget bartender generously since I

wasn’t sure how Patrick treats the staff at The Source.

Well, after surveying a control, combo and aggro deck in the current Legacy environment,

that covers it for today.

For my next article, I’d like to run a “Legacy Mail Bag” piece, similar

to Jeroen Remie excellent column. So, if you have any questions about Legacy decks, the

format as a whole, its future, etc., drop me a line at [email protected] and I’ll gladly answer them or will

find someone who can.

Lastly, I’d like to thank Pete Hoefling and the rest of the StarCityGames.com crew

for giving me and my fellow Legacy columnists a shot at this. The Eternal community owes SCG a

hearty amount of thanks; from sponsoring and overseeing the Vintage Power 9 and Legacy Duel for

Duals tournaments, funding columns on Eternal content such as this one and Menendian’s to

covering the maintenance costs for TheManaDrain.

Without StarCityGames, both Vintage and Legacy would be far less interesting places to be.

Before this turns into some kind of group hug thing, I shall just close with a “Thank

You.”

Ciao.
Dan Spero
‘Bardo’ around the Internet
‘Bardo Trout’ in the SCG Forums
Team Reflection

Acknowledgements. Many thanks go to my teammate Jesus Roxas (REB) for

cropping and resizing my picture. To be completely honest, that was the single most

nerve-wracking thing about starting this column, especially for a techno-newb like me. But when

I took a good look at the profiles of my StarCityGames.com contemporaries, I somehow lost the

fear. Let’s just leave it at that.