Let me get this out there first: I’m no Legacy expert. I make no claims to know all the ins and outs of the format or the intricacies of every major deck. I’m just a guy who likes to play Magic with my favorite cards, and Legacy gives me the opportunity to do just that. I don’t play in a lot of tournaments outside of Grand Prix, Pro Tour, and StarCityGames.com Open Series level events, but when the local store is having a Legacy tournament, I make a point of showing up. It’s just incredibly fun to play because there are so many crazy things going on. It’s like the cheesecake of formats—I wouldn’t want to have it all the time, but I sure as hell enjoy it when I do.
So despite the fact that I’m desperately yearning for a break from my non-stop tournament schedule, having not so much as put my luggage away since the beginning of the year, I’m going to be in Indianapolis this weekend battling it out at the Grand Prix. I want my cheesecake (and my St Elmo’s shrimp cocktail, but that’s another matter entirely)! And I’m not going to settle for some Sara Lee grocery store quality stuff. I’m talking Carnegie Deli cheesecake or the kind grandma used to make. The good stuff.
Okay, maybe I’ve taken my analogy a bit too far. But what I mean is that just because I’m going to the Grand Prix to play Legacy primarily for fun doesn’t mean I don’t want to give myself the best chance to win. I know there are lots of players who like Legacy because it gives them a chance to play "their deck," whether that deck is Goblins or Merfolk or Kobolds or Goats. I love that about Legacy—it provides a place for players to have a single deck and stick to it without worrying about card rotating out or getting banned, for the most part—but that kind of loyalty isn’t for me. I want to win.
Sure, I have my pet cards and decks—who doesn’t? But my first foray into Legacy was an instructive one. I had identified a deck that looked like my style that was experiencing a decent amount of success in the format—Junk—and decided to put it together for myself so I’d have a deck to play when Legacy events rolled around. I played that deck exclusively for every Legacy event I entered, from local tournaments for Tarmogoyfs to StarCityGames.com Opens to Grand Prix Providence. The deck seemed good enough for a while and I posted some decent finishes here and there, but I could never quite seal the deal. I always found myself drawing one too many Mox Diamonds here and there, or peeling Thoughtseize and Hymn after I’d emptied my opponent’s hand, or seeing all of my Swords to Plowshares against control and combo decks in game 1. But that’s Magic, right? The luck of the draw.
Wrong. That’s Magic in Standard, maybe. Or Limited. Maybe if you’re playing Modern you can whine about your bad draws, but in Legacy it’s your own fault. After all—you could be playing Brainstorm.
There’s not much for me to say about Brainstorm that hasn’t been said. I don’t intend to attempt to expand upon the fast canon of Brainstorm-related knowledge in this article, but rather to gently nudge my fellow Legacy neophytes in the right direction. It’s easy to look at a card as seemingly innocuous as Brainstorm and see all of the glowing things written about it—or the calls for it to be banned—and to think it’s all a tremendous amount of hyperbole. Some of it is, for sure. But most of it is not.
The type of deck I generally like to play is an aggressive strategy backed up with disruption. In Legacy, this is a hard direction to go without playing blue. Some argue the reason is the importance of Force of Will, but in my opinion the real culprit is Brainstorm. All of the cards in Legacy are so powerful that you can’t afford for your disruption to sit dead in your hand. When your cards rot and your opponent’s cards are live, you’re going to lose.
When I was playing Junk, I’d say time and time again that the only blue card I really wanted to play was Brainstorm. That’s it. All I wanted was to be able to have some amount of control over the cards that I drew. And don’t tell me that there’s Sensei’s Divining Top and Sylvan Library for that. I know. I’ve played both of them. They’re not the same. They can’t do anything about the extra Mox Diamond I drew on turn 3 when I had no more use for mana acceleration, or the Swords to Plowshares I drew against the Hive Mind deck, or the Hymn I drew when my opponent and I were both living off the tops of our decks. Top and Sylvan are excellent cards, but for doing what Brainstorm does, there’s no substitute.
So I caved. At the StarCityGames.com Invitational last year in Charlotte, this is approximately what I played:
Creatures (17)
- 1 Birds of Paradise
- 1 Scryb Ranger
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 3 Vendilion Clique
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 2 Qasali Pridemage
- 1 Scavenging Ooze
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (17)
I’m not certain of all the numbers here, since I don’t have a copy of the actual list I played anywhere, but you get the gist. I ended up going 4-1 in the Legacy rounds of the Invitational, beating RUG Delver, Zoo, Show and Tell, and Dredge and losing to Belcher. I was very happy with the deck, and I’m leaning towards playing something similar this weekend in Indianapolis.
There are a few things that probably stand out about this list compared to most Bant decks floating around out there in Legacy land. The first and most glaring is the omission of Force of Will. Force of Will is generally understood to be the glue that holds Legacy together. It’s the last, best hope of the "fair decks." Without it, we would all stand no chance against the otherwise unstoppable insurrection of combo domination. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But it’s a myth, like so many assumptions people make in Magic. Is Force of Will a good card against Combo decks? Sure—some of them. But it’s not like the people playing combo decks don’t realize that other people are going to play Force of Will and think of a way to get around it. Reanimator decks come with a full complement of discard spells. So do Storm decks. Is Force of Will really going to save you? The only combo deck that really asks "Force of Will or no?" is Belcher, but are you so afraid of a single deck that you’re going to jam four copies of Force of Will into every blue deck?
The thing is that against just about everything except combo decks, Force of Will is a bad card. I don’t just mean a mediocre card or a below average card—it’s quite frequently very, very bad. Remember what I said earlier about the power level of the average card in Legacy being so high that you can’t afford to have dead cards? Well, you can’t afford to throw away cards either! Force of Will doesn’t just cost you two cards to play—it costs you two blue cards to play. What blue cards do you really expect to play that you can just afford to toss one aside in a close game? Brainstorm? Jace? Vendilion Clique? These are all extremely powerful cards, and you don’t want to have to pitch them to Force of Will to counter anything but a game winning Goblin Charbelcher.
Whenever you have the opportunity, you’d much rather trade one-for-one than two-for-one. That ought to be obvious, but the sheer popularity of Force of Will in decks that it doesn’t belong makes it seem like it’s not. Cards like Spell Pierce and Daze can do excellent Force of Will impersonations in a large percentage of the situations in which you can imagine wanting a Force of Will, and they do so without the loss of card economy. They have their own downsides, of course, but in a deck that applies substantial pressure to the opponent and doesn’t give them time to build up a bulk of excess mana, they can generally do the job.
That pressure isn’t strictly in the form of damage—in fact, it’s primarily in the form of disruptive creatures. The best card in this deck by a mile is Green Sun’s Zenith because it gives you access to whatever form of disruptive creature you want as long as it’s green. Against Storm decks, you don’t have to sit back behind a counter wall forever—much of the time, you just have to get Gaddock Teeg into play. Similarly, against Reanimator, you don’t need to fight over every Reanimate and Exhume—you just have to get a Scavenging Ooze into play with the mana to use it. Daze and Spell Pierce go a long way toward giving you the early game cover you need to get to that point, especially in combination with Wasteland.
Because of the preparedness of combo decks in Legacy for Force of Will, these creature-based solutions are frequently better than the ubiquitous free counter. Most combo decks in Legacy are designed to search for their combo and the disruption to force it through with Brainstorms and the like of their own, and once they find what they’re looking for they can usually punch through a counter wall. Against a hate-bear, however, such decks are frequently drawing to a far smaller number of outs, and you can generally finish them off before they’re capable of finding it.
So—that’s why I don’t like Force of Will. But why didn’t I play Stoneforge Mystic? In the past year, Stoneforge has surged to prominence as Legacy’s most popular creature. From Sword of Feast and Famine to Umezawa’s Jitte to Batterskull, the Squire on steroids can fetch up any number of equipment that can break games wide open. Why would you play a creature deck with white and not play Stoneforge Mystic?
The biggest reason is that Stoneforge is slow. I was actually trying several copies of Stoneforge Mystic in my Junk deck before I made the switch to Bant, and I found that it just wasn’t a high enough impact card much of the time for how much I was investing in it. Against any kind of combo deck, fetching Feast and Famine took many turns of doing nothing before I so much as Funeral Charmed my opponent. Against opposing control decks, I was presenting a potentially juicy Spell Snare target—you’ll note that none of the major threats in my list are countered by Spell Snare—and even if it did resolve, what was I going to get? I certainly didn’t want to spend two turns and four mana to make a 4/4 life linker with Batterskull, and the various Swords were fine but certainly not terribly exciting.
The only matchups in which I found I really wanted Stoneforge Mystic was against other creature decks, where it provides a way to win creature standoffs. But Knight of the Reliquary already does that, so what it really turns out is that Stoneforge is a card that I want against other Knight of the Reliquary decks and no one else. And there—is it really better than Elspeth, which plays double duty as a huge threat against control? Or Jace, which has a similar impact?
Perhaps with the rise in popularity of Maverick decks it’s worth playing some number of Stoneforge Mystic in the maindeck, but I’m much more inclined to include Mother of Runes first (since it helps make your hate-bears that much harder for combo decks to beat) and frankly there just isn’t that much room. It’s possible the Maverick decks are a more streamlined version of what this deck is trying to do, and I’m certainly going to explore that direction as a possibility for the Grand Prix, but I’m not quite sure I’m willing to give up Brainstorm just yet. Not after just getting over all those repressed memories of dead cards in my hand.
If I had to submit a decklist for Grand Prix Indy right now, this is what I’d play:
Creatures (17)
- 4 Mother of Runes
- 1 Gaddock Teeg
- 2 Vendilion Clique
- 4 Noble Hierarch
- 4 Knight of the Reliquary
- 1 Qasali Pridemage
- 1 Scavenging Ooze
Planeswalkers (4)
Lands (22)
Spells (17)
Not a lot different from what I played at the Invitational, but with a nod towards the lessons I’ve learned from the Maverick decks. Mother of Runes is a serious customer and does a lot of work not only against other creature decks, but also at protecting your key utility creatures against combo. I’m a little reluctant to go down to only a single copy of Qasali Pridemage, especially in a world of Stoneforge Mystics, but no addition to a deck comes without a price and I’m not sure where else to make room.
The sideboard may seem a little random, but the one-ofs all have specific functions—except Armageddon, really, which is just a catchall awesome card against mana intensive decks that also happens to be one of my favorite cards of all time, so why not play it? Stony Silence is my favorite answer to Storm decks that rely on artifact mana that also happens to have a ton of utility against decks like Thopter-Sword and Countertop (or Affinity for that matter). Tower of the Magistrate is a fetchable answer to any kind of equipment, while Kitchen Finks is a nod towards the recent inexplicable popularity of Burn. Jitte is the first line of defense there, but Finks is a fine Green Sun’s target against Zoo, as well, so it seems like a reasonable inclusion.
One thing is for certain—my deck this weekend will contain Noble Hierarch, Knight of the Reliquary, and Elspeth. The rest of the supporting cast is still up in the air, and there sure are a lot of options. But that’s the charm of Legacy, isn’t it?
Now—about that cheesecake…
-bmk