Aside from the match coverage and player interviews, we don’t find out much about how Magic players get to the final tables in a Grand Prix. What may seem like a cunning deck choice may have been luck, while a strange card selection might have been soundly chosen and proven in the field. With these factors in mind, I interviewed three of the top competitors at GP: Chicago – Gabriel Nassif, Andrew Probasco and Brian Six. You can glean from their insights the top card picks in the format, the best plays and the strongest decks.
We’ll start with Brian Six, who played this Naya aggro deck:
3 Rift Bolt
4 Price of Progress
4 Magma Jet
1 Lightning Helix
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Fireblast
4 Chain Lightning
4 Wild Nacatl
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Kird Ape
3 Grim Lavamancer
4 Wooded Foothills
3 Windswept Heath
3 Wasteland
3 Taiga
2 Plateau
3 Mountain
4 Bloodstained Mire
Sideboard:
3 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Krosan Grip
2 Pyroblast
4 Pyroclasm
3 Vexing Shusher
You’ll note that it’s nearly a 20/20/20 burn/dudes/land split, which has historically led to very consistent aggro decks. It can easily sit back and burn an opponent that has answers for its creatures, while it can press Wild Nacatl into duty very early as a powerful threat. Here’s what Brian said about it, with my questions in bold and his responses italicized.
You’d mentioned that card access limited your deck choice. What were you considering before, and do you think you would have done well with that selection?
About a month before the GP I started looking at possible decks to play. Considering the immense quantity of cards played in Legacy that I do not know, I knew I wanted to play something aggressive or combo-ish. Control decks usually require a good idea of your opponents strategies to be played well, and I knew I wouldn’t have that. I was looking at Affinity, Goblins, and Enchantress, using the advice of Doug Linn himself. I don’t think I would have done as well with the other decks, as many players there seemed equipped to handle those decks better than mine.
Your sideboard is noticeably light on anti-combo and anti-dredge cards. Did this hurt you at all in the event?
I was pretty light on anti-combo and dredge cards. I played 0 combo decks on the weekend and I beat dredge once. In truth, I only ever sideboarded the Pyroblasts, Pyroclasms, Vexing Shushers, and 1 Krosan Grip the whole tournament.
What was your most surprising win?
In round 4, I was playing against a dredge player. Game 1, he was going off, as dredge normally does, and I was silently kicking myself for skimping on dredge sideboard cards. He seemed pretty inexperienced, and very excited to be dredging so much, and I played along with him. At one point I even said “wow, you can dredge your whole deck this turn!” and he enthusiastically agreed. When he did dredge his last card, he went to Dread Return a Flame-Kin Zealot and put 12 Bridge from Below triggers on the stack, which I responded to by Lightning Bolting my Wild Nacatl. He attacked me for 5 and lost in his next draw step. Game 2, I blew him out with a Pyroblast on his Breakthrough and felt blessed to beat what seems like an awful matchup.
What’s your bad beat story? Did you feel you were outplayed at any point?
I had no real bad beat stories, besides perhaps my top 8 match. My 2 losses in the swiss were to Gabriel Nassif and Andrew Probasco, who obviously were pretty on top of their game that weekend. In top 8, my opponent opened with Dark Ritual, Thoughtseize, Hymn to Tourach both games. This combined with a few mulligans turned what seemed like a good matchup for me into a slaughterfest for the wrong team.
You’ve played in large, pro events before. How did the skill of players in Legacy compare those encountered in other formats?
Most of my opponents at the Grand Prix were not legacy specialists. They were the same people who you see at all the Grand Prix and Pro Tours, and most of them seemed somewhat inexperienced with the format. Truthfully, I just beat most people down before they got their decks even set up. Some of them would finally start to stabilize with a Tarmogoyf and a Counterbalance/Top, and I would sneak in a Price of Progress or a Fireblast for the kill. I even had to ask one of my opponents what kind of deck he was playing after our match!
Would you attend another Legacy event if it didn’t feed into the Pro Tour circuit?
I would definitely attend another Legacy tournament. There’s one coming up in Columbus, OH on April 4th or 5th that I hope to play in if I can get the deck together again.
What card was MVP for you? Can you share some examples of its use?
As most people seem to know, Price of Progress is pretty busted in this format. I was hitting people for 6 damage all day with it. I tried really hard to not play one game 1 in any of my matches in hopes that they wouldn’t play around it games 2 or 3. One B/G opponent got mad at me for a slowroll when he cast a Mesmeric Fiend in game 1 and I responded by casting the lethal Price of Progress that I had been holding for a few turns, hoping to draw another burn spell to maximize my card’s value in games 2 and 3. Also a turn 1 Wild Nacatl is awesome in any format with dual lands, especially if you can follow it up with a Wasteland and another 1 drop.
Was anything dead weight in your deck?
The Lightning Helix definitely should just be the 4th Rift Bolt. I thought the Helix would be cute and drastically underestimated Rift Bolt’s ability to get around Counterbalance. Also, most of my sideboard is complete chaff, and I would probably change a lot. Vexing Shusher, while cute, is probably just better as Pyroblast.
How much testing did you put into your deck? Did you find that experience in other formats helped your performance?
I played exactly 0 games of Legacy before turning in my decklist the morning of the GP. Adam Yurchick and I split 2 games during the byes in round 3. The decklist started with one I found online from a German player named Michael Steinke, but I polished it up with help from Owen Turtenwald, Adam Yurchick, and Matt Westfall. I’ve been playing a pretty similar RGw deck in extended, so that experience certainly helped. This is pretty much the same deck but Grim Lavamancer is amazing and the burn spells are more efficient.
Brian had a stellar performance that weekend, especially based on the back of having no in-Legacy testing experience! I am sure that his experience in Extended with a very similar deck aided him immensely, as Nacatls pound for about the same in every format. I also really respect his honest evaluation of his knowledge of the format and his choice to run a deck that didn’t require knowing the ins and outs to perform well.
Next, let’s hear from Andrew Probasco, a Vintage superstar and easily in the top 3 of Magic Players You Should Meet. Here’s his list from Chicago:
2 Vedalken Shackles
3 Spell Snare
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
3 Ponder
1 Pithing Needle
2 Krosan Grip
4 Force of Will
1 Engineered Explosives
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
3 Trinket Mage
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Sower of Temptation
2 Volcanic Island
1 Underground Sea
3 Tropical Island
4 Polluted Delta
6 Island
4 Flooded Strand
2 Academy Ruins
Sideboard:
2 Ancient Grudge
3 Duress
3 Firespout
2 Hydroblast
1 Krosan Grip
1 Pithing Needle
1 Relic of Progenitus
2 Tormod’s Crypt
You said before that your deck used to have Grindstone and Painter’s Servant in it. When and why did you make the change?
The Painter’s Servant combo was the last in a line of “finisher” style cards I tested in the CB deck. This would include commonly used strategies like Dreadnaught/Standstill and Mongoose/Mystic Enforcer, as well as more oddball ideas like Helm of Awakening (with the Divining Tops already in the deck)/Cunning Wish->Brain Freeze, and Reanimate/Buried Alive and Kiki Jiki/Karmic Guide/Sky Hussar. A few months before the GP, two things happened.
The first is that I finally realized that with all of these decks, the majority of the games were won with Counterbalance alone, or with an early Goyf, or in the lists that had them, with Shackles advantage. The second is that other Counterbalance decks were getting more and more popular in my metagame. Painter / Grindstone was an amazing way to ignore aggro, but against other Counterbalance decks, it was just another card that didn’t help me, being exceptionally vulnerable to removal and resolved Counterbalance. Even if Painter (and probably more important, his friend Chrome Mox) helped against every other deck in the field, the Counterbalance match was important enough to metagame specifically for.
What cards or strategies enable a person to win a Counterbalance/Top mirror match?
There are three ways you can fight a Counterbalance mirror (and this probably applies to a lot of other mirror matches, too).
A) Drop yours first. There’s a lot of luck here, but if you’re not running the full set of Counterbalances and Tops you’re already behind. My list ran Ponders in addition to Brainstorms just to increase the chances of this happening. At one point the list had 4 Ponder and only 3 Brainstorm almost purely because dropping CB first is SO IMPORTANT, and Ponder is better at accomplishing this than Brainstorm is. At the GP I went back to the 4th Brainstorm, but I’m not completely sure which is correct.
B) Kill theirs. There’s only a few reasonable ways to do this. Krosan Grip and Engineered Explosives + Academy Ruins are the best two in my experience. I’ve also run Reverent Silence for reasons that have nothing to do with the Counterbalance matchup, but it’s not terrible here. Note that you really don’t want to have to kill a Counterbalance if the other two options are available, but it’s a mirror match, so sometimes there are none.
C) Ignore theirs. Going into the Grand Prix, this was pretty easy. Most Counterbalance decks were all one and two drops, so Shackles and Academy Ruins was usually enough to win, if not Trinket Mage -> EE, or Sower. As the meta “evolves” into CB versus CB, casting costs are going to become more varied, making this more difficult. Difficult/Impossible to stop options like Tombstalker, Decree of Justice, or X Spells could be the final result of the casting cost arms race, but that might risk spreading the decks too thin to be worth running.
Note that there’s usually an option D) Win before they get it down. While normally fine in a mirror match, I just don’t think that’s a realistic option here. There are decks that try this, like Dreadtill, but removal is so efficient and common in Legacy that it seems like a losing strategy.
What was your most surprising win?
Without trying to sound arrogant, I was lucky enough to be able to play this deck a TON before the GP. I had a really good handle on where the strengths and weakness of the list were. I didn’t expect to get as far as I did without being blown out earlier by chance, but the individual matches played out pretty much how I expected them to. Walking into the tournament, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed I would knock out LSV on my way to the top, but I think my deck was the favorite in the matchup.
What’s your bad beat story? Did you feel you were outplayed at any point?
Against Brian Kowal, in our first game he led with Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Dark Ritual, Dark Confidant, Tombstalker before I had my first turn.
Aside from playing in large events, you’ve also played a lot of small- and medium-scale Legacy events as well. How did the skill of players in Legacy compare those encountered in other formats?
Obviously in the last few rounds, I was playing against literally the best players in the world, and not much compares to that. Most of the event, however, I felt pretty prepared for just from the smaller events. Most of the people at SuperGames Legacy haven’t won PTQs, but they know the cards and they know the format. More than one opponent at the GP played well, but missed some legacy specific interactions or rulings that cost them the match.
The creature-stealing element hearkens back to Next Level Blue in Extended, where it was a powerful strategy there as well. In Legacy, how effective was Sower and Shackles, when the removal for both is faster? Did you find that they acted as “virtual” creatures, upping your threat density?
While removal for Sower and Shackles is efficient, it’s more vulnerable to Counterbalance, and not particularly any more common than it was in extended. There are certainly games where you just can’t stick them, but hands that are filled with removal are often slow hands, which reduces your need to stick them in the first place. As for “virtual” creatures, that’s definitely the case. Over all of the previous tournaments and testing games I played with the list, it’s possible I’ve won with my opponents creatures at least as much as my own.
What card was MVP for you? Can you share some examples of its use?
It feels stupid saying Counterbalance here, but I really think that right now the entire format is built around it. Just about every card in my deck is in there to find Counterbalance, beat Counterbalance, or beat the few cards that beat it.
Was anything dead weight in your deck?
I never played against Dredge, so I never brought in the 2 Tormod’s Crypts in my sideboard, and I only played against combo once, so I only played one Duress on the day. It’s hard to say if those choices where wrong though, as the pairings could easily have gone another way. Sideboard space is definitely at a premium in this deck though, and if there isn’t dredge or combo in a specific meta, you can definitely make better use of those slots.
Your deck is striking for the very spare manabase and conservativeness with color splash. Could you go into this a bit? For example, did you miss Swords to Plowshares?
The low dual count/high fetch count mana base comes from deckbuilding in vintage. There are a lot strategies that some people struggle to answer that you can completely ignore just by having a solid manabase. Multiple times at the GP I head a disappointed sigh or an offhanded comment when I fetched out ANOTHER island. In one case an opponent boarded in Price of Progress against me, revealed it to Counterbalance, and shuddered a few turns later when I got my fifth basic in play, against his board of 4 duals.
Swords to Plowshares is an article in and of itself. Cutting Swords wasn’t some kind of compromise for the manabase (though the 5th color would have been a stretch.) I actively didn’t want Swords in my deck and I think it would have made the list worse (that is, if I was running white anyway for Mystic Enforcer or something, I wouldn’t have added them). The short explanation is that for every matchup besides fast Tombstalker.dec (which I did lose to in the swiss, not unexpectedly) Swords is suboptimal, and therefore a liability.
Andrew, true to fashion, gives the reader a lot to consider. His evaluation of the Top mirror reminds me of this fantastic article by Patrick Chapin. His take on Swords to Plowshares is really fascinating and, as he says, worth an article. Expect one in the future… This also serves as a nice compliment to Brian’s interview regarding the time spent tuning and testing the deck. Probasco spent months getting to where he is, and I can sympathize personally with having to cut cute and clever options. The playing time required to get to Andrew’s level with the deck is clearly much higher than that needed to make RGW Zoo tick, so if you’re considering dipping into Legacy, consider these practice time differences when you make your decision.
Finally, let’s get to the boss himself, Gabriel Nassif. He chose this list:
2 Vedalken Shackles
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Ponder
1 Krosan Grip
4 Force of Will
3 Daze
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
2 Trygon Predator
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Sower of Temptation
4 Dark Confidant
4 Underground Sea
3 Tundra
3 Tropical Island
4 Polluted Delta
2 Island
4 Flooded Strand
Sideboard:
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Engineered Plague
1 Energy Flux
1 Darkblast
1 Forge[/author]-Tender”]Burrenton [author name="Forge"]Forge[/author]-Tender
1 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Hydroblast
1 Kataki, War’s Wage
1 Krosan Grip
1 Perish
1 Planar Void
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Umezawa’s Jitte
Let’s get one of the big questions out of the way: your sideboard. Patrick Chapin said you ran it on a bet from Heezy, and my teammate Mattieu Durand said that French players have run sideboards like that in Legacy for awhile. Can you clear up this mystery?
It wasn’t really a bet, I just had a bunch of cards I wanted to play and it didn’t seem bad at all to have all one-ofs. Once I suggested that to LSV, Mark wouldn’t let me back down.
What was your most surprising win?
None of my wins were really surprising, but I definitely got lucky to beat Merfolk and the Goblin deck I played against.
What’s your bad beat story? Did you feel you were outplayed at any point?
I don’t remember any moment where I felt I got outplayed, even though I myself definitely didn’t play perfectly or outplay my opponents that much.
You’ve obviously played in a crazy amount of pro events before. How did the skill of players in Legacy compare those encountered in other formats?
I didn’t have the feeling my opponents were bad at all. I don’t think I thought to myself a single one of them played badly, even though a few made some mistakes here and there, but I think it’s harder to figure out in Legacy if your opponents are playing that good or not since there is so much stuff going on every turn and a lot more choices at any given point.
Would you attend another Legacy event if it didn’t feed into the Pro Tour circuit?
I’d need a good reason, but yes. I am in fact attending a festival May 1-3 in Annecy, France, holding a prerelease, a Legacy tourney and a Vintage one.
What card was MVP for you? Can you share some examples of its use?
No cards in particular, all of the maindeck cards are really essential. I guess the more unconventional choices, Sower and Shackles maindeck, were pretty good. If I had to pick a single of my sideboard cards, I’d say the Threads of Disloyalty.
Was anything dead weight in your deck?
The Trygon Predators were unimpressive.
How much testing did you put into your deck? Did you find that experience in other formats helped your performance?
I played twentyish games of Legacy before the tournament, but not all with this deck. I had already played with Counterbalance/Top decks before and I have a decent amount of experience with cards like Brainstorm, so I wasn’t completely lost.
How did you go about building your deck? Did you find the four-color manabase ever caused problems getting the right mana, or did the card selection power in the deck overcome mana screw?
I got the decklist from LSV but it is really close to what I would have ended up running anyway. I liked the four colors, Confidant is really powerful, and Swords to Plowshares necessary too.
Gabriel differs from Andrew over the need for Swords and the color splash in general, but their results show that either strategy can carry a lot of weight in Legacy. We’ll soon see the after-effects of this event reverberate through future tournament results, bringing more Vedalken Shackles and singleton-sideboard action for months to come.
Thanks for joining me this week, and a special thanks to Brian, Andrew and Gabriel for giving their time and insights for the article.
Until next week…