Last time, I looked at the Extended format, which did not list — or even accurately predict — the decks played at the top tables for the length of the tournament. But the point was not to examine every single aspect and return with the thoroughly-tuned top tier decks, but instead to see what you could do and go from there to see the trends that followed from there.
If I failed in any one thing, it was my zealousness in the belief that the format was wide open, when everyone else seemed to think it was closed up tight thanks to the Magic Online metagame. The intent of the article was to point out trends; the two big ones I pointed to were the multi-colored bleeding of the format (made possible by the combination of Ravnica and Onslaught dual lands) and the avenues of attack it made possible, and the resultant gravitation of the top cards to the top of the metagame in a variety of decks.
I didn’t take that second hint far enough, though, and that seems to be the key failing; I did point to Psychatog appearing everywhere with his little grinning face, but I missed the Life from the Loam advantage engine entirely, and I didn’t consider the ramifications of the Dredge mechanic in a format where two of the most powerful spells were Cabal Therapy and Psychatog. At least I pegged Psychatog as playing Fact or Fiction rather than Gifts Ungiven for that very reason — and while the final results certainly showed that this was definitely an avenue of approach, there were still definite elements I missed, such as the use of Darkblast due to the metagame gravitating towards one-toughness beaters from the aggressive decks.
The point of this article, then, is to have a chance to look at the same trends in Legacy while I type merrily away at an Excel database for the Los Angeles Pro Tour. Seeing what was done in a so-called stagnant Extended format brings to mind just what might be possible in Legacy.
Legacy is an unusual format, because it is a format at odds with itself: it is a format where anything is possible, because of the freedom provided by a redundant amount of good mana at low cost and the abundance of cards that can back up any reasonable strategy. In a format where anything is possible, only the best of things will be worth using, because anyone can use them. The most powerful cards (along with the neighboring cards that maximize their synergy or effective use) tend to conglomerate into the most powerful decks…. And these most powerful cards create the limiting factors that hold back the format from being a truly open field.
Careful balance has been put in to avoid format degeneracy — but honing that edge any further would damage a format that’s supposed to be about playing with the most powerful cards in a fair way. Much like the format of Five-Color, the bannings may seem arbitrary at times (Metalworker?) but are all designed for one overarching goal: High power, limited degeneracy.
There are some key cards that define the format — and just as I did in my article last week for Extended, I’m going to step through the format to see why things do or do not work, but keep it to a much more limited scope. Rather than trying to come up with decklists of my own, I am going to cite decklists that have been effective in the format to date, as last week’s experiment wasn’t very well-received.
In the forums, someone told me that I was obsessed with Cabal Therapy in the Extended format… But of the most-played cards at the Pro Tour, Therapy finished behind only Forest, Island, Mountain, Chrome Mox, and Bloodstained Mire, with sixty-two more copies played on Day One than the next most prevalent spell, Pithing Needle. Remember, the best cards are the ones that help generate the rules for what will (and will not) succeed at the format, and by seeing what decks will play them we can learn when those rules can be broken during deck design.
1. Wasteland
If Strip Mine were legal, I’m sure it would be number one instead. As it is, Wasteland may prove to be the most prevalent card in the format, even more than Force of Will. Wasteland is the counterbalance to a format chock-full of dual lands and fetch lands; it’s the reason to urge restraint rather than going all over the place with your mana. Just because you can, after all, doesn’t mean you should.
The backbreaking strength of a free Stone Rain doesn’t sound like much, but the decks that are playing Wasteland are trying to do something unfair with it. One of two successful approaches is to put it in a beatdown deck, like Goblins — it’s not quite an afterthought, but rather it’s a tool that can be used while the Red Army marches onward. Aggressive tempo can break the apparent symmetry of the card, one land of yours for one of theirs, by spending the time used before it more fruitfully.
The second approach is as a tool in a mana-denial strategy, with Crucible of Worlds, where it serves a part of a greater whole or disrupts the opponent continuously. If your opponent could only Wasteland you four times a game, you could get away with all nonbasics if you really wanted to; with your opponent technically able to Wasteland every land you ever play, the threat of being left with zero permanents is far too real to be ignored.
On the one hand, we have a host of potential beatdown decks that can take advantage of Wasteland, and at least two good control decks (well, maybe one-and-a-half, since we’re talking about Stax and Landstill) that focus on Wasteland as a fundamental aspect of their strategy. On the other hand, we have an unusual development in modern Legacy, since one of the best decks is a mono-colored deck with no useful Wasteland targets, designed specifically to combat this trend.
If you don’t believe this format is all about the Wasteland, try explaining why a well-designed Blue deck running eight fetchlands doesn’t have even a single dual land for even so much as a light splash color. And yet High Tide is exactly that — a monochromatic deck in the world of perfect multicolored mana. And it’s a highly-successful (if not downright disgusting) combo deck.
That said, the primary strain of the Legacy format is balancing the things you can do with all the colored mana fixing you could ever want against the number of nonbasic lands that you want to expose to Wasteland. Wasteland is so good that some decks want Rishadan Ports as well, just to try and squeeze in more Wastelands than they will legally let you play. If all you care about is taking advantage of the mana as God intended you to, you can do some really powerful things… As decks like Survival show, since their key cards flip all across the spectrum in their quest to lock you up.
If all you care about is never losing a turn to a Wasteland, you can play all Basic lands, and that’s exactly what High Tide does.
2. Force of Will
In my Extended article, the cheapest and most effective disruption/control spell was Cabal Therapy; in Legacy, you have Force of Will. Combo decks can pack it to push through their spells, control decks can play it because, well, it’s a Counterspell, and beatdown decks can use it to generate much-needed tempo to ensure they buy enough time to push through lethal damage.
The limits of what you can do in Legacy are in many ways restrained by this card: combo decks that have it are superior to those that don’t, and Force fits equally well in a dedicated control or an aggro-control deck. Neither seem to find “free” to be too high of a cost, and the loss of a card matters less in a short game than one that will last past the first four or five turns. This gravitates decks into being “Blue Versus The World” — and the scary thing is that Blue is up to the challenge. Even Survival of the Fittest decks are playing Force of Will nowadays to give them the time to take advantage of their Survival engine — and not necessarily in a dedicated board control deck, as was seen back in the days of Tradewind Rider-Survival.
This creates a schism: Pyroblast versus Hydroblast. The Goblins pack up to the full eight Blasts for blue spells, which is important in a world with a mono-blue deck that can kill by turn 3. The Blue decks pack up to the full eight Blasts for red spells, because Goblin Lackey is just that dangerous.
While it’s clear that some people can avoid this schism entirely (and others make a point of it), it nonetheless helps to define the metagame. Landstill is looked upon as the best Blue control deck available in Legacy today, much to the disappointment of those who came to Legacy to play a real control deck. The reason for this is simply that it gets to take advantage of another key card (Swords to Plowshares) and builds a board-control strategy from there…. But the reason other decks aren’t better have more to do with what does and does not work.
Morphling is a wonderful card, but five-mana creatures are a little difficult to play in a Legacy control deck. Mishra’s Factory is the right cost, but then you again run into Limiting Factor #1: Wasteland interaction. After this weekend’s Psychatog domination, clearly Psychatog is one of the most powerful creatures ever printed, and would under ordinary circumstances count as the kill method of choice in a Blue deck…. But an extension of the rift between Red and Blue places a big target on Dr. Teeth’s head. As a kill mechanic that exhausts an awful lot of resources, and is vulnerable to not just Swords to Plowshares but to sideboarded Red Blasts as well, what would seem to be an excellent control finisher has been relegated to being just one more aggressive card among many similar-minded cards for aggro-control decks.
Force of Will conveniently circumvents a normal rule of Magic: the linear growth of mana from turn to turn. This can help support decks that otherwise develop too slowly, such as Landstill. At the moment, Force of Will is the crutch keeping Landstill from finally being kicked to the curb in Legacy, as the metagame that spawned it falls further and further into the past.
Arguably, a Blue-based control strategy must exist in some iteration or another, as it is best equipped to battle the fast combo elements that exist in the format. The difficulty remains in finding a way to beat the aggressive decks, which seems to spiral back towards the difficulty Mono-Blue has always had with creature spells resolving, and thus necessitates a second color for creature (or other wayward permanent) control. White is acceptable — but not good, as Landstill seems to show, and Black is good, but has a giant bulls-eye on its best reason for using it, aside from Hideous Laughter as a Cunning Wish target for a U/B deck.
3. Brainstorm
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Brainstorm is the card that follows Force of Will, since it is easily the best Blue card-selection spell not banned in the format. Its simple yet powerful design lets you find the cards you need, and a turn 1 Brainstorm gives you a ten-card opening hand instead of the usual seven.
Without other elements, however, Brainstorm wouldn’t be anything special. It is only in combination with the Onslaught fetchlands (which are used exceptionally well to smooth your mana draws) that Brainstorm’s power shines. Both are very good; put together, they complement each other excellently. A pair of small effects with great synergy in this case helps define Legacy, as I have not yet seen the Blue deck that wouldn’t benefit from casting Brainstorm. With the power of Force of Will both obvious and dominant, this is support card number one for Blue-based decks.
4. Goblin Lackey
Keeping in line with the theme of the format, where it is the severely undercosted effects that dictate what can and cannot be done in the format, consider this little man the key representative of the Goblin tribe. Like lemmings, Goblins work well only in ever-larger numbers, and you need some kind of tangible rewards for packing as many Goblins in your deck as it can allow. Unfortunately, this strategy is not merely viable but may very well be dominant, thanks to the aggressive push these little buggers can accomplish when working together and the combo-like synergy they have piling on together into the Red Zone. They are dangerous not simply because of the card advantage that they can accumulate — cycling Gempalm Incinerators, copying Goblin Matrons, and finding three friends with a Goblin Ringleader — but because they are fast while they do this, and this synergy gives an already fast creature deck an undeserved amount of resilience to the strategies that normally defeat creature decks.
Goblin Lackey is part of that problem, and in some ways is the most dangerous part of it.
Goblin Warchief was capable of bringing Goblins into Tier One status in every format prior to Legacy, from Extended to Block Constructed. Warchief drops the cost of all your Goblins by one, making the already-fast and efficient Goblin deck just that much faster and that much more efficient. Goblin Warchief never cast Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker for free on the second turn.
Goblin Lackey is an innocent-seeming 1/1 creature that gives Red a mana elf, and an elf that does its job by doing what Red likes doing best anyway: attacking. This humble one-drop was derided in the good old days because nobody was doing anything unfair with him, or even particularly good… They used to drop Goblin Mutants with him, after all. Now, its very existence forces all decks to be able to kill a creature on the first turn — or to be able to race the Goblin horde that will soon follow.
Unlike the other cards we’ve mentioned so far, which help to limit what you can do and the tools you’ve got to work with, this one helps you figure out the speed of the format. It’s fast, with a reasonable time to see people killed being somewhere in the neighborhood of turn 4. Interaction is of course always going to drag the game longer, but a fish sitting in its bowl on the table won’t live to see its own fourth turn on the draw.
It also helps to define the format, by reminding people that creature decks do exist, and require some attention.
4 Mogg Fanatic
4 Goblin Lackey
4 Goblin Piledriver
4 Goblin Matron
4 Goblin Warchief
4 Goblin Ringleader
4 Gempalm Incinerator
1 Siege-Gang Commander
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Goblin King
1 Goblin Sharpshooter
4 AEther Vial
4 Wasteland
4 Rishadan Port
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Wooded Foothills
8 Mountain
Admittedly, this is not compensating for the fact that you can splash a second color for sideboard tools at very little cost to the deck, and thus does not include any dual lands.
5. Dark Ritual And Friends
On the one hand, no single one of these cards can be labeled “the problem.” We’re talking about cards that, taken individually, are fair and not worthy of excessive attention; they’ll be used well if a deck can fit them into its strategy, or not used when decks are unwilling to trade cards (or life, or whatever) for speed. It’s when they start teaming up in redundant bunches that we’re talking about a dangerous situation, and people who want a lot of fast mana quickly and cheaply can find it pretty well.
This tends to split down into two different types of mana: the permanent resource and the temporary boost. There are definitely decks that want to use the permanent resource to its advantage, from decks willing to play Mox Diamond or Chrome Mox for that extra touch of speed to the artifact decks that use City of Traitors and Ancient Tomb to make up for the Vintage toys they can’t quite replace. The permanent resources are ultimately fair until you start grouping too many of them together, in which case they either a) get punished by Wasteland, which is both fair and acceptable, or b) do something degenerate, ending the game.
The fast mana is good, but comes with just enough strings attached (loss of life, an unfortunate tendency to end up in the graveyard, requiring the investment of other cards) that ultimately the trade-off required makes it fair. Fast mana becomes problematic when there just aren’t enough strings attached, and that’s why you don’t see real Moxes or Grim Monolith around; they even considered Metalworker to be too dangerous to allow to run rampant, in a format where four colors of mana can kill it for one mana (Swords to Plowshares, Oxidize/Crumble, name a Red spell, Vendetta) and the fourth can counter or bounce it within the same window.
The “string” attached to fast mana that generates more than it costs is that it is for a single use only, and this ultimately keeps it in check. Ritualing out Hypnotic Specter only to face Swords to Plowshares, Force of Will, or Lightning Bolt doesn’t get you anywhere you want to be — and so it’s ultimately only a dedicated combo deck that can take advantage of Dark Ritual mana. Unfortunately, such a combo deck could use Dark Ritual, Lotus Petal, Lion’s Eye Diamond, and even stretch so far as Cabal Ritual with Threshold — as the PT: LA 2005 Dragonstorm decks did, and any number of lands that tap or sacrifice for two mana on top of that.
That deck, by the way, exists. Called “Iggy Pop” in a fit of pique, it is a deck focusing on doing nothing but casting a bunch of spells, then eventually casting Tendrils of Agony for your life total. Instead of your usual Tendrils Storm deck from Type One, which gets to focus on using Yawgmoth’s Will, it’s the red-headed stepchild of YawgWin from the same set, Ill-Gotten Gains, that helps make this engine run.
Ill-Gotten Storm, a.k.a. ”Iggy Pop”
3 Island
2 Swamp
2 Underground Sea
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Lotus Petal
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
3 Night’s Whisper
4 Brainstorm
4 Mystical Tutor
3 Lim-Dul’s Vault
4 Intuition
4 Ill-Gotten Gains
4 Tendrils of Agony
2 Chromatic Sphere
1 Chain of Vapor
And from a certain perspective, it is another fast mana card that makes the other Legacy combo deck run, from a Fallen Empires common that seemed so innocent back before we knew better. No one would ever play High Tide; you’d still need four Islands anyway to “Ritual” out your Fat Moti!
Reset High Tide, a.k.a. “Solidarity” (but don’t ask why!)
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 High Tide
4 Opt
4 Impulse
4 Meditate
4 Reset
4 Cunning Wish
4 Twincast
3 Brain Freeze
3 Turnabout
10 Islands
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
If you aren’t aware of both of these decks (as well as having a general understanding of what cards are important, as well as how they do what they do), you’re going to run into difficulties. Combo decks can be quite difficult to disrupt even when you know what to aim for, and a lack of awareness of these two decks will prove to be a hindrance.
There are, of course, a wide variety of other combos possible, with a wide swath of old combo decks available without any limitation on the less-broken elements (no Vampiric Tutor, so sorry)… But as always, the ones that take advantage of the greatest number of the most powerful cards will float to the top of the heap. Many will get to benefit from these accelerants, such as the Flame Fusillade/Time Vault deck, but these try not to be reliant on any non-land permanent being in play for the resolution of any one of its particular spells, and so are a more difficult strategy to effectively hose.
5a. AEther Vial
Remember that Red deck mentioned before? The only non-Land, non-Goblin card to make the cut was Aether Vial, which is in many ways a testament to that card. Like the other cards on this list so far, Vial costs no more than one mana. What you get for that mana takes time, but for this time you get the benefit of instant-speed, uncounterable creatures. How fair.
Three turns will net you six mana, four will get you ten, and either way it lets you increase your clock or spend your mana on other things (like Rishadan Port) if you’re so inclined. For most decks you’ll encounter, this is the mana accelerant that will be taken advantage of…. And it’s a dangerous one. Free, uncounterable, and bound to show up at the worst possible time are not three things we like to see in our opponents’ creatures.
We’ve learned how wrong we were about this card, and we’ve apologized to it repeatedly. It got banned in Extended, and may yet be destined for that same fate here… Though that does not seem so very likely. It’s based on creatures, and thus is ultimately fair.
6. Swords to Plowshares
This hardly counts, for the most part, because any creature that needs killing on the first turn can probably be killed by Lightning Bolt, which has the benefit of additional utility. Likewise, the most important creature to kill on the first turn can be killed by the one-mana twins Blue Elemental Blast and Hydroblast.
But not every creature is red, nor does every deck need to respond to a creature threat. And as embarrassing as it may sound, sometimes the creature you’re trying to kill is a monster Lightning Bolt doesn’t touch — and every once in a while, removing it from the game ends an unexpectedly painful problem. If what you want is any creature dead with no negotiation, this will do the job. Some decks want to splash removal, and those decks fit in Plow before they look to Terror, the Dark Banishing effect of your choice, Terminate, or what have you.
Interacting with creatures, however, is ultimately fair. While Swords to Plowshares is undercosted, especially in comparison to some of the threats you can see popping up out of the more interesting decks in the format (like reanimated Akroma, Angel of Wrath), it’s still something you choose to do or don’t do. Where the other cards on this list are being touted for their power, this one is being praised for its efficiency. That this card has helped float strategies that would otherwise sink miserably is a testament to just how good being efficient can be.
And for the most part, that seems to set the broad strokes for Legacy. A lot more is possible (and far more cards are good in the format), but these few lead the way and challenge the other cards to follow. The most powerful cards that rise to the top are the cheapest, most action-packed cards you can get, either getting you more mana or fundamentally altering the game in a substantial way. Even Brainstorm, innocent as it seems, has an immediate impact on what’s going on, as it ramps up the early power (and consistency) of your deck by drawing three cards. There are more words written on it that make it fair — but getting to start with ten instead of seven is well worth getting caught with your hand in the cookie jar and having to put two back. The worst card on this short list is still a card that White mages have been lamenting the loss of ever since Ice Age and Fourth Edition rotated out of Standard.
These cards give us the defining elements of Legacy:
1. The struggle for the best mana from the least number of nonbasic lands.
Wasteland is probably the card that has the single greatest impact on Legacy, because it, more than anything else, limits you from going buck-wild with a five-color deck.
Some decks try rather hard to keep themselves Wasteland-proof, while others struggle to ensure they’ll have operating mana in the color of their choice even if their opponent has a Wasteland or two. Others sacrifice the fight against Wasteland, figuring a little bit of vulnerability was effectively the same as a lot of vulnerability, when there are too many juicy targets to settle for less. While it’s true that most of the time they won’t get caught and punished for their greedy mana base, the possibility is there, so they have to make up for this inherent weakness by doing something absolutely crazy with that mana now that they have it. The five-color Survival decks are an excellent example of that, as they are crammed to bursting with powerful and undercosted cards that combine with amazing synergy. The fight is deciding when you’ve got enough lands that are Wasteland-bait, and whether you can build in an inherent resilience to Wasteland.
2. The cream rises to the top; the rest falls away.
Some people really love their Natural Order/Verdant Force decks. Other people look at Verdant Force and try and decide whether he’s worth Exhuming against Goblins right now, when they could have Akroma instead. Legacy has such a massive card-pool that only the downright best cards have a chance of surviving here, and the cards that are staples (Meddling Mage, Force of Will, Cabal Therapy) have all withstood the test of time to get into that top 1% of all cards.
While it’s possible that some otherwise-bad card can combine to fuel an otherwise top-notch strategy, you either have to be a good card yourself or have a very close relative with that kind of pedigree. Ill-Gotten Gains gets by because it works well with some of the other best cards in the format, Intuition and Tendrils of Agony, while the Standard backbreaker Tooth and Nail gets laughed at by the rest of the cards in the locker room.
A deck not using some of the best cards (or specifically and directly attacking a facet of the metagame with cards that exploit a weakness) won’t be very good. Fortunately, there are still a lot of very good cards to choose from, and thus a living metagame instead of a stagnant environment.
3. You really can do anything! Really!
With every card in Magic at your fingertips, with a few noteworthy exceptions that fouled the whole thing up for everybody, literally anything is possible. Re-framing how you look at a card is an absolute necessity with Legacy, because there are so many things that still haven’t been tried.
Recently, I worked on a version of Stax that was missing another key card to lock down the board, one that could have inherently good synergy with the rest of the cards in the deck. By playing around with my Spheres of Resistance and Crucibles of Worlds and Tangle Wires and Smokestacks, it occurred to me that Stasis might be a genuinely good support card here. This was a novel way of using Stasis, simply because it was not the centerpiece of its own deck but just another tool in the toolbox, working on its inherent good synergy with the rest of the elements of the deck (“Why don’t you sit here while I wait for you to run out of things?”) and the subtle interplay of cards that had never been put in the same deck before (“With Crucible and Smokestack for one out, I can pay the upkeep for Stasis forever!”).
This is, for all intents and purposes, an unexplored format that’s waiting to be mined for valuable gems. There are a lot of legal cards in the Legacy format, some of which you’ve never even heard of before. (Well, not unless you’re up to speed with the latest from Portal: Three Kingdoms Block Constructed that is.)
Even those who have played forever, and are getting to use toys they came to love the game with for the first time in ages, will find that their old cards do new tricks with some of the other cardboard flopping around out there. It’s a world of infinite possibilities — and you won’t be disappointed so long as you don’t break the rules. And even that might not disappoint you, if you break the right rule for the right reason at an opportune moment… just know what you’re getting into, and what can be traded off for what and at what cost.
The nonbasic land tension is one that’s surprising a lot of new Legacy players, who think that having mana as you always wanted it to be gives you the right to use it all to the exclusion of all else. All it takes is a few Wastelands to learn that rule. It takes a lot more playing — and creative design — to know when to break it.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!
To Isengard! To Isengard!
What did you say?
They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard!
To Isengard! To Isengard!
Tell me, where is Gandalf, for I much desire to speak with him…”
— an amusement on my computer I just can’t get out of my head