I’ve been meaning to talk about Legacy again for a while, as my last article on the subject was talking about understanding the format and the strongest cards that define the format (hint: look at the one-mana or less cards) and then I was uncharacteristically silent following up Grand Prix: Philadelphia. My first brush playing with Legacy made an unusual Stax build appear out of nowhere, with Stasis supporting the board-advantage artifacts that deny mana and other resources in an interesting fashion. Unenthused with the deck (and not interested in morphing it into Flame Vault), I instead began wondering why Survival of the Fittest decks weren’t doing well in Legacy, because it’s an absurdly powerful card. Looking over The Mana Drain and Star City Games boards talking about Legacy, I saw five-color control Survival decks, and bad attempts at using Survival in Blue/Green Madness, and the deck known as “RGSA”, short for Red/Green Survival Advantage. Something did not seem right about that deck, mostly due to the fact that opponents that tried to ignore it and win without interacting with creatures in play could do so easily. In a format where combo decks are left with some of the most powerful cards a mage can use, ignoring combo decks seemed a poor option.
Instead of a bad Red/Green deck as the solution to “what do you do if you don’t draw Survival?” I turned to The Rock.
The Rock is a deck that many players have had a love-hate relationship with. Its game-plan seems fundamentally flawed at times, its ability to control the board often goes against its best interests when it comes to winning the game in anything approaching a timely fashion, and its card selections always seem… off. To say the least. Fortunately, I was thinking more of a beatdown-oriented deck, more like the Macey Rock strategy (or is it French Rock now?) that was the best version of The Rock at PT: LA in October. One of the best cards in the format is Cabal Therapy and it gets better in a deck with a lot of creatures. Survival of the Fittest necessitates a lot of creatures. Crafting a good beatdown deck that can capitalize on these two cards seems like a way to put peanut butter in your chocolate, or Illusions of Grandeur in your Necrodeck. Make sure the rest of the cards are good, too, and you’ll have a deck that can win without its key card, so you don’t have a limp Survival deck if Force of Will, Duress, or Pithing Needle have anything to say about it.
Give me Wild Mongrel, or give me death.
Creatures (27)
- 4 Birds of Paradise
- 4 Wild Mongrel
- 3 Arrogant Wurm
- 4 Basking Rootwalla
- 1 Genesis
- 1 Eternal Witness
- 1 Viridian Zealot
- 1 Viridian Shaman
- 1 Krovikan Horror
- 4 Wall of Roots
- 1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
- 1 Masticore
- 1 Mesmeric Fiend
Lands (21)
Spells (12)
Now, this is a rather unusual decklist to look at, as it seems to be an odd blend of a Blue/Green Madness deck, The Rock, and the Survival-powered Stupid Green Deck from forever ago (with discard instead of LD). What it actually is… is a hybridized mix of all of these things, built around card synergy and cranking the card power as high as we can. It’s underpowered for a Survival deck, if a Survival deck is supposed to utilize overpowered silver bullet creatures to dominate the board. This Survival deck just wants to beat down, and isn’t against using Squee and Krovikan Horror to fill your hand with chaff and throw it to the Mongrel in one attack if there’s nothing else worth doing. Without Survival, you have a reasonably solid beatdown plan, even if using Birds and Walls doesn’t really further the beatdown plan; they fuel the mana-hungry Survival of the Fittest usually, and without it are mostly used as Therapy fodder or enough acceleration to play a few creatures faster, or pump Rootwallas. When everything works beautifully and Survival is cranking, it’s an army in a box, single-handedly creating a swarm of Wurms and Rootwallas to attack the opponents’ life total, while at the same time aggressively ramping up your mana production to absolutely explode with Survival of the Fittest.
The ideal plan is:
- Turn one: Forest, Bird of Paradise.
- Turn two: Wall of Roots, play Gaea’s Cradle, use Cradle to cast Survival of the Fittest. Use Wall of Roots for mana on your turn and on theirs to pitch Rootwallas to Survival, fetching Rootwallas.
- Turn three: Forest #2. On your turn, attack with two Rootwallas, and use Wall of Roots to activate Survival of the Fittest, fetch Rootwalla #4 and put Rootwalla #3 into play. On the opponents’ turn, you can use the Wall again to get the fourth Rootwalla into play, fetching Arrogant Wurm #1. Opponent is at 18 life. Gaea’s Cradle taps for six, the madness cost of two Wurms. You have two Forests and a Bird untapped, which can Survival out two Wurms, and use Survival one more time for anything you want.
- Turn four: Attack with four Rootwallas and two Wurms, use Cradle for 8 mana pumping all four Rootwallas. Attack for 20.
(If you didn’t have a Rootwalla to discard to start all of this out, you attack for one less damage and don’t have that one extra mana left over on turn three. You still attack for 20 on turn four, though.)
Survival of the Fittest, when used with Madness creatures, is an army in a box. Even doing this in slow motion without Gaea’s Cradle is pretty good against decks that let you play the game after turn 3, and that all of these creatures are free even before accounting for Squee/Horror tricks with the Survival deck is pretty sweet. For the board-control oriented, who like having answers to problem cards in play instead of just attacking for 20, there’s a small but not inconsiderable creature suite included to remove key problems: a Shaman for artifacts that need to die now, a Zealot to remove problem enchantments and back up the artifact destruction if you need a second thing dead, Masticore (preferably fueled off the Cradle) for creatures, Mesmeric Fiend as discard you can Survival for to complement the Duress/Therapy suite, and Krovikan Horror can even solve problems like too-high life totals. Genesis and Eternal Witness are just good, and can allow for any problem-solver to be re-used without having to dilute the deck by having multiple copies. All of these were chosen to best fit the mana curve, and thus randomly sometimes help out the beatdown draw, lending to the idea of the deck being good without Survival of the Fittest. (Beatdown + Duress/Therapy = good.)
There are a lot of subtle things going on, and I have to credit Seth Burn with the insistence that Mesmeric Fiend make the deck in some reasonable quantity, and myself for taking the fourth and playing Sadistic Hypnotist in the sideboard instead. At one point during the Grand Prix, BDM came and took a picture of it, because I was something like 4-0-1 at the time when it was in play and wrecking my opponents’ hand. This janky Odyssey card is clearly bad, but it does good things to decks that you can’t trust with cards in hand, and is a Mind Twist you can Survival for if your Duresses, Therapies, and Fiends buy you the time against High Tide or Iggy Pop to get him out. Hail Storm wrecks Goblins‘ ability to kill you, and Hideous Laughter is the less-good (because of the double Black cost) stand-in for Hail Storm that solves more problems (like their choosing to try and kill you with Sharpshooter instead). I’d play six Hail Storms in the board if they’d let me, but it seems there are rules against that.
Now, crazy as I am, I tested this deck and it looked damn good. I made it to the Top Four of a Grand Prix Trial, and while there were only 9 people, I still did well in the Swiss (2-0 against White Stax and Welder-based Charbelcher combo, and a draw against Iggy Pop) and only lost to Goblins because I was cheating. Literally. I hadn’t realized Sickening Dreams was a Sorcery, and thinking it was an Instant when I chose to sideboard it where I now have Laughters, and didn’t find out it was a Sorcery until I cast it during my opponents’ attack to wipe the board. Playtesting was very favorable for the deck because its broken draw is very broken, and its nonbroken draws allow for good beats, solid disruption, and an excellent card-advantage plan for interacting with the opponents’ board. I showed up for the Neutral Ground players’ mock tournament, even if I was late, and seeing Pikula’s choice for the GP was content to stick with mine… because the plan was not dissimilar. I was just trading explosive Ritual/Specter draws and the power of Hymn to Tourach for a better aggressive plan and the Survival package.
On to the tourney itself, after a fashion, I’d gotten the results I was looking for. The weekend did not go well, to start with: problems with my bank meant I literally had $0 in my pocket when leaving New York City for Philly the night before, and wasn’t likely to clear up at any point during the weekend. (I still owe roommates and playtest partners Seth Burn and Jim Halter for the room, and Seth Burn for transportation there and back again…) Seth was caught in traffic picking us up, and our 3:30 meet-up time became a 5:00 meet-up time, and the only method I had for having any dollars at all in my pocket to, y’know, eat with during the weekend was to kick my credit card over the max on the trip down with Steve Sadin, Flores, and Seth Burn, paying for the dinner (and tipping horribly, it seems, ’cause I screwed up the math) and nutting up the $30 overage fee. The game played on the trip down was “Biggest Bag”, trying to mathematically combine sheer gross size with sheer bagitudinousness (the habit of being a scumbag) on Magic players, with the winners being both big + baggy rather than just the biggest scumbag in the game. At 6:19 on the car ride down, Flores’s ego ate itself… but that story is for Seth Burn to tell, as he will do it better justice. There was only one bed in the room, and while the space was large, we had three people… and thus, as the one with a known habit for possibly cuddling up with whoever I happen to be in bed with and with my girlfriend nowhere to be found, I was relegated to sleeping uncomfortably on the chair, floor, or what-have-you instead of getting actual rest.
Now, that’s not necessarily the worst of the negatives, because I was coming into this with no Byes. I’d blown the Grand Prix Trial by accidentally cheating, thanks to not reading the card I was searching for on Gatherer when tuning the deck and sideboard. My Standard rating is below 1800 because I quit the game for two years and haven’t played in enough tournaments to get it up after coming back and also due to being awful at Constructed. Oh, and also due to one random Regionals I played two years ago, despite having quit, because my girlfriend at the time had papers to finish that weekend while I was visiting her and insisted I do something to occupy my time that Saturday. Being rusty hurts… but even though I’m not now, the rating doesn’t reflect it. My Vintage rating was 1554, up from the 1543 hole I dug it into the first year or two I played Magic (with Type One Stormbind.dec, featuring Tuknir Deathlock), and looking at it now I see my rivalry with Ped Bun began in 1997, the first of many times I lost to him. Having no Byes at an eight-round Grand Prix cutting to Top 64 isn’t easy, as even 6-1-1 might not make it then. Having not played in a Grand Prix-level tournament in two years, I was shaky… but confident in what I was doing.
And there was nothing to do about it but get my game on.
Round one, I played against a reasonably good area player I know from the PTQ scene, Eric Wenokor. Seth knows him too, so when Seth shows up and offers to do me the favor of getting me breakfast, he’s getting food for my opponent, too. He’s got a Black-based Zombie Infestation deck, and it looks like Reanimator but happens to not be quite as good as that because he cut the reanimation. Game one I’m in a tight place, thanks to him wrecking me a bit and getting Infestation going with Squee + Krovikan Horror, but I recover and clear the relevant permanents, then get my beats on. Game two, he casts turn 2 Dystopia when I had no turn 1 play, and my turn 2 play is a very confident Survival of the Fittest, which can defend itself with Basking Rootwallas with Dystopia on the stack. Eric Sinkholes one of my two lands, banking on me not having a Rootwalla in hand, and I don’t. We fight for position, with him going through two more Dystopias in the meantime and losing too much life in the process, and he stops at seven to let me beat him to death from there. More happened, in a long fight for board advantage, but that’s the gist of it. 1-0
Round two, I play against Mike Hayner with Red Deck Wins. We fight for advantage and I lose game one, unable to recover from a Wasteland beating and affect the board enough to stay out of burn range. Game two he concedes to recurring Spike Feeder and Ravenous Baloth off of Genesis, and game three puts us in a difficult spot. I’m playing without Survival, and my only creature that stays in play is an Arrogant Wurm. He’s at 20 and I’m at 10, and I have Wall of Roots to block his Jackal Pup. Clearly I have to swing here and start the beats. I crash, 16-10. He casts Ball Lightning and attacks, and I choose to block the Pup and keep my Wall and go down to four with no other cards in his hand, because I have no other cards in my hand and my best plan is to keep crashing with the Wurm and I can’t do that if the Pup is going to kill me before then anyway. I draw Wall of Roots and would happily trade it to that Ball Lightning for five of my life back, and hold onto it in case I draw Survival next turn and can actually turn it into lifegain. Crack with Wurm. Draw nothing three times, crack with Wurm three more times, opponent dies because he’s drawn nothing. Jackal Pup can’t effectively block because of Trample and its infamous drawback. By the skin of my teeth and the size of my balls, I’m 2-0.
Round three I play against Joblins. Some guy named Seth Perrin is casting them. Game one he keeps no Red mana and Wasteland/Aether Vial as his mana sources, and I randomly Duress turn 1, hitting one of the two Vials. Turn 3 I Shaman the one in play, and he still has no Red mana, and I plant Survival and monsters. Game two, he cracks with Goblin King as one of his many attacking Goblins, letting Hail Storm sweep the board… and kill every mana producer I have plus all my creatures, so I die. Game three I just set up the Masticore machine gun, and he’s playing around Hail Storm cautiously enough that this pulls it off. This is easy. I’m 3-0.
Now it’s round four, and people with three Byes get to come into the mix. I don’t know if my opponent had ’em or not, but I got a sudden and sharp reminder of what some people interpret playing at this level to mean. I’m playing Rory Walker with Joblins again, and in game one I lead off with Cabal Therapy and name “Warchief” after he’s played out a few Goblins. He reveals his hand and there is a Goblin Warchief in it, as well as a few other saucy cards, and he informs me that I cannot take Goblin Warchief from him as I did not name that card. I told him simply that my interpretation of these events would match up with the judge if he wanted to insist on calling one, and he did, and the fact that there is no card in the game of Magic called “Warchief” stood up to reason. One way or the other, I found out my opponent would choose to be a stickler on all of the little niceties that are taken for granted at lower levels, like not having to say the word “Goblin” every time you cast Cabal Therapy. Some people call that rules-lawyering – mostly I’m just glad that I got the warning to tighten up and be more careful in a dispute that actually was in my favor as far as intervening judges would be concerned. In the realm of cards that were actually affecting the board, Survival came out, cranked the board, and pulled out Masticore backed up by Cradle.
Against Goblins, all of the discard comes out, ripping nine cards from the deck, and I usually pull Krovikan Horror as well to fit in the last card I want. In go 4 Hail Storm, 2 Hideous Laughter, three more Monkeys for Pithing Needles and Aether Vials, and one Ravenous Baloth. With one-sixth of my deck replaced, all the dead weight has been pulled and it’s actually a pretty good matchup, and more of the predictable things happen in game two, I believe Masticore locked up the board after green fat maintained parity early on. Other things occur along the way, including a lot of careful enunciation and painful clarity about what is happening when. 4-0 with no byes, and halfway through the day.
Round five was pretty difficult. I played against James Tang with a Threshold-Grow style deck, and lost the first game to quality beats. For this match, I boarded in Sadistic Hypnotist, Mesmeric Fiend, and Bone Shredder, losing otherwise inconsequential cards, and threw in some Monkeys to protect against Pithing Needle while I was at it. We struggled back and forth trying to gain advantage, and I couldn’t get a Survival to stick and had to backpedal quite a bit just to keep the board anything close to in my favor. We finish up one game apiece with eight minutes on the clock, and both ask each other to play and shuffle quickly so we can finish the match. My deck involves a lot of Survival activations and fetchlands, while he’s got a lot of fetchlands and early draw-smoothing cantrips, so it’s not really a surprise that it’s taking a while. A back-and-forth exchange of pressure occurs early, but when time is called he’s got two lands in play, no creatures or other permanents, and no cards in hand, thanks to my Sadistic Hypnotist. I’ve just got Survival planted, but don’t have as much mana as I would like, and in my three of the five extra turns I get him to 5 but not 0, would have won the game if I’d drawn Gaea’s Cradle (I’d pulled up Krovikan Horror, and could cast it by itself, while a Cradle would fuel the last five damage) but instead saw a draw for the last turn. Too many of the combo-y Madness cards had been depleted from my deck already in the setting-up phase to really let me explode once I got to take advantage of Survival against an empty board, and despite asking for the concession he didn’t think it was his wisest option. No surprise, really, though it would have been nice. 30 seconds more, or one more exchange of turns, and I’m 5-0, but instead I settle in at 4-0-1.
Round six was a laugh. I’m paired against Landstill in the hands of one Noah Long, no relation of course. I cave his skull in with creatures, no Survival involved, for the first game, he’s mulliganed too many times and I Duressed his Wrath of God. They were the B-team, we’re talking Eternal Witness, Viridian Shaman, and Genesis attacking quickly for the kill. Game two, Survival goes crazy, and for the second match in a row I get to have fun with bad cards and wreck with Sadistic Hypnotist.
Round Seven, I get hit with the feature match for the first time ever thanks to BDM perhaps laughing at the only Sadistic Hypnotist in the room sitting in a deck at 5-0-1. The match is against Eugene Levin, with the altered Landstill deck the TOGIT players were playing, and we have a marathon first game without Survival on my side. This was quite an odd one, all told, as Birds were resurrected via Genesis to chump block over and over again if needed, and bad creatures squared off against Moat (and destroyed it, thanks to Viridian Zealot), eventually pushing through for the last bits of damage. Clearly I’m playing the most random deck in the room – a bad Rock deck with miserable creature selection and no cohesion, or at least that’s the way it looks.
Game two, I am again playing without Survival, and I putter out against him much earlier than the first time around, leaving me stuck with the non-interactive kinds of cards in play, not quite enough mana to do what I want, and backpedaling as he sticks board advantage down. I was inches from being in the game, then the Crucible of Worlds in play recurring Fetchlands finally had a Wasteland to go with it, and I had drawn three Bayous and only two lands I’d get to keep. Game three I was still playing without Survival, was falling behind on board position because of it, but had a Therapy in the graveyard waiting for me to draw Survival so I could clear the counters out of the way. I couldn’t mount a kill fast enough and while he’d settled into control of the game he couldn’t kill me either, so it was a draw. Frustrating, but there you have it… individual games without Survival went well enough, as beatdown happens sometimes, but his deck was more powerful than mine if I have to play without drawing Survival all three games.
5-0-2. Still undefeated, if only technically, and really wishing I’d had 30 more seconds in round five. Nothing to do but win to get in, and the deck’s been performing excellently well, even if I haven’t necessarily… being a little too slow, having to think a little too much to make a good decision, not necessarily thinking deeply enough to make the most optimal decision when I’ve found one I think is good enough.
Round eight is pretty simple, and very depressing. I play against a U/G/W Threshold-based deck again, facing Top 8 competitor Lan Pham. Game one I can’t get Survival to stick, as Chris Pikula is chanting its name, and his creatures therefore eventually get the better of mine in a down and dirty brawl. Game two I go a bit on tilt, not considering the possibility he might have Pithing Needle and boarding my Shaman out while I’m considering and positioning, when to be safe I should have been maneuvering out Walls of Roots and Krovikan Horror and other dead-seeming things for stuff like Viridian Shaman that cover gaps and can still contribute to the board while they do it. I lead with Birds of Paradise, thinking I could follow up with Duress + Survival, lacking Black mana and having Duress be dead otherwise. He leads up with Pithing Needle on Survival of the Fittest, despite not having “seen” it game one, being banned by the Mage and all. That was game, I couldn’t remove it from play and the draw I had without it fell to 4/4 Werebears and 6/6 Mystic Enforcers. I struggled on, but it wasn’t close. I’d zigged when I should have zagged, and I lost because of that.
5-1-2, missed Day Two. Shoulda played faster, thanx barn.
The rest of the story of that weekend involves going on tilt in Draft and drafting a miserable deck Saturday night (but winning somehow to go 2-0 and earn a Watery Grave), playing Affinity in Extended (friends don’t let friends play Affinity!) because my database project was not progressing far enough along to give me information based on the trends I’d been hacking away at, playing a side draft I couldn’t really afford to play in and drafting a ridiculous Boros deck only to lose to roommate Jim who had a more ridiculous Dimir deck. I also drafted a miserable deck to 0-3 a draft Becker would have won if I’d won a single match, and being pretty miserable by the time I got home. (Sorry Becker!) Working up a lot of enthusiasm to carry me through the day, then getting to within inches of making Day Two and presumably doing well there as well, was followed up with failure, not success. Clearly I was on tilt after round 8 was done, and wrecked for the rest of the weekend… but before I got there, walking into that last round, I was living the dream I’d been reaching for since coming back to the game: to march to the beat of my own drummer, and do well.
In between rounds was the best part of the weekend, commiserating with Brian Kowal and hanging around with John Shuler. Kowal was having a rough time with his CAL-like Burning Wish control deck based around Life from the Loam, and the look on Shuler’s face as his eyes bulged the first time his brain clicked “Madness creatures” and “Survival of the Fittest” together was priceless. Of course, Shuler was ragging on Flores the whole way, and after watching Flores’ ego eat itself at 6:19 PM the night before, somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike, I can’t say I could do anything besides laugh at Flores’ quotes from back in the stone age of Magic. I don’t usually think I have any kind of a hard-on for competing with Flores, and it was a little bit mean of Shuler, but how can you not laugh?
I’d say the deck is an excellent choice for Lille and a powerful enough deck to be a potential component of the Legacy metagame. Maybe I’m just saying that because it’s my pet deck, and maybe I’m just trying to defend having Sadistic Hypnotist in my box of 75 cards. But maybe, just maybe, you can try it out and be rewarded by the results. Beatdown and disruption with board-control elements to deal with a relentless horde of Goblins does well in Legacy right now, and that is something that this has. I went from knowing nothing about Legacy three months ago to constructing my own deck and being inches from Day Two at my first Grand Prix after laying down the spells several years ago, and I’d like to think I succeeded at building a deck that can hang with the big boys. Maybe you’ll batter your opponents’ hands with Duress, Therapy, and Mesmeric Fiend then Survival up a Mind Twist, and think maybe that one sideboard slot wasn’t as wasted as it looked just because a 2/2 for 3BB with some strange sorcery-based discard ability wouldn’t get played in most of your draft decks.
And Jamie… my apologies for the Black cards polluting my Green deck. I really did try to hew as closely to the mono-Green aspect as I could, but it just didn’t win without the Duress/Therapy discard suite. Perhaps I can be forgiven for tainting the Cradles by putting them next to Bayous… and perhaps not.
— Sean McKeown
— [email protected]
“And in the fury of this darkest hour, I will be your light
A lifetime for this destiny, for I am Winter born
And in this moment… I will not run, it is my place to stand
We few shall carry hope within our bloodied hands
And in our dying, we’re more alive than we have ever been
I’ve lived for these few seconds, for I am Winter born…”
— the Cruxshadows, “Winter Born”