Part 1 can be found here.
Part 2 can be found here.
Part 3 can be found here.
Shortcuts are vital. With Legacy, Standard, and Draft all potentially infinite time sinks, the important thing isn’t to know everything on each format but to get the most out of the time you have. To do that, the key is to remember Finkel’s Law and focus only on what matters. That means at the very beginning you need to know what matters, so the first thing I did after some brainstorming and early testing was to decide to use the State Championships together with my own brainstorming to decide what I would consider important in Standard. My conclusion quickly was that none of the States concepts looked appealing other than Faeries and the Gargadon R/G decks, and my decision between those was over quickly. Krakow would later offer Guile, which I quickly decided was a fraud; ramp R/G which didn’t look at all good to me; and a Faeries variant I knew was worse. That made the metagame look good for Faeries and made it clear a worse model could win, so that was easy.
In Draft, what mattered was drafting. What mattered next was more drafting. I took care of that whenever I could, knowing that opportunities for good Constructed testing were limited so when I couldn’t get such testing I would focus on drafting the booster. There I learned about flexibility and knowing how to adapt to changing circumstances. That left Legacy. Obviously Legacy is a wide open format. You have the option to play a huge variety of strategies, and many of those that don’t pass muster can still be highly appealing if you haven’t built them yet.
With Sadin’s feedback from the Grand Prix and a study of the decks from GenCon, it became clear quickly that playing without the Counterbalance package would simply be wrong. I knew I wanted four copies of Force of Will, Brainstorm, Counterbalance, and Sensei’s Divining Top. Daze was considered part of the package as well, since fighting early wars over Counterbalance and cards that outright kill people was so important, but I knew that was a card we could compromise over later if the deck choice called for it. We now had card selection, a good engine that won a lot of games, and a need for Blue cards. The question was, how does this deck finish?
The three choices seemed to be the three classics: You could play Counterbalance-Beatdown, which meant Threshold with Counterbalance. You could play Counterbalance-Combo, which was Cephalid Breakfast with Counterbalance instead of Aether Vial. The final choice was to play Counterbalance-Control, which initially was still a combo deck but far more control oriented, built around Time Vault and Rings of Brighthearth.
The list I proposed for that deck looked like this:
“Timestill”
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
3 Counterspell
4 Enlightened Tutor
3 Rings of Brighthearth
2 Time Vault
1 Moat
1 Seal of Cleansing
2 Eternal Dragon
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Mishra’s Factory
3 Wasteland
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
2 Plains
5 Island
1 Seat of the Synod
1 Academy Ruins
This was a control deck, in the sense that it could play the Moat game which I realized that most Threshold and Goblin decks all but scooped to. Goblins could still kill you, but it gave you time. The basic lands were protection against Wasteland, and Seat let you Tutor for a Blue source. Academy Ruins let you beat counters by getting back your engine and it let you do infinite damage by preventing yourself from being decked. The best part about this deck was that you were just playing Magic. You had a combo that could win as early as turn 4 and often did, but that wasn’t what you were about. You were about playing the control game. It was a Counterbalance deck with a Vault engine, not a Vault deck with a Counterbalance engine, and the combination only took up five slots. Meanwhile Enlightened Tutor got all the pieces to both combos, plus Moat and Seal. Rings and Top even combined to form a card drawing engine, making it very hard to draw cards that you couldn’t utilize.
Sadin assembled the Cephalid Breakfast deck, which initially had Chrome Mox in it at first, but quickly we realized that the deck needed cards more than it needed that extra mana boost. At first we tried Tarmogoyf as well, but it soon seemed like that plan too often meant giving up on the primary plan due to card loss. Since they weren’t impressive, a move from Sutured Ghoul to Karmic Guide saved us some space. Thus it looked like this:
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
4 Cephalid Illusionist
4 Nomad en-Kor
4 Worldly Tutor
3 Nacromoeba
2 Cabal Therapy
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Sky Hussar
1 Karmic Guide
1 Dread Return
19 Lands
We tested both decks. For Timestill, Moat was an impressive bullet and many games were won before the combo came out to finish the job. The Goblin matchup was close game 1 as often it was a race between fourth turn kills or a fourth turn kill and a Moat. We could stall them with Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares, they had Wasteland and Rishadan Port. Krosan Grip and Ancient Grudge were potentially troublesome after sideboarding. Threshold was similar but easier, as they put you under less direct pressure, Counterbalance was huge and they still scooped to the Moat. The Cephalid deck was far better against Goblins due to its speed, but worse against Threshold since it couldn’t strand their creature removal and had far less ability to control the situation. Even with the lock you still often had to go off to finish the job.
I tuned the decks. Mishra’s Factory came out to make the mana better, as did Academy Ruins. Then Factory went back in, because without it we had to keep both Dragons and I wanted to cut that to one, which saved space and diversified the threats. Wasteland count was cut down to compensate, as Wasteland with Rings wasn’t relevant in many spots. The Cephalid deck was more stable, as there wasn’t much wiggle room involved. You could trim the engine, but there was no good reason to do that.
Sadin and I were working on the sideboards, and the question became what threats we would face. The Cephalid deck’s most likely hate was Engineered Plague and Leyline of the Void slash Tormod’s Crypt. The cards facing Timestill were Ancient Grudge and Krosan Grip. The two decks were laid out on opposite corners of my kitchen table. Transformations were the order of the day, as that was the logical response to extreme hatred. Sadin had won a Grand Prix that way, busting out the Quirion Dryads and Dark Confidants to go with Counterbalance, but this time Confidant didn’t get to start so you were starting further behind with that plan. I also thought that the post-sideboard deck simply wasn’t impressive, even though you did have some creatures to start off with. You could go that way, but it seemed poor. Meanwhile the Time Vault deck could transform as well but didn’t really want to put in either creatures or cards that utilize the graveyard. The sideboard could stick to its guns and be based on Enlightened Tutor, but it was going to feel awkward.
I was brainstorming out loud, and I noted that the big advantage of the Time Vault engine was that it didn’t use the graveyard, which was turning into a liability because you couldn’t get them to put in useless cards against you. How could you “catch” someone who didn’t have graveyard hate? How could I turn this liability into a strength and punish them? And then it hit me:
I would sideboard one combination into… another combination.
Traditionally, anti-combination cards have led to transformations to beatdown decks. It’s a basic idea to bring in men and catch someone by surprise, but what good is that for a creature-based combination? Instead, punish them… by bringing in a creature-based combination. At first I assumed I was going to be kidding, but it dawned on both of us that the two decks weren’t that far off from each other. Sadin noted that using Enlightened Tutor over Worldly Tutor wasn’t that big a deal, since Flash had no way to get Protean Hulk and that worked out fine. Meanwhile, you could now tutor for Top or for Counterbalance. With that fixed, it was going to be a squeeze but maybe we could get the two decks within fifteen cards?
The third Nacromoeba wasn’t strictly necessary, nor was the second Therapy. They’re nice, but you have to go through counters anyway without Vial. In fact, the strange part about the Cephalid engine is that it can’t actually beat anything, which is exactly what Flash could beat. Neither deck can go through any disruption whatsoever, but they were fast enough to hopefully not care. Meanwhile, if the opponent had that disruption they would use it immediately. Who would gamble on us having a fragile engine and let us start it up when they could try and stop it? That meant we could trim those two cards, and suddenly we could count to fifteen. A copy of Shuko replaced one Nomad en-Kor, allowing us to Tutor for that half of the engine. On top of all that, it became clear that Mishra’s Factory was highly useful to the Cephalid deck. If you had it, they couldn’t burn out your en-Kor!
The only question was which deck to start with and which to sideboard.
So here was our masterpiece:
“Breakfast Time” by Zvi Mowshowitz and Steve Sadin
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Daze
2 Counterspell
4 Enlightened Tutor
3 Rings of Brighthearth
2 Time Vault
1 Moat
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Eternal Dragon
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Mishra’s Factory
2 Wasteland
1 Polluted Delta
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
2 Plains
6 Island
Sideboard
4 Cephalid Illusionist
3 Nomad en-Kor
1 Shuko
2 Narcomoeba
1 Dread Return
1 Sky Hussar
1 Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker
1 Karmic Guide
1 Cabal Therapy
This deck ALMOST works on lots of different levels. It’s also the coolest thing ever. The transformation offers you everything the deck needs and nothing you don’t, as long as you don’t ever need a little something extra. It’s also one of the rudest shocks in the history of Magic. In game 2 they think you’ve done nothing and then suddenly you win off three mana. In game 3 they don’t have any idea which plan you’re on until you start trying to win. In particular, if you’re on the Time plan many opponents won’t figure it out until you go for Rings or Vault themselves and often that takes a long time.
The problem was that the deck didn’t quite work in Cephalid mode. There were a lot of corner cases where it didn’t work. Yes, they were all corner cases, but they added up. A lot of games you won out of nowhere, but far too frequently something small meant you couldn’t quite pull it off. In the end, we realized that playing Cephalid into a largely unprepared field was a mistake. Their lack of knowledge would often work against us, as they would be difficult to read and would often have either an overload of answers we’d walk into or have no answers but we would have no way of knowing that. Why take these kind of risks when you don’t have to?
I was ready to go back to Timestill, and at this point we noted that the best part of the deck was that it played Magic. Technically, the combination was irrelevant to most wins, or at least irrelevant enough that good cards costing similar amounts of mana would have been enough. After sideboarding I could actually take them out and still have a deck, or go to one copy each. So what if we simply ran the deck without them? What if we ran it as a true control deck?
The only card that wasn’t in my initial build was Engineered Explosives, but once we tried it there was no question that it belonged, leading to this build:
“Topstill,” now with actual Stills!
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Counterbalance
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
3 Counterspell
4 Enlightened Tutor
2 Standstill
1 Moat
1 Seal of Cleansing
1 Engineered Explosives
1 Crucible of Worlds
2 Eternal Dragon
2 Wrath of God
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Mishra’s Factory
3 Wasteland
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
2 Plains
5 Island
1 Polluted Delta
Sideboard
1 Energy Flux
1 Ghostly Prison
1 Rule of Law
1 Nevinyrral’s Disk
1 Circle of Protection: Red
1 Circle of Protection: Green
1 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Tivadar’s Crusade
3 Pulse of the Fields
1 Moat
1 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Crucible of Worlds
That maindeck wouldn’t change through the testing of the last few days, and the sideboard proved primitive but largely stable. The lost cards will get an explanation now. Energy Flux was for Affinity, since my teammates kept suggesting it before throwing the proxy cards into garbage cans when they wouldn’t listen to me. If one slot would solve the problem, why not use it? Turned out it wasn’t needed. Ghostly Prison is decidedly lousy against both Threshold and Goblins, with its real target being people like Dredge or those packing Empty the Warrens. Between being unable to play multiples and the fact that most decks could still eventually kill you, the card proved poor in testing. Nevinyrral’s’ Disk was a Moat replacement so you still had a four in your deck as well as a way to blow up boards in a pinch, but while it’s kind of nice it is too slow, and if you were taking Moat out the Disk would rarely be cast other than against Landstill. The second Crucible’s purpose is obvious, but other cards proved more important, as Eternal Dragon already meant that we essentially “won ties” in the Landstill matchup, at least in theory.
The Portuguese liked the deck as well, so with them, Finkel, Sadin and I playing the deck, we put five copies into the tournament. The three American lists were the same, and the Portuguese cut a Counterspell to get a Scrubland[/author]“][author name="Scrubland"]Scrubland[/author]. That made their mana more stable and enabled Explosives for three, so while I’m not the biggest fan, that can be strong against Landstill and Enchantress and is an improvement against Goblins so it might want to be considered.
Finkel’s reaction was that he wanted to make sure he had Aura of Silence to cut down Counterbalance and random other cards along with Engineered Explosives, which we added extra copies of for this and other reasons. I agreed and it was done. There was a tremendous squeeze on sideboard slots, but for the right reasons: There were lots of great options. Still, you needed to sideboard against beatdown “by hand” so you ran out of bullet slots quickly.
This was my final list:
Creatures (2)
Lands (23)
Spells (35)
If I had to play the deck again, I would adjust the sideboard based on the metagame I expected, but there are no cards that I want to lose; I simply might want something else more.
The fourth Engineered Explosives is a possibility, especially if you will see a lot more Counterbalances in Threshold decks since this is a way out that will also often get a creature or two along the way. The second Threads would also be strong against them, but you have all the tools here that you need. If there’s something better, I haven’t thought of it. You could also try maindecking a second copy over the Seal, which the Portuguese did. It’s a huge risk, and it prevents you from Tutoring your way out of a Vial, but Explosives is often a great card where Seal is dead or not strong. Obviously if you do that you must maintain the Aura of Silence. Similarly you can have more copies of Tormod’s Crypt for where that is strong, or in an extreme case increase the anti-Goblin set.
Back to Basics is an interesting thought, since a lot of decks have zero basics and can’t afford more than one or two even if they want them. You don’t like being under it, but the people you’re up against will like it even less. Circle of Protection: Black is a good answer to the decks with Nantuko Shade and Hypnotic Specter, if they prove popular. Don’t get cute with Story Circle, your mana’s not good enough. Ghostly Prison and Nevinyrral’s Disk aren’t the worst ideas if the opposition calls for them. If you want to lean on Landstill, a third Eternal Dragon is good, Decree of Justice is solid, access to that third color for Explosives is interesting but likely unreliable, and a second Crucible of Worlds is likely best of all. You can also have more artifact removal, since your main (probably only) fear against modern builds is that they stick Crucible of Worlds.
In my opinion, this is the best deck in Legacy. You get a ton of flexibility and power, fighting over what matters without wasting cards on things that don’t. Your sideboard is far more powerful than most other people’s can hope to be, thanks to the Enlightened Tutor base. You get the full Counterbalance engine and a Tutor that can go all the way to four without having to play any awkward cards, and access to the best kept secret in Legacy… Moat. The basic lands offer outstanding protection against many random factors that can take down other control decks. Try it, you’ll like it.
Zvi