Fortunately, we live in a world very far from such extreme hypotheticals. Well, sort of. If you are like most people playing Legacy, you own the cards for one and a half decks. You have a deck that’s built and some staples that may or may not go into the deck. You may own Counterbalances and Tops in addition to your Team America deck, for instance. If you do, you can play BUG Tempo or BUG Counterbalance—certainly not a bad place to be. Still, you’re constrained by what cards you own and what dual lands you can afford or borrow. After all, even though the Gilded Age of lands being the most expensive cards in Standard decks is gone, the Legacy real estate market shows no signs of subprime toxicity.

Dual land constraints mean that entire strategies are shut off to most people. For States, I chatted with a ton of people about what I thought was the best deck to play. On Saturday, people had options. They could play their Snapcaster Mages or their Thrun, the Last Trolls or their Plague Stingers or their Gideon Juras. It’s far more common for Legacy players to message me and ask me how to make their deck beat the expected metagame. They don’t have the breadth of options that Standard players do, and so they have to make do.

Incidentally, this is both a blessing and a curse. The SCG grinder’s strategy of playing the same deck for weeks and weeks on end to create advantages through increased archetype familiarity is involuntary for many Legacy players. A person may own City of Traitors and Ancient Tombs and no dual lands; they’re going to be playing Show and Tell, Painter’s Servant/Grindstone, a Chalice of the Void deck, or a Metalworker deck. They don’t really have other options when it comes to “beating the metagame,” so they have to learn all of their options within their card ownership range. They might be able to afford a few $10-20 cards, but they aren’t going to go on a shopping binge for Stifles and Wastelands and blue fetchlands and Underground Seas and Force of Wills just because they want to beat that guy with Ad Nauseam Tendrils. In all likelihood, they’ll spend some money on Trinispheres and Chalice of the Voids and call it a day.

This is a relevant point to make now because we’re a few days away from Grand Prix Amsterdam and StarCityGames.com Open: Baltimore. These two tournaments will have incredibly different results because, as I just explained, liquidity in Legacy deck selection isn’t universal, so not everyone is capable of “reacting” to metagame changes. If a white aggressive deck wins a tournament, they’ll add Darkblast to the sideboard of their black deck, sure. But in the case of StarCityGames.com Open: Indianapolis (and Nashville the following weekend), people were still going to play decks that lose to Storm and Reanimator instead of playing Storm and Reanimator because Entomb and Lion’s Eye Diamond are expensive cards, and not everyone owns the cards to react fluidly to shifts in what constitutes a Tier One strategy.

With that said, I can still help you metagame in whatever way you’re able. For those of you going to Grand Prix Amsterdam, you probably both pay attention to the American metagame enough to know what’s going on while being smart enough to discount a lot of what happens over here. After all, as I’ve learned, you aren’t fighting the same problems that we are. I’ve done a decent amount of research into European tournament results and feel reasonably qualified to highlight some of the stronger strategies available to you.

Grand Prix: Amsterdam

A few weeks ago, there was a huge Legacy tournament called OvinoSex in Milan, Italy that attracted 388 players. If you’re going to Amsterdam, you may already know that. For those of you who don’t know, below is a metagame breakdown. I have included only decks with ten or more players, since a lot of the rest of it is noise:

Full results and breakdown can be found here (Warning: Italian).

So what can we figure out from looking at these results? Well, let’s start with Maverick. Maverick is a green-white hate bear deck that has existed in multiple different formats at different times. It relies on early mana acceleration and a Green Sun’s Zenith toolbox to play a very interactive, board-presence-centric midgame. It has ways to attack various metagame contenders that “should” be bad matchups, but for the presence of a given card.

For instance, there are some combo decks that can’t beat a Noble Hierarch into flashed-in Aven Mindcensor in response to a fetchland. Reanimator probably has a real tough time with Birds of Paradise into Green Sun’s Zenith for two getting Scavenging Ooze. Blue control decks (like my Counterbalance deck from Nashville) might just be ice cold to a Green Sun’s Zenith for four getting Thrun, the Last Troll. Granted, Riptide Laboratory is an out there, but G/W plays four Wastelands and four Knights of the Reliquary. No matter who you are, G/W isn’t totally dead to your game plan.

The non-black spell-heavy blue decks have it the worst against G/W. Decks like Counterbalance and Merfolk alike have to kill a Mother of Runes on turn one or concede the inevitable two-for-one down the line to get rid of an opposing 1/1. In the meantime, though, the blue deck is going to get beat up by all manner of Knights, Mystics, Trolls, and Cats. The top-finishing Maverick list from OvinoSex is the fifth place list, piloted by 2010 Rookie of the Year Andrea Giarola:

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is the deck to beat, but I would say that it is a deck that you should plan on playing against at least once in Amsterdam. If you are expecting a lot of mirror matches, a second and third Umezawa’s Jitte and a fourth Aven Mindcensor are both very reasonable inclusions. The mirror match looks like it’s determined primarily by mana availability, then by Knight advantage (think of the Vengevine Naya mirrors in Grand Prix: DC-era Standard), and then by Mother of Runes advantage. The thing is, both of the first two determining factors are supercharged by the power of Green Sun’s Zenith. Aven Mindcensor is the single best card that this deck can play against a Zenith strategy, and Zenith’s power really escalates on turns two and three. In addition, Aven Mindcensor on turn two on the play trumps a Stoneforge Mystic, cutting off access to their Umezawa’s Jitte, which—in conjunction with a flier like Aven Mindcensor—is a very important part of a creature-on-creature matchup.

But let’s say you’re not interested in playing Maverick; you want to play blue control. What options do you have here? Well, it depends on how controlling you want to get. After all, the two most popular decks at OvinoSex were G/W and Merfolk, both of them very vulnerable to damage-based removal in increments of two. That gives us two avenues—we can play Grim Lavamancer, or we can play Grove of the Burnwillows.

The organizers of a major tournament in Spain called Eternal Weekend 2011 drew a crowd of 297 players just a few weeks ago. In their tournament coverage, they highlighted David Rocher’s Top 8 four-color control deck with Punishing Fire and Jace, the Mind Sculptor. The link to the deck tech is here; the list is below. For those of you interested in the rest of the Top 8 decklists, you can find them here.

U/G/R/b Punishing Fire

Drew Levin

Test deck on 10-23-2011

Legacy

Creatures (7)

• 4 Tarmogoyf
• 3 Vendilion Clique

Planeswalkers (3)

• 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (21)

• 3 Wasteland
• 1 Island
• 4 Volcanic Island
• 1 Underground Sea
• 2 Tropical Island
• 1 Polluted Delta
• 1 Flooded Strand
• 4 Grove of the Burnwillows
• 2 Misty Rainforest
• 2 Scalding Tarn

Spells (29)

• 4 Brainstorm
• 3 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Force of Will
• 3 Stifle
• 2 Engineered Explosives
• 3 Spell Snare
• 4 Punishing Fire
• 3 Spell Pierce
• 3 Preordain

Sideboard

• 1 Underground Sea
• 2 Red Elemental Blast
• 3 Perish
• 2 Pyroblast
• 1 Tormod's Crypt
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 2 Firespout
• 2 Nihil Spellbomb

This is the sort of deck that, without Grove of the Burnwillows, Maverick should eat alive. Typically, U/G/R decks are light on removal and light on blockers, preferring to interact on the stack. The problem is that a green deck like Maverick can get ahead on mana and present multiple threats in a turn, making life hard for the counter-heavy U/G/R deck. David Rocher adapted to this problem by adopting Modern staples Grove of the Burnwillows and Punishing Fire, giving him recursive answers to problem cards like Stoneforge Mystic, Mother of Runes, and Aven Mindcensor.

The “tempo shell” of Brainstorm, Force of Will, Stifle, and Wasteland (and occasionally Spell Snare, Vendilion Clique, and Spell Pierce) pops up in European decklists quite a bit, suggesting a high presence of Storm combo and greedy manabases in control decks. Whereas Rocher’s list gives a long-game answer to the question of how to beat Maverick, Sergi Barque gives us a much shorter-game deck. This list comes from another event from the same Spanish organizers. The other Top 8 decklists can be found here. If so inclined, one could call this the inheritor to Canadian Threshold:

Tempo Thresh

Sergi Barque

Test deck on 10-23-2011

Legacy

Creatures (12)

• 4 Nimble Mongoose
• 4 Tarmogoyf
• 4 Delver of Secrets

Lands (18)

• 4 Wasteland
• 4 Volcanic Island
• 4 Tropical Island
• 2 Polluted Delta
• 2 Flooded Strand
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Scalding Tarn

Spells (30)

• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Daze
• 4 Stifle
• 3 Spell Pierce
• 4 Preordain
• 3 Dismember

Sideboard

• 1 Red Elemental Blast
• 3 Grim Lavamancer
• 1 Pyroblast
• 4 Submerge
• 2 Ancient Grudge
• 1 Spell Pierce
• 3 Surgical Extraction

This deck wants to keep an opposing deck on its heels for the entire game. Delver of Secrets is a fantastic addition to a spell-heavy deck that wants its Wild Nacatl as soon as possible. Since Mental Misstep was banned, I’ve been looking for blue tempo decks that have a non-redundant one-drop like Nimble Mongoose, so I’m happy to show this list to you guys.

Sergi knows exactly what his game plan is against almost every deck in Legacy: land a cheap threat on turn one or two, protect it with cheap counterspells, cut off the opponent’s access to the midgame with mana denial, and beat down for three every turn until they’re dead. After sideboarding, Sergi has access to seven incredible cards against Maverick, bringing in three Grim Lavamancer and four Submerge for four Stifle and three other counters, depending on whether or not he’s on the play. I might want the fourth Lavamancer over the fourth Submerge, depending on how much I see Merfolk or BUG decks. I would want the fourth Lavamancer against a Merfolk-heavy field and the fourth Submerge against a BUG-heavy field, since both are good against a Maverick-heavy field.

This deck is very conscious of its previous inability to kill Knight of the Reliquary and Tarmogoyf, going so far as to put THREE (3) Dismember in its maindeck. Gone are the days of Fire / Ice—it’s Dismember from here on out, even though it’s going to hurt for four life every single time. Sometimes, you just have to get their guy dead, and Dismember does the job for cheaper than the competition.

Sergi’s deck provides us with the perfect staging ground for another discussion: Ponder versus Preordain. I’ve heard the question asked a lot, seen a lot of arguments about it, and heard absurd assertions such as “Preordain is better than Ponder every single time, not close.” I disagree—I believe that Ponder gets better than Preordain with the seventh fetchland you put into your deck. I don’t have the raw data to back up my opinion to you right now, but it has been my (subjective, anecdotal) experience that Ponder is very weak in a deck with fewer than seven fetchlands, and Preordain has been less powerful than Ponder in a deck that wants very specific cards at very specific times. Ponder is also a card that gets better when it’s playing next to Daze, as you can Ponder into Daze and stack your deck with your second-best card. This lets you sculpt your line of play a little more than you would be able to with Preordain. Regardless of which one you play, though, I would recommend Sergi’s deck or something close to it in a Grand Prix field where people are likely to play Maverick and Merfolk.

It’s very possible that the U/G/R archetype can afford to go a little more midrange, drop Delver of Secrets, and add Snapcaster Mage. Some of the best spells out there are in those three colors, so flashing any of them back seems like a welcome way to get ahead in an archetype that traditionally has had very few ways of putting itself up on actual cards. If you decide to play this archetype, however, be very cognizant of the next section.

Past the aggressive decks that were best-represented in OvinoSex, we have the Bad Guys. You know them. Storm, Time Spiral, Reanimator, and Dredge. Two stack-based degenerate strategies and two graveyard-based degenerate strategies. If you look at successful aggressive decks’ sideboards from European tournaments, you’ll find a common thread going through all of them: they play enough graveyard hate and enough storm hate. Look at Andrea’s sideboard again:

3 Ethersworn Canonist
3 Faerie Macabre
1 Gaddock Teeg
2 Phyrexian Metamorph
1 Qasali Pridemage
2 Krosan Grip
3 Choke

He has Faerie Macabre and Phyrexian Metamorph to attack Reanimator on top of his maindeck (!) Scavenging Ooze that he can Green Sun’s Zenith for. He has Ethersworn Canonist and a Zenithable Gaddock Teeg to complement his trio of Aven Mindcensors against Storm and Time Spiral. This is a man who knows that he needs to be able to put up a good fight against the unfair decks.

Look at Sergi Barque’s sideboard again:

3 Grim Lavamancer
1 Pyroblast
1 Red Elemental Blast
2 Ancient Grudge
1 Spell Pierce
4 Submerge
3 Surgical Extraction

He has a ton of counters in his maindeck to fight Storm and Reanimator, and he’s still boarding in three Surgical Extractions. He’s got a ton of stack interaction in his deck, and he still wants to board in the last Spell Pierce! And if you look at winner Jose Angel Cantero’s decklist from Eternal Weekend 2011…

Zenith NO Bant

Jose Angel Cantero

Test deck on 10-23-2011

Legacy

Creatures (16)

• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Trygon Predator
• 1 Tarmogoyf
• 3 Vendilion Clique
• 4 Noble Hierarch
• 3 Knight of the Reliquary
• 1 Progenitus
• 1 Qasali Pridemage
• 1 Scavenging Ooze

Lands (20)

• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 3 Tundra
• 4 Tropical Island
• 1 Karakas
• 4 Windswept Heath
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Horizon Canopy
• 4 Misty Rainforest

Spells (24)

• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Swords to Plowshares
• 4 Natural Order
• 4 Daze
• 4 Green Sun's Zenith

Sideboard

• 1 Umezawa's Jitte
• 1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
• 1 Loaming Shaman
• 2 Krosan Grip
• 1 Gaddock Teeg
• 2 Ethersworn Canonist
• 3 Spell Pierce
• 3 Stoneforge Mystic
• 1 Sword of Body and Mind

…he has the same maindeck Scavenging Ooze as Giarola, the same Zeniths, the same Karakas that he can get with his three Knight of the Reliquary, the same Gaddock Teeg in the sideboard, and he still has two Ethersworn Canonist, three Spell Pierce, and a Loaming Shaman to complement his Force of Wills and Vendilion Cliques!

This is what it takes to win. The last time the Grand Prix came to Europe, the Top 8 was Reanimator, Storm, U/G/W anti-combo decks, and Zoo. The finals of the largest Grand Prix ever (Madrid, also Legacy, with 2,224 people) was Reanimator versus Storm. If you want to beat G/W and Merfolk, I suggest playing Red. Just be careful that you don’t give up all chance of beating the unfair decks in doing so.

That’s all I’ve got for you on Amsterdam. Sadly, for all my well-laid plans of attending, I won’t be able to make it, as my job is picking up intensity, and I can’t get that much time off. I’ll be in Baltimore this weekend trying to become the seventh Level 8 player in the SCG Player’s Club before the end of the year. If any of you have questions, my invitation to message me on Facebook and Twitter remains as open as ever.

For the next few weeks, I’m interested in trying a new approach to Legacy. As I wrote my opening section on Patrick Sullivan Legacy metagame wisdom, I realized that the vast majority of my articles are written from a position of extreme privilege—that is, I have access to more cards than the people reading my articles. Since these articles are for you, I want to fix that. I’m interested in approaching Legacy the way you approach Legacy: you have your deck; you’re not really going to buy a bunch of dual lands to build another deck; and you want to be able to beat a decently broad metagame. How do you beat the field with the core archetype you’ve got?

If that sort of article is something you’d be interested in reading, please let me know in the forums. If you want it, I’ll write one every week for the next few weeks. I’ve got one deck in mind already, but if this format sticks, I’ll be asking you guys to vote on what archetype I write about for the next week.

Good luck to everyone going to Amsterdam and Baltimore!

Until next week,

Drew Levin
@drew_levin on Twitter