“Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.“
Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
It’s amazing where ideas and inspirations come from. I was browsing the StarCityGames.com Legacy forums and I came across this deck. I have no idea why this deck fascinated me; just about everyone and their mother has built a similar deck with little to no results; the only thing special about this build is maindeck Pyroclasm. However, I could not make the deck consistently beat Goblins and Threshold, so I tuned the deck for two months until it was beating all of the top Tier. And that’s why you care about the deck here, because it does have a winning matchup versus Goblins, Threshold, and High Tide. With this article I want to present the deck and walk you through its evolution. If you are interested further, the thread here on StarCityGames and a similar one on The Mana Drain. Enough with the introduction already. Here was the decklist that Phantoom posted in the beginning of December:
4 Volcanic Island
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Plains
1 Island
4 Court Hussar
3 Jotun Grunt
3 Mother of Runes
3 Serra Avengers
2 Meddling Mage
1 Lightning Angel
4 Brainstorm
4 Serum Visions
4 Force of Will
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Pyroclasm
2 Daze
2 Counterspell
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
From initial goldfishing, I was unsatisfied with a few slots. I found that because so few of your creatures could actually deal twenty damage, you were constantly tapping out, and that made it difficult to keep up Counterspell mana. You could not just put a Meddling Mage or Mother of Runes on the board and hope to connect seven times; that gives your opponent too many chances to draw a bomb you cannot handle. I turned all the Counterspells into Dazes and played the build as if it were a very aggressive U/G/R Threshold build. The theory behind that change was that if all your countermagic were free, you could beat down more easily and have a better shot at beating Threshold before their Counterspells and larger creatures came online. You can tell that even I underestimated the power of Jotun Grunt; plenty of hands featuring Jotun Grunt allow you to out-control Threshold and force them to beat down while they still have a chance at maintaining Threshold. Four copies of the White Werebear in later builds will help justify the change back to Counterspell. Another card I struggled with role is Mother of Runes; Mother of Runes is a very good defensive creature in a deck that still needs to learn how to play offense. As the deck changed its strategy from pure aggro to aggro-control, the Mother of Runes count fluctuated between none and a full set. Ironically, when the deck had weaker creatures, you had to commit more of them to the board and play the game as if you were a pure beatdown deck. There were dozens of test games in which Mother of Runes helped hold off two or three Goblins with another creature, but as better creatures moved into the deck, the need for Mom diminished. Mother of Runes was only essential when you had just four or five threats and desperately needed to protect them.
The other immediate change is to turn Serum Visions into Sleight of Hand. Seven fetchlands ensures that several of your early land drops will provide the deck a free shuffle. Serum Visions is much worse at getting you the card you need in the early game, but it sets up your future draws very well. Therefore Sleight of Hand is only going to be good if you can guarantee the Scryed cards will be staying on the top of your library. There are only two situations where Serum Visions outperforms Sleight of Hand: if both the top two cards of your library are very good or if all of the top three library cards are bad. In all other situations Sleight of Hand performs better. The reason Threshold runs Serum Visions is because it functions better with some of its tools like Mental Note and Brainstorm, but here we need Sleight of Hand to stand on its own.
I do not have a large testing group available, and I have to scrounge to get real-life testing done. Thankfully there are a few great tools for people like me (and most of you), things like Magic Workstation and online bulletin boards. The first thing I do with any deck is goldfish it in Magic Workstation. I get a lot of ideas, and a large percentage of them are poor. Magic Workstation lets me see if a manabase works, or play around with a deck concept without having to proxy a bunch of cards. It is also a good way to take a deck someone else suggests and play around with it. Once I have a deck concept, I will turn to people I know online and play them using Magic Workstation; I know many of other good Legacy players that are as desperate for testing as I am. Every chance I get I play these decks against people, but this is not always feasible. This is one of the main reasons why sites like The Mana Drain and The Source are popular; they give you a way to discuss your deck with someone else without having to sit down next to them. I will discuss a deck I am developing with everyone I can to find new ideas and holes in a deck. The same way that my previous experience with Survival decks helps me to build a stronger Survival deck, if I talk to people that have played Survival decks, they can help me refine one I am working on.
First, goldfishing. Single games are statistically insignificant, but Magic Workstation lets me shuffle up dozens of starting hands and see if the mana is working out by turn 3, or if I draw enough creatures. I like to get a feel for the way a deck plays and what hands I can and cannot keep, especially because I can play out the questionable hands to see how often they pay off. In the above decklist, could you keep this hand on the draw? “Island, Brainstorm, Jotun Grunt, Mother of Runes, Force of Will, Swords to Plowshares, Pyroclasm.” Depending on the exact circumstances, I would be glad to keep that hand, since I have a fairly high percentage of seeing a land within the top 4 cards. But what about this hand? “Plains, Force of Will, Daze, Mother of Runes, Umezawa’s Jitte, Brainstorm, Jotun Grunt”. With only eighteen lands left in the deck, you need to draw at least one in the next two draws to be even in the game, and you only have a 43% chance of doing that. I can look at a calculator and tell you to mulligan that hand, but enough goldfishing will let you do that easily. Before I start playing a deck, I always work out the probability of drawing out of a one-land hand on the draw.
Goldfishing backed up my initial assessment of Court Hussar. I found it too slow to be relevant and too underwhelming for a three-mana creature. Sure it carried equipment well, but I was finding that by the time I hit that stage of the game, I was just using Court Hussar to dig for a more impressive creature. I remembered liking Serendib Efreet from U/G/R Threshold, and used this new decklist as my base point:
4 Volcanic Island
4 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
2 Plains
1 Island
4 Jotun Grunt
3 Mother of Runes
3 Serra Avenger
4 Serendib Efreet
4 Brainstorm
4 Pyroclasm
4 Daze
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Force of Will
4 Sleight of Hand
One of the most important parts of any testing procedure is to have other people look at and play your deck for unbiased feedback. Since I can’t physically hand the deck to a friend and play against it, I do the next best thing. I post the deck on Legacy websites and show it to all the best Magic players I know and ask for their opinion; if I need to know how well my deck performs against Threshold, I show it to Bardo and ask for his opinion. The main criticisms from a few different players were that the deck needed focus and that it needed more creatures; the deck gradually evolved to fit both needs.
My next step is to take it onto MWSPlay, Magic Workstation’s in-game testing module. MWSPlay works just like Magic Online, except that everyone has every card, and the game does not handle the rules. The quality of the decks and players here is pretty poor; a large portion of the players are just not as serious about Legacy as I am. For that reason I am not happy with a deck’s performance if it loses more than once in a play session on MWSPlay. This sounds arrogant, but bear with me; if you play against substandard or Tier 2 decks, you should be expect to beat them, and your goal is to beat the Tier 1 decks, so you do not want to lose there either. Given the poor grasp of the rules by the average MWS player, I consider this time just goldfishing. My goal is to make sure that I have enough creatures and removal to beat the average deck. Playing with this deck, I found that I would easily seize control of the game, but I lacked enough threats to win the game quickly. I cut the Swords to Plowshares to make room for more creatures. The creatures needed to be efficient, powerful, preferably non-Blue, and either immune to Pyroclasm or good enough that I did not care if one dies. Here are the creatures that are feasible to run in the deck: Silver Knight, Goblin Legionnaire, Galina’s Knight, Meddling Mage, Serendib Efreet, Sea Drake, Serra Avenger, Lightning Angel, Mother of Runes, and Jotun Grunt.
I consider four Jotun Grunt an auto-include. Grunt’s ability is relevant in several matches and the stats and low cost makes Grunt worth it in just about every matchup. The first Grunt will last two to three turns, and successive Grunts will come when your graveyard is loaded. Just because you do not play this creature every game on turn 2 does not mean you don’t want to see as many as you can. After all, occasionally you will just win because you have a steady stream of 4/4s, especially against Threshold.
Four Silver Knight turns out to be an incredible call. Silver Knight has two of the three best abilities on a creature in Legacy – First Strike (almost no other playable creature has First Strike) and Protection from Red; the third would be Flying or unblockability. They kill every creature in Goblins without dying and are immune to Red removal, and two of them team up to take down any Threshold creature without dying. Even Grunt has to trade with a threshed Werebear. Yeah, sometimes Goblins splashes for Swords to Plowshares, but please waste StP on a 2/2 instead of Serra Avenger or Jotun Grunt. In this deck, Silver Knight’s Protection from Red is often better than Flying in terms of evasion; if you equip him you basically cannot lose against Goblins.
I remained similar to that list for over a week, goldfishing and occasionally testing. The mana issues continued to give me trouble, and I was finding Daze considerably underwhelming. One of the biggest problems is that against Goblins, you often have to fetch out a Plains turn 1 with your fetchlands so that you have Wasteland-proof White, making Daze pretty poor. At the same time Doug Linn (Hi-Val) convinced me to test Aether Vial, dropping back from the temporarily high nineteen mana sources. What that change came a slight re-tweaking of the manabase, but more significantly, the four Daze became four Counterspell instead. But didn’t I just say it was hard to get access to Daze, so why am I adding Counterspell? Daze is much weaker as the game progresses, where Counterspell will always be good. You have Force of Will on turn 0 anyway. At this point, the deck was firmly U/W/r and would stay that way through the rest of the evolution. The strongest point of the deck I felt was the manabase; I added the second Island and ran the following land configuration:
4 Volcanic Island
3 Tundra
4 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
2 Island
2 Plains
The reason the numbers are so weird is because when you have to play honestly through Wasteland (or fear of Wasteland from B/x aggro decks), you play as a standard U/W deck until you draw Pyroclasm. Leave a fetchland behind if you can for Brainstorm, but you can get into play both your Islands and your Plains and live just fine. You only need to fetch a Volcanic Island if you need Pyroclasm or Goblin Legionnaire. This is even easier since Legionnaire can jump out of an Aether Vial.
I lost a disappointing set of games against Goblins where I found that not only did I not have enough creatures to win an attrition war against their removal, but I lost a crucial game because I drew multiple Serendib Efreets and died to Piledriver. While I feel like objectively Serendib Efreet is a better creature, Serra Avenger is better suited to battling Goblins and interacting with Aether Vial. With this change now all of your creatures cost two mana for Aether Vial. This was the penultimate creature base.
4 Jotun Grunt
3 Goblin Legionnaire
3 Silver Knight
4 Serra Avenger
Throughout this time I basically talked to everyone I know that played Legacy about the deck. I contributed to threads on all three major Legacy bulletin boards, and I discussed it with a wide variety of players. I tested a wide range of cards until finalizing the deck with the help of TMDers Jesus Roxas ([Roxas]), Rich Shay (TheAtogLord) and Josh Silvestri (Veggies). If I were to play in a tournament tomorrow, this is what I would shuffle up.
Creatures (16)
Lands (18)
Spells (26)
I find it amazing to see the final version’s roots in the early builds. I was wrong on a lot of the arguments and card decisions. I resisted playing Aether Vial, Serra Avenger, and Silver Knight, but they turned out to be the right decision. This is really one of the main reasons why you should test and discuss deck ideas with other people; if I developed this deck in a vacuum I would still be losing to Goblins and wondering why. Because I stuck with it and kept getting advice from other people I ended up giving in and testing those cards, expecting them to be pretty poor. It is also important to develop good relationships with other people who test decks as well. I took Jesus’s advice much more seriously because he had done some work on his own with the deck, and could point out some things to me that I was too blind to see. “You need more creatures” carries less weight than “Here are the cuts I made to fit in these creatures. I found they helped in these matchups.” Even if you are not on a team with other people locally, Magic players can work together through the Internet to achieve success.
A general guide to sideboarding: if Pyroclasm is bad in a matchup, you probably side it out for Meddling Mage. If Pyroclasm is good in a matchup, you side out counterspells for more removal. There is a wide variation of removal in the deck so you can bring in as much or as little as is relevant.
You smash Goblins. Unlike other decks, you do not care if Goblin Lackey connects. Most decks cannot deal with Lackey connecting because they get overwhelmed in card advantage. With Pyroclasm maindeck, every time Goblin Lackey connects they lose an extra card to your Pyroclasm. These games play out very similarly. You develop your mana and play out creatures they cannot afford to attack into, forcing them to overextended into Pyroclasm. The game ends either with Serra Avenger being a vigilante or swinging multiple times with an equipped creature and just burying Goblins in card advantage. Goblin Tinkerer is occasionally troublesome in the early game to remove Aether Vial, but generally it’s too ineffective a creature to be relevant.
Blue Elemental Blast is strictly superior to Counterspell in this matchup, and you can bring in extra Swords to Plowshares from the sideboard. Post-board this plays out similarly, but you can tempo them out with your efficient removal.
-4 Counterspell, -2 Force of Will
+4 Blue Elemental Blast, +2 Swords to Plowshares.
Pre-board, the Threshold matchup plays out much like the Goblins matchup; with your equipment and Jotun Grunts you have the trumps. You can take the time to set up Vial and Counterspell, to make sure you keep it. The only creature worth using a Counterspell to protect is Jotun Grunt; otherwise you want your countermagic to force through things like Aether Vial, Pyroclasm (if it is relevant), and equipment. You have four removal slots to bring in against Threshold in place of Pyroclasm. The problem with Pyroclasm is that it is only good against Threshold when they do not have Threshold; whenever that happens, you are already winning. Threads of Disloyalty to steal a Werebear is incredibly powerful, but it is expensive and cannot target Mystic Enforcer, so you have a 2/2 split on Threads and Swords. Post-board will play out similarly.
High Tide combo seems extremely favorable. Pre-board you have about the same tools as the Mageless Threshold builds do, with Aether Vial to avoid increasing storm and to keep mana open. Goblin Legionnaire even gives you reach. Post-board you remove Pyroclasms and equipment, bringing in four Meddling Mage and three Red Elemental Blast. This plays out extremely similar to U/G/W Threshold versus High Tide, but with the benefit of having to get Threshold to have useful creatures.
Tendrils-based combo might be more difficult because you have less time to find your creatures and play them, but they are much less resilient to hate. Post-board you definitely bring out Pyroclasms for Meddling Mages. You probably also want to bring in Red Elemental Blast for equipment, so you can counter their Blue draw and tutors.
The one card I miss having in the deck somewhere is Stifle. It has a lot of general utility, both offensively and defensively. The problem is that you can afford to specialize in your removal. Stifle is good in a lot of matchups, but you have so little room to board in and out, so it makes sense to just run the cards that are very good. I just wanted to point it out for consideration.
I would also mention Galina’s Knight since that is a popular addition to the deck, generally in the place of Goblin Legionnaire. Galina’s Knight is arguably better against Goblins since it lives through Pyroclasm and is another source of Protection from Red. You lose the ability to block Piledriver, but you have plenty of other creatures to do that. The main argument for Galina’s Knight is that it does not die to Pyroclasm. My counter-analysis is that Goblin Legionnaire is much better at stopping end of turn Warchief nonsense and taking down larger creatures. It is also not insignificant that Legionnaire + Pyroclasm or Silver Knight can take out almost any creature in the format, and I dislike how poor Galina’s Knight is against Threshold. That said, it is not an awful choice and probably correct in more Goblins heavy metagames.
I probably overrate the importance of Goblins in the metagame, but then again maybe not. Patrick Maeder (GodzillA) pointed out to me that certain metagames make maindeck Pyroclasm untenable. After all, once the surprise value is out, maindeck Pyroclasm is pretty mediocre against Threshold, and it has hardly any value against combo, board control, or aggro decks like Faerie Stompy and Angel Stompy. Perhaps I am just a little focused on the Goblins matchup; I played it a total of five times at the past StarCityGames.com Duel for Duals; twice on Day 1 and three times on Day 2. I do not feel like the matchup is so in favor of you that it is worth moving the Pyroclasms to the board. My main concern here is that there really isn’t anything else you can bring in from the current sideboard that is good against multiple Tier 1 decks; Meddling Mage is probably your strongest option. It is also possible that board control becomes a significant metagame factor at or before Grand Prix: Columbus. In that case, you might want to pack Armageddon in your sideboard, just to be able to deal with it. I feel that the presence of High Tide will keep board control from becoming relevant, but we will have to see closer to the tournament.
So here I am supposed to say “PLAY THIS DECK! PLAY IT NOW!” And yes, it has a favorable matchup against High Tide, Goblins and Threshold. It is somewhat behind versus Faerie Stompy, and has a pretty good matchup against a lot of randomness…. Okay, I’m trying to come up with some supposed downside to justify you not playing the deck, and I really cannot come up with one. So take the deck, read my evaluation, and test it. If you like it, great. If you have any questions, come into the forums.
Kevin Binswanger
Anusien everywhere
[email protected]