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Video: Legacy Young Reanimator

Sam found a really interesting Reanimator build using Young Pyromancer that got to do some of his very favorite things, and he gives it a tune-up and takes it for a spin!

Last week I saw this tweet:

This deck looks sweet. It’s a graveyard deck that doesn’t fold if they answer your graveyard, it’s a Young Pyromancer deck, and it’s a deck that makes good use of Cabal Therapy. All of those are qualities I like in a Legacy deck.

However, this list definitely isn’t perfect. For starters, I’ve seen conversations about how several Legacy decks would be better if you just stuck four Gitaxian Probes into them. This deck is the biggest offender of this I’ve ever seen. It’s short on blue cards for Force of Will, it’s playing Young Pyromancer, and it’s playing Cabal Therapy! Cabal Therapy and Gitaxian Probe are BFFs! This also looks like a good home for at least one Faithless Looting, as it currently has no way to discard cards that it wants in the graveyard aside from targeting itself with Cabal Therapy, and there are ~4 of those. If you have Faithless Looting, you can accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish without needing to find Entomb, which is pretty nice. Obviously, four isn’t a lot, so I only want a single Faithless Looting, I just want to be able to find it eventually. I can even see Entombing for it if I’ve drawn the wrong cards. Also, Verdant Catacombs over Polluted Delta is strictly worse.

Finally, Grave Titan over Griselbrand is… let’s say a relatively unique choice as a Reanimator target. I’m not saying it’s indefensible, but it doesn’t seem like where I’d want to start. My list, which attempts to fix these problems, looks like this:


Round One

Not a whole lot to say there. I’m pretty satisfied with my play and sideboarding. The land count is definitely on the greedy side, but I couldn’t figure out what else to cut for the Gitaxian Probe.

Round Two

Well, that was unreasonably lucky.

Missing with that Brainstorm in game one was really bad. My draw in game two worked out perfectly, since the Brainstorm was awesome. Game three was more interesting an interactive. My early removal was key.

Round Four

The storm matchup feels pretty bad. I’m low on interaction in game one, not horribly low but lower than I’d like, and my pressure is terrible when I can’t reanimate, which I’m not set up to consistently do quickly enough. Bringing in a few more counters helps, but not enough.