Inspired by the fascinating question “What should define the Legacy format?” posited by Matthew Pate on mtgthesource, I
started to outline what I think Legacy is all about, what role it serves in the grand scheme of Magic formats, and the features that defined it. This was back in the beginning of January. Back then, I told you all that there
was a lot more to say about these than I could fit into a single article – well, today is the second installment, so if you haven’t checked out part 1, do
so now, and I’ll see you back here with the continuation. If you’re already up to speed, let’s not waste more time on introductory words.
Old-School Preservation
We stopped last time with the idea that Legacy, as a whole, is meant to be a home for experienced, long-term players and what that entails. One particular
facet I highlighted was that, to truly cater to old-school players, Legacy needs to give us access to all of the wide variety of strategies (or at least as
many as possible) that can be pursued in a game as intricate and flexible as Magic.
This strategic variety is required by another fundamental function of the format as I see it: Legacy needs to be a refuge for all those venerable strategic
approaches Wizards has phased out of Standard play for a long time now because they made a certain type of players unhappy.
I’m not saying getting rid of things like prison, fast combo, draw-go, and land destruction in Magic’s largest format was a bad idea. We need new players.
Standard is what draws new players into the tournament scene, and for some reason, newer players have a tendency to get frustrated when their opponent’s
make it so they can’t cast spells, or counter all of them or kill them on turn 2. I suspect at least some part of Magic’s enormous growth can be traced
back to that decision (though I do think Wizards is overdoing it a little with the midrange focus in Standard in recent years).
However, if you’re like me and many others, you’ve learned to play the game when those strategies were around, and when you want to see how cruel a
mistress Magic really can be when the gloves come off or what kind of ridiculous things people were doing throughout the game’s twenty-year history, there
needs to be a place where these things can still be done. Legacy is the obvious choice.
Vintage, while incredibly fun, will never allow for a huge variety of vastly different strategies simply because the core cards that shape the format are
so absurdly powerful that they eliminate a wide variety of strategies and archetypes almost by themselves. There simply aren’t all that many strategies
that can keep up with Bazaar of Baghdad, Mishra’s Workshop, Ancestral Recall, and Time Walk. So Legacy, the other format that allows you to play with cards
from the game’s complete timeline, needs to be the refuge where those strategies can thrive and face each other.
That might sound miserable on first sight. After all, what I’m saying can easily be boiled down to “Legacy is the place where players get to make the game
no fun for their opponents.” The beautiful secret is that, as much as newer players might not grasp it when first exposed to all those “unfriendly”
strategies, trying to do these disgustingly unfair things to one another actually leads to extremely interesting, highly complex games that are a great
load of fun once you’ve developed the stomach for such a brutal environment (and the experience to see what’s going on). Think about it: those are the
kinds of things Magic revolved around to a significant extent when the game started taking off. If they weren’t fun, do you really think it’d have grown to
the immense size it has?
Instead of blaming the strategies for being unfair, playing Legacy is about learning to accept that you’re playing a game in which you’re trying to win
using the most ruthless strategies available. With a bit of experience, you’ll develop a much higher threshold for painful plays, you’ll learn how to beat
these kinds of strategies once exposed to them, and you’ll enjoy the process of two players getting each other dead in the most efficient way possible
without concerns for the opponent’s suffering. It’s exhilarating, really (well, most of the time), and if there wasn’t a place to do these things, Magic
would be much the poorer for it.
This consideration in combination with where Magic has been going in modern times also leads to one somewhat unintuitive conclusion: when we consider how
to shape the format with bans, it’s more important to protect the “endangered” strategies than those strategies Magic still caters to. If Legacy threatened
to be overrun by midrange or aggressive strategies (like, say, the Jund dominance era in Modern), action is actually more necessary than if some of the
now-considered unfair strategies end up among the top tier.
That being said, there’s a balance to strike here. Some decks are quite demoralizing even for the prepared player if you face them incessantly – prison
strategies and easy-to-execute, super-fast combo in particular have a tendency to lead to unenjoyable games when they work consistently enough. In other
formats, that would mean they should be taken out of circulation if they’re tier 1. In Legacy, on the other hand, they demand action when they become
widely played for power level reasons instead of players enjoying playing them.
It takes a specific kind of player to enjoy Chalice of the Void plus Trinisphere locking their opponents, discarding a Golgari Grave-Troll on turn 1, or to
want to Tendrils of Agony them for twenty on turn 2, so as long as those decks are simply among the best archetypes, players that don’t enjoy that
kind of gameplay will still gravitate to more usual archetypes, naturally limiting the number of times players are exposed to them throughout a tournament.
Only when those players that want to do something different feel forced into playing these archetypes because there are no alternatives that can keep up do
we get a problem with unfair things happening too frequently to keep the format fun. So that’s the point in time we should wait for to act against the
granddaddy strategies. Hence why basically nobody complained about Flash getting the ax, while Mystical Tutor drew a lot of raised eyebrows.
On the other hand, if a deck with much more common play patterns threatens to take over the format, it will rapidly be everywhere – there are a lot more
players that are looking for something resembling “normal” Magic than those looking for the extremes – and threaten to push out the unusual strategies.
Therefore, the threshold for action against cards that put the so-called fair archetypes over the top needs to be lower accordingly (this is where I could
see Treasure Cruise’s downfall coming from, by the way).
Strategic and Archetype Variety
Out of this idea of a strategy repository in which old school strategies that have been culled from the game as it is currently produced get to live on,
grows what might be the most defining feature of Legacy: that of vast strategic variety. Almost no matter how you like to play Magic, there will be a
viable deck (viable, as in able to put you in the top 8 of a 500-player event, not necessarily tier 1) in Legacy that will allow you to play that kind of
game.
Some macro-archetypes are more limited than others, but from beating down with creatures, to locking your opponent’s out of playing the game, from pulling
off a combo win on turn 1, to winning after grinding away all your opponent’s resources on turn 20, there’s a deck for you to play and to experience just
about any fundamental strategy ever invented.
In fact, in a lot of cases, there isn’t a deck that allows you to explore that macro-archetype most of the time, there is a wide variety of them.
The power level of the format, if by chance or design, is such that it allows a wide variety of different archetypes (decks) to exist at roughly the same
power level, leading to a format in which you can fully expect to run into seven to nine different decks when playing a nine-round tournament. In my
experience, there is no other format in Magic that duplicates this amazing variety of archetypes that can compete and are actually being played.
I think some of this has to do with the fact that Legacy players play Legacy because they love playing with certain cards and will stick with an archetype
even when they know it isn’t the best positioned currently. Some of it comes from the fact that Legacy games are extremely intricate, and as a result,
often reward experience with an archetype more than having the perfect deck for the tournament. Some of it has to do with the hard truth that a deck, once
it has enough raw power, will win games no matter if it’s the best deck in the room.
Trying to protect this feature of the format without enforcing staleness through banning anything new that has an impact – format power levels tend to rise
over time, pushing some decks and strategies to the sidelines – should be a primary concern for all of us, as it’s worth protecting when we see a clear way
to do so without threatening the variety of the format through that very act.
One example for that happening was Survival of the Fittest. The Survival + Vengevine interaction proved powerful enough that it pushed a wide number of
fringe strategies out of the format and streamlined much of the creature/midrange part of the format into Survival decks. By banning Survival at that
point, variety was protected at the expense of a very fun card.
In fact, this banning process is somewhat reminiscent of Chris Pikula’s suggestion to Wizards as to how to deal with the brokenness Urza’s Saga had
unleashed: “Ban everything until Necro[potence] is good again, then ban Necro.” Legacy has a certain power level threshold, and when a card pushes things
above that threshold, banning it puts things back to a level where a vast majority of strategies can compete. Now that obviously isn’t the only viable
solution given how many cards happen to be banned in the format, there’s also decidedly the option of trying to push the power level of the format as a
whole through unbans until there are enough strategies that can compete on the new power level threshold, and we can always hope for new cards to elevate
floundering archetypes to new heights.
Hopefully there are also other ways to achieve the same ends I haven’t thought of yet, as banning everything down to the same level again could become
stale in the long run; pushing the power level is limited by what Wizards is ready to print in current sets, and the banned list is actually finite.
However, as long as it is possible, protecting the awesome variety that Legacy exhibits should be on all our minds, as it is one of its most loveable
features for sure.
Favoring Defense
The aforementioned protection of powerful, proactive strategies that threaten to make the game one-sided early on also has another effect: it means that
answers and defensive cards need to get special dispensation during any consideration of what should be legal in the format.
Most of you have probably heard the phrase “Force of Will is the glue that holds the Eternal formats together.” That (very true) sentence is an expression
of this philosophy. I talked about Legacy as the format of the “second offender” in part 1 – the strongest enabler for a particular strategy can usually be
found on the banned list, basically – yet Force of Will is the clear best defensive card in the game. It allows you to answer just about anything for zero
mana, a feat unsurpassed by any other card in the game, and yet it is legal in Legacy and luckily so.
We allow some very degenerate things to be possible in Legacy, and the best way to ensure that we still get real games to play instead of one-sided
blowouts is to not curtail the answers while keeping the threats to the second offender rule. We have all the most powerful removal (Swords to
Plowshares, Lightning Bolt, Terminus) and countermagic (Force of Will), inherently compensating for the Magic truism that there are no wrong threats, just
wrong answers.
However, as the Mental Misstep era showed us, there is such a thing as too many too efficient answers. When the defense becomes too good, much of the
strategic variety of the format is lost, and action must be taken. Only in that case, we’re taking out the second offender, so as to keep the inherent
advantage of answers compared to threats alive, and thereby allow the format to stay enjoyable.
As an aside, that’s why I think Mental Misstep is awesome as a four-of in Vintage. The threats are so much better that having all the most powerful answers
available is actually a good thing to keep the format in check.
Synergy Over Single-Card Strategies
That was a lot of philosophy, huh? Well, let’s get back to something more gameplay-related that was driven home by getting to play Vintage again last
Friday at our soon-to-be-regular Vintage FNM (it was awesome by the way). When playing Vintage, you don’t tend to structure your gameplay around maximizing
your cards to reach a specific goal and instead tend to set things up so that some particular key card can do the heavy lifting of actually deciding the
game. A lot of earlygame maneuvering among blue decks, for example, tends to revolve around resolving Ancestral Recall to pull ahead, and the endgame is
often focused on setting up something like Fastbond or Yawgmoth’s Will.
Ironically, the best illustration of where I’m going with this though, is based on a card that isn’t even restricted: Bazaar of Baghdad. Vintage Dredge as
a deck is built with the very specific idea of abusing that card as much as possible, to the point that you use Serum Powder to make sure you can simply
mulligan into it every game. The whole deck’s strategy revolves around finding and abusing that single card.
In contrast, Dredge as a strategy is perfectly fine, alive and kicking in Legacy, yet it has no such focal card. Instead the deck uses a wide variety of
tools from Careful Study and Faithless Looting to Putrid Imp to get the Dredge engine humming. Instead of a single card strategy we have redundancy and
interlocking pieces enabling a specific type of gameplay.
There are other examples. Look at Vintage Oath and the Legacy Sneak and Show deck. While Vintage Oath decks have started to commonly incorporate a Show and
Tell back-up plan, the whole deck is actually built around a single card: Griselbrand. All the deck does is try to put the big bad demon of doom into play
by any means possible. Legacy Show and Tell on the other hand, uses two different yet similar cards (Show and Tell and Sneak Attack) to put one of two
different yet dominating fatties (Emrakul and Griselbrand) into play. Instead of getting consistent access to the tool of choice, the deck has two
different ways to execute the same kind of gameplan.
To me, this reliance on different ways to achieve the same end result is what differentiates Legacy the most from Vintage outside of the broken mana
accelerators. Stoneblade isn’t really a Stoneforge Mystic deck, the Kor Artificer is just its most powerful earlygame threat. Miracles isn’t really a
Counterbalance or Terminus deck, it blends these different tools to craft a coherent control strategy. Elves is neither a pure Glimpse of Nature deck nor
is it totally focused on Natural Order or Gaea’s Cradle. Even Storm, one of the decks that tries to come as close as possible to the “single-card-combo”
feel, plays out differently from game to game, sometimes being a Past in Flames deck, sometimes an Ad Nauseam deck, and sometimes a straight Lion’s Eye
Diamond deck.
There is also a different facet of this that bears mentioning: Legacy doesn’t really have one-card tactics the way Vintage does. There isn’t anything like
Tinker into Blightsteel Colossus that you can basically graft onto your deck without much of a cost outside of spending two deck slots that aren’t related
to the deck’s actual gameplan and yet gives your deck a totally different, very lethal angle of attack you can just switch to if your usual gameplan has
been stopped by your opponent. As a result, sidestepping your opponent’s answers by switching to plan B is a lot harder in Legacy, and it happens a lot
less often.
The result is a format that extremely consistently enables very powerful gameplans, but it is one in which decks rarely rely on just a single card doing
the heavy lifting throughout the game. Instead games revolve around finding the correct pieces that together will allow your deck to function as intended,
with those pieces regularly being replaceable by other tools the deck has available to it. You aren’t planning your games with a particular card in mind,
but with a particular strategy implemented through different, often interchangeable cards.
Is That All?
I’m pretty sure I’ll think of other things that define Legacy as a format as I think more about the subject – and ever since Matthew brought it up, I’ve
found myself pondering the question at random times – but for the moment these two articles feel like they sum up my ideas about Legacy quite nicely, at
least as far as I can put them into words at the moment. If you have suggestions on where I should turn my thoughts to find other elements of what makes
Legacy Legacy, or have your own ideas about the format’s identity, feel free to share them.