My Magical Comeback: Building The Deck

This article is going to be kinda technical in Magic the Gathering and won’t really have any appeal to 40k people.  Not much I can or want to do about that.  More Games Workshop articles next week.

As I mentioned, my ‘comeback’ with be at the SCG Legacy Open in Orlando on May 20.  Legacy is a fantastic Magic format, with an unfortunately high barrier to entry for most people, especially new players.  Luckily for me, most of the incredibly expensive cards were not super expensive when I was playing, and I still have them because I wisely never sold my collection when I stopped playing competitively.  So money was not an obstacle to keep me away from Legacy.

To stay on topic, Legacy is great because of the variety of viable decks.  In Standard right now, there are about 2 tier 1 decks and probably 3-5 tier 2 decks that are bit further down the ladder whose viability waxes and wanes based on which of the tier 1 decks is more popular at the moment.  In Legacy there are a handful of popular decks (Esper Stoneblade, RUG Delver, Maverick) but there are at least a dozen other decks that are more than capable of beating them and winning a tournament.  In fact, there are so many viable decks that there are no tiers in Legacy.  There is simply “viable” and “not viable.”   The card pool is so large that the potential for viable decks is huge, and as many competitive players will say of Legacy, “you can play anything, within reason.”  The wide variety of decks at a large Legacy tournament makes following the tournament quite enjoyable.

Additionally, while some deck are more popular than others that does not mean they are better.  If you play tested exclusively against the popular decks you’d still only be prepared for less than 50% of the metagame.  The format is so large and diverse that you simply cannot playtest every possible match up.  So the key to the format is not simply playtesting against a gauntlet until you learn all the match ups, it’s playtesting against as many different decks as possible.  2 matches against 10 decks are more valuable than 4 matches against 5 decks, generally speaking.   That said, you need to know the major 12-16 decks in the format so that you can know what your opponent is playing by no later than turn 2.  The format is rather fast, and making the right play early is key.  Making the right play early is tough if you can’t determine what your opponent is playing.

So the wide variety of Legacy attracted me t the format.  After watching dozens of Legacy tournaments, and reading all the Legacy columnists on the web I had a pretty good idea of what decks were out there.  My play style usually gravitates to mid-range control decks, like The Rock.  I also tend to gravitate to Bant colors.  Based on this, the first deck I put together was a Bantblade deck that looked like so…

4x Knight of the Reliquary

4x Stoneforge Mystic

4x Noble Hierarch

3x Vendillion Clique

1x Scavenging Ooze

1x Qasali Pridemage

4x Force of will

4x Brain Storm

1x Ponder

1x Sylvan Library

1x Sword of Feast or Famine

1x Umizawa’s Jitte

1x Batterskull

2x Jace the Mind Sculptor

1x Elspeth Knight Errant

4x Swords to Plowshares
1x Forest
1x Island
1x Flooded Strand
4x Misty Rainforest
1x Savannah
4x Tropical Island
3x Tundra
4x Wasteland
3x Windswept Heath
1x Karakas

I really liked the deck, and I still do.  It has all the tricks and is basically the all the best cards in the respective colors.  Unfortunately, the metagame is faster and more tempo based.  Stoneforge Mystic is insanely powerful, but it doesn’t come down until turn 2 at the earliest, doesn’t put a Batterskull into play until Turn 3, and it can’t attack until Turn 4.  Turn 4 is simply a turn too late to start attacking.  The deck can also go Hierarch -> Knight -> Knight and bash for a lot of fast damage.  But what I found is, unless you get a Hierarch in your opening hand, the deck is too slow to beat the combo decks, and is too fragile to beat the control decks.  It doesn’t have a favorable match up against Maverick or Esper Stoneblade, which is a real problem as those are two of the most popular decks.  This deck is ideal in a format where decks like Countertop or Hymn to Tourach are more popular, but that isn’t right now.

Add to this, there are a lot of decisions to be made in this deck.  “Do I play Stoneforge turn 2 and try to win with Batterskull, or play my Knight turn 2 and try to take that line?” or “what should I do with my Jace this turn?” or “what equipment should I grab with my first Stoneforge Mystic?”  A lot of decisions and interactions.  At this point, I don’t trust myself to make the correct play enough to the time.

So I decided I need to play a more aggressive plan.  My next idea was to play a Maverick type of deck with blue for Brainstorm and go more aggressive with more attacking Green creatures and no Stoneforge package.  Unfortunately, this idea didn’t make it past the brainstorming stage, because I kept thinking, “just play Maverick, it will be better than cluttering your deck with unnecessary Blue cards.”  Then inspiration struck!  In March, Phillip Contreras won the Legacy Open in Sacramento with a bizarre aggressive Bant deck featuring lot’s of mana acceleration, hexproof creatures, creature Auras to buff them, and tempo based counterspells like Daze and Spell Pierce.  This was the exact style of deck I wanted!  You can find his list here.

Strange, eh?  Spectral Flight and Psionic Blast in Legacy is odd indeed.  But what works is what works.  I rushed to throw this together and play a bunch of games.  The first thing I learned from the games I got to play is that I want 4 Wastelands.  I almost always want my third turn to be to put Spectral Flight on a Gheist, drop a Wasteland, kill a land, and attack for 9.  So I cut down on one the basic Islands and a Spell Pierce to pick up two more Wastelands.  And I arrived at the following deck…

4x Noble Hierarch

4x Birds of Paradise

4x Troll Ascetic

4x Geist of St. Traft

4x Quasali Pridemage

4x Daze

3x Spell Pierce

3x Unstable Mutation

2x Spectral Flight

4x Brainstorm

3x Psionic Blast

4x Wasteland

2x Forest

1x Island

1x Savannah

4x Tundra

4x Tropical Island

3x Windswept Heath

3x Misty Rainforest

It’s fast and beaty.  Best of all it has a rather linear game plan: drop a powerful threat turn 2, attack for a bunch turn 3, protect my advantage with the disruption, and win turn 4 or 5 before the slower decks can react.  This deck is powerful in the current environment because the threats are difficult for the midrange decks that rely on Swords to Plowshares to interact with and the threats are bigger and just as fast as the Delver decks.  Lastly, it has fast enough threats to force combo decks to try to go off before they are ready and has enough countermagic to keep them honest. 

So that’s where I am at with the deck.  I’ll discuss my sideboard choices next and my tournament preparation.

Thoughts?  Comments?  Questions?