About
Pierre Dagen

Age:25
Works as a buisness consultant in the field of public health.

Likes: Magic, Contemporary Arts, Electro Music, Travelling in the Middle East, Tennis, Kick Boxing, Drinking, Poker, Series.

In magic, played in 4 PT, got three GP top 16 and 1 top8
2nd Pro Tour Dublin 2013

More Posts (11)

Hi Folks,

In this column I usually try to elaborate on something I feel like I have a decent grasp on. This time will be different. This time, I want to take you on a tour through a format I do not know a thing about: Legacy.

You see, I only played four legacy tournaments in my entire life. I did win the very first one, despite not knowing what my Japanese Sylvan Library did (I don’t think I will ever run that good, ever), and could not pull a single win in the other three. I enjoyed the format though, despite the fact that some games are just incredibly lopsided (mostly due to the unhealthy presence of Wasteland in the format, if you want my opinion). The ones you get to actually play are incredibly technical and lead to some of the most skill-intensive games you can get outside of cube draft. There is a contradiction with this format: on the one hand it is a very complex, wide, diverse format with virtually countless niche decks and even more possibilities, which means that it rewards practice more than other formats. And on the other hand, there are only about two legacy GPs a year, no PTQ and obviously no Pro Tour, which means that the incentive to actually test the format for competitive play is kind of narrow. Most grinders tend to write it off, like I did last year when I did not attend GP Strasbourg in my home country.

But not today. Today we shall try to find a solution. Today we shall face those upper-class, deck-pimping dorks. Today we fight!

I – Metagame for Dummies

When I decided I would attend GP Paris this year I knew I would have to pick a deck carefully. You see, I cannot spend an infinite amount of time testing, especially now that GP Paris happens one week before Pro Tour Valencia. So I had to think how to make the most efficient use of my time in order to pull a decent result with a minimum time investment, and that required picking a deck accordingly.

To do that, I asked a few legacy experts about the format and played or watched a few games with every deck. This left me with a basic but operational understanding of the format; one that I would like to share with you. In my opinion it has everything you need to get a clear view of what legacy is about and it shows you how to attack it, even if you aren’t too familiar with it.

Here we go:

AGGRO
The Delver Decks: They try to win the game on the back of a single mana-efficient threat backed by a LOT of disruption. They are really impressive as long as they have a threat in play but they look pathetic when they don’t – they are just not meant to win long games and the value of their cards decreases really fast.

URw Delver by Jacob Wilson

Lands

4 Wasteland

4 Tundra

4 Scalding Tarn

4 Misty Rainforest

3 Volcanic Island

1 Arid Mesa

Creatures

4 Stoneforge Mystic

4 Delver of Secrets

2 True-Name Nemesis

Spells

4 Ponder

4 Lightning Bolt

4 Force of Will

4 Daze

4 Brainstorm

4 Spell Pierce

3 Swords to Plowshares

1 Gitaxian Probe

1 Umezawa’s Jitte

1 Batterskull

Sideboard

1 Swords to Plowshares

1 True-Name Nemesis

2 Meddling Mage

1 Grim Lavamancer

1 Pyroblast

2 Red Elemental Blast

1 Wear

Tear

2 Ethersworn Canonist

1 Sword of Feast and Famine

1 Grafdigger’s Cage

2 Rest in Peace

 

Death & Taxes: They deploy lots of hatebears and hope that they draw the right hatebear for the right matchup. If they need to play against another fair deck they rely very heavily on Stoneforge Mystic and a lot of equipment. Whatever they face, their entire strategy is to have one of their cards being so good against you that it compensates for all the other cards being very bad against you.

Death & Taxes by Craig Wescoe

Lands

10 Plains

4 Rishadan Port

4 Wasteland

3 Karakas

1 Cavern of Souls

1 Horizon Canopy

Creatures

4 Stoneforge Mystic

4 Flickerwisp

4 Mother of Runes

4 Phyrexian Revoker

4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben

3 Serra Avenger

2 Aven Mindcensor

1 Mirran Crusader

Spells

4 Swords to Plowshares

4 Aether Vial

1 Batterskull

1 Sword of Fire and Ice

1 Umezawa’s Jitte

Sideboard

2 Cataclysm

2 Ethersworn Canonist

2 Oblivion Ring

1 Pithing Needle

2 Ratchet Bomb

1 Relic of Progenitus

2 Rest in Peace

1 Sunlance

2 Wilt-Leaf Liege

 

Jund: Exactly the opposite of Death & Taxes: they play all the best cards along with the most flexible answers available (things like Abrupt Decay or Thoughtseize). They are trying to force you to play a fair game against them, one that is not about synergies but more about raw power, because they are very hard to beat on that level.

Jund by Erik Smith

Lands

4 Grove of the Burnwillows

4 Verdant Catacombs

3 Wooded Foothills

3 Wasteland

3 Bloodstained Mire

2 Badlands

2 Bayou

1 Forest

1 Swamp

Creatures

4 Dark Confidant

4 Deathrite Shaman

4 Tarmogoyf

3 Bloodbraid Elf

Spells

4 Punishing Fire

4 Abrupt Decay

3 Thoughtseize

3 Hymn to Tourach

1 Maelstrom Pulse

1 Life from the Loam

4 Liliana of the Veil

2 Sylvan Library

Sideboard

3 Pyroblast

2 Surgical Extraction

2 Ancient Grudge

1 Scavenging Ooze

1 Pithing Needle

1 Grafdigger’s Cage

2 Duress

1 Umezawa’s Jitte

2 Golgari Charm

 

CONTROL
Esperblade: Even though they are not real control decks, they will assume this role in most matchups. They play out like a Blue Jund deck in the sense that they just want to force you into a fair, drawn-out game, but the difference here is that their goal is to grind you via Lingering Souls or Jace, the Mind Sculptor. Like Jund their cards are tremendously powerful but unlike Jund they have a hard time being proactive, because their threats are much more expensive. So all they want to do is play for time.

Esperblade by Shaheen Soorani

Lands

4 Tundra

4 Flooded Strand

3 Polluted Delta

3 Underground Sea

2 Marsh Flats

2 Island

1 Plains

1 Swamp

1 Scrubland

1 Karakas

Creatures

4 Stoneforge Mystic

3 Snapcaster Mage

1 Vendilion Clique

Spells

4 Swords to Plowshares

4 Brainstorm

3 Force of Will

3 Lingering Souls

2 Thoughtseize

2 Ponder

2 Inquisition of Kozilek

1 Counterspell

1 Vindicate

1 Supreme Verdict

1 Intuition

3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

1 Umezawa’s Jitte

1 Batterskull

1 Engineered Explosives

Sideboard

1 Force of Will

2 Supreme Verdict

 

Miracles: The only real control deck of the format. It’s a deck that deploys lots of mini-combos (things like Brainstorm + Entreat the Angels or Sensei’s Divining Top + Counterbalance) that enables them to lock you out of the game if they have enough mana. All they need to do is buy enough time to assemble these combos. You just need to win before that happens. Their main weakness is that their hands tend to be filled with clunky combo pieces that they cannot really use in the first few turns for lack of mana, making [card]Brainstorm[card] the absolute best card in their deck.

Miracles by Yohan Dudognon

Lands

4 Flooded Strand

4 Scalding Tarn

4 Island

2 Arid Mesa

2 Tundra

2 Karakas

2 Mystic Gate

2 Plains

1 Volcanic Island

Creatures

3 Vendilion Clique

1 Venser, Shaper Savant

Spells

4 Force of Will

4 Brainstorm

3 Swords to Plowshares

3 Entreat the Angels

3 Terminus

2 Spell Pierce

2 Counterspell

1 Supreme Verdict

4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Counterbalance

3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Sideboard

1 Venser, Shaper Savant

1 Engineered Explosives

1 Wear

Tear

1 Flusterstorm

1 Red Elemental Blast

2 Pyroblast

1 Pithing Needle

3 Rest in Peace

2 Pyroclasm

1 Elspeth, Knight-Errant

1 Mountain

 

COMBO
Show & Tell: The most popular, and supposedly powerful, combo deck. They try to assemble a two-cards combo along the lines of Emrakul + Show and Tell, with some variations depending on the version (some of them use Sneak Attack, others use Omniscience). Since this does not take up too much room in their deck, they can also afford to play a lot of library manipulation and countermagic, making it a very resilient combo deck with an excellent chance of winning the long games. The flaw here is that being so straightforward makes their combo easy to play against.

Sneak Show by Brian Braun-Duin

Lands

4 Ancient Tomb

4 Polluted Delta

4 Scalding Tarn

3 Island

3 Volcanic Island

1 Mountain

Creatures

4 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn

4 Griselbrand

Spells

4 Brainstorm

4 Gitaxian Probe

4 Ponder

4 Show and Tell

4 Force of Will

3 Spell Pierce

1 Misdirection

4 Lotus Petal

4 Sneak Attack

1 Sensei’s Divining Top

Sideboard

2 Grafdigger’s Cage

2 Ashen Rider

2 Blood Moon

2 Red Elemental Blast

2 Swan Song

2 Through the Breach

3 Pyroclasm

 

ANT: Unlike Show & Tell, ANT is a “critical mass” deck in the sense that the whole deck is about generating a lot of spells and mana before eventually killing the opponent via Tendrils of Agony. It is probably the most explosive combo deck and is very good at doing its thing. However, playing so many cards that do nothing outside of comboing (like Lion’s Eye Diamond), and the fact that you play very few lands, means that you cannot hope to win the long games against a reasonably well-prepared opponent.

ANT by Andreas Petersen

Lands

4 Polluted Delta

4 Misty Rainforest

2 Underground Sea

1 Island

1 Swamp

1 Verdant Catacombs

1 Volcanic Island

1 Tropical Island

1 Bayou

Spells

4 Thoughtseize

4 Infernal Tutor

4 Preordain

4 Ponder

4 Brainstorm

4 Dark Ritual

4 Duress

4 Cabal Ritual

1 Past in Flames

1 Tendrils of Agony

1 Ad Nauseam

1 Lim-Dul’s Vault

4 Lion’s Eye Diamond

4 Lotus Petal

Sideboard

2 Chain of Vapor

2 Slaughter Pact

4 Dread of Night

1 Xantid Swarm

1 Empty the Warrens

3 Abrupt Decay

2 Surgical Extraction

 

Elves: Elves is another “critical mass” deck, except that it combos via creatures instead of spells. Therefore it is both the easiest combo to attack (discard, countermagic, removal – everything goes!) and the most resilient, because it can easily win simply by attacking for lethal with its dudes if you devote too many resources to fighting his combo.

Elves! by Andrew Cuneo

Lands

4 Gaea’s Cradle

4 Verdant Catacombs

3 Misty Rainforest

2 Wooded Foothills

2 Dryad Arbor

2 Bayou

1 Windswept Heath

1 Savannah

1 Forest

Creatures

4 Deathrite Shaman

4 Elvish Visionary

4 Heritage Druid

4 Nettle Sentinel

4 Quirion Ranger

4 Wirewood Symbiote

2 Craterhoof Behemoth

1 Fyndhorn Elves

1 Llanowar Elves

1 Scavenging Ooze

Spells

4 Glimpse of Nature

4 Green Sun’s Zenith

3 Natural Order

Sideboard

1 Natural Order

1 Scavenging Ooze

4 Thoughtseize

1 Qasali Pridemage

1 Progenitus

1 Mindbreak Trap

3 Cabal Therapy

2 Abrupt Decay

1 Worldspine Wurm

 

Weird Stuff: One of the interesting things about legacy is that a huge number of players will show up with some “terrible-to-good” brews you might never have heard of. There are about twenty niche decks (such as Belcher, Tezzeret, Nic Fit and Dredge) that represent about 1%-2% of the field each. This is such an important part of the metagame that you need to take it into account, even though there is no way to tell if your deck will be good or bad against it, because you have no idea which one of them you will face.

II – Picking a Deck

All the decks we discussed are legitimate: they won some events and can be good for you if you play them well. Still, not all of them are a viable choice for a player like me, and probably like you. Assuming you still want to play legacy I advise you write your own criteria for deck selection and then go through Part I of my article to see which deck suits your needs.

For me, I would say that:
• I want a deck that is worth testing. I do not want to play a niche deck that might become very bad in a month or two (like Dredge) or a stupid one-trick pony (like Belcher). No, I want the time I invest in testing this deck to pay off in the next Legacy GPs I play.
• I want a deck that does its own thing. If I need to play around everything, I’ll lose some games simply because I wouldn’t know what to play when facing “weird stuff”. This is just not acceptable. I also need a deck with a straightforward strategy: if I cannot tell what I am supposed to do against a given deck I didn’t anticipate, I will lose, period.
• I want a deck that rewards good plays. I intend to take the time to play it well so that it will show in my win percentage. This obviously applies to every deck, but I feel like it is more important with some of them (like Elves) than with others (like Death & Taxes: if you do not draw your Thalia, guardian of Thraben versus ANT there is not much you can do about it).

With this in mind I decided that I should go with either Jund, Show and Tell or ANT. All of those decks are very good at doing their thing. It is always pretty easy to figure out what to do in a given matchup (unlike with Elves, where deciding whether to go off or grind is very challenging) and there is no reason why they should become bad anytime soon.

Of course, there is no reason why you guys should use the same criteria as me. But I hope this article will help you decide the best way to get into legacy, depending on how invested you want to be in the format.

Until next time,
Pierre Dagen