Last week, I asked questions. This week, I took your answers and, hopefully, brought you the hot Legacy action you wanted! Leading the charge, in terms of votes was “come crazy Dack brew,” so into the brewery we went! Fusing the ideas of CalebD with my own from a couple months back, we emerged with a sweet Punishing RUG brew. In second, we had a number of voters going with the choice of “buy Power and stream Vintage, idiot!” Yeeeeeah, that’s going to cost a pretty penny, but we’ll come back to that (in this article, today!), I promise. So the second place vote-getter among Legacy archetypes was none other than High Tide. Rounding out the top three was a deck that’s been on my radar for some time, but have not yet had the chance to pick up, BURG Delver. In the two evenings prior to this writing, I’ve had the chance to battle with (and stream) all three of the lists you wanted. For those that missed out, I’m including some videos with commentary, but if you prefer your action live, fear not, as I plan to have some encore performances!
Dack
Round One – Grixis Show
Our opponent’s list is a bit of a holdover from a short-lived era—an era when Omniscience existed without its better half, Enter the Infinite. The idea was to either Show a fatty (Emmy or Griz; typically a 2/2 split) and win, the old-fashioned way, or show Omniscience, and then win through either a fatty or by casting Burning Wish for Petals of Insight, using Petals to generate an arbitrarily large storm count and finding another Burning Wish, and then wishing for Grapeshot to finish the deal. Since the printing of Enter the Infinite, I’m not as crazy about this specific Show and Tell variant, but I do have a soft spot for it, as it was my first Show and Tell deck.
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Round Two – “The Toolbox”
Jeff Hoogland has a bit of a reputation for playing off-kilter brews, so this was a battle of two non-traditional archetypes. I strongly believe—and I make mention of this several times throughout the video—that this matchup comes down to whether I can stick a Deathrite before he can stick a Knight of the Reliquary. I fail to do so in both games, and lose, in game one to a pair of freaking HUGE knights (after I used a Force on his first Knight) and in game two to Nasty Terrasty blowing up my board.
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Round Three – Belcher
They blow us up immediately, in game one, before we have any sort of chance to stop them. Once we board in all of our excess countermagic, the matchup doesn’t feel as bad. Engineered Explosives did serious work on cutting off the Empty the Warrens plan in both of our wins. Dack even gets to steal one of his mana rocks to help put the nail in the coffin.
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Round Four – Affinity
Imagine my delight to face an opponent where Dack’s -2 is suddenly VERY relevant. In fact, it is so relevant, that I don’t even need the extra help from Liquimetal Coating. I do almost succumb to the clock due to MTGO becoming incredibly non-responsive at one point, in game one; I also almost lose due to this, because I tapped two lands for mana, then ended up skipping to the next phase without getting to spend my mana on a key spell or being prompted that my mana pool will empty if I continue. Fortunately, this hiccup does not prove to be costly, and Dack shows all the crazy things he can do when we give him a chance to start thieving.
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The Future of Dack
There were some aspects of the deck that I was not crazy about, that I started tweaking almost immediately. I was actually making tweaks between rounds of the Daily as I figured out certain things that didn’t work and certain things that I wished I had access to. For starters, I wanted a second copy of Underground Sea so that I had another black source for activating Deathrite’s drain. When you’re playing Grixis or Esper, you can get away with splashing a single green source for Deathrite’s ability outside of your main colors, because it doesn’t always come up as something relevant. The black-activated ability is almost ALWAYS relevant, because being able to use Deathrite as a clock is HUGE. HUUUUUUUUUUGE! It’s more than just an afterthought that you can look at and say, “Well, this ability might be nice to have, once in awhile, so here’s a single black source in the 75 to make it work.” With the extra swamp, I decided that I wanted some discard in the board. With Punishing Fire as my only removal, I wanted more ways to stop haymakers before they hit the table, so Thoughtseize comes in; it make even be correct to bring in some Bolts.
So far, though, we’ve only touched on the Punishing RUG archetype. There are other potentially exciting uses for him, like Grixis/BURG with Notion Thief, Grixis/Izzet with Welder and possibly Tezz, and as one viewer mentioned on the stream, Landstill! While the first two ideas were in my head as early as Dack’s spoiling, the Landstill plan seems pretty interesting, and I may explore that in the next week or two.
BURG Delver
Round One – Miracles
Unfortunately, I do not have a recording of the round one match. It’s a pity, because I remember making what I thought was a clever play to kill him. I put him in a situation where he had two mana and CounterTop, but was dead on board to my attack of two elemental tokens. He used Top to draw (presumably Terminus), to which I respond with a Bolt. If the top card is Terminus, he dies to bolt and if it’s a one (unless it’s Plow), he dies to the tokens.
Round Two – High Tide
Xsplit was acting up, here, so I only have game two. I won game one on the back of triple Daze, when he tried to go off with double Tide and a Spiral in hand.
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Round Three – Burn
Not much to say here. We mulligan to oblivion, and get annihilated (not literally, because that would be weird if Burn started casting Eldrazi). Pyrostatic Pillar on legs is a heckuva card.
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Round Four – UWR Delver
In game three, I thought for sure that there was no way that I was losing after I Cabal Therapy‘d away his two True-Names AND got him to trade two-for-one with his Force plus Daze for my Pyroblast. He had some strong topdecks late in the game to help him claw his way back in, but it was a fun game. Had I been more clever on the first Therapy, I may have been able to ice the game, so I can blame myself on that one.
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Bonus: Here is me, wrecking house with Miracles
Round One – Dredge
Ugh, I hate Dredge.
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Round Two – Dredge
Oh, awesome, another Dredge opponent.
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Round Three – WTF DREDGE
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By the time this match is over, I’ve slaughtered so many zombies, that I feel like this:
Then round four starts, and THIS happens:
Round Four – (mirror, in case you didn’t get the bad joke I just made by flipping the picture)
Nobody takes me down in a Miracles Mirror… except maybe Joe Lossett. This guy ain’t Joe, though. If you had never seen Legacy before, and just tuned into this Daily, you would think that the only two archetypes in the format are Dredge and Miracles.
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Anyways, that’s it for this week. I’ll do some more polls from time to time in the future to get an idea of what kind of decks you’d like to see, but I like to think I do a pretty good job of mixing it up to keep things from getting too repetitive. Who knows, maybe now that I own Groves, we can look at… *gasp*… non-blue decks. Whoaaa… mildly hyperventilating after I just typed that last sentence, give me a moment to catch my breath. But ok, yeah, Jund could be a thing that happens in the near future, if I go and pick up a couple $5 Badlands.
Evil Tim is just fucking with you.. of course he’s sticking to blue decks.