Last week I got the opportunity to play my budget Death & Taxes deck for the first time since since the ban list dropped, removing the number one Legacy deck. To say the format has changed a lot would be an understatement. (You can see my breakdown of this in my article for this week for Hipster’s Hope Eternal column.)
I was streaming and playing the Death & Taxes deck on MTGO—a first for me—and it was far from enjoyable. I ended up losing horribly to Storm and Lands. It’s not that I lost every game, but the games I did lose weren’t close. After looking through the metagame I’m not super excited to be playing D&T anymore. It doesn’t feel as good as it did before Sensei’s Divining Top got banned. There are a lot of creature-based decks at the moment, and I don’t think Death and Taxes is the strongest one of the field. Currently I’m extremely nervous for Vegas and I’m hoping that these early numbers are not a strong predictor of the weeks to come.
I haven’t used May or June’s budget for updating the deck yet. My current plan is to sit down and fine tune the deck and use that budget to make some improvements for the new metagame. I personally feel like the deck needs to focus on hate more than bears now with Grixis Delver being the top Aggro deck and Storm being the top combo deck.
More generally for everyone getting into Legacy on a budget, I think at the moment starting to build a deck before the metagame settles is not a great idea. The best thing to do now is play some brews. It’s a great time to shock the metagame with something new but probably not a great idea to invest in a new deck when no one knows what is going to come out.
Kate hails from Worcester MA and also does a bit of Card Altering. Check her Stuff out on Facebook! She mainly plays legacy and modern though will occasionally find herself playing EDH.