Richard Leader (rleader) is a New York Legacy player that offers new perspective on how one should build Legacy decks -- with less emphasis on expensive manabases in favor of owning a variety of decks with character. He provides a realistic way to enjoy Legacy without killing your wallet. Enjoy!
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Once you have all the staples — your entire playsets of dual lands and fetches, Force of Wills and Goyfs — Legacy is a fairly inexpensive format to play.
That’s what they say, anyway. My brother followed that advice when we were pulled back into Magic shortly after the release of Time Spiral. Neither of us had opened a pack since Mirage. A younger cousin, half our age, had somehow gotten into the Legacy format. He played in a weekly tournament where he turned little red men sideways — the top deck at the time! — and he invited my brother to join him.
My brother only had one deck, the same he played back in 1996. You could call it Bant: he used Serendib Efreet and Erhnam Djinn, Swords to Plowshares backed by Force of Will, and a surprise Armageddon. At first, he made only inexpensive changes to the deck. He added newer cards like Rancor and Werebear, but soon found himself transitioning to a more contemporary Threshold list, upgrading to fetches and true duals. (We bought some Revised back when we started but ended up with a pile of Deathlaces.)
My introduction to Legacy was a bit different. On holiday, I flew out from New York to visit him in California. I was told about the weekly tournament in advance and was instructed to bring my cards, which I doubted were good enough. (My own 1996 deck was an early version of what would become Anwar Ahmad’s Red Death: Hypnotic Specters matched with burn spells, Hymn to Tourachs and Ashes to Ashes.) After a weekend on the internet, trying to make sense of mind-blowing things like split cards and hybrid mana, I put together a Pox deck. As it used a fair amount of cards that I already owned, it felt like a safe choice that wouldn’t cost too much. I went 3-2. Not great, but not entirely bad for a guy who had never heard of the Stack!
I had a blast and knew that I wanted to be able to keep playing — and more than that, I was positive that I wanted to keep thinking and talking about the game. It was a great vacation, and my brother and I forged a stronger connection through Magic. I also knew that I wouldn’t be playing every week: not everyone’s local “FNM” is Legacy. If I bought an Underground Sea, I could easily imagine myself looking at it and thinking “Well, now what? Only 39 more duals to go...”
It might be an “investment,” and cheaper in the long run than even thinking about Standard, but the buy-in price can also be an absolutely chilling thought for someone who doesn’t play on a weekly basis for positive reinforcement.
I’m someone who hasn’t followed the conventional wisdom when it comes to collecting and playing Legacy. I’d like to detail some of the pitfalls of that path. And perhaps, propose a few benefits, too.
When I got back to New York, I started to upgrade my Pox deck. It started out as something that played a lot of discard and The Rack and slowly transformed into a Sinkhole-drilling, Wasteland-locking monstrosity. Did all of the money I threw at it make it a better deck? Not necessarily. It was mostly just a different deck. (Yes, the know-it-alls of the format might call it “polishing a turd,” but I still love to play it.) After I had “upgraded” it as far as I could without adding additional colors, it occurred to me that for the price of improving the manabase to play green or white, I could go out and buy an entirely different deck that didn’t require duals at all. Several, even.
So I put together Affinity. I never saw it dominate Standard so it felt like something quirky and new to me. Paradise Mantle and a handful of five-color lands made it seem like I could try out virtually anything in my sideboard. That looked fun: no color was off limits! My next was Dragon Stompy. Blood Moon had always been one of my favorite cards and was even featured in my 1996 deck. It felt like a populist choice, a way to fight back against the fetches and duals that were out of my league. It was followed by UB Reanimator (with a somewhat sketchy manabase) and Mono White Control (of the “Quinn” variety). And then Burn — because “why not?” I have most of Belcher, and I’m considering Merfolk, provided our cousin ever ships my Forces back, now that his store has stopped offering Legacy tournaments.
The cons of my path are fairly straightforward:
1. If I ever need to sell my cards, it’ll be fairly difficult, as few of them are commodities; while most of them have gained value in an absolute sense since I purchased them, it’s unlikely I’d be able to move them as quickly or as easily as sets of duals and fetches.
2. I often can’t play the “best deck” or — more accurately — any deck that tries to employ the most “best cards” because those cards are inconveniently located in different colors; this includes a variety of different strategies from Counter-Top to Aggro-Loam.
3. I can’t metagame with a scalpel, only with a sledgehammer; when you can only choose vastly different decks to play, only so much fine-tuning can be done.
However, there are some benefits:
1. Your manabase doesn’t overlap between decks. All of my decks are put together, all the time. Sleeved and in boxes. There’s never any starting from ground zero, pulling cards out of binders, to build a deck at the last minute. Now that Pithing Needles are $3 instead of $20, they all have their own complete sideboards, too. This is great for testing. It’s great for guests at the kitchen table. It’s great for roping people into traveling to tournaments with you; they certainly can’t say they don’t have anything to play. Even pulling decks out for goldfishing purposes can be fun.
2. Legacy players love their decks. They become their decks. They become unreasonably attached to their decks and cuss people out at The Source who badmouth their decks. Insulting Enchantress in an Enchantress player’s presence (Magic pun intended) is akin to an ad hominem attack. We love our decks, and we’ll defend them, even when they suck. And they often do. When you don’t have all the cards, you grow more invested in the ones that you do have — and there’s a good chance that you’ll grow equally attached to the smaller community of players that shares the same pet deck. Even if they’re a bunch of tools.
3. Your decks have character. They might not be the “decks to beat,” but they can still have a fair chance of coming out on top, given skill and the right matchups; that’s all you can really ask for from a deck. Dragon Stompy has dragons (even Bull-shaped ones). Affinity is robots. Mono Black Control, whether it’s Pox or Cabal Coffers or even Dark Depths silliness, is pure evil. It’s the deck they warned me about back in Sunday School when they screened Mazes and Monsters with Tom Hanks. Mono White Control, conversely, would be equally reviled as the feminist deck. (I believe it has more female characters than any other competitive deck in Magic: Runed Halo, Enlightened Tutor, Abeyance, Orim’s Chant, Isochron Scepter, and more, depending upon which version of Swords to Plowshares and Oblivion Ring you choose.) Counter-Top decks, on the other hand, feel entirely random outside of their mechanics.
Preferring decks “with character” isn’t just an aesthetic decision, though. Some of us hate mirror-matches. This is mostly due to an overinflated sense of self esteem. In Street Fighter 4, for example, I’m fairly solid with Ryu. But most of my peers in online G1 tournaments can make the same claim. Ryu is thus played a lot. If I lose a Ryu mirror-match, and they happen rather frequently for people who choose him, I really have nothing to blame but my own ability. If I’m playing Boxer (my “main”), however, I can mentally assign some of that blame to the unorthodox character: all things weren’t strictly equal in the competition, and it takes comparatively less practice in the Boxer mirror-match to develop more than most other players.
For some of us, never having to grind out a Counter-Top mirror-match makes Magic a great deal more fun — if only on an irrational level where we assume we’re awesome. Win or lose, we get to be mavericks. We can blame bad beats on our deck choice while taking too much credit for easy victories, such as when an opponent doesn’t realize that Mono White Control can go for a turn-three Grindstone win.
A few more points to consider:
If you have any interest in avoiding the dual lands route, pick up your City of Traitors now. It’s amazing that Star City Games hasn’t priced them at $50, if you consider that they’ve never been able to keep more than one or two in stock for several years now. It’s not as sexy as Phyrexian Dreadnaught, but it should be worth far more. City is a fundamental building block of the Chalice of the Void / Trinisphere archetype that wants to have two mana — preferably three — on the first turn of the game. While Dragon Stompy gets the most press because it resembles All-In Red in Extended and can be played in online Classic; every single color (yes, even green) has a Chalice-Aggro build of some sort. Once you have the basic pieces, you can start collecting other colors at your leisure, whether that means tapping out for Sea Drakes, unmorphing Angels, or even switching to a true Stax build in the future.
Your first turn is really important in Legacy. You need to be doing something, even if it’s just putting down something that counts as an island for Daze. “Enters the battlefield tapped” lands don’t really make the cut. If you absolutely have to cheat (as I did with my UB Reanimator), Painlands interact fairly well with the often overlooked cycle of allied lands from Odyssey. (Egglands?) A first turn Underground River, followed by a Darkwater Catacombs, does one less damage to you than opening with an untapped Shockland, while giving you the same access to Duress and Brainstorm, with a pain-free choice on turn two. This manabase typically has better tempo throughout the course of the game and is almost never discussed as a budget option. (Although if you actually are playing Daze, you’ll certainly want to reconsider this specific example.) And yes, fetches are more important than duals, especially past the first.
Being “stuck” with only a deck or two isn’t as boring as it’s often portrayed. The card pool in Legacy allows for a lot of room to experiment, even if you fail spectacularly. If Affinity is your deck, you won’t just be choosing between Soul’s Fire and Thopter-combo as in Extended: You might be trying out 8-Sphere builds (or now 12 with Lodestone Golem), mash-ups that include Force of Will, and other sordid attempts at cleverness. Heck, my favorite affinity deck is actually tribal in nature, featuring rogues. It uses Oona’s Blackguard and her interaction with modular creatures to give it a better chance against combo and control; another rogue, Dunerider Outlaw, can block ‘Goyf all day long and then rush past with a Cranial Plating or two. No, I wouldn’t take it to a 5K or a Grand Prix, having other options, but you can get more mileage out of decks than you might expect.
To continue the above example in a slightly different vein: Dredge without Lion’s Eye Diamond isn’t necessarily a budget strategy, as a lot of people seem to consider. It’s a different strategy. If you like to play Ichorid, you might want to pick up the cards to try Bloodghast, too. Pumping money into a deck doesn’t always automatically make it superior, but it does give you more options and can be fun. You’ll probably have a better time with the game if you don’t treat such debates as gang rivalries where you have to join one and stick with it for life.
Don’t assume that everyone else has a huge Magic collection or that “real players” have always had all the cards from the ground up. I started playing fairly early and never cracked an original dual land. (Those Deathlaces and Purelaces always found their way into my Revised packs; heck, my first booster from Time Spiral had a Moonlace in it, although an Avatar of Woe evened things out!) There are a ton of people who talk big on the internet, freely dispensing sage advice, even though they don’t actually own any paper cards at the moment and never play outside of Magic Workstation. While this might give them a different perspective (“Every deck should have Mox Diamond to speed it up a turn!” and “Combo? What combo, why would I ever worry about that?”), I’m not bringing this up to criticize them. They’re not all trolls and goons: you’d probably be surprised how many respected — or at least highly tolerated — forum members fall in that category.
It’s unrealistic to think that everyone could or should have access to every deck that could possibly be played. If you’re a Legacy player with a lousy collection, that’s perfectly fine. Welcome. The more, the merrier. Be aware that other people in the community might be “projecting” when they attack you for not being able to sleeve up a “deck to beat.” The number of people, including pros, showing up to 5Ks with Merfolk proves that you’re probably not too far behind the rest of the field when it comes to card access.
Having decks sleeved up makes it that much easier to look through spoilers and forums (as you can jump straight to your decks’ threads) when new sets are coming out; you can almost instantly tell what might be playable given what you currently have, rather than what might be good someday in the abstract. The former is a far easier decision to make. This is especially useful when doing pre-orders.
It’s also a lot easier to jump on “fast movers” when you have a deck to plug them into right away. If I didn’t already have a Reanimator deck put together, I probably wouldn’t have ordered Entomb the night it was unbanned. That would have been the difference between a $40 set and a $120 set. When you have all your cards in a binder, it’s easier to assume that you’ll never play a particular deck or that you can wait and thus miss out on a deal; intellectually, you know the price is going to go up, but you don’t have any basis of determining how that might affect you.
The thought of impulsively spending $40 five minutes after midnight affects most of us in a fairly obvious way, so it’s easy to conclude, “Maybe tomorrow.” That just might be too late. Conversely, having specific decks in mind keeps you from collecting a lot of cards that will never actually see play but are bought to keep up with the Joneses, “just in case.”
I generally fall on a different side of the proxy and reprint debates, owning a Tabernacle and a Moat but not a single Tropical Island. Players with full sets of duals tend to believe that since they can play just about any deck — save for a unique few that require cards from Legends or Portal — they should rightfully gain access to that small minority. I feel that the “small minority” in question is an interesting and valuable minority and should be protected because it opens up a potentially different path when it comes to collecting.
Reprinting cards like Grim Tutor or Sea Drake (or Berserk, which has already happened) would “harm” fewer collectors than would the reprinting of true duals in M11, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a better decision. It would make seeing Dutch Stax or Imperial-Painter at a tournament feel like less of a special occasion while not truly opening up the format to any additional players.
Richard Leader (rleader)
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