Playing a single deck or keeping up with tech?

[bruizar]

always sling artifacts. If they come prepared, play artifacts with welding jars obv

[Amon Amarth]

I just stick with one deck and then adjust as needed. For me that deck has been Goblins which requires very little change in regards to cards printed but often requires a change in tactics depending on what decks are in vogue at the time.

[zeagle]

I secomd the notion of having two decks with different attack angles. Having only one deck leaves you vulnerable to being hated out. Some decks are more susceptible to being hated out of a meta than others. For example, if you show up with burn, dredge, or storm week after week people will show up with the relevant hate cards and ruin your day.

[bruizar]

I actually play every deck. You don't really understand the weaknesses of a deck until you play with it.

[Dark Ritual]

I usually just play storm combo. Thinking about the BUG train right now with deathrite shaman and abrupt decay for GP Denver, although I'm unsure as of yet. Storm combo is almost always good in the hands of a good pilot except when misstep was legal. I don't have the most experience with control though so I'm hesitant.

Overall though I generally stay with one deck for a while with minor tweaks to it here and there unless I think I have the optimal list. Even then I usually agonize over slots though.

[Aggro_zombies]

There tends to be a single style of deck I play because it's intuitive for me to play those decks - stuff like Aggro Loam in this format. It helps to compensate for the fact that long tournaments tire me out very quickly.

However, there are very few decks in Legacy that are good for more than a year or two - combo decks that don't get nerfed (Storm, Dredge) and some intrinsically powerful decks like RUG tend to be the only things most people can play for years and still consistently place outside of regional metagames. I played Zoo for a while but I remember that only being good for a year or a year and a half after it became big before it fell off the radar again.

I'd say there isn't really a need to build the latest week-on-week tech unless you want to test for an upcoming tournament - the signal to noise ratio is pretty high when you're limiting your data to just Top X for large tournaments and you won't get a complete, or even good, picture of the early rounds. Multi-month trends are more important to keep up with for testing, especially new sets coming out since those are the main ways for the metagame to shift in the long term. If there's a certain style of deck - midrange, control, whatever - that you feel you can play consistently well on little practice, you might want to choose a deck in that category since the time to mastery will be lower.

[Iare]

A little of both is what I go with. I have the cards to play optimal Zoo, Big Zoo, Burn, Kitty Sligh (Steppe Lynx, Wild Nacatl and lots of burn) and various black based decks. For the most part I only take something black if I think aggro is going to be hated on.

So in the end I am only realling playing one archetype, but I have many different cards to switch it up to adapt to the metagame as needed. Sometimes it comes down to making your own tech if you want to take something that might not be the best choice, but its what you are comfortable with. For example, when counterbalance was everywhere, I ran big Zoo and boarded Siege of Towers as a finisher for them (And, landstill which was pretty popular around here at the time). Right now I can't seem to avoid tons of black control/aggro control, so I am testing kitty sligh with Grim Lavamancers and Vexing Devils with Proclimation of Rebirth in the sideboard.

So in short, if you are going to play one deck, make one that is easily adaptable to any situation. Keeping up with tech will be minimal, since you only need to pickup a few cards here and there to add to the pool to select your current decklist with.