[Article] Top 5 Legacy Decks According to the Experts

[Griselpuff]

http://www.channelfireball.com/artic...o-the-experts/

[Stuart]

Thanks for posting this, Bob. It's baffling to me that there were any non-Miracles votes for 1st place.

[Megadeus]

I'm surprised by that as well. Looking at numbers the only way you can argue it isn't is that its top 8 penetration is only due to the oversaturation of the deck with number of players playing it. Man it would be really nice if their 1 mana instant wrath at least killed the creatures. Fucking misery

[Pilhas]

I'm surprised by that as well. Looking at numbers the only way you can argue it isn't is that its top 8 penetration is only due to the oversaturation of the deck with number of players playing it. Man it would be really nice if their 1 mana instant wrath at least killed the creatures. Fucking misery

I would actually argue that it would be worse if it did kill them....
I also believe that Miracles is the best deck, however the level of player you play influences the deck by a larger margin than most of the other decks.

[Stuart]

Man it would be really nice if their 1 mana instant wrath at least killed the creatures. Fucking misery

That's something I don't tend to notice when I'm on MUD or Enchantress, but I expect to be aggravated by it once I hop on the GBx train. The one upside is that Dryad Arbor becomes GSZable again .

I also believe that Miracles is the best deck, however the level of player you play influences the deck by a larger margin than most of the other decks.

More or less agree with this, though Miracles does get some brainless wins off the back of Countertop and Mentor. Likewise, when you play a million pieces of card selection and filtering, it's not that hard to find the silver bullet that wrecks your opponent.

But yeah, bad-to-average Miracles players tend to be pretty easy to beat, but the good-to-great ones always wipe the floor with me. If they know how to pilot the deck well, it feels unbeatable.

[Julian23]

I would actually argue that it would be worse if it did kill them....

True. Terminus would be significantly worse and easier to interact with if it just destroyed the creatures. Thrun and Vengevine come to mind. That would actually make for quite interesting games. Back in early 2013 we actually ran a couple of Elves lists with 4x Vengevines.

[Megadeus]

Destroy would be great. There's so many interesting ways to interact with that, thrun and vengevine like Julian said, selfless spirit on board bones it, dauntless escort would be pretty interesting as a green Sun target. Bloodghast might even still be playable. Yeah in green Sun decks and stuff it's kind of nice to be able to get those back, but that is basically two decks in the format, whereas if it were a destroy effect you'd have things like Zombardment and other petty cool things. Now you get a deck that pushes out non blue aggro because they can't interact with terminus on the stack and you also push out any other control deck because their answers are generally just worse than instant speed tuck wrath for W. The deck damages diversity at this point and makes the format pretty stale as it's been top dog for 4 years now with now real end in sight.

[thefringthing]

I started working on a 2012 update to the History of Legacy series that Nightmare and akatsuki have contributed to, which has included writing about the birth of Miracles. It's been interesting, but it's surprising how long it's been on top.

[Barook]

Destroy would be great. There's so many interesting ways to interact with that, thrun and vengevine like Julian said, selfless spirit on board bones it, dauntless escort would be pretty interesting as a green Sun target. Bloodghast might even still be playable. Yeah in green Sun decks and stuff it's kind of nice to be able to get those back, but that is basically two decks in the format, whereas if it were a destroy effect you'd have things like Zombardment and other petty cool things. Now you get a deck that pushes out non blue aggro because they can't interact with terminus on the stack and you also push out any other control deck because their answers are generally just worse than instant speed tuck wrath for W. The deck damages diversity at this point and makes the format pretty stale as it's been top dog for 4 years now with now real end in sight.

Actually, it's just 3 years of domination as results before varied strongly, but your point still stands:



Especially the last two years are pretty ugly. It would be great if more pros spoke about Miracles like BBD did a few days ago on Twitter. Then maybe R&D would get off their asses and banned something to bring it back in line.

[UnderwaterGuy]

Destroy would be great. There's so many interesting ways to interact with that, thrun and vengevine like Julian said, selfless spirit on board bones it, dauntless escort

All that talk of "interesting" and you just want to play unkillable green creatures? I don't see what's interesting about non-interactive cards like that.

This just boils down to players that like playing creatures and players that like playing spells. Terminus is what a wrath needs to be when so many creatures have insane protection (True Name Nemesis, etc). It may have still been playable at 1W though; I'll admit that.

[Julian23]

You are wrong about that part. Interacting with cards like Thrun, TNN or Vengevine is several levels of magnitude easier than Terminus.

[UnderwaterGuy]

True Name Nemesis is easier to interact with? You might as well say that about every instant and sorcery then because you need to be able to interact while they're on the stack. TNN is the definition of non-interaction, that is its entire design with "protection from your opponent". Luckily we have some methods of killing these almost unkillable creatures though.

[TsumiBand]

TNN isn't much better than Terminus, it's part of a larger problem of iteration.

I've said as much before but really the summation of a long-winded argument is basically this -- once upon a time the creature removal dynamic was established as either being a function of damage or spells, and it was simpler stuff like "Terror your Tarpan" or whatever two things you want to put in there. Then they started iterating over things and trying to shore up perceived imbalances, and the swings of the pendulum led to removing "can't regenerate" from Wraths or giving creatures Indestructible or Hexproof or what have you, and as things escalated and got weirder the conditions upon which they could be addressed got weirder too.

Like it's one thing to go "StP your Llanowar Elves", that's a very clean and simple interaction there assuming we don't go down the rabbit hole of potential counterplays. But if you look back at like, the dumb stuff that "had to" see print because of the last escalation in technology, we're now at this "Terminus your super-efficient creature board" stage where a ton of other plays were invalidated along the way, just to satisfy some weird need to make really potent things with Indestructible or Hexproof on them as an answer to the last ridiculous board sweeper that came along. Like, from a strict "My card counters your threat" standpoint, where again the dynamic was pretty straightforward for years, we have moved on from "StP your Elves" to "Council of Judgment, it resolves, I vote for your True-Name Nemesis" and it uses a lot more words to achieve the same endpoint but really it's basically the same game. Only now, we have these big dogs like Terminus wiping boards for one White, which is just inexplicably stupid in a format where there's sooooooo many ways to stack the top couple of cards in your deck. I'm not even going down the Brainstorm path right now, it's completely nuts the number of other cantrips or Scrys or Tops that would make this kind of Wrath effect so easy to cast in Legacy for its Miracle cost.

Like I get that you can't just let dudes like Thrun or Geist of Saint Traft just exist without a way to respond to them, even though they both cost 3 or more mana and don't end the game immediately. But it's like Gordon's speech to Batman at the end of Batman Begins -- what about escalation? In making provisions for those cards they've unleashed this huge monster that just pwns all the guys so fucking hard, and for so cheaply. It's easy to forget that Legacy was once this sort of bastion for aggro-control, with how far things have come.

[Julian23]

What I was getting at was that regular mass removal, a centerpiece of control decks, still removes TNN and some of it even hits Thrun.

Whereas Terminus, you just swallow it. I'd love to get rid off both Terminus and TNN, but claiming Terminus wasn't miles beyond TNN in what it did the format is incorrect.

[rlesko]

All that talk of "interesting" and you just want to play unkillable green creatures? I don't see what's interesting about non-interactive cards like that.

This just boils down to players that like playing creatures and players that like playing spells. Terminus is what a wrath needs to be when so many creatures have insane protection (True Name Nemesis, etc). It may have still been playable at 1W though; I'll admit that.

First of all, I'm interested in hearing about the creatures that aren't dying to traditional board wipes. You said "true name, etc." implying there are a lot of creatures dominating the legacy meta game with protections. True name is the only one I can think of thats even relevant, and dies to every non red board wipe that I can think of, including other effects. See wrath of god, supreme verdict, damnation, -x/-x crap like golgari charm, toxic deluge, and sacrifice effects like liliana -2 and diabolic edict. So, I don't really think your point about needing terminus to answer tnn and co. is valid at all.

Second, its ridiculously inaccurate to simply summarize things as "some players like casting creatures, some like casting instants and sorceries". There are a ton of ways nonblue decks could interact with board wipes through regeneration and indestructible. potentially playable cards with those abilities would include but not be limited to golgari charm, boros charm, selfless spirit, dauntless escort, thrun, ascetic troll, and heroic intervention. Also cards that can recur creatures from the graveyard like sword of light and shadow, second sunrise, all hallow's eve / living death, and even patriarch's bidding could be explored. But no, since it puts things on the bottom of the library your options are grenzo and some crappy artifact from innistrad i can't remember right now.

[bigbobbobber]

But no, since it puts things on the bottom of the library your options are grenzo and some crappy artifact from innistrad i can't remember right now.

Cellar Door. Is there any world where this card becomes even sideboard playable? I do and I don't know if I want to live in that world...

[Varal]

What is this 4C Snapcaster Delver deck? I've never heard of it before and it's one of the few decks believed to be better than Miracles.

[rlesko]

What is this 4C Snapcaster Delver deck? I've never heard of it before and it's one of the few decks believed to be better than Miracles.

Also can be referred to as "Friedman delver"

http://www.gatheringmagic.com/benfri...-color-delver/

[ESG]

It's interesting that all 16 of the experts surveyed have put Miracles as either No. 1 or No. 2. Usually there are always one or two contrarians out there, but it seems everyone is finally in agreement that Miracles is OP.

[Nicklas]

Also can be referred to as "Friedman delver"

http://www.gatheringmagic.com/benfri...-color-delver/

I assumed at least Angelo Cadei was talking about the czech.dec that Noah Walker played recently. 4c Delverless Delver or Goodstuff or whatever you wanna call it. I just know it as the czech pile...
Quote from the MKM Series website, when Angelo was asked for the best deck:

What is the best Legacy deck in your opinion (that you did not play yourself)?
Tomas Mar's deck.

List: http://mtgtop8.com/event?e=13630&d=280217&f=LE

I might be mistaken though.