The Deck Approach In Legacy

[Cire]

Recently i read a very intresting article by Stephen Menendian on star city games (http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/vintage/18454_So_Many_Insane_Plays_The_Return_of_The_Deck.html)[it's a free article atm] which talked about the approach that stephen took on creating the vintage deck 'the Deck.'

The Article got me wondering if such a similar approach might be taken in creating a deck for Legacy. Understandably a legacy version of 'The Deck' and the vintage version of 'The Deck' would not look or play similarly at all, yet the approach of 'The Deck's' creation is what intrigued me the most:

To Paraphrase Stephen's approach you first have to indentify the metagame, and then build three sperate decks designed to beat the top three contendors in that said metagame, and then somehow synthesize the three sperate decklists in some way; from what i can tell first you take all cards sharded by all the three deck lists, then by 2/3 of the three decks lists and the remaining cards you pick seeing how they will perform against the entire feild in its entirity. I suggest that you refer to Mr. Menendian's article for a complete look at his intresting method at creating 'The Deck'

Now so far from research and the recent thread about the entire metagame by Stephen again, with his constant contributions to magic writing and the recent breakdown of tier decks godryk the top legacy decks appear to be (in no particular order):

Zoo
Ant
Merfolk
Candian Thresh
Countertop strategies (prog, bant, supreme blue, baseruption, etc)

The top three would though apear to be

Zoo
Merfolk
Countertop strategies (prog, bant, supreme blue, baseruption, etc) taken as a whole

Now my earlier question was whether you think Stephen's aproach to 'The Deck' applied to these three decks would bear merit, or if it's just a useless exercise? Normally i would just try to follow through this exercise by myself, but i don't have the experince needed to know if any deck i build would be the qunitisential anti-zoo deck, etc.that is why i turn to the community in order to see this little experiment out to the fullest;

First; i would like to see if people even agree with me on those top three decks, arguements could certainly be made replacing zoo out for Candain Thresh or countertop for Ant.
Second; once the top three are decided upon, to go down in order and attempt to make a 'anti-deck' that would crush that particular deck (for example if merfolk is chosen as one of the top three, im sure the 'anti-merfolk' deck would start with 4 pyroblast and 4 red elemental blasts'). Thus at the end we should try to agree on three seperate anti-decks
And Three we attempt to Synthesize the three decks lists as best we can, and then finnally gaze upon the Frankenstine that the end product will be and then test it out against the feild and see if we wasted our time.

Again i am intrested to see if this deck building approach would invite intrest if not merit and if anyone wants to join me on it, if not ill probeberly post my own terrible anti-decklists on this thread and continue onward...but any help would be appreciated.

Also i would like to thank Stephen Menendian for inspiring me to try this (i have nothing better to occupy my time with anyway :laugh:) and also for the decklist data, as well as godryk for his top-8 data

[paK0]

You kinda got that wrong. Stephen did not build a new deck, he just used this method to tune a given archetype (The Deck in this case) to beat a given metagame.


I think you can use this procedure for Legacy as well, but it is not intendet to build something from scratch. Lets say you apply this to the CounterTop deck. You first draw up a list of all Cards that might go into Countertop. Of these cards you build a Countertop Deck that beats Zoo. Then you Build a Countertop Deck to beat Merfolk. Then the mirror. After that you can combine the lists. Its not throwing all cards that beat Zoo into a single list, rather all cards from the "Countertop pool" (or any deck you wanna build)

[Mark Sun]

He actually tried the method in Legacy, rebuilding CounterTop (http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/18570_So_Many_Insane_Plays_Reassembling_CounterTop_To_Beat_the_Metagame.html) to play at a Meandeck Open.

He ultimately got 9th that day, missing the Top 8 with tie breakers (I was one of his wins :cry:). But I agree, the method is a good one; he was able to fix a lot of problems that he had the last tournament.



Btw, he does analyze the metagames from a lot of the tournaments in the previous year, the ones that are most successful, I believe, are the ones that you indeed posted. So it would be a good starting point.

[Cire]

You kinda got that wrong. Stephen did not build a new deck, he just used this method to tune a given archetype (The Deck in this case) to beat a given metagame.


I think you can use this procedure for Legacy as well, but it is not intendet to build something from scratch. Lets say you apply this to the CounterTop deck. You first draw up a list of all Cards that might go into Countertop. Of these cards you build a Countertop Deck that beats Zoo. Then you Build a Countertop Deck to beat Merfolk. Then the mirror. After that you can combine the lists. Its not throwing all cards that beat Zoo into a single list, rather all cards from the "Countertop pool" (or any deck you wanna build)

Ah, i guess i did not catch that part in his article, to me it seemed he built a deck straight up from the ground; but maybe thats just how it seems in vintage, since most decks use the same couple of cards with little variation. Anyway I still want to give this method a shot, so why don't we try to pick a deck that can undergo this metamorphoses (if you can call it that).

Seeing the poster above me, showed that the method has been tried to moderate success already in legacy i think it has some merit, so now all that needs to be done is to pick which deck we want to run through this proccess, and what the metagame is.The metagame appears to be correct under the analysis posted in the OP, mainly Zoo, MerFolk and Countertop (taken as a whole, indivudally decks like ANT and Thresh make a better showing than supreme blue or Prog-Top alone, yet i think the fact that the engine of counter-top is just as dominant if not more so than Zoo proves it should be among the top three decks). Thus we need to pick a deck to experiment with.

Now seeing how the deck is a control deck, in order to make this exercise not only true to the original deck and even perhaps relevant, why dont we attempt this exercise with the fallen out of grace Landstill?
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Edit: to start discussion, assuming that anyone is intrested with this (and that this belongs here and not in the landstill thread) here is my take on a supposedly Anti-Zoo Landstill list...meaning that all card choices in the following landstill deck were made with the sole intent to beat the shit out of Zoo decks and nothing else. thus the following decklist should not look like an optimized decklist at all but instead as a very narrow control deck. (to Those reading this that skipped the OP, the goal of this exercise is to make an Anti-Zoo deck, an Ant-Merflok deck, and a Anti-Countertop deck and synthesize the lists) Anyway heres my first attempt at the Anti-Zoo landstill deck:

Most landstill decks can be broken up like so;

Lands (24)
Win conditions (6)
Removal (10)
Counter (10)
Ca (10)

Of course there is alot of variation in those lists as well; but that is the basic formula im going to follow for now, yet especially tailored to fight against zoo;

first the removal:

4 Engineered Explosives
4 Swords to Plowshare
2 Deed

Understandably that might seem like too much but given that Zoo concentrates on Creature beat Down and burn, cheap mass removal (complemented by swords) should be enough to beat the Rush, also deed and EE can take care of the pesky library and jitter that Wrath's can't get rid of.

Counters:

4 Force of Will
4 Spell Snare
2 Pulse of the Fields

First Force of will needs no explanations, but given that half the zoo deck is 2 mana, spell snare seems ridicoulos compared to the other counters for this matchup. I counter Pulse as a counter because it effectivly is for all the burn spells played by Zoo, and not only is it effectivly a Counter its a reusable one.

CA:
4 Brainstorm
4 Standstill
1 Fact of Fiction
1 Jace (the original)

The usual draw package to my understanding, but with added jace, sincemultiple Fact or Fiction's seemed a little to much clustered for me, and jace can save you some life by drawing away burn spells

Win Cons;
4 Elspeth
1 Jace the MindSculpter
1 Life from the loam

elpseth is already a landstil win con, but the added benifit of being just simply annoying to Zoo decks, and the New Jace which from what i saw when he was played does stupid things to aggro decks, and is simply good CA all around, maybe even better than fact or fiction? And of course life of the loam, for recuring Manlands and wasteland lock

Land;
4 wasteland
4 Mishra's Factory
16 other lands (didn't really take the time to break down the colors and ect, but with so much draw and minimal splash colors i dont think this part of the problem would take to long or that hard)

-4 wastelands because of Zoo's reliance on nacatal/ape/lion and thus reliance on duals..

Anyway here would be thefirst take on the Anti-Zoo list:

- 24 Lands
4 wasteland
4 Mishra's Factory
16 other lands

-6 Planeswalkers
4 Elspeth
1 Jace the MindSculpter
1 Jace (The original)

-30 Spells
4 Brainstorm
4 Standstill
4 Force of Will
4 Spell Snare
4 Engineered Explosives
4 Swords to Plowshare
2 Deed
2 Pulse of the Fields
1 Fact of Fiction
1 Life from the loam

How would that fair against Zoo?

Anyway i will test and refine the above deck against Zoo and when it performs satisfactory against that particular deck i will try to go through the same exercise against Merfolk then countertop and then synthesize the lists. And hopefully something decent will emerge from it all