SpikeyMikey
02-26-2010, 12:57 PM
The deck I'm about to present actually dates back to a little before GP: Chicago. It's what I would've played, if I'd have had several hundred dollars to spend on new cards. This means that the format is different than it was when this was created, but I've done some work tweaking it and unsurprisingly, it's still a viable deck.
It started, as I said, before GP:C, when everyone was going gaga over CB/Top Thresh. I felt like the deck was just a weak deck overall because of its lack of answers to permanents that slipped through the counter wall. Keeping enough blue cards to support FoW required passing up incredibly strong cards in favor of mediocre blue cards (Wipe Away, Vendilion Clique).
The CB/Top soft lock is enough, in and of itself, to control out a game. Running a ton of extra counters is like running Kismet with Stasis. It's unnecessary and while it looks good, it's just too clunky for an optimized deck. So I decided to build a deck that had a solid answer to most problems but still utilized the strength of Counterbalance.
Ice Blue Zoo
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Tidehollow Sculler
1 Sower of Temptation
1 Trygon Predator
4 Ponder
4 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Enlightened Tutor
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Vindicate
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Vedalken Shackles
3 Counterbalance
2 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Umezawa's Jitte
4 Underground Sea
4 Tundra
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Misty Rainforest
Sideboard
3 Chalice of the Void
3 Krosan Grip
3 Engineered Plague
2 Pernicious Deed
2 Extirpate
2 Rhox War Monk
Deck Breakdown:
Creatures:
Everything except for Tarmogoyf does something. I think that this is critical to the deck's successes, because every creature is a threat beyond its ability to beat. Interactive card advantage is a powerful thing, especially in today's format where the power level has crept up to such a point where dead draws are unacceptable. Each card you play needs to be able to end the game on its own or counter a game-ending threat.
Tarmogoyf is, of course, an auto-include in any deck running green. In fact, a lot of decks run green specifically for 'goyf. If you can't beat 'goyf, join him. His massive size and cheap cost make him a must for any deck that plans to win through the combat phase.
Dark Confidant is not quite an auto-include, as he is dependant on deck construction, but in a CB deck with black, you can generally count on the average CC to be low enough that he's worth playing. I've heard that drawing cards wins games.
Tidehollow Sculler is probably the first card that people will question in this listing. It's included for several reasons. One, discard is a solid option for a deck with no counters against any deck that doesn't win through the combat phase. This would include storm combo and loam variants, as well as Stax. Technically, Loam and Stax will generally "win" with beats, but the actual victory comes when they lock you out of the game with powerful non-creature effects. At that point, either deck could, for example, win with Mountain Goat. The actual win-con becomes moot once you've established control of the game. Because these decks generally don't put down early creatures, threat density is a key to victory, as long as you can back it with enough disruption to keep them from stabilizing. In this instance, Sculler is a Thoughtseize that can carry a Sword or a Jitte.
Two, against decks like CB/Top Thresh and Bant Survival, you've got a strong chance of being able to pull the removal out of their hand. These decks run very heavy on the counters (CB/Top) or creatures (Bant) and do not run excess removal, expecting, in either case, to stop attackers with Tarmogoyfs (or Rhox War Monks). In this situation, Sculler can protect your 'goyf or your Confidant and let you keep your side of the board intact while you blow their side up with Plows and Vindicates.
I wouldn’t say that Sculler is the kind of card that gets a nod as an auto-include, as it’s only good in certain decks, but this is one of them.
Sower and Predator both used to be 2 of’s, but after having seen Jace, the Mind Sculptor in action, I cut one of each to fit him in. Sower is a solid creature, but I don’t want to see multiples of him. I don’t have FoW to pitch him to and the tempo loss from tapping out late and then having him removed can be difficult to handle. Still, there are some situations in which he’s invaluable. He’s on the cusp of getting cut but is still in the deck for now. Predator is in the same situation. When I built the deck, Counterbalance was a serious concern and so having a solid answer to CB (as well as being an irritant to anyone running Sensei’s Divining Top) was important. For this reason I packed 2 in the main and a second one in the board. Since then, CB has become much less of a consideration, and the Predator spot is looking like it could be updated to Qasali Pridemage or, to stay in the CC range, Knight of the Reliquary. If I added Knight, I would want to add Bojuka Bog and Volrath’s Stronghold, which would mean bringing my land count up to 20 (I’d probably cut a fetch). The reason that neither of them has left yet is that having fliers to carry Swords/Jitte is useful.
Draw/Dig:
Brainstorm and Ponder are both excellent spells, but in almost all cases, Ponder is simply better. Why? First, because Ponder is better at finding land early game. If you Brainstorm and don’t find land, you know you’re dead in the water. With Ponder, if there are no lands in the top 3, you can shuffle, giving you a better chance of finding a land. Second, because Ponder works better with Sensei’s Divining Top.
Top is, in my opinion, the single most powerful card in the format right now. By itself, it changes deck design and allows decks to move in directions they could never have gone before it was printed. This deck features 14 shuffle effects. While that means you’re going to go through a lot of sleeves, it also means that you can find any card in your deck with relative quickness, even the 1 of’s. Even more important, after you’ve cherry picked what you want from the top of your library, you can shuffle away the chaff and have a fresh set of bombs to pick from. Remember how I said earlier that in this day and age, dead draws were unacceptable? With Top, you don’t have to worry about that. I would propose that Top is similar to Force of Will in that Force needs at least 14 blue cards to be viable and Top needs at least 9 shuffle effects. 9 shuffle effects means averaging 1 per starting hand. Most of you probably remember Nassif’s silver bullet sideboard from Grand Prix: Chicago. It works almost entirely because of Top.
Jace and E. Tutor are both cards that don’t see play in Legacy right now, Jace, because people are afraid of his high CC and E. Tutor because people have this irrational fear of losing a draw step. Both are absolute powerhouses. Until I played against a deck running Jace, I didn’t truly appreciate how powerful he is. In this deck, he functions as a quasi-removal spell that can generate ridiculous card selection and advantage. As we’ve already been over, the deck is packing 14 shuffle effects, making each turn’s brainstorm a way to unload dead cards and refill with Good Stuff. I normally wouldn’t advocate using Unsummon as removal, but when it’s reusable, the tempo loss caused by low curve decks having to tap out or come close to tap out to replay threats (and they have to keep pressure on Jace, or they just simply lose the game) can actually be better than a real removal spell. Enlightened Tutor lets me pull any of my powerful enchantments or artifacts out, and generally, the advantage generated by searching out exactly the right answer to the problems you’re facing on the board outweighs the loss of a single card. Much like the disadvantage of pitching something to Force outweighs letting some troublesome spell resolve.
Removal Suite:
There are two cards that are generally considered auto-includes in their colors for Legacy, Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares. This deck eschews Force in favor of more threats, but even I can’t deny that Swords is the best removal in the format right now. Having an early Swords is important to the deck’s strategy of depleting an opponent’s resources, and against a fast deck like Zoo or Fish, not having Swords can easily lose you the game.
I’m a big fan of having a solution to every problem. Either your solution is blazing speed or it’s flexible removal. Sometimes, it’s both (before the format split from Vintage, I ran a WBR aggro deck that was running 25 burn spells, if you counted Mogg Fanatic, Goblin Legionnaire and Icatian Javelineer as burn). For this style of deck, flexible removal is key. Vindicate, and to a lesser extent, Oblivion Ring, deal with any permanent-based problem. You pay a premium for that flexibility on the mana cost, but it’s worth it. Because sometimes, cutting a player off from a color can win the game. And sometimes, being able to kill an equipment is more efficient than killing the critter carrying it. I run a 3-1 split between Vindicate and Ring because the 1 Ring gives me a tutorable target for spot removal. Vedalken Shackles is a good target as well, but sometimes, 5 mana is more than I can afford.
Other Goodies:
Counterbalance started as the basis of this deck. The whole thought process behind the deck’s design was to abuse CB without having to blow another 10 slots on additional counters. As I’ve been playing the deck, however, CB has become less and less important. This is not to say that it’s not still important, but it’s no longer the central path to victory for the deck. I don’t find myself tutoring for CB/Top locks as much as I used to. When it comes down, this deck runs enough 2cc spells that it functions much like a true CB/Top Thresh, but it has the additional flexibility of having more 3cc spells. Traditional Counter-Top was weak against 3cc spells and had almost no outs against 4cc+ spells. It was well known that the way to beat Counter-Top was to play more 3cc spells and cut down on your 2cc spells. Now that CB/Top Thresh is less of a threat in the metagame, people have started playing a lot of 2cc spells again.
The equipment is there to give my creatures the edge in the combat phase. A Confidant is a serious threat, but it’s not much of a clock. A Confidant with a SoFI is a clock and a half. I run a 2-1 split because Jitte makes an excellent answer to Jitte. There are times when being a 4 mana drop and equip is superior to a 5, or when I need the life gain from Jitte against an aggressive opening, but 90% of the time, Sword is simply better.
Card breakdowns are nice and can help with understanding specific card choices that fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but far more important to understanding a deck is understanding the general flow of the deck and it’s strategy. Anyone that’s played T1 in the modern era knows that decks running very similar lists can have very different game plans.
The general plan of Ice Blue Zoo is to simply win the war of attrition. The first turn or two, you’re trying to just masturbate with Top and Ponder to set up enough mana to be able to comfortably cast your 3 and 4 mana bombs. You Plow things only if you have to (no shooting Cursecatchers, with no counters in the deck, you don’t really care about it). You try and bait out your opponent’s removal with things you don’t really care about, like Tarmogoyf (this early he’s not a huge threat). Or you strip it out of their hands with Sculler. The next couple of turns you’re trying to land a beater that will stick and pair it up with either equipment or Jace. If you can keep Jace on the board, he will win you the game all by himself. At this point, Sower and Shackles both come online and if you’ve depleted your opponent’s removal with bait and discard, you can start beating him to death with his own critters. Late game, don’t be afraid to use Jace to play with your opponent’s topdecking. Drawing more cards every turn is good, but having answers isn’t as good as ensuring that you don’t ever need answers. Once you’ve got a comfortable 2-4 card lead over your opponent, start screwing with their draws. Anything threatening gets cycled to the bottom. If they happen to have 2 real threats in a row, you can always go back to using Jace to dig, but at this point, you’ve probably got an SDT in play and you’ve got the dig to answer just about anything they can come back at you with. If you can land CB/Top in the mid game, you can play more defensively, saving creatures in your hand while you manipulate your library with Top. Eventually, when the creatures come down, you should be able to protect them with Top.
If I can see an opponent is mana screwed and I’ve got the option to Vindicate on turn 3, I’ll do so, but if they’re not missing land drops, I’ll save it for serious threats. Even though you’re not running counters, you’re still the control deck in almost every matchup; your creatures aren’t suited to fast beats and even against decks like Planeswalker control, you’re trying to outlast them.
Sideboarding:
The sideboard is in flux as I test, so I can’t give you absolutes on what to board against any given deck. I recently changed a Deed and a second Trygon Predator out for 2 Rhox War Monks, which I think will improve the matchups with Zoo and to a lesser extent Fish. Deed is important in both of these matchups, since it allows you to wipe the board, removing multiple creatures as well as taking care of two problem cards, Aether Vial and Grim Lavamancer. Mancer is too small to blow removal spells on; you need to save Plows and Vindicates for threats like ‘goyf or KotR or even Wild Nacatl. He ruins your side of the board though.
You might question CotV over Mindbreak Trap. The logic behind it runs like this: Even though we don’t run any counters, anyone that sees exclusively blue duals and Counterbalance is going to assume there are counters in the deck somewhere. Xantid Swarm is likely to come in, and since you’re boarding removal out to make room for board cards, you don’t want to get stuck with Trap in hand and a Xantid on the other side that you just can’t handle. The reason that you’re boarding removal out instead of anything else is exactly because you don’t really have counters. You need to put pressure on their life, making Ad Nauseam unplayable, so you can’t lower your threat density. Deed is good here too, since their options are either holding jewelry for storm count and walking into CotV, or playing it out early and walking into Deed.
Engineered Plague comes in against tribal decks, obviously. Goblins, Merfolk, and to a lesser extent Elves all see play and Plague is hands down the best answer to them. If Fish were a better preboard matchup, I’d consider Perish, since it’s so good in the Zoo matchup, but Elves can combo out very quickly and against Fish, you have to have some way to negate their lords. Humility is out of the question.
A word on Extirpate. I have yet to find anyone that likes this card. The biggest complaint that I hear is that it doesn’t have an immediate effect on game state, you’re stripping cards out of your opponent’s library. In this day and age, with SDT as prevalent as it is, that’s not a small concern. Every card in your deck is within easy reach, so stripping all of something is huge. It’s even better in decks packing Wasteland, where you can frequently cut someone off from an entire color with a single Extirpate. However, even in a deck like this, it’s a better option than Relic/Crypt against Loam because it can’t be needled or Gripped. If I were running Knight of the Reliquary main, with the Bojuka Bog, I would probably have these slots as 1xRelic of Progenitus and 1xKnight of the Reliquary.
As always, sideboards are highly fluid things, changing from location to location. Feel free to tweak the board as needed. I’ve been doing a fair amount of playing on MWS lately, and I’ve got around 80 games played (only around 30 full matches though). I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of how it does against major contenders and also how it does against random MWS junk (combo Elves, Vampires, Faeries, Enchantress and other tier 3 decks). I will post that information when I get home. In the mean time, the basic gist of the chart is that there’s a lot of junk on MWS, but this deck has an even or better than even matchup against everything it’s gone up against with the exception of a German guy playing Aggro Loam. That I think was more a function of draws than of the matchup.
Any suggestions or comments you have are welcome, although I’d like you to keep in mind that I’ve played a lot of games with this deck prior to posting it. So if you don’t have playtesting to back up your comments, I’m not necessarily going to give them a lot of weight. I say this, not to be a dick, but because I know I’m going to hear “Ugh, Extirpate is terrible” or “Jace is too expensive for Legacy” from people who haven’t shuffled this up and played with it.
It started, as I said, before GP:C, when everyone was going gaga over CB/Top Thresh. I felt like the deck was just a weak deck overall because of its lack of answers to permanents that slipped through the counter wall. Keeping enough blue cards to support FoW required passing up incredibly strong cards in favor of mediocre blue cards (Wipe Away, Vendilion Clique).
The CB/Top soft lock is enough, in and of itself, to control out a game. Running a ton of extra counters is like running Kismet with Stasis. It's unnecessary and while it looks good, it's just too clunky for an optimized deck. So I decided to build a deck that had a solid answer to most problems but still utilized the strength of Counterbalance.
Ice Blue Zoo
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Tidehollow Sculler
1 Sower of Temptation
1 Trygon Predator
4 Ponder
4 Sensei's Divining Top
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Enlightened Tutor
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Vindicate
1 Oblivion Ring
1 Vedalken Shackles
3 Counterbalance
2 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Umezawa's Jitte
4 Underground Sea
4 Tundra
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Misty Rainforest
Sideboard
3 Chalice of the Void
3 Krosan Grip
3 Engineered Plague
2 Pernicious Deed
2 Extirpate
2 Rhox War Monk
Deck Breakdown:
Creatures:
Everything except for Tarmogoyf does something. I think that this is critical to the deck's successes, because every creature is a threat beyond its ability to beat. Interactive card advantage is a powerful thing, especially in today's format where the power level has crept up to such a point where dead draws are unacceptable. Each card you play needs to be able to end the game on its own or counter a game-ending threat.
Tarmogoyf is, of course, an auto-include in any deck running green. In fact, a lot of decks run green specifically for 'goyf. If you can't beat 'goyf, join him. His massive size and cheap cost make him a must for any deck that plans to win through the combat phase.
Dark Confidant is not quite an auto-include, as he is dependant on deck construction, but in a CB deck with black, you can generally count on the average CC to be low enough that he's worth playing. I've heard that drawing cards wins games.
Tidehollow Sculler is probably the first card that people will question in this listing. It's included for several reasons. One, discard is a solid option for a deck with no counters against any deck that doesn't win through the combat phase. This would include storm combo and loam variants, as well as Stax. Technically, Loam and Stax will generally "win" with beats, but the actual victory comes when they lock you out of the game with powerful non-creature effects. At that point, either deck could, for example, win with Mountain Goat. The actual win-con becomes moot once you've established control of the game. Because these decks generally don't put down early creatures, threat density is a key to victory, as long as you can back it with enough disruption to keep them from stabilizing. In this instance, Sculler is a Thoughtseize that can carry a Sword or a Jitte.
Two, against decks like CB/Top Thresh and Bant Survival, you've got a strong chance of being able to pull the removal out of their hand. These decks run very heavy on the counters (CB/Top) or creatures (Bant) and do not run excess removal, expecting, in either case, to stop attackers with Tarmogoyfs (or Rhox War Monks). In this situation, Sculler can protect your 'goyf or your Confidant and let you keep your side of the board intact while you blow their side up with Plows and Vindicates.
I wouldn’t say that Sculler is the kind of card that gets a nod as an auto-include, as it’s only good in certain decks, but this is one of them.
Sower and Predator both used to be 2 of’s, but after having seen Jace, the Mind Sculptor in action, I cut one of each to fit him in. Sower is a solid creature, but I don’t want to see multiples of him. I don’t have FoW to pitch him to and the tempo loss from tapping out late and then having him removed can be difficult to handle. Still, there are some situations in which he’s invaluable. He’s on the cusp of getting cut but is still in the deck for now. Predator is in the same situation. When I built the deck, Counterbalance was a serious concern and so having a solid answer to CB (as well as being an irritant to anyone running Sensei’s Divining Top) was important. For this reason I packed 2 in the main and a second one in the board. Since then, CB has become much less of a consideration, and the Predator spot is looking like it could be updated to Qasali Pridemage or, to stay in the CC range, Knight of the Reliquary. If I added Knight, I would want to add Bojuka Bog and Volrath’s Stronghold, which would mean bringing my land count up to 20 (I’d probably cut a fetch). The reason that neither of them has left yet is that having fliers to carry Swords/Jitte is useful.
Draw/Dig:
Brainstorm and Ponder are both excellent spells, but in almost all cases, Ponder is simply better. Why? First, because Ponder is better at finding land early game. If you Brainstorm and don’t find land, you know you’re dead in the water. With Ponder, if there are no lands in the top 3, you can shuffle, giving you a better chance of finding a land. Second, because Ponder works better with Sensei’s Divining Top.
Top is, in my opinion, the single most powerful card in the format right now. By itself, it changes deck design and allows decks to move in directions they could never have gone before it was printed. This deck features 14 shuffle effects. While that means you’re going to go through a lot of sleeves, it also means that you can find any card in your deck with relative quickness, even the 1 of’s. Even more important, after you’ve cherry picked what you want from the top of your library, you can shuffle away the chaff and have a fresh set of bombs to pick from. Remember how I said earlier that in this day and age, dead draws were unacceptable? With Top, you don’t have to worry about that. I would propose that Top is similar to Force of Will in that Force needs at least 14 blue cards to be viable and Top needs at least 9 shuffle effects. 9 shuffle effects means averaging 1 per starting hand. Most of you probably remember Nassif’s silver bullet sideboard from Grand Prix: Chicago. It works almost entirely because of Top.
Jace and E. Tutor are both cards that don’t see play in Legacy right now, Jace, because people are afraid of his high CC and E. Tutor because people have this irrational fear of losing a draw step. Both are absolute powerhouses. Until I played against a deck running Jace, I didn’t truly appreciate how powerful he is. In this deck, he functions as a quasi-removal spell that can generate ridiculous card selection and advantage. As we’ve already been over, the deck is packing 14 shuffle effects, making each turn’s brainstorm a way to unload dead cards and refill with Good Stuff. I normally wouldn’t advocate using Unsummon as removal, but when it’s reusable, the tempo loss caused by low curve decks having to tap out or come close to tap out to replay threats (and they have to keep pressure on Jace, or they just simply lose the game) can actually be better than a real removal spell. Enlightened Tutor lets me pull any of my powerful enchantments or artifacts out, and generally, the advantage generated by searching out exactly the right answer to the problems you’re facing on the board outweighs the loss of a single card. Much like the disadvantage of pitching something to Force outweighs letting some troublesome spell resolve.
Removal Suite:
There are two cards that are generally considered auto-includes in their colors for Legacy, Force of Will and Swords to Plowshares. This deck eschews Force in favor of more threats, but even I can’t deny that Swords is the best removal in the format right now. Having an early Swords is important to the deck’s strategy of depleting an opponent’s resources, and against a fast deck like Zoo or Fish, not having Swords can easily lose you the game.
I’m a big fan of having a solution to every problem. Either your solution is blazing speed or it’s flexible removal. Sometimes, it’s both (before the format split from Vintage, I ran a WBR aggro deck that was running 25 burn spells, if you counted Mogg Fanatic, Goblin Legionnaire and Icatian Javelineer as burn). For this style of deck, flexible removal is key. Vindicate, and to a lesser extent, Oblivion Ring, deal with any permanent-based problem. You pay a premium for that flexibility on the mana cost, but it’s worth it. Because sometimes, cutting a player off from a color can win the game. And sometimes, being able to kill an equipment is more efficient than killing the critter carrying it. I run a 3-1 split between Vindicate and Ring because the 1 Ring gives me a tutorable target for spot removal. Vedalken Shackles is a good target as well, but sometimes, 5 mana is more than I can afford.
Other Goodies:
Counterbalance started as the basis of this deck. The whole thought process behind the deck’s design was to abuse CB without having to blow another 10 slots on additional counters. As I’ve been playing the deck, however, CB has become less and less important. This is not to say that it’s not still important, but it’s no longer the central path to victory for the deck. I don’t find myself tutoring for CB/Top locks as much as I used to. When it comes down, this deck runs enough 2cc spells that it functions much like a true CB/Top Thresh, but it has the additional flexibility of having more 3cc spells. Traditional Counter-Top was weak against 3cc spells and had almost no outs against 4cc+ spells. It was well known that the way to beat Counter-Top was to play more 3cc spells and cut down on your 2cc spells. Now that CB/Top Thresh is less of a threat in the metagame, people have started playing a lot of 2cc spells again.
The equipment is there to give my creatures the edge in the combat phase. A Confidant is a serious threat, but it’s not much of a clock. A Confidant with a SoFI is a clock and a half. I run a 2-1 split because Jitte makes an excellent answer to Jitte. There are times when being a 4 mana drop and equip is superior to a 5, or when I need the life gain from Jitte against an aggressive opening, but 90% of the time, Sword is simply better.
Card breakdowns are nice and can help with understanding specific card choices that fly in the face of conventional wisdom, but far more important to understanding a deck is understanding the general flow of the deck and it’s strategy. Anyone that’s played T1 in the modern era knows that decks running very similar lists can have very different game plans.
The general plan of Ice Blue Zoo is to simply win the war of attrition. The first turn or two, you’re trying to just masturbate with Top and Ponder to set up enough mana to be able to comfortably cast your 3 and 4 mana bombs. You Plow things only if you have to (no shooting Cursecatchers, with no counters in the deck, you don’t really care about it). You try and bait out your opponent’s removal with things you don’t really care about, like Tarmogoyf (this early he’s not a huge threat). Or you strip it out of their hands with Sculler. The next couple of turns you’re trying to land a beater that will stick and pair it up with either equipment or Jace. If you can keep Jace on the board, he will win you the game all by himself. At this point, Sower and Shackles both come online and if you’ve depleted your opponent’s removal with bait and discard, you can start beating him to death with his own critters. Late game, don’t be afraid to use Jace to play with your opponent’s topdecking. Drawing more cards every turn is good, but having answers isn’t as good as ensuring that you don’t ever need answers. Once you’ve got a comfortable 2-4 card lead over your opponent, start screwing with their draws. Anything threatening gets cycled to the bottom. If they happen to have 2 real threats in a row, you can always go back to using Jace to dig, but at this point, you’ve probably got an SDT in play and you’ve got the dig to answer just about anything they can come back at you with. If you can land CB/Top in the mid game, you can play more defensively, saving creatures in your hand while you manipulate your library with Top. Eventually, when the creatures come down, you should be able to protect them with Top.
If I can see an opponent is mana screwed and I’ve got the option to Vindicate on turn 3, I’ll do so, but if they’re not missing land drops, I’ll save it for serious threats. Even though you’re not running counters, you’re still the control deck in almost every matchup; your creatures aren’t suited to fast beats and even against decks like Planeswalker control, you’re trying to outlast them.
Sideboarding:
The sideboard is in flux as I test, so I can’t give you absolutes on what to board against any given deck. I recently changed a Deed and a second Trygon Predator out for 2 Rhox War Monks, which I think will improve the matchups with Zoo and to a lesser extent Fish. Deed is important in both of these matchups, since it allows you to wipe the board, removing multiple creatures as well as taking care of two problem cards, Aether Vial and Grim Lavamancer. Mancer is too small to blow removal spells on; you need to save Plows and Vindicates for threats like ‘goyf or KotR or even Wild Nacatl. He ruins your side of the board though.
You might question CotV over Mindbreak Trap. The logic behind it runs like this: Even though we don’t run any counters, anyone that sees exclusively blue duals and Counterbalance is going to assume there are counters in the deck somewhere. Xantid Swarm is likely to come in, and since you’re boarding removal out to make room for board cards, you don’t want to get stuck with Trap in hand and a Xantid on the other side that you just can’t handle. The reason that you’re boarding removal out instead of anything else is exactly because you don’t really have counters. You need to put pressure on their life, making Ad Nauseam unplayable, so you can’t lower your threat density. Deed is good here too, since their options are either holding jewelry for storm count and walking into CotV, or playing it out early and walking into Deed.
Engineered Plague comes in against tribal decks, obviously. Goblins, Merfolk, and to a lesser extent Elves all see play and Plague is hands down the best answer to them. If Fish were a better preboard matchup, I’d consider Perish, since it’s so good in the Zoo matchup, but Elves can combo out very quickly and against Fish, you have to have some way to negate their lords. Humility is out of the question.
A word on Extirpate. I have yet to find anyone that likes this card. The biggest complaint that I hear is that it doesn’t have an immediate effect on game state, you’re stripping cards out of your opponent’s library. In this day and age, with SDT as prevalent as it is, that’s not a small concern. Every card in your deck is within easy reach, so stripping all of something is huge. It’s even better in decks packing Wasteland, where you can frequently cut someone off from an entire color with a single Extirpate. However, even in a deck like this, it’s a better option than Relic/Crypt against Loam because it can’t be needled or Gripped. If I were running Knight of the Reliquary main, with the Bojuka Bog, I would probably have these slots as 1xRelic of Progenitus and 1xKnight of the Reliquary.
As always, sideboards are highly fluid things, changing from location to location. Feel free to tweak the board as needed. I’ve been doing a fair amount of playing on MWS lately, and I’ve got around 80 games played (only around 30 full matches though). I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of how it does against major contenders and also how it does against random MWS junk (combo Elves, Vampires, Faeries, Enchantress and other tier 3 decks). I will post that information when I get home. In the mean time, the basic gist of the chart is that there’s a lot of junk on MWS, but this deck has an even or better than even matchup against everything it’s gone up against with the exception of a German guy playing Aggro Loam. That I think was more a function of draws than of the matchup.
Any suggestions or comments you have are welcome, although I’d like you to keep in mind that I’ve played a lot of games with this deck prior to posting it. So if you don’t have playtesting to back up your comments, I’m not necessarily going to give them a lot of weight. I say this, not to be a dick, but because I know I’m going to hear “Ugh, Extirpate is terrible” or “Jace is too expensive for Legacy” from people who haven’t shuffled this up and played with it.