Hybridizing Decks

[morgan_coke]

Recently I've been incorporating elements of Lands and Eternal Garden into Slide with good results (at least initially).

This got me thinking about deck hybrids in general, and how they often end up being more successful than their original versions. Sometimes these hybrid combinations are obvious, and sometimes they're completely counter-intuitive.

Some recent examples of successful hybrid decks and strategies:

Survival + Threshold = Bant Survival

Thresh Cantrips + Doomsday + TEPS = ANT

Elfs + Survival = Elf Survival

Threshold + Landstill = Countertop

Threshold + Eva Green = Team America

WW + Vial Tricks + Goblin LD package = Death and Taxes

I might be stretching the definition of a Hybridized deck on some of those, but I think its worth noting just how many decks now are either straight hybrids, or more commonly, halfway hybrids.

What I mean by halfway hybrids is that these decks include a specific combo or set of cards that has almost been shoehorned into an otherwise entirely different strategy.

Think Iona/Retainers in Survival decks, or NOPro in any number of green decks. Or Painterstone in any number of decks with a way to tutor up the pieces, or "the thresh cantrip package/shell" (Ponder/Brainstorm/Top/Daze/Force) in anything with blue.

I'll be honest, I don't have a great read on what this means long term for Legacy, but it definitely seems like certain, particular combos/strategies are being widely adopted across many different deck types and philosophies.

I'm definitely not immune to this, with my Slide decks incorporating elements of Rock, Eternal Garden, and Chant. I'm interested in hearing others' thoughts on this trend, or even if you just think this is a silly concept.

[chokin]

I always used to think of TES as Belcher+IggyPop. It packed ETW as an alternative win condition, featured Wish and wish board to produce win conditions, answers, and draw mechanics. But that deck has changed so much that it's not really like that anymore. It's like...rainbow storm.

[theintangiblefatman]

A large number of Legacy decks a good stuff decks that simply play the best cards a particular color or strategy has to offer. This naturally leads to a small number of cards showing up repeatedly across decks. Even in highly specific decks like ANT, you still see a few cards common to other archetypes, because those cards are simply too good at what they do for another card, maybe even one with high internal synergy with the deck, to take their role.

[FoulQ]

Well, legacy has always been about unintentional synergies, oftentimes fuckups by R&D. LED + Tutor/Wish, Natural Order + Prog, Painter + Grindstone, etc etc. Think about it, most of the powerful interactions we see in legacy involve one old card and one new card. Fuck, even the life force of legacy, fetch-->dual, is based on an unintentional synergy (as I doubt they had fetchlands planned when they made the original duals).

[chokin]

@FoulQ - That's a pretty accurate statement. Legacy does seem to use old and obscure cards to break shiny new cards.

I know that R+D keeps the Eternal Formats in mind when it comes to bigger cards. Proof of this is easily seen in the big Eldazi cards, which shuffle into the deck when they hit the graveyard. They are NOT easy to reanimate (Loyal Retainers has a window, Goryo's Vengeance works, and there are worse spells from there), and since they are colorless, you can't Natural Order them in like you could Progenitus. People are already talking about cheating those in with Gamekeeper.

But then I wonder what they're thinking when they make it easy for a deck like Reanimator and Bant Survival to get Iona for so cheap.

It's like every once and a while they like to throw us a few gems that just shake everything up. I suppose that's better than ignoring us, but sometimes it feels like just a few cards can change the face of a deck. Like Ad Nauseum.