Bloodcrank? In Legacy?

[Vastros]

So Id love to make this deck Viable for competitive play, its been a fun deck in casual:

4 Badlands
4 Wasteland
4 Rix Maadi
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Bloodcrypt

4 Dark Confidant

4 Bloodchief's ascension
4 Mindcrank
4 lightening bolt
4 Blightening
4 Staggershock
4 Volcanic Fallout
4 Terminate
4 Beseech the Queen
4 hymn to touroch

[Kich867]

Beseech the queen should be something else, I don't know what exactly, but something. I'd splash white for enlightened tutor or something..

[Vastros]

what else white would benifit the deck, apart from the one white burnspell that lord knows I cant remember the name.

I feel like white would also complicate the manabase and make it a lot more expensive (kind of the issue)

[Kich867]

Quote my post to see how to link cards for future reference: (fixed some typos)

4 Badlands
4 Wasteland
4 Rix Maadi
4 Bloodstained Mire
4 Blood crypt

4 Dark Confidant

4 Bloodchief ascension
4 Mindcrank
4 lightning bolt
4 Blightning
4 Staggershock
4 Volcanic Fallout
4 Terminate
4 Beseech the Queen
4 hymn to tourach

Sorry didn't realize this was in the casual section:

A few things on second glance: why wastelands? why rix maadi?

These two lands do nothing for you. Deck's don't actually require wasteland unless it furthers some kind of goal in the deck or deals with something that you don't want to see (like a Maze of Ith perhaps). Rix Maadi taps for colorless and has an extremely subpar activated ability.

I would drop these for both more fetches and basics, just, things that tap for real mana here. All you really care about here is getting this combo online and winning with it.

If you want a mirrored discard, I would run Liliana over Rix Maadi. However she doesn't really further any sort of goal either. I would drop Beseech the Queen for Grim Lavamancer.

Grim Lavamancer is an efficient threat that furthers the plan, it hits for just enough damage to put a quest counter on bloodchief and can help keep the board occupied. You don't really need anything to make people discard here, as soon as it has 3 quest counters on it with mindcrank out the moment they play a spell or fetch they die.

That's what I would do at least if I were to run this. So long as you just optimize the fact that Ascension triggers on both your and their end steps you can ramp up quest counters pretty quickly.

[evanmartyr]

Hymn to Tourach seems bad when your opponent will be doing neat things on turn 2, while you play crap like Mindcrank. Thoughtseize, man.

Beseech the Queen you may have problems paying for, and casting it means you're not triggering Bloodchief's Ascension since you don't have that much mana. Play cooler things.

1-damage reusable burn might be more useful than you think: a lot of Legacy decks play 1-drops, and a lot of Legacy decks play fetchlands (which combined with 1 damage from you put a quest counter on Ascension). Bam, so meta. Flame Jab? Geistflame? Lava Dart? Needle Drop? There are a lot of options, and some of them can easily contribute towards triggering Ascension without the benefit of your opponents damaging themselves.

If you could afford to, splash the white for Enlightened Tutor. And play at least 1 basic swamp/mountain, you're gonna die to dumb shit a ton if you don't.

Grim Lavamancer is a great idea, especially since you'll likely be filling your graveyard fairly rapidly.

Seems like a really neat deck idea, especially since you can build a sup-optimal version now and slowly build up to a more consistent control/combo deck as you pick up dual lands and such.

[Vastros]

what would be a list you suggest, and what would be a way to budget-ize the land base as duals are way out of the price range right now.

[evanmartyr]

So I built some janky pile to get a feel for how BCA worked in Legacy. It was BWR with no hand disruption, Grim Lavamancers, Lightning Helix/Terminate, Enlightened Tutor/1x Mindcrank, etc.

1: E-tutor is bad. The deck played like a burn deck that relied entirely on the assumption your opponent played creatures, since you'd have a lot of downtime where you're killing creatures to survive waiting on your Lavamancers or Confidants to get you enough mana/cards to do anything relevant. E-tutor goes and gets things that you either can't afford to spend time on (the 2+ turns it takes to activate Ascension) or things that are fairly overkill-ey (Mindcrank with an active Ascension IS overkill).

2: BCA is bad without Mindcrank. Without the threat of an instant win looming over the opponent, only a few decks really care about an active Ascension and an opponent with a grip full (or not so full) of efficient removal. Maverick/etc weren't terrible as long as you could answer Thalia and Mother of Runes in a timely manner, all the other decks with Hexproof/big threats were nightmares. EDIT: Storm combo very much cares about an active ascension but can usually outplay it since I wasn't running disruption; they also usually didn't give the deck enough time to actually get Ascension active anyway, so there's that.

So...I guess my conclusion is either BCA/MC is a bad idea for Legacy, since you have to build a deck that fulfills multiple roles at different stages of the game (which is hard to do for BR or BWR or whatever), or I am unintelligent enough to really make it work.

The biggest hurdle seemed to be that in the early stages of the game you're non-interactive, doming your opponent just to trigger BCA, but as soon as it's active you want to be interactive because killing creatures/lands is your win condition. The creatures that get played in Legacy are too resilient for this to be a sound strategy.

EDIT: My conclusions were a bit too far-reaching: BCA is bad in this shell, in Legacy. Maybe switch to a much more controlling shell that aims to maintain board control and uses BCA as a win condition? Grixis shell, Lavamancers, Snapcasters, countermagic, etc?

[ween]

I played this deck in Standard when BCA was legal. Loved it.

It used a little more creature heavy strategy to get the 2 points of damage in.

Bloodghast
Vampire Lacerator
Pulse Tracker
Goblin Guide
Lavaclaw Reaches

You could probably drop the Bloodstained Mire's, Hymn to Tourach's and Badlands, and run the same shell you're already working on, in the Modern format.

Also, Volt Charge works pretty well with Bloodchief ascension on 1 counter.