Survival of the Fittest (Cockatrice Testing)

[Shax]

So I've come up with a Survival of the Fittest list since it was my favorite deck while legal in Legacy.

It's to be used on Cockatrice only with the game title being :Use any one banned card in Legacy:, meaning you can use one banned card as a four of in your favorite Legacy deck just for fun. Survival believe it or not has the power to stack up against the decks quite well.

(The worst offenders being Goblin Recruiter or Mind's Desire, Yawgmoth's Bargain or something silly like Wheel of Fortune.deck. You can also just throw in Black Lotus if you really just want to be on curve since Lotus does do what it does best.)


So heres my Survival of the Fittest list for Cockatrice in a you can use 1 banned card in Legacy Format!

3 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills
4 Tropical Island
1 Taiga
2 Savannah
5 Forest
1 Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary
4 Tradewind Rider
1 Quirion Ranger
1 Gilded Drake
1 Mystic Snake
4 Squee, Goblin Nabob
1 Ravenous Baloth
1 Genesis
1 Anger
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Swords to Plowshares
1 Wonder
1 Man-o'-War
1 Misty Rainforest
4 Noble Hierarch
1 Harmonic Sliver
1 Verdant Catacombs
SB: 4 Nature's Claim
SB: 4 Grafdigger's Cage
SB: 4 Disrupt
SB: 3 Chain of Vapor

Card Choices: It's a standard Tradewind Survival list but it's got upgraded Grafdigger's Cage and Nature's Claim in the sideboard compared to junk like Tormod's Crypt and Naturalize or the other 1 drop green spell that gets rid of enchantments only. (Or maybe thats just erase)


Notice I'm one creature short, and I believe it's a green creature with 2 abilities and the last ability on the card being a keyword ability. If anyone can help me find it I would greatly appreciate it.

[LegacyIsAnEternalFormat]

I'm sorry but in a format where you can play skullclamp Elves or Yawgmoth's Will storm this deck would suck. Also where is Venegevine.?

[Shax]

Force of Will handles the problems of Storm Combo usually, and for aggro you have Survival tools at your disposal.

Vengevine was never needed in Survival of the Fittest, when people starting jamming it in their list as a four of it caused a great shift in the metagame. Yes, I understand Vengevine Survival was 'the' deck for a while but then again Survival was 'the' deck when Tradewind Rider was a thing.

I'll gladly take on challenges on Cockatrice for the time being since Survival is my favorite deck if you ever want to prove Skullclamp Elves or Y.Win Storm was a thing.

Honestly I would take it a step further and say how this deck competes against the likes of Mental Misstep or Ancestral Recall control decks.

[Shax]

Also I found Ravenous Baloth as a substitute Green Card or as another tech card to be used since the lifegain really rocks against the likes of Burn, Canadian Thresh and other Lightning Bolt decks.

It's only 4 life gained a turn but still that shaves off a Bolt a turn and is really the only option you have against the sort of decks that want to take advantage of your life before you get Tradewind Riders going.

As another plus is messes with Storm Combo's perfect 20 damage on the nose Storm Count that they usually have.

[Dice_Box]

As much as I understand what you are trying to do, this is not a Legacy legal deck. I have shifted it to the only place on the site it can realistically go.

[Finn]

Shax, this is called ATS or Angry Tradewind Survival. It was the very first Deck to Beat in Legacy. But during its brief reign, the Quirion Dryad players were figuring out how to build their deck (mostly by removing the stupid Dryads). What developed in those months was Legacy's first Threshold deck (blue, white, green), and it pounded ATS into the ground. Landstill was also good against ATS, but it did beat the various Goblins decks that had also yet to solidify.

It was never any good, Shax. TheSource had about 600 members when Legacy was born. There were just so few people brewing that it took us a few months to get anything solid from the giant soup of cards. ATS just got its stake in the ground first.

[lavafrogg]

The only real survival decks you should consider using are the ones that either killed you with vengevines on turn 4 or the ones that played a tarmogoyf every turn, forever. All of the other builds were way too cute and lost to themselves, especially when they did not draw SotF/it got countered/it got destroyed/tons of graveyard hate.

Also, I love survival and it would be the only thing I played if it was unbanned.

Also, it will be unbanned one day.

Last also, pick skullclamp as your banned card if you want to run a creature deck, it is bonkers. Elves, goblins, clerics goodstuff.dec, anything.

[Epeirogeny]

Sorry to revive this thread. But I was looking at old decklists and was wondering why this deck got banned in the first place. I do not see it as that fast of a deck compared to others in the format. And there is a lot of graveyard hate. However, I was not playing legacy back then.

Why is it banned now? Could it be unbanned?

[Ace/Homebrew]

My understanding (as I also did not start playing until after SotF got the axe) is that Survival of the Fittest is such a powerful creature-tutoring-engine that it pushes all other creature-strategies out of the format.

[Bobmans]

I have been playing SotF since 1999. It is the biggest loss in Legacy. I hate Vengevine. But blaming Vengevine is kind of wrong here. Something would have forced a ban anyway, although i think that SotF never was over the top anyway's.

Verstuurd vanaf mijn SM-G900F met Tapatalk

[Stevestamopz]

I brought a Survival deck to our weekly Legacy last night and asked everyone if I could try it out. No one had a problem with me jamming it and most were also excited to see how it would go.

I wasn't around during Survival's prime so I was going in blind, but after trying to study the materials from back then (a lot less was printed about Legacy then there is now) I came to this list:

//Creature (28)
2 Basking Rootwalla
1 Big Game Hunter
1 Birds of Paradise
4 Deathrite Shaman
1 Emrakul, the Aeons Torn
1 Eternal Witness
1 Fauna Shaman
2 Knight of the Reliquary
1 Loyal Retainers
2 Noble Hierarch
1 Phyrexian Revoker
1 Qasali Pridemage
1 Shriekmaw
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob
4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
4 Vengevine

//Enchantment (4)
4 Survival of the Fittest

//Instant (6)
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Enlightened Tutor
3 Swords to Plowshares

//Artifact (1)
1 Umezawa's Jitte

//Land (21)
2 Bayou
1 Forest
1 Gaea's Cradle
1 Karakas
1 Plains
3 Savannah
1 Swamp
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Wasteland
4 Windswept Heath

SB: 2 Ethersworn Canonist
SB: 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
SB: 3 Leyline of the Void
SB: 2 Orzhov Pontiff
SB: 1 Qasali Pridemage
SB: 1 Reclamation Sage
SB: 1 Sanctum Prelate
SB: 3 Tarmogoyf
SB: 1 Abrupt Decay

I ended up at 2-2, beating BUG Delver and 4c Loam 2-0 and losing to Elves 0-2 (got absolutely dunked on) and lost to Jund 1-2. I won game 1 against Jund by just hardcasting Vengevines repeatedly and then casting random idiots to bring them back. Games 2 and 3 I got locked out by Deathrites and Punishing Fires and his Goyfs were better than mine. My lazy deckbuilding decisions really got me in the 2nd game: He had a Grafdigger's Cage in play, so I survivaled for a Pridemage. I cast it with 1 mana open and passed the turn. He untaps and plays Pithing Needle. If I don't use Pridemage now, he'll name Pridemage with Needle and then I'm never getting anywhere. So I blew up the Cage but never found my way out of being "junded out" as they say. More than likely a different game if I can tutor for Rec Sage as I intended to, but I couldn't find my single copy of it at home so Pridemage #3 it was. It still felt pretty awful though from my side; Survival is so reliant on mana-creatures to make boatloads of Green mana and if there's a deck capable of destroying lots of little creatures, it's Jund.

Deck was super sweet and load of fun, but "busted and degenerate" it is not. Graveyard hate is really good now and the Elf matchup wasn't even close. Not that I was getting there anyway, but after the match he showed me the Surgical he had in hand if I actually got to Retainer in Iona (and by this stage I was already losing to the board).

Game 2 against 4c Loam I didn't end up casting the Survival in my hand, instead electing to just put a Jitte on a fairly big Knight and bash for lethal. Game 1 I did the "it's turn 4 have 4 vengevines" thing and it was pretty mediocre tbh. He had a huge Knight and a Maze of Ith which slowed me down quite a bit, although I will admit that Survival was disgusting at this point, as I worked my way out of it by survivaling for my own Knight to then get a Wasteland for his Maze and also Suvivaling for a Shriekmaw to kill the other Knight. That felt pretty powerful, but it's not like 4c Loam is that insane against other creature decks anyway and I likely would have won without having infinite Shriekmaws if it came to that.

I'm still unsure of the best way to build this deck, or even if going U/G with Intuition or Necrotic Ooze is the best (I can't imagine that to be true after being repeatedly fisted by multiple Deathrites by Jund) and I didn't get close to using Retainers once.

The BUG Delver decks draws were pretty average (1 Delver as the lone threat in both games) and 2 Plows in both games were more than enough to stop him from doing anything and the 4c Loams draws were pretty shit in game 2 (3 Bobs in play and drawing nothing but lands).

As I suspected, this deck is nowhere near "1G win the game" as others have said. It's a shame too, because it really is fun albeit a bit slow.