Peter_Rotten
01-04-2007, 04:18 PM
Here's an interesting deck originally posted by Eric Becker on TMD I cut and pasted his original post here. TMD already has a discussion started if you wish to check that out; here is the link (http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=31563.new;boardseen#new).
Within one week of when Magus of the Jar was spoiled I started goldfishing a deck based around the interaction of Magus of the Jar combined with Corpse Dance and Shallow Grave. The ability to draw 7 cards for 1B or 2B seemed to be dismissed by just about every legacy player in the format. However, I'm not a legacy player, I'm a vintage adept, so I decided that I would be the player that I would give this deck a try.
Building a combo deck from the ground up is never an easy task, however it was going to be especially difficult for me, since I don't play or even like legacy. I have built at 4 upper tier combo decks on my own (IT, Pitch Long, Extended Ritual Desire, and my unreleased new vintage deck) so I figured I could tackle this.
As with every deck I build, I start with lots and lots of goldfishing and I came to this list (I hardly ever get to actually play magic)
Land 14
4 Usea
4 Delta
4 Strand
1 Island
1 Swamp
Accel 16
4 LED
4 Dark Rit
4 Cabal Rit
4 Petal
Kill 2
2 Brainfreeze
Combo 12
4 Shallow Grave
4 Corpse Dance
4 Magus
Setup 12
4 Careful Study
3 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
2 Intuition
1 Buried Alive
Protection 4
4 Defense Grid
Here's the logic I put into the deck at this point.
-One thing you'll notice is the inclusion of Brain Freeze over Tendrils of Agony. Running Tendrils as the kill means that you would be forced to run 3 or 4 Tendrils to not have the problem of losing all your kill spells in your Magus hands that get removed from the game with each Magus activation. From my experience with vintage combo, having more that 2 Tendrils in the deck can very problematic in clogging up opening hands and can be the cause of some very ugly brainstorms. Brain Freeze on the other hand works in conjunction with Magus to mill my opponent, so storming up to a lethal Freeze doesn’t seem all that difficult. Also by running Brain Freeze, I could get away with running only 2 kill spells as opposed to 3 or 4 and here’s why. During my end of turn step, all the cards that were once in my hand, but are currently removed from the game by Magus, will filter back into my hand long enough to play instants. Thus, if Brain Freeze is found early on when comboing at which time storm is not lethal, you could either A) play a small brain freeze for around 18-24 cards and plan to mill them the rest of the way with Magus activations or B) Activate Magus again and set aside my brain freeze so I can play it during my end step when it filters back through my hand. This is surprisingly very relevant and comes up in about 30% of the deck’s wins. With my current configuration, I have never once had a problem coming up with my finisher. Lastly, Brain Freeze also can target your self in a crunch to get Magus in the graveyard.
-The next thing piece of the puzzle was figuring out if the deck could play any sort of disruption or protection, and if so what. Defense Grid and Xantid Swarm are the best cards to protect yourself from countermagic, since they simply don’t allow your opponent to do anything while you are comboing. This is especially important when you consider that you are constantly refilling your opponents hand every time you activate a Magus and draw 7 new cards. Since we are not running Green, defense Grid seemed like the best option however I did consider other options. Duress is traditionally the card for storm combo uses to protect itself with, however in here it just didn’t cut it, because you are constantly refilling your opponents hand. Lastly, a mixture of Force of Will and Misdirection was quickly ruled out since the deck would be running 4 Lion’s Eye Diamonds. On to LED……
-Lion’s Eye Diamond. It’s the card that seems to taunt every combo player in the format, netting three mana for a single card is just ridiculous. The problem has been its drawback of discarding your hand to be far too limiting to effectively use it. Iggy Pop is really the only deck in the format to use LED and but its use is limited vs. control decks due to its hefty drawback and Iggy’s lack of protection spells. Against aggro decks though, LED really shines, especially in conjunction with Infernal Tutor. In this deck, LED drawback is suddenly an advantage, just as it can be in madness decks LED is a discard outlet, putting Magus into your graveyard. The trick here is to announce either Shallow Grave or Corpse Dance and before passing priority, breaking Lion’s Eye Diamond for mana putting Magus into the graveyard, upon resolution of your reanimate spell Magus comes into play with haste, and you’ve got 3 mana the you just netted with LED to start the comboing. Seems good.
A number of teammates began testing the deck and began to rave about how good it was
If this isn't pre-emptively banned somebody isn't paying attention. Seriously, Land Tax and MoM are banned still...
i shuffled up the deck tonight Holy Shit Eric Becker.. What have you done to Legacy?!?! This deck is fing stupid.
I've played against goblins, b/w condfidant, and threshold. Haven't lost a game...Eric, you have officially ------ up legacy.
We are all gonna owe you when we clean up the Pastimes Events
This deck feels as broken, if not more so, than Vintage decks
Supposedly the deck was unstoppable. I took their word for it and jumped on the Becker broke legacy bandwagon and even added it to my signature here on TMD. Talk of the deck even began to around Chicago area and I still hadn't even played 1 game with the deck up to this point. We decided that we were going to release this monster at the Pastimes event for 40 Ravinca Duals. I wasn't going to be able to make it since I was going to be attending SCG Roanoke, but 3-4 teammates were going to be running the Magus deck there. I decided that I’d like to play the deck since everyone was still running my list card for card, and I hadn’t ever played a game with the deck.
I drove to Chicago to meet up with what I thought was going to be 4 other teammates and 3 random good legacy players that I had never met. We were going to test the hell out of Magus and figure out what if anything needs to be changed.
1 teammate and 2 other people showed up, so there were only 4 of us. Great. So we started testing my list. Our testing gave us results of a very favorable goblins matchup, slightly favorable threshold matchup, and an slightly unfavorable BW confidant matchup. The Solidarity matchup revolved mostly around defense grid.
One thing we noted was about 1 in every 8 games you just couldn’t find a Magus for your life so you just sat there and died. The other problem we found was fizzling after 1 magus activation, if you got in 2 activations then you were going to win. After about 40 games of me playing the deck and 15 games from a teammate our time was up. I left knowing that I hadn’t broke legacy, but built a solid deck. Here was the list I came to
Land 15
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Underground Sea
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tundra
Instants 24
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
4 Corpse Dance
4 Shallow Grave
2 Brain Freeze
4 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
1 Orim’s Chant
1 Chain of Vapor
Sorceries 5
4 Careful Study
1 Buried Alive
Creatures 4
4 Magus of the Jar
Artifacts 12
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
3 Defense Grid
Sideboard 15
2 Massacre
3 Misdirection
2 Repeal
1 Chain of Vapor
2 Echoing Truth
2 Tormod's Crypt
3 Orim's Chant
The tournament weekend was upon us. I went to Roanoke had a successful outing claiming a 3rd and 10th with another creation of mine, URBana fish. Upon arriving home I eagerly anticipated some good news about the Magus deck only to here 1 person played it and he felt he didn’t know what he was doing when playing. He went 0-2 drop losing one match to a teammate who heavily metagamed against the magus deck with ludicrous amounts of hate pre and post board.
But what was worse was suddenly my team decided the deck sucked saying:
There were 30 people at Pastimes today for Legacy. Ben played Magus.dec. He got PWND by pithing needle, sphere of resistnce(boarded in by affinity LOL), and fizzling he said goin 0-2.
One of John's guys from COD was also telling me how they tested the hell out of it and had put up terrible results.
Ouch. Just 1 week ago my team was raving about how good the deck was.
One thing I’ve learned in life is that, sometimes you can only trust yourself. And this experience has really is one of them. I really felt like a failure with how everything had played out up to this point.
Fast-forward 1 month later. I decide to go to Pastimes 40 revised dual land tournament and I was going to play magus. I did about 10 games of games of testing with a new list. I ended up running this list at Pastimes
Land 15
1 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
3 Underground Sea
4 Ancient Spring
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tundra
Instants 30
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Corpse Dance
4 Shallow Grave
4 Brain Freeze
4 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
4 Orim’s Chant
Sorceries 3
2 Careful Study
1 Massacre (a friend convinced me this was the call)
Creatures 4
4 Magus of the Jar
Artifacts 18
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
Sideboard 15
3 Misdirection
3 Repeal
1 Chain of Vapor
2 Echoing Truth
2 Tormod's Crypt
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 ??????
This list was my best yet. The only card I’d change is massacre in favor of a chain of vapor and cut a careful study for a tainted pact.
Getting Magus in your GY is not a problem anymore sporting 4 Brain Freezes as a common play is Chant, Ritual, Ritual, shallow grave, and with grave on the stack you freeze yourself digging 15 cards for a magus.
I ended up a very frustrating 3-3 on the day. I lost 1 game to massacre not being a bounce spell and a whooping 5 games to fizzled draw 7 hands (all which happened to be the first magus activation). In 4 of those games that I lost I drew 7 card hands of all mana sources the other let me brain freeze my opponent down to one card in there deck (b/c massacre was not a bounce spell).
A very frustrating day indeed. The gods of combo just weren’t with me. I also had about 10 people giving me shit all day about how my deck was bad.
The whole experience has really been frustrating. I decided that I will never play legacy again as this experience has reinforced my dislike for the format.
I figured I’d share my deck to all of you since I’m done with it.
-Eric Becker
Within one week of when Magus of the Jar was spoiled I started goldfishing a deck based around the interaction of Magus of the Jar combined with Corpse Dance and Shallow Grave. The ability to draw 7 cards for 1B or 2B seemed to be dismissed by just about every legacy player in the format. However, I'm not a legacy player, I'm a vintage adept, so I decided that I would be the player that I would give this deck a try.
Building a combo deck from the ground up is never an easy task, however it was going to be especially difficult for me, since I don't play or even like legacy. I have built at 4 upper tier combo decks on my own (IT, Pitch Long, Extended Ritual Desire, and my unreleased new vintage deck) so I figured I could tackle this.
As with every deck I build, I start with lots and lots of goldfishing and I came to this list (I hardly ever get to actually play magic)
Land 14
4 Usea
4 Delta
4 Strand
1 Island
1 Swamp
Accel 16
4 LED
4 Dark Rit
4 Cabal Rit
4 Petal
Kill 2
2 Brainfreeze
Combo 12
4 Shallow Grave
4 Corpse Dance
4 Magus
Setup 12
4 Careful Study
3 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
2 Intuition
1 Buried Alive
Protection 4
4 Defense Grid
Here's the logic I put into the deck at this point.
-One thing you'll notice is the inclusion of Brain Freeze over Tendrils of Agony. Running Tendrils as the kill means that you would be forced to run 3 or 4 Tendrils to not have the problem of losing all your kill spells in your Magus hands that get removed from the game with each Magus activation. From my experience with vintage combo, having more that 2 Tendrils in the deck can very problematic in clogging up opening hands and can be the cause of some very ugly brainstorms. Brain Freeze on the other hand works in conjunction with Magus to mill my opponent, so storming up to a lethal Freeze doesn’t seem all that difficult. Also by running Brain Freeze, I could get away with running only 2 kill spells as opposed to 3 or 4 and here’s why. During my end of turn step, all the cards that were once in my hand, but are currently removed from the game by Magus, will filter back into my hand long enough to play instants. Thus, if Brain Freeze is found early on when comboing at which time storm is not lethal, you could either A) play a small brain freeze for around 18-24 cards and plan to mill them the rest of the way with Magus activations or B) Activate Magus again and set aside my brain freeze so I can play it during my end step when it filters back through my hand. This is surprisingly very relevant and comes up in about 30% of the deck’s wins. With my current configuration, I have never once had a problem coming up with my finisher. Lastly, Brain Freeze also can target your self in a crunch to get Magus in the graveyard.
-The next thing piece of the puzzle was figuring out if the deck could play any sort of disruption or protection, and if so what. Defense Grid and Xantid Swarm are the best cards to protect yourself from countermagic, since they simply don’t allow your opponent to do anything while you are comboing. This is especially important when you consider that you are constantly refilling your opponents hand every time you activate a Magus and draw 7 new cards. Since we are not running Green, defense Grid seemed like the best option however I did consider other options. Duress is traditionally the card for storm combo uses to protect itself with, however in here it just didn’t cut it, because you are constantly refilling your opponents hand. Lastly, a mixture of Force of Will and Misdirection was quickly ruled out since the deck would be running 4 Lion’s Eye Diamonds. On to LED……
-Lion’s Eye Diamond. It’s the card that seems to taunt every combo player in the format, netting three mana for a single card is just ridiculous. The problem has been its drawback of discarding your hand to be far too limiting to effectively use it. Iggy Pop is really the only deck in the format to use LED and but its use is limited vs. control decks due to its hefty drawback and Iggy’s lack of protection spells. Against aggro decks though, LED really shines, especially in conjunction with Infernal Tutor. In this deck, LED drawback is suddenly an advantage, just as it can be in madness decks LED is a discard outlet, putting Magus into your graveyard. The trick here is to announce either Shallow Grave or Corpse Dance and before passing priority, breaking Lion’s Eye Diamond for mana putting Magus into the graveyard, upon resolution of your reanimate spell Magus comes into play with haste, and you’ve got 3 mana the you just netted with LED to start the comboing. Seems good.
A number of teammates began testing the deck and began to rave about how good it was
If this isn't pre-emptively banned somebody isn't paying attention. Seriously, Land Tax and MoM are banned still...
i shuffled up the deck tonight Holy Shit Eric Becker.. What have you done to Legacy?!?! This deck is fing stupid.
I've played against goblins, b/w condfidant, and threshold. Haven't lost a game...Eric, you have officially ------ up legacy.
We are all gonna owe you when we clean up the Pastimes Events
This deck feels as broken, if not more so, than Vintage decks
Supposedly the deck was unstoppable. I took their word for it and jumped on the Becker broke legacy bandwagon and even added it to my signature here on TMD. Talk of the deck even began to around Chicago area and I still hadn't even played 1 game with the deck up to this point. We decided that we were going to release this monster at the Pastimes event for 40 Ravinca Duals. I wasn't going to be able to make it since I was going to be attending SCG Roanoke, but 3-4 teammates were going to be running the Magus deck there. I decided that I’d like to play the deck since everyone was still running my list card for card, and I hadn’t ever played a game with the deck.
I drove to Chicago to meet up with what I thought was going to be 4 other teammates and 3 random good legacy players that I had never met. We were going to test the hell out of Magus and figure out what if anything needs to be changed.
1 teammate and 2 other people showed up, so there were only 4 of us. Great. So we started testing my list. Our testing gave us results of a very favorable goblins matchup, slightly favorable threshold matchup, and an slightly unfavorable BW confidant matchup. The Solidarity matchup revolved mostly around defense grid.
One thing we noted was about 1 in every 8 games you just couldn’t find a Magus for your life so you just sat there and died. The other problem we found was fizzling after 1 magus activation, if you got in 2 activations then you were going to win. After about 40 games of me playing the deck and 15 games from a teammate our time was up. I left knowing that I hadn’t broke legacy, but built a solid deck. Here was the list I came to
Land 15
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Underground Sea
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tundra
Instants 24
4 Dark Ritual
3 Cabal Ritual
4 Corpse Dance
4 Shallow Grave
2 Brain Freeze
4 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
1 Orim’s Chant
1 Chain of Vapor
Sorceries 5
4 Careful Study
1 Buried Alive
Creatures 4
4 Magus of the Jar
Artifacts 12
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
3 Defense Grid
Sideboard 15
2 Massacre
3 Misdirection
2 Repeal
1 Chain of Vapor
2 Echoing Truth
2 Tormod's Crypt
3 Orim's Chant
The tournament weekend was upon us. I went to Roanoke had a successful outing claiming a 3rd and 10th with another creation of mine, URBana fish. Upon arriving home I eagerly anticipated some good news about the Magus deck only to here 1 person played it and he felt he didn’t know what he was doing when playing. He went 0-2 drop losing one match to a teammate who heavily metagamed against the magus deck with ludicrous amounts of hate pre and post board.
But what was worse was suddenly my team decided the deck sucked saying:
There were 30 people at Pastimes today for Legacy. Ben played Magus.dec. He got PWND by pithing needle, sphere of resistnce(boarded in by affinity LOL), and fizzling he said goin 0-2.
One of John's guys from COD was also telling me how they tested the hell out of it and had put up terrible results.
Ouch. Just 1 week ago my team was raving about how good the deck was.
One thing I’ve learned in life is that, sometimes you can only trust yourself. And this experience has really is one of them. I really felt like a failure with how everything had played out up to this point.
Fast-forward 1 month later. I decide to go to Pastimes 40 revised dual land tournament and I was going to play magus. I did about 10 games of games of testing with a new list. I ended up running this list at Pastimes
Land 15
1 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
3 Underground Sea
4 Ancient Spring
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tundra
Instants 30
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual
4 Corpse Dance
4 Shallow Grave
4 Brain Freeze
4 Brainstorm
2 Mystical Tutor
4 Orim’s Chant
Sorceries 3
2 Careful Study
1 Massacre (a friend convinced me this was the call)
Creatures 4
4 Magus of the Jar
Artifacts 18
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
Sideboard 15
3 Misdirection
3 Repeal
1 Chain of Vapor
2 Echoing Truth
2 Tormod's Crypt
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 ??????
This list was my best yet. The only card I’d change is massacre in favor of a chain of vapor and cut a careful study for a tainted pact.
Getting Magus in your GY is not a problem anymore sporting 4 Brain Freezes as a common play is Chant, Ritual, Ritual, shallow grave, and with grave on the stack you freeze yourself digging 15 cards for a magus.
I ended up a very frustrating 3-3 on the day. I lost 1 game to massacre not being a bounce spell and a whooping 5 games to fizzled draw 7 hands (all which happened to be the first magus activation). In 4 of those games that I lost I drew 7 card hands of all mana sources the other let me brain freeze my opponent down to one card in there deck (b/c massacre was not a bounce spell).
A very frustrating day indeed. The gods of combo just weren’t with me. I also had about 10 people giving me shit all day about how my deck was bad.
The whole experience has really been frustrating. I decided that I will never play legacy again as this experience has reinforced my dislike for the format.
I figured I’d share my deck to all of you since I’m done with it.
-Eric Becker