Chatter of the Squirrel — Legacy Elves!

So… Legacy.

I know. The format’s dead, everything changes with Future Sight, there’s no reason to talk about it, blah blah blah. Whatever. The important thing was that, in Columbus, the sky was still firmly rooted way up in the clouds, and Chicken Little was looking around awkwardly trying to pretend that he didn’t know what all the commotion was about.

I, of course, continued my savage streak of doing poorly at every single event in the 2007 calendar year, going 1-3 after my two byes in the main event and then 4-2 with Kowal in the PTQ the next day. This was my first Grand Prix since St. Louis, actually, so I had high hopes – but you know what they say about high hopes…

(I actually have no idea what they say about high hopes.)

With “four amateurs in the Top 8,” a lot of people were quick to point out how random and unbalanced the format was. But some counterpoints:

The best deck there won the tournament.
The best raw player in the room (who was actually playing in the event*) made the Top 8.
There were five different decks in said Top 8.
Mikey P got 129th.

All in all, I was not the only person who believed that the existence of Flash was good for the metagame. It set a very clear bar that all rogue decks had to be able to beat, and it weeded out many of the more random combo decks both by virtue of being “better” in the abstract and because of the necessity to try and hate it out. After FS it probably gets ridiculous, but in Columbus it was simply a very good but very vulnerable combo deck that defined the metagame without unhealthily warping it.

I say “very vulnerable” because for whatever reason people weren’t playing the Disciple version of Flash. This confuses me. In Billy’s deck it makes perfect sense, because that deck uses the open slots to execute a counter-strategy that just so happens to trump everything in the format. Nice engine. In every single other deck, though, the four or so free slots were simply devoted to more disruption spells.

Inconveniently enough, most of those decks had to end up using those disruption spells to ensure that they weren’t kold to their opponents’ countermeasures: everything from Umezawa’s Jitte to Ghostly Prison (in Adrian’s deck, at least) to Pyrokinesis to Tormod’s Crypt. That doesn’t seem to accomplish very much. Sure, both builds are vulnerable to Leyline and countermagic from the opposite side, but Smmenen’s deck still played Daze, Force of Will, Echoing Truth, and Duress. It seems to me that you might as well render yourself invulnerable to most of the disruption that people are actually playing, and go ahead and suck up the four extra slots. Sometimes, it’s even really good to play out a Shifting Wall on turn 2 or 3.

I’m sure Smmenen will write about his deck next week, but it was definitely the best “normal” Flash deck there. Sometimes, I think there’s a tendency for people to want to get too cute with their combo, without exactly thinking through what they are trying to accomplish. I actually really like the Peeks in Gadiel’s list, because he’s so unreal at this game that it’s hard to beat him if he has perfect information. But in general, it’s okay to play “old technology” if it serves the deck’s purposes best.

Speaking of old technology, you know I couldn’t speed through this whole article without a fair dose of self-aggrandizing, and so I have to talk about Richard’s and my deck. Here’s the list for you non-premium peeps:

B/G Elves

Zac Hill

Test deck on 05-27-2007

Legacy

Creatures (23)

Lands (22)

Spells (15)

Sideboard

One of the Pernicious Deeds should have been a Putrefy, but that’s not the point. Netdecking this list isn’t really going to get anyone anywhere because the format’s about to shift so radically, but I do think it’s worth spending time on the theory behind how this list came into being. I’ve devoted a lot of time over the last few months thinking about deckbuilding theory – how to approach different formats, how to design for different needs, how to prepare for specific types of tournaments (predominately-public-information versus predominately-private-information events**, for example), and what have you – and I’ve realized that no matter what format you’re playing, certain principles are going to hold true given a large enough card pool. I think Richard’s and my thought process for developing this deck is fairly typical of any format where there are specific questions to answer and specific problems to solve.

Notice: this process mainly applies to decks that are trying to “solve” formats, not decks that are going to be the objectively most powerful decks in the format. I am extremely bad at designing those sorts of decks, and am trying to get better.

For now, though, I’ll talk about what I do know. I mentioned certain principles that I’ve noticed generally hold true in larger formats, but I’ll detail the most important one right here. Rather than ascribe some meaningless term to it and hope that everyone can figure out what I’m talking about, I’ll just try to give you an idea of what I’m trying to say.

Obviously, with a diverse card pool to work with, you’ll probably be able to cobble together a reliable manabase. In Legacy this is particularly true, obviously, because of the sac-lands and duals. But even in Standard right now – the largest Type-2 format of all time – you’ve got Ninth Edition painlands, Ravnica duals, storage lands, Terramorphic Expanse, Signets, and the Future Sight duals to work with. This makes splashing a whole lot easier, but more importantly it means that if it’s relatively obvious what *air quote* the best cards *end air quote* in the format are, most decks are going to a) be able to run and b) want to run those cards. Because of this key fact, even huge, huge formats like Legacy are going to end up being defined by a relatively small number of spells – a smaller number of spells, on average, than in Standard.

Don’t believe me? Sure. But take a look at the top Legacy decklists, and tell me how many of them run some combination of Duress, Force of Will, Daze, Meddling Mage, Swords to Plowshares, Brainstorm, and Dark Confidant.

What this means is that if you’re trying to break the format, you really only have to beat a very small sample of very particular cards.

Now, it’s going to turn out that (again, because the card pool you’re working with in these types of formats is so freakin’ huge) there will be some cards that demolish a huge portion of the very narrow decks in the format because they cripple some important resource. In Vintage a few years back, the card was Null Rod. Uba Stax had several powerful weapons against all of the format’s most potent decks, but hardly any was so effective as the stick that could be dropped on turn 1 only to shut down Gifts and Slaver’s most potent offense. In Extended earlier this season, Chalice of the Void was that card. In Mirrodin-Champions Standard, that card was Damping Matrix. Waaaay back during Black Summer, that card was Stasis.

So if the plan is to break a large format, the first step is to find That Card.

For Columbus Legacy, Richard and I chose Leyline of the Void. It hosed Threshold, Flash, Iggy (which was relevant at that point in time), and a whole lot of random decks like Gamekeeper and Life from the Loam. We also realized Chalice would be just as good as it had been for us earlier, and made a deck from there. But one of the questions we were asked several times was: “Okay, I understand the disruption, I understand the Chalices, I understand the proactive elements of the deck. But why Elves?!”

Rest assured, we didn’t have a hankering to play one mana 1/1s or four mana 2/2s. The reason that the Elves made the cut was the second defining principle of large formats:

People aren’t stupid. They’ll also find “That Card.” If you’re going to exploit it, make sure you don’t lose to it. To employ a Floresian term – yes, I will gladly use these when they make sense – dodge “splash damage.”

Now, the reason That Card is generally so amazing is that it stops the decks that are doing the most broken things in the format. So the risk in dodging That Card is that you’re doing something inherently weaker than everybody else. With “Elves!,” despite the, um, elves, we didn’t feel like we had to make that sacrifice.

Let’s look at Fish, for example. They do their damnedest to try and disrupt whatever deck they’re up against, and they wind up killing the opponent with a bunch of random 2/2s or occasionally an Angel or a Jotun Grunt. Skyshroud Poacher, on the other hand, kills (usually) two turns after you’re able to activate it. Moreover, he trumps the strategy of those “random 2/2” decks, because they sure aren’t attacking into him as long as he can go holler at his boy the Squirrelly Man. Masticore is similar. He kills quickly, beats random decks, and trumps every single Fish player’s plan because he kills all of their guys and then kills them.

Meanwhile, you need the Elves because along with Ancient Tomb they allow you to execute these trumps reasonably quickly, and they also help you dodge Daze. Perhaps most importantly, they mean you don’t have to go out of your way to play Umezawa’s Jitte, which is actually good against every deck. Nice Benevolent Bodyguard, glad you don’t have Safekeeper, etc.

So you’re casting turn 2 Masticores, Chalices at 2, and Poachers. Your threats cost a lot so you don’t care about Chalice. You don’t care about the graveyard so you don’t lose to Leyline. You play sixteen maindeck turn 1 or turn 2 disruption spells, so the Flash matchup is good. You play Masticores, Jittes, and Hermits, so the Fish matchups are good. What all’s left?

Sometimes, you have to bite the bullet.

I’ve done a lot of talking about Fish-type decks (which also include Threshold, Slivers, and honestly even the mono-Black aggro decks we saw in the Top 8) because I assumed they were the only decks that could hold their own against Flash, the defining deck of the format. When you’re playing a deck that attacks specifically the best strategies in the format, you have to understand that you risk losing against the Tier 2 creations that people are going to be playing anyway. Notice I haven’t said a word about Goblins. Goblins does something completely different from every other deck in Legacy, and so it should come as no surprise that a deck designed to attack the format’s common denominators would have a bad matchup against strategies that don’t operate according to similar procedures. As it turns out, our Goblins matchup is horrible, even though Richard beat the only Goblin deck he faced. I, on the other hand, got crushed by Landstill and Goblins and was out of contention before I knew what happens. Scalpels aren’t good when all you need’s a hammer, so any time you make a very narrowly-tailored metagame deck you do so fully aware that if you predict incorrectly what people are going to actually play, you’re probably going to crash and burn. You also can’t get angry when that happens, because it’s part of the risk. You weren’t “unlucky” to get bad pairings; you are just bearing the responsibility for your risk.

In my case, we (correctly) predicted that most of the Goblin and Landstill decks would be out of our bracket by round 4 or so, and therefore I’d only need to win my first round. As it turned out, I couldn’t, and I lost because of it. Richard, on the other hand, started out 8-0-1 because once he beat the random decks in rounds 2 and 3, it was smooth sailing from there on out. That was the risk we took on the front end fully aware of the consequences. If you’re not prepared to “get randomed out,” as it were, then playing a “solution” deck isn’t for you.

Anyway, I’m interested to see what Wizards chooses to do with the format after Future Sight rotates in. What do y’all think should happen?

By the way, because a whole lot of people have asked, here’s the list I’d recommend for Regionals:

Dragonstorm

Zac Hill

Test deck on 05-27-2007

Standard

Creatures (6)

Lands (12)

Spells (42)

Sideboard

For next week, I’ve got a theory article on Initiative that’s been brewing for awhile, or I have some juicy Standard decks that I’ve been cooking up with the help of some Memphians and the good ol’ Internet. I haven’t made up my mind yet, indecisive little attention-monger that I am, but if you’ve got a preference feel free to let me know.

Until next time,
Zac

* a.k.a. “whose name wasn’t Aten”

** This, in all but the rarest of circumstances, is what differentiates PTQ seasons from Pro Tours. In a PTQ you’re pretty aware of the environment; in a Pro Tour, everybody’s scrambling to keep things as secret as possible. I am also pretty positive I could have come up with better terminology for what I’m trying to say than an awkward multiply-hyphened string of words, but it just wasn’t coming to me.