I have to be honest, I was paying very close attention to the results of Grand Prix: Columbus, as I have my very own Star City Games Open coming up in a couple of weeks in Denver, and ... well, I’m not exactly decided on a Legacy deck for Sunday.

During my time in Germany, I actually played a lot of Legacy tournaments; in fact, when I was running tournaments, we often picked Legacy as the format simply because it would let stragglers come in off the street and be able to play. Some soldiers would pick up the game after six or eight years of never playing, but carting around a tub of cards - often they’d be so excited to find another person playing the game (let alone an organized group) that we’d eventually be able to lure them into buying the more recent sets and playing Standard with us, but Legacy definitely made re-entry a lot easier.

My deck of choice, for “serious” Legacy events, was almost always Reanimator. For some reason, getting giant fuzzy monsters onto the battlefield early has always appealed to me, ever since I was dropping Verdant Force on turn four in Secret Force. Because I have been playing Reanimator for ten years or so (and because I was actually playing during Odyssey block), I actually have the Entombs (picked up well before their current $40 price tag), and Reanimator has always seemed like a great budget choice because, by definition, you only need one or two of the monsters that you want to be pulling out of the graveyard.

(It probably didn’t hurt that I was running the Mono-Black version and didn’t have to hunt down Force of Wills.)

And so, once Reanimator started putting up decent results in early SCG Opens, I went ahead and built the winning versions and started playtesting with it. I scraped together what I had, confirmed that I knew people from which I could borrow the remaining bits (namely the Underground Seas), and started learning the deck again from scratch. The addition of the blue doesn’t change the main purpose of the deck, but it does alter the ways that you go about your main game plan (and the ways you have to fight against your opponent).

With the banning of Mystical Tutor, though, I’m at an impasse. I’m trying to keep my eyes and ears open for how the search for a replacement is going, but part of me just wants to go back to the mono-colored version of Reanimator and go back to “what I know” -- even if some Legacy purists would consider it a “less powerful” version of the deck.

The deck I played, circa 2004:

4 Entomb
4 Buried Alive
4 Exhume
4 Reanimate
4 Dark Ritual
4 Duress
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Putrid Imp
1 Phantom Nishoba
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Petradon
1 Symbiotic Wurm
1 Arcanis the Omnipotent
1 Ihsan’s Shade
22 Swamp

(Presented for historic purposes only.) Phantom Nishoba had lifelink and was practically unkillable by Goblins. Akroma was also unkillable by Goblins and was good on offense and defense. Petradon handled troublesome lands like Maze of Ith. Symbiotic Wurm left me with multiple threats against targeted removal. Arcanis drew cards when you couldn’t guarantee that a reanimation target would win the game. Ihsan’s Shade couldn’t be sent farming.

In those days, Reanimator was more of a battle of inches. You could almost always be sure that your first reanimation target wouldn’t win you the game, so Buried Alive actually had some merit, as it set you up for the second and third reanimation. Tormod’s Crypt was the only readily-available sideboard hate, and it didn’t have enough other applications to be present in large numbers.

So when the Mystical Tutor banning was announced, the first thing I considered was just scrapping the whole shebang and going back to the Mono-Black version. We haven’t gotten any great new cheap reanimation spells (and we may never), and we haven’t seen anything like Entomb, so there shouldn’t be much sway in that original decklist barring the reanimation targets themselves.

I did first look to see if it made sense to just go ahead and swap Mystical Tutor for one of the unbanned Tutor cards in Legacy, either Cruel Tutor ($13) or Grim Tutor ($140). Aside from having to pick my jaw up off the floor upon discovering that Grim Tutor was over a hundred bucks, neither really gave me that much of an advantage - I could use them in similar fashion to Mystical Tutor when it came to finding Entomb (crucial for getting fuzzies into the graveyard), but I couldn’t use them to fetch answers I could Brainstorm into, which meant that (ultimately) it wasn’t any better or worse than Beseech the Queen.

And then I realized, hey, Beseech the Queen really kinda does what I need to do here. On turn 1, I can Ritual-Beseech for Entomb or Reanimate, filling out the other half of the “combo” that I might be missing. I can get Buried Alive or Putrid Imp on turn th3ree, or Exhume if I need a reanimation spell. I can use it to get probably every sideboard card that’s relevant - Null Rod, Extirpate, Perish, Engineered Plague, and so on.

Zombie Queen Featured by Dave Meeson on 2010-08-08 (Legacy) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/legacy/19820_Tribal_Thriftiness_122_MonoBlack_Reanimator.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifact Creatures 1 Inkwell Leviathan 1 Sphinx of the Steel Wind Creatures 1 Blazing Archon 4 Putrid Imp 1 Terastodon Instants 4 Dark Ritual 4 Entomb	Legendary Creatures 1 Iona, Shield of Emeria Sorceries 4 Beseech the Queen 4 Buried Alive 4 Cabal Therapy 4 Duress 4 Exhume 4 Reanimate Basic Lands 11 Swamp Lands 4 Marsh Flats 4 Verdant Catacombs	Stats: Average mana: 1.85 Average creature mana cost: 5.22 Average creature power: 4.22 Average creature toughness: 4.78 Deck Composition: Basic Lands: 18.33% Sorceries: 40.00% Artifact Creatures: 3.33% Instants: 13.33% Creatures: 10.00% Legendary Creatures: 1.67% Lands: 13.33%
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Rare Cost Summary:
Entomb ($39.99 x 4 = $159.96)
Iona, Shield of Emeria ($5.99 x 1 = $5.99)
Inkwell Leviathan ($1.49 x 1 = $1.49)
Blazing Archon ($1.99 x 1 = $1.99)
Sphinx of the Steel Wind ($5.99 x 1 = $5.99)
Terastodon ($0.99 x 1 $0.99)
Verdant Catacombs ($11.99 x 4 = $47.96)
Marsh Flats ($11.99 x 4 = $47.96)

Yes, the Entombs are expensive. No, the deck does not work without them. Hopefully, like me, you were excited about reanimation back when they were $4-6 and you held on to them while they were banned in Legacy. Beyond that, the animation targets are all one-off, and the fetchlands can be whatever black-based fetchlands you want to use, in whatever number you have - I just picked the two cheapest ones.

Rares You Could Add, if You Had ‘Em: Thoughtseize seems like a direct upgrade on Duress; ostensibly you want it mostly to protect your fuzzy once he gets out on the battlefield, but (like Cabal Therapy) Thoughtseize can double-up and give you a discard outlet if you just cannot find a way to get a creature in your hand into the graveyard. But Duress still handles a lot of the problem cards that your opponent might be holding onto, so I think it’s an acceptable choice here.

Madness, I Tell Ya

I’m likely still playing Reanimator at the StarCityGames.com Legacy Open. But I’m also intrigued by the Madness Survival deck that seemed like the “next big thing” the weekend of Grand Prix: Columbus. Bennie Smith shares a fondness for Green and for using the graveyard as a resource, so I expected he’d be interested in seeing this deck. We had the following exchange on Twitter:

@blairwitchgreen: Survival / Rootwalla / Vengevine has me intrigued about Legacy for the first time in... well, ever.

@davemassive: I'm intrigued by the list, mostly because I bet the sideboard hate for it REALLY screws my first choice: Reanimator.

@blairwitchgreen: I just need to figure out a version with no Blue in it ;)

@davemassive: Challenge ... accepted!

@blairwitchgreen: My first thought is that Rootwallas and Vengevines probably make decent Cabal Therapy food...

Me too. So, as a bonus list, here’s my first crack at BG Survival Madness:

4 Oona's Prowler
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Birds of Paradise
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Vengevine
4 Wild Mongrel

2 Sinkhole / Hymn to Tourach
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Thoughtseize
4 Survival of the Fittest
2 Umezawa's Jitte

3 Forest
2 Swamp
4 Verdant Catacombs
1 Bloodstained Mire
4 Bayou
4 Wasteland
2 Windswept Heath
1 Wooded Foothills

It almost becomes a TarmoRack build, with a Survival-into-Vengevine secondary plan. You could possibly squeeze in The Rack as well. I hated that janky one-of Gaea's Cradle so I replaced it with another basic, as you might have double-black needs with Hymn / Sinkhole. That's probably the spot for The Rack as well. Oona’s Prowler takes over the 3-power discard outlet role from Aquamoeba, and unfortunately we’re stuck with Birds of Paradise over Noble Hierarch - you’re going to need access to that Black mana - although if those last two slots become The Rack, then you don’t have the need for double-Black and the focus goes back on having enough Green mana to Survival multiple times in a turn, and you probably COULD go back to Noble Hierarch and gain that small margin.

Really, it’s too bad that Filth doesn’t have as many practical applications as Wonder does.

Two Weeks

It’s only two weeks until StarCityGames.com visits my largest-metropolitan-area-nearby-my-home, DENVER! I will definitely be there both days, fighting for my spot in the StarCityGames.com Invitational. Hope to see you all there! (You know, if you aren’t going to Nationals that weekend.)

Until next week...

Dave

dave dot massive at gmail and davemassive on twitter and facebook