On September 20th, Wizards of the Coast created a "new" format from the ashes of the old Vintage Restricted. The first tournaments around that time were scattered with no clearly good decks and nothing notably strong except Survival of the Fittest. A few months later and we are still looking at a disaster area in place of a well-defined metagame. Survival is still strong, but there has been an outburst of aggro-control that has shown to be quite strong in the face of Survival. New decks continue to crop up on the message boards that show some promise, and the top players are still having trouble deciding what the best decks are.

There were three decks that got a lot of serious consideration between September 1^st and 20^th, U/G/R LED Madness, Belcher and Long - sadly none of the three have ever shown very good results and the only consistency they have had is 0-2 drop. However the strong decks of the old format that have gone untouched have shown off a little without the powerhouses of Dragon and MUD around. WWW, ATS, Survival Advantage and U/G Madness have all done well since the new list relying on either their catch-all answers, early lock, consistent speed, or 4/4 tramplers to carry them to victory.

There have been only three notable decks to rise from nothing and form themselves as the new decks of Legacy; Welder Survival, San Diego Zoo and Solidarity. San Diego Zoo is built around the untargetable trio of Nimble Mongoose, Troll Ascetic, and Blastoderm with Mogg Fanatics, Swords to Plowshares, Burn and Isochron Scepter to back it up. The deck does well because it has a creature base that is resistant to the creature removal that is running rampant in the format, it can also garner a large amount of card advantage from Isochron Scepter either through Fire / Ice or the less conventional Philosophy of Fire. Solidarity is a combo deck based around Brain Freeze. The deck works by casting High Tide and then using the untap effect of Reset and Turnabout to create large amounts of mana and then cast large amounts of spells until casting Brain Freeze and either Words of Wisdom or Stroke of Genius to deck your opponent. I recently wrote an article about Welder Survival and will leave it at that.

So what makes a deck good? Why can some decks succeed where others have failed in this new format? Since when was Green a good color? And why in the heck is there not a single control deck mentioned in any of this? This all comes from a very simple set of problems that are the plague of deck design. People like getting stuck in ruts, or at least that would seem to be the case. Players in Magic have a tendency to fall in love with a deck and play it forever; this is natural however it is also unhealthy for the development of new formats.

Problem number one is when people think they need to play a certain card, they limit themselves and it limits the decks that are played. In the past, this has been most notable in Standard, however it is quickly creeping into Legacy - if you are comfortable with a deck then you will play that deck as long as you can, and if there is nothing to stop you, why not? Problem number two is that players are very quick to dismiss decks and not very quick to look at them. This stems somewhat from the first problem but is not the same. When I first started building Welder Survival, I was laughed at because the first drafts weren't very strong; it takes dedication to push a deck on and to embrace the criticism. I have said it before and will say it again: every deck is viable until proven otherwise. If the deck has a central strategy that can do good things, then maybe it has a future... you just need to give it some loving while it's still an infant.

Though I am an adept on The Source, I find myself touring other Legacy forums on a somewhat regular basis. I don't do this to share my wisdom no that is saved for only The Source and StarCityGames.com, I do it to find ideas for decks. Yes, there are a large number of bad decks. However I can sometimes gain some small enlightenment on an underplayed card or a concept for a deck that can then be tested and checked for viability. The discussion on The Source has recently turned to "how do we stop Survival?" That type of thinking will lead to nothing in the end. What really needs to be asked is, "how do I build a better deck than Survival?"

There is a fairly substantial list of cards that are strong and still legal in Legacy, however only a small segment of them have been seeing play lately. The more played cards include Survival or the Fittest, Goblin Lackey, and Enlightened Tutor, but that is only three cards in the thousands available in our card pool. Other strong cards include Goblin Welder, Dark Ritual, Lion's Eye Diamond, Fact or Fiction, Isochron Scepter, Humility, Argothian Enchantress, Burning Wish, and the list goes on. So how do we go about abusing these cards and finding decks to break the format with? We start with the cards that can easily accompany them.

Let's start with Goblin Welder. There are a few very obvious cards that have very good synergy with the little guy like Mindslaver, Sundering Titan, Triskelion, and Platinum Angel. In Vintage there are a few decks that are focused around the interaction between Goblin Welder and Sundering Titan or Mindslaver, so let's start with Control Slaver. In Legacy there is no need to splash Black, so we have a two-color control deck. Let's start with a quick port from the Type 1 lists:

4 Goblin Welder

4 Counterspell
4 Force of Will

4 Accumulated Knowledge
3 Intuition
4 Thirst for Knowledge
3 Brainstorm

2 Mindslaver
1 Sundering Titan
1 Triskelion
1 Platinum Angel

4 Fire / Ice
2 Crucible of Worlds

3 Chrome Mox
3 Darksteel Citadel
4 Volcanic Island
2 Bloodstained Mire
4 Flooded Strand
5 Island
2 Mountain

This deck has the ability to play the control deck where it is important; but it also has the ability to win quickly with an early Welder and Intuition. The mana base can probably support Wasteland if it needs to, and the answers can be changed to include more board sweepers if it is deemed necessary. Now that we have the backbone for a deck, we can start testing. Don't give up quickly here - try to fight through the early losses as you are learning the deck. If you find that something needs to be changed, then change it, just remember that if you are adding situational cards you better be in that situation against a large number of decks.

Let's move on now to look at another card on our list and see if we can make a deck around it. Isochron Scepter is inherently strong because of its huge card advantage - with a draw spell on it you gain the best Psychic Vortex ever, with a burn spell on it you can kill opposing armies, and with Orim's Chant you can gain an incredible amount of virtual card advantage by locking your opponent out of the game. In Vintage Restricted, there was a Trenches control deck that did fairly well, but now we have Enlightened Tutor so let's base our deck off of the old but include the new:

4 Isochron Scepter

4 Accumulated Knowledge
4 Brainstorm
2 Intuition
2 Enlightened Tutor

3 Swords to Plowshares
2 Decree of Justice
1 Goblin Trenches
1 Humility

3 Fire / Ice
1 Crucible of Worlds

4 Counterspell
4 Force of Will
3 Orim's Chant

7 Island
4 Tundra
4 Volcanic Island
4 Flooded Strand
1 Polluted Delta
2 Wasteland

Again we start with the base to the deck, very simple and elegant, from there we can learn the intricacies of the deck and expand upon its subtleties and shore its weaknesses. The benefits that Enlightened Tutor gains us are great, depending upon the situation you can tutor up Goblin Trenches and go for the throat or you can grab Humility and stall out the game long enough to build up an army with either Decree or Trenches. The sideboard to the deck can support versatile options like Life Burst against aggro and REB against control. Against Survival the fourth Fire can be brought in along with Starstorm to stunt their growth until you drop Humility.

Both of these decks provide relatively obvious ways to explore Legacy in an attempt to expand the metagame of this burgeoning format. The card pool is nearly as big as that of Vintage, so if people simply start thinking outside the box, I'm sure new decks (even control decks) will start sprouting up all over the place.