Legacy Valakut? Why Not!

Hello everybody! I haven't been playing much magic this week, but that's because I have been hanging out with friends who are back from college for the week. CJ said he wanted to play in the FNM, so I pulled together a Valakut deck for him while rocking UB Shape Anew myself. We both started 1-0, but CJ immediatly dropped because he felt it was too stressful and he couldn't take the game seriously enough without mentally exploding all night. Competetive Magic isn't for everyone... I started off 1-0, but then lost 2 heartbreaking rounds in a row against RUG both times.

The first game I had Blightsteel in play, and I had just swung and trampled over an Inferno Titan to bring him to 5 poison. All he had to work with was 1 untapped land, Lotus Cobra, and Oracle of Mul Daya. I had a Jace TMS in play as well at 3 loyalty, with 2 mana up. He wound up playing 2 explores and 2 preordains and played 4 lands, and was able to kill my Jace before landing his own and bouncing my Colossus with his Jace. He played another Inferno Titan, and powered it out from there.

The second game I had the stone cold nut draw, and I just needed him to play any spell so I could Mana Leak it, then untap, and Shape Anew (I had Not of This World in hand to stop Jace/Tumble Magnet). However, he just played a land every turn and I never drew a 4th land, and lost because of that....

But Standard isn't where it's at. There's only so much you can do in standard with such a small pool of cards to work with: 1204. Compare this to Extended, which has 2725 cards, or Legacy which has 11439 cards. As there are more and more cards available in the format, there are more and more crazy deck you can build! I don't know Llorwyn block at all, so I'm fairly out of the loop for extended, and standard doesn't excite me right now, but Legacy never stops blowing my mind!

The majority of decks are those that are Legacy-only obviously, but if you can't come up with any of those deck with all old cards, you can easily take a standard or extended deck you love and make it go nuts by adding sick Legacy cards.

Today's episode of Pimp my Deck features Valakut Ramp! Valakut is considered to be one of the most powerful decks in Standard and Extended due to its ability to combo out crazy turns to blow an opponent out from nowhere (I saw CJ get attacked by Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre then come back and kill his opponent who was at 17 life the next turn despite only having 1 Valakut, 4 mountains [he had 8 but sacced 4 to Ulamog], 2 forests, and 2 Khalni Heart Expeditions in play). Legacy adds a ton of cards that can make the deck nuts such as:

Exploration
Burgeoning
Sensei's Divining Top
Crucible of the Worlds
Life from the Loam
Dual Lands

Exploration and Burgeoning allow us to pour our hand full of land onto the board, and also work very well with the card draw engine that is Crucible of the Worlds + Life from the Loam that you can find in the 43 lands control deck. I put Sensei's Divining Top on the list, because that card feels WAY too good with Oracle of Mul Daya in play! those cards by themselves work as a card draw engine, and it only gets crazier with an Exploration in play!

Oh, did I mention the Dual lands are mountains that produce other colors of mana?!?! We can play any color combination we want with as many colors as we want without reducing the number of mountains in our deck!

One of the most format defining cards in Legacy is Force of Will, but this deck really doesn't care about that card! Sure, they can Force an Exploration or Crucible of the Worlds, but that may not be so obvious to them. One of the greatest things about Legacy is that because there are so many decks possible, it's very likely your opponent won't attack from from the proper angle because they have never heard of a Legacy Valakut deck before.

I feel like the Crucible-Life from the Loam engine is the most powerful option we have available to us, so here is my first list:

4x Exploration
4x Crucible of the Worlds
4x Life from the Loam
3x Firespout
3x Khalni Heart Expedition
3x Sylvan Scrying

4x Valakut, the Molten Pinnical
2x Vesuva
4x Taiga
4x Stomping Grounds

4x Wasteland
4x Wooded Foothills
4x Scalding Tarn
4x Arid Mesa
9x Mountain

Sideboard options:
Nature's Claim/Krosan Grip
Red Elemental Blast/Pyroblast
Ensnaring Bridge
Mindbreak Trap

Thanks to the awesomeness that is the interaction between fetchlands and Dual Lands, we have 8 "Taiga" and 12 lands that can fetch those up, so we will never have a hand that doesn't have a green source. Also, because of the 2 Vesuvas, we can have up to 6 Valakuts in play at the same time!!! Wastelands are always good when we can play 2 lands every turn, and recurse them from the graveyard. Wastelanding every turn with Crucible is nice, but being able to continue to develop our board while locking the opponent at 1 land or less is just gravy! Imagine this opening:

T1
Arid Mesa --> Taiga
Exploration
Wasteland, sac to destroy your only land.

T2
Land, Life from the Loam, return Arid Mesa and Wasteland
Wasteland, sac to destroy your only land

Now we can recur Wasteland to keep them on 0 mana while ramping very quickly up to Valakut Critical Mass. Did I mention this deck does perfectly fine in the face of your opponent's wastelands? Sounds good to me!

If you are like me and really enjoy building new decks are taking the game from angles no one else will, then Legacy is what you really need to get into! With literally endless decks available to build and play against, I have heard it's possible to play in a 10 round event and never play the same deck twice. Sideboards have to be incredibly general, and there isn't any overwhelming dominate deck, so the format is quite healthy.

Other decks I want to touch upon soon include Doomsday and Infect that can win the game on turn 2 against the unprepared opponent. But until next time, stay classy!