Legacy for the Modern Player

Hello Everyone! I am once again writing to you from work, which is quickly becoming the easiest place to write from. Here's how my daw went today:

8am - Wake up
9am - Get to work
11:30am - Done with all work delivered to us, Warehouse is empty
1pm - Done reading articles on CFB, SCG, and TCGPlayer that caught my attention
1:30pm - Lunch Break at Acapulcos
2:30pm - Get back from lunch break, fight off doubters who said I left for lunch at 1, not 1:30
3pm - Finished with random stuff that showed up in the past hour
3:15pm - Remembered I could update blog from work
3:21pm - Finished typing this scentence

So seeing as I am here at work for another 2 hours with nothing to do, I will finish what I intended to talk about way back on monday, which was delayed to yesterday, which was then left off of the final post: Modern.

For those of you who don't know what Modern is, and don't feel like reading my synopsis of the format at the end of my previous post, here is an ultra-abbriged version of what Modern is:

A new eternal format from 8th Edition/Mirrodin Block - on

So before I get into the meat of this topic, I must say I think this is an awesome idea for a format and I thoroughly support it! With that being said, why is this format so great? Well first, it's a non-rotating format, which is great financially. I find myself hardly investing in NPH and Standard as a whole right now, because it is ever emminent that cards that may seem so epic now will just be in the casual binder next year, like Gideon Jura, which is currently $31.74 but can only hold a $10-15 price tag once it rotates [read: Elspeth, Knight Errant. 35/40 --> 15].

But financials is the least of our worries, as they will always warp themselves around new tech and the popular formats. What we really care about is playability. There are already 2 eternal formats: Legacy and Vintage, so lets see how Modern stacks up against them. First, let's compare Legacy and Vintage. The only difference between them is the B&R list. So few cards apart, such vastly different formats! The mere existence of 1 copy of the power 9 cards and other stupidly overpowered cards makes the format so much faster turns-wise! Its not even reasonably possible to call Legacy and Vintage similar formats because those cards completely warp what is even viable.

Vintage > Legacy > Modern

So now we have to compare Legacy vs Modern. Here's a list of Archaetypes you can expect to face at a Legacy event:

Dredge
Reanimator
Counter-Top
Enchantress
Affinity
Painted Stone
Metalworker
Lide from the Loam
Aggro Loam
Burn
Cephalid Breakfast
Natural Order
Zoo
Junk
Team America
ANT
TES
Merfolk
Goblins
Canadian Threshold
Pyromancer Ascension
Hypergenesis
Landstill
Doomsday
Show and Tell
Stifle-Naught
High Tide
Death and Taxes
Elves
Bant Aggro
Eldrazi Ramp
Charbelcher

Every deck listed above is significantly impacted through the smaller card pool and the banned list. But these decks I would consider unplayable in this new format:

Counter-Top (Sensei's Divining Top is banned)
Enchantress
Painted Stone
Metalworker
Cephalid Breakfast
Natural Order
ANT
TES
Canadian Threshold
Landstill
Doomsday
Show and Tell
Stifle-Naught
High Tide

TL;DR version: of the 32 decks I listed as possible decks to run into at a legacy tournament, 14 decks are completely unplayable

Now this unplayable factor is simply because of the alloted card pool. There are decks that I feel can rebound, like Affinity, Dredge, and Reanimator, despite banned cards and cards that are no longer available. The card that I feel defines Legacy is Force of Will because its the glue that keeps the format honest. Combo decks are stupidly fast, but Force of Will is just as fast. Now lets take that thought and move it to Modern: without Force of Will, are there combo decks that are fast enough to win turn 1? I can think of 1 off the top of my head: Hypergenesis. While the deck will never be completely over the top good because it lacks any hand fixing at all, it's like a Charbelcher deck in that it draws 7 and sees if it gets there. Besides that, I think this format will sit very nicely between Standard and Legacy in terms of speed.

Speaking of Combo decks, I definitely feel there is space for some kind of Storm deck, although the only storm deck I can really consider viable would be Dragonstorm. The only other Storm card that deals damage is Grapeshot. 10 Storm is sometimes difficult to accumulate, so 20 is nigh impossible. BTW, banking on your opponent making life easy for you with their fetches and Ravnica duals is a bad game plan. Check out Patrick Chapin's Worlds list as a reference for Dragonstorm.

They're trying to hate it out, but I think it can still work, let's take a look at Modern Dredge! First, we need to see what we lose from Legacy Dredge:

Cephalid Colliseum
Putrid Imp/Tireless Tribe
Careful Study
Breakthrough
LED
Golgari Grave-Troll (banned)
Cabal Therapy
Chain of Vapor
Ichorid

The thing that jumps out at me first is the loss of a solid discard outlet. 3 cards that I thought of to solve this problem are Glimpse of the Unthinkable, Hedron Crab, and One With Nothing. Glimpse and Crab are fantastic cards because they are effictively card draw engines for yourself. They make you rely much less on your dredgers, which is important because we lost our heavy-hitting Grave-Troll. One With Nothing will probably not get played, but it is important to remember all of our options. With much less action from our graveyard, discarding our hand ASAP isn't all that important. So instead of a discard outlet, we can just mill ourselves. The next thing that jumps out at me is the loss of aggressive card draw. The one card that peaked my attention to fix this problem was Magus of the Bazaar. After a while your hand doesn't matter, so losing cards on every activation becomes less and less relavent, while drawing 2 extra cards a turn is just bonkers!

Finally, the last card that I feel bad losing is Ichorid. Ichorid can win many games completely by itself through its relentless recursive nature. I was trying to think of a replacement when I thought of Extractor Demon, which worked with Hedron Crab in last year's Standard Dredge-Uh-Vine deck. This got me thinking about Unearth as a mechanic as a whole, which led to seeing a ton of sweet cards! Maybe the dredge deck to go for would be an aggro-unearth deck? A tricky problem though, is that unearthed creatures have a replacement effect on death to be exiled, so Bridge from Below won't trigger. This is important if we want to do some crazy stuff and try to make a Zombie Horde by sacrificing creatures to Dread Return targetng the Flame-Kiln. That being said, there is a recursive creature that DOES die, named Bloodghast. Bloodghast could make be this deck's Narcomeba #5-8. All we need to do is play Dakmore Salvage, and we can go nuts with them!

So let's take a look at the cards I think should be considered as creatures that come from the dead:

Narcomeba
Bloodghast
Dredgscape Zombie
Hellspark Elemental
Rotting Rats
Scourge Devil
Sedraxis Specter
Extractor Demon
Shambling Remains
Viscera Dragger

WOW! We actually have way more options available to us than I previously thought! One card that I want ot point out especially is Scourge Devil. This card is like a mini-Flamekiln Zealot. It doesn't grant haste, but it can make a seemingly timid army explode in power before going straight for the throat (1B)!

So work is ending in 8 minutes, here's a decklist:

4x Hedron Crab
4x Narcomeba
1x Flame-Kiln Zealot
4x Golgari Thug
4x Stinkweed Imp
4x Bloodghast
4x Darkblast
2x Dread Return
4x Bridge from Below
2x Scourge Devil
4x Magus of the Bazaar
2x Shambling Remains
4x Glimpse of the Unthinkable

4x City of Brass
4x Crumbling Necropolis
3x Dakmore Salvage
4x Gemstone Mine
2x Reflecting Pool

That is all from me today, I hope you enjoy the rest of your life! But always remember... Stay Classy!