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With the rapid growth of Magic Online, Wizards of the Coast has been bringing more players into the digital world of card slinging by creating new formats and releasing all of the old sets online. Earlier this year Wizards of the Coast recently announced the creating of the Legacy Online format, which is a bit surprising. That in and of itself is not surprising, but not all of the older Legacy playable cards are yet in the Magic Online card pool so it is surprising that they would launch it before this. But with the release of the rest of Urza’s block and the Masters Edition IV (slated for release December 13 2010), most of the remaining cards will be released ‘into the wild’ if the speculation proves correct that Masters Edition IV will include the hits from Mercadian Masques block (Mercadian Masques/Nemesis/Prophecy). Wizards go eventually release the entire Mercadian block, but the consensus in the past seems to be that Mercadian was the worst block and would be a very poor seller online (hence the theory of just including releveant cards in Masters Edition IV).

The Magic Online Legacy community has slowly been gaining steam, with Daily Events running regularly and succesfully firing with 16-30+ people. The Premier Events have been hit or miss, but there seems to be plenty of data coming in from the developing Online Legacy metagame in Daily Events. In our new weekly column here we’ll take a look at what is the exact make up of the Online Legacy metagame by analyzing every deck played and how they finished.

For those unfamiliar with Daily Events, they are usually run once or twice a day, with a minimum of 16 people to start and a max of 128, and are always exactly 4 rounds. They are 6 tickets to enter and pay out 11 booster packs (roughly 44 ticket value) to players finishing 4-0, and 6 booster packs (roughly 24 ticket value) to players finishing 3-1. Premier Events require a minimum of 33 players (and a max of 256) and cost 10 tickets to enter, and are similar to most tournaments with Swiss rounds based on the number of competitors, with a cut to a single elimination Top 8 playoff. The prizes are 36 booster packs for first place, 27 for second, 18 for third and fourth, and 9 for fifth through eighth. All prize winning players in both types of tournaments are also rewarded with Qualifying Points based on their finish, and these points accumulate and can be used for other prizes in the description found here.

All scheduled online events can be found courtesy of the Magic Online Events Calendar.

With our first week (04-25-2010 through 05-01-2010) of Online Legacy analysis, we have 7 Daily Events worth of data to pull from. The events will be listed by number and date, and then broken out by archetype, players, average points per archetype and sub-archetype (there is a maximum of 12 points per tournament, as there are 4 rounds in each Daily Event), and money finishes (money finish defined as 4-0 or 3-1 finish, which is the cutoff for payouts in Daily Events).

Daily Event 1154851 04-25-2010 (32 players):
Ad Nauseam – 3 players; average 4.00 points by player
(2 with 3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version; average 0.00 points per player)
Reanimator – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Painter Grindstone – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant Tempo/New Horizons – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 3 players; average 2.00 points per player
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Merfolk U – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Enchantress – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
BGU Smallpox – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 7.00 pionts per player; 2 money finishes
Dredge (LED-less) – 3 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 5 players; average 5.40 points per player; 2 money finishes
(2 with Goblins R; average 10.5 points per player; 2 money finishes)
(2 with Goblins RB; average 3.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RG; average 0.00 points per player)
Naya Zoo – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Red Green aggro – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Affinity – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish

Daily Event 1154853 04-26-2010 (29 players):
Ad Nauseam (3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version) – 1 player; average 3.00 points by player
Charbelcher – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
Stoneforge Bant (no CounterTop) – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
4C Landstill – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Nearly Mono Blue – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Stax WG – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Black Aggro Control – 1 players; 6.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 6.00 pionts per player; 1 money finish
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 3 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(2 with Goblins RB; average 3.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RG; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Naya Zoo – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player
Affinity – 2 players; average 1.50 points per player

Daily Event 1154855 04-27-2010 (25 players):
Ad Nauseam (3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version) – 1 player; average 6.00 points by player
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Canadian Threshold – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
Enchantress – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
BGW RecSur – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BG Junk – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Naya Zoo – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 4 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(1 with Goblins R; 1 player; average 3.00 points per player)
(2 with Goblins RB; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 6.00 points per player)

Daily Event 1175104 04-28-2010 (16 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Imperial Aluren – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 1 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
4C Landstill – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Green NOPro – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 2 players; average 5.40 points per player; 1 money finish
(1 with Goblins RB; average 0.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 3.00 points per player)

Daily Event 1175105 04-29-2010 (16 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Reanimator – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
4C Landstill – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Mono Black Smallpox – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
AggroLoam RGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player; 1 money finish
(3 with Goblins R; 3 players; average 5.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 3 players; average 3.00 points per player

Daily Event 1175106 04-29-2010 (27 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Next Level Storm – 1 player; 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Charbelcher – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Painter Grindstone – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 1 players; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
CounterTop UGW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
4C Landstill – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Enchantress – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
BG Junk – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
BG Smallpox – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
BGWU Survival – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 2 players; average 7.50 points per player; 1 money finish
Dredge (LED-less) – 3 players; average 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Elves – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Goblins – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 3.00 points per player)
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Naya Zoo – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish

Daily Event 1175107 04-30-2010 (24 players):
Ad Nauseam (Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version) – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Charbelcher – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Hypergenesis Show and Tell – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Reanimator – 2 players; average 0.00 points per player
Canadian Threshold – 2 players; average 6.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGBW – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
CounterTop UGW – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish
CounterTop UGRW – 1 player; 6.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Enchantress – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 1 player; average 12.00 points per player; 1 money finish
Death and Taxes – 3 players; average 8.00 pionts per player; 2 money finishes
Dredge (LED-less) – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Goblins – 4 players; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish
(2 with Goblins R; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RB; average 6.00 points per player)
(1 with Goblins RBG; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish)
Naya Zoo – 2 players; average 4.5 points per player

NOTE: missing data for Daily Event 1175108 05-01-2010 (17 players) and Daily Event 1175109 05-01-2010 (27 players)

So, that’s a pretty nice data set to pull from, even though we’re missing complete results for 2 of the Daily Events. The data from the 7 events that we do have data for breaks down like this, when adding them all up.

7 events, 169 players total, with an average of 24.14 players per event
Ad Nauseam – 11 players; average 5.46 points by player; 3 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
(4 with 3 Ad Nauseam + Pact of Negation version; average 5.25 points per player)
(7 with Saito 2 Ad Nauseam + Lion’s Eye version; average 5.57 points per player; 3 money finishes [.43 times per playing the deck])
Next Level Storm – 3 players; average 4.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
Charbelcher – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player
Painter Grindstone – 2 players; average 4.50 points per player
Hypergenesis Show and Tell – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Imperial Aluren – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Reanimator – 11 players; average 4.91 points per player; 3 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
Merfolk U – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
Canadian Threshold – 5 players; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish (.20 times per playing the deck)
Bant Tempo/New Horizons – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Stoneforge Bant (no CounterTop) – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Bant NOPro (no CounterTop) – 3 players; average 5.00 points per player
Bant NOPro CounterTop – 6 players; average 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGW – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (1.00 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGBW – 5 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.40 times per playing the deck)
CounterTop UGRW – 3 players; average 4.00 points per player
Englightened CounterTop UGW – 6 players; 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish (.17 times per playing the deck)
Englightened CounterTop UGRW – 3 players; 3.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.33 times per playing the deck)
4C Landstill – 6 players; average 7.00 points per player; 3 money finishes (.5 times per playing the deck)
Nearly Mono Blue – 1 player; 3.00 points per player
Enchantress – 4 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.5 times per playing the deck)
Stax WG – 1 player; 0.00 points per player
BGWU Survival – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
BGW RecSur – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Astral Slide BGW Junk – 5 players; average 6.60 points per player; 3 money finishes (.60 times per playing the deck)
BGW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
BW Junk – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per plalying the deck)
BG Junk – 2 players; 1.50 points per player
BG Smallpox – 2 players; average 3.00 points per player
BGU Smallpox – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Mono Black Smallpox – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
Mono Black Aggro Control – 1 players; 6.00 points per player
Mono Green NOPro – 1 player; average 6.00 points per player
AggroLoam RGB – 3 players; average 11.00 points per player; 3 money finishes (1.00 times per playing the deck)
AggroLoam RGBW – 1 player; average 3.00 points per player
Death and Taxes – 15 players; average 6.60 pionts per player; 8 money finishes (.53 times per playing the deck)
Dredge (LED-less) – 11 players; average 4.91 points per player; 5 money finishes (.45 times per playing the deck)
Dredge (Bloodghasted) – 2 players; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (.50 times per playing the deck)
Elves – 1 player; average 9.00 points per player; 1 money finish (1.00 times per playing the deck)
Goblins – 22 players; average 4.91 points per player; 6 money finishes (.27 times per playing the deck)
(8 with Goblins R; average 6.38 points per player; 3 money finishes [.38 times per playing the deck])
(8 with Goblins RB; average 3.38 points per player; 1 money finish [.13 times per playing the deck])
(2 with Goblins RG; average 4.50 points per player; 1 money finish [.5 times per playing the deck])
(4 with Goblins RBG; average 5.25 points per player; 1 money finish [.25 times per playing the deck])
Sligh/Mono Red Burn – 5 players; average 3.60 points per player
Red Green aggro – 1 player; average 0.00 points per player
Naya Zoo – 7 players; average 6.00 points per player; 2 money finishes (.29 times per playing the deck)
Affinity – 4 players; average 3.75 points per player; 1 money finish (.25 times per playing the deck)

So with this look at what’s actually been played the past week, you can start to get a good idea of what is actually being played (not just placing), to get a better idea of what you might square off against in the Online Legacy Daily Events. Goblins variants, Reanimator, Death and Taxes, Dredge, ANT, and CounterTop and Bant variants are the most frequent players, although not necessarily the best finishing ones.

Goblins, Zoo, and Dredge appear to have pushed Merfolk almost entirely out of the metagame this week, but don’t be surprised to see Merfolk back again soon if CounterTop and Combo strategies can overpower the aggro decks. Cards like Firespout and Engineered Plague seem very well positioned right now, so we should start seeing more and more of these in the coming weeks as players attempt to combat the throng of cheap creatures in the environment.

The boogeymen in the room named Dredge, Reanimator, and Ad Nauseam averaged 4.91, 4.91, and 5.46 points each (respectively, out of a possible 12.0 points in a 4 round tournament). Those are pretty average results, especially analyzing them next to ‘fair’ decks like Death and Taxes (6.60 point average) and Naya Zoo (6.00 point average). Is Attacking Miserable, as author Max McCall argued in a recent debate stirring article? Or is it just part of a more consistent approach that might be the way to frequent success in Legacy? I guess true statistics will tell after some period of time, as conjecture will do little good when compared to actual empirical data.

We hope to make this a weekly column every Monday as the MTGO Eternal metagame evolves, so be sure to check out the TP website frequently for other Eternal content. Please let us know in the comments section below what you found useful and what you’d like to see more of next time. See you again soon!

In the world of Legacy Storm combo there are a handful of shells and options available to the Real Men Who Play Combo. There are speed versions of Ad Nauseam Tendrils (ANT), versions with the powerful Burning Wish as a tutor (which also give you the power of Empty the Warrens), and other unique creations such as Jordi Amat’s Ill-Gotten Gains Tendrils deck (IggyPop 2.0). The version that I think offers the best balance of power, stability, and flexibility right now is a hybrid of Ad Nauseam and Doomsday strategies, or as we’ll call it ANT-Doomsday Hybrid.

ANT decks are typically only running 1-2 copies of Ad Nauseam, along with a lot of fast mana, protection, tutors, and deck manipulation spells. They’re pretty straight forward, and ideally would like to kill the opponent somewhere between the second and fourth turn. Just set up by digging or tutoring for whatever you don’t have from these components, and then fire off a piece of protection (often in the form of Duress or Orim’s Chant) and then away you go with your fast mana spells and either Ad Nauseam or Infernal Tutor. Outside of a nearly full hand of cards and the ability to do an Infernal Tutor into Ill-Gotten Gains loop, much of the time ANT will seek to use its life as a resource to power up a game winning Ad Nauseam.

But what if you don’t have a lot of life? Legacy decks are faster and more disruptive than ever, and you can easily be at only 13 life or less on turn 2 when facing a Zoo player (Steppe Lynx you for 4, Chain Lightning and/or Lightning Bolt you for 3, fetchlands, etc.). In these cases, or the cases that you facing down a quick Tarmogoyf and your first spell or three were countered, you can’t necessarily leverage the power of Ad Nauseam to generate enough of a Storm count to kill your opponent with Tendrils of Agony. This is where the card Doomsday shines. It doesn’t require a lot of life to win the game.

Doomsday Demystified
A lot of people seem to be hesitant to include Doomsday or look at it as a viable alternative in Storm decks because they either don’t feel comfortable or knowledgeable enough to abuse it. Brandon Adams (known as emidlin online) and Michael Seubert (known as cheeseburger online) have co-authored a handy guide to using and creating Doomsday piles, and have done a fantastic job at providing a list of many options and even arithmetic formulas to teach you how to craft the perfect pile for whatever scenario you’re in during a game. Victor Martinez (known as gocho online) took this a step further and used those lists to make a convenient spreadsheet available to the public.

I won’t go into all of the details of each pile because there are so many variants and Brandon and Michael have already done a great job of explaining them, but being uncomfortable with Doomsday should not be an excuse for you in the future if you read these. Doomsday is an extremely powerful and important weapon that provides the Storm player with another path to victory that doesn’t depend on a lot of life as a resource, which is often very critical in Legacy if things don’t go according to plan early in the game.

Protection
The reason to play ANT variants over something like Goblin Charbelcher is that it has a more stable manabase and offers better forms of protection in the face of counterspells and other hate. Here is a brief rundown of the commonly seen protection spells and why you might use them:
Orim’s Chant – at a cost of 1 White mana you prevent your opponent from being able to play any spells for the turn, and in rarer situations can be used to prevent combat damage if kicked; has the added bonus of being great against opposing combo
Silence – similar to Orim’s Chant without the kicker ability, this shuts off opponent’s spells for the turn and can’t be Misdirected or Diverted
Abeyance – costs and additional mana beyond Chant or Silence, but also cantrips, and more importantly prevents the opponent from interacting at all by preventing activated abilities
Duress – strips away a potential counterspell or Counterbalance, or can give you precious information about the contents of opponent’s hand
Thoughtseize – can strip away problematic counterspells, permanents, and the added bonus of creatures, but at the cost of two life
Pact of Negation – a free counterspell, but has the liability of having a cost on the next upkeep that you most likely won’t be able pay; really only great when protecting a spell to go off
Xantid Swarm – at the investment of only a single Green mana, you can effectively Orim’s Chant your opponent every turn; the disadvantage of this is that it validates any common main deck removal, so it is best relegated to the sideboard unless you are in an extremely Blue-heavy metagame

In Tomoharu Saito’s build of ANT that he piloted to a Top 8 birth at GP Madrid 2010 he chose to use a combined 6 Duress and Thoughtseize effects as his disruption suite, in order to stay primarily Black and Blue (he had no White) and presumably to gain information about his opponent’s hand. The debates about which disruption cards you choose can go on forever, but Orim’s Chant provides an ultimate finality if resolved, and if you resolve one before attempting to combo off you should win 95% of your game or more. The same cannot be said for Duress, as the opponent with other non-Force of Will spells can still interact with you, which you want to ultimately avoid.

The other advantage of playing Orim’s Chant is its usefulness against other combo matches. While Duress is certainly nice at stripping away a key spell, it does nothing in the face of Brainstorm or Mystical Tutor, and by allowing your opponent to cast a few spells and then casting Orim’s Chant you have actually made them expend or waste Storm and mana resources, which is often better and will lead to more victories for the player packing Chant. For these reasons I strongly advocate Orim’s Chant as the top choice, and your additional disruption slots can be composed of whatever you think is best.

Tutoring and Deck Manipulation
Mystical Tutor – at a cost of only 1 Blue mana you can find any of your combo pieces, protection, or removal; this is the most efficient tutor available, but comes at the cost of card disadvantage
Infernal Tutor – the restrictions of Internal Tutor are removed when you sacrifice a Lion’s Eye Diamond or two in response, but this card is great as the game goes on at fueling a number of different ways to win (sometimes by chaining multiple Infernal Tutors if you have tons of mana)
Grim Tutor – gets you any card you want for 3 mana and 3 life this is somewhat attractive, but the price is probably too steep to pay in this deck
Burning Wish – if you are into a Red splash Burning Wish allows you to create even more Doomsday piles (including pass the turn piles where you needn’t win that turn), and also unlocks access to Empty the Warrens
Sensei’s Divining Top – you want this to be your first turn play every time if possible, as it allows for reusable searching and deck manipulation and is fantastic in conjunction with Doomsday and Mystical Tutor
Brainstorm – this is on color, cheap, and can both dig for cards you need and shuffle away cards you don’t need; in short, it’s insane in here
Ponder – this is probably the second best first turn play, as it allows you see up to four cards to find whatever you need (land, Dark Ritual, tutor, protection, etc.) and you can also shuffle away the cards if you don’t like them (reducing your potentially dead draws the next couple of turns)

Most ANT decks will run a number of the cards above, but with the ANT-Doomsday hybrid deck Sensei’s Divining Top is extremely good. It is a great first turn play that can filter your draws as the game goes on, dig for mana to ensure you hit your land drops, and works extremely well with Mystical Tutor and Doomsday.

The Mana Sources
Many decks (especially game 1) are serious underdogs to your storm deck no matter what shell you are using, so it makes sense to build to also be as strong as possible against those matches that are tougher. When playing this deck you really want have as many cards in hands as possible (to generate storm) and to be able to hit your land drops. To this end you want to reduce mulligans and to make your opening hands as consistent and keepable as possible, so in this regard having more lands rather than less will be better, as will having fewer cards like Chrome Mox in your opening hand. Playing a stable manabase and hitting your land drops will strengthen your matchups against decks with Wasteland and decks with counterspells, so having the strongest manabase possible while still being able to play your powerful spells should be your goal when building this deck. So let’s jump in to building the manabase.
Chrome Mox – some people will advocate playing more of these and/or Mox Diamonds, but you really only want to see this card when going off with Ad Nauseam and you don’t want it in your opening hand too often, so after a lot of testing I’d recommend two, as this will often be one of the first cards you sideboard out against control decks
Lotus Petal – a free spell that provides any color mana is pretty good, even though it is only a single shot use
Lion’s Eye Diamond – aside from the drawback of discarding your hand (not a big deal when going off), getting 3 mana of any color for free is a huge boon to however you are trying to combo out, and this is why LED is a staple of storm combo decks of all forms
Dark Ritual – another fantastic bargain by providing 3 black mana for the cost of 1, Dark Ritual is one of the best cards in the deck
Cabal Ritual – sometimes better (with Threshold), but usually slightly worse, Cabal Ritual is still pretty good but you only need so many mana sources, so 2-3 of these are generally all you need

I tend to fetch out basic lands whenever possible to play around Wasteland (and other non-basic hate), so even though we have four colors in this deck I recommend keeping the dual lands to a minimum and including as many basic lands as you have room for. Saito’s GP deck had only one basic land, but for a deck like this you always want stable mana. Some people will question the inclusion of many basic lands or of a maindeck Plains, but this again goes back to building your deck to playing against tougher matchups (such as Canadian Threshold). You really want basic lands to keep being able to reliably cast your important spells (such as Orim’s Chant), and there’s enough extra mana sources like Lotus Petal and Lion’s Eye Diamond that you don’t really have to worry much about having the correct mana when comboing out. There is also a good amount of colorless mana in many of your spells (Meditate, Sensei’s Divining Top, Cabal Ritual, Infernal Tutor, etc.), so keep in mind you can always use your Plains or whatever White mana source to help in casting those (or with activating Sensei’s Divining Top nearly every turn) if you aren’t using it for Orim’s Chant. You’re probably going to destroy other matchups that can’t disrupt your manabase and interact with you, so this doesn’t matter too much there.

With these options in mind, here’s what I would recommend right now.
ANT-Doomsday Hybrid 20101Q1.4, by Jaco 02-15-2010
Business (28)
4 Orim’s Chant
2 Silence
1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
4 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Mystical Tutor
2 Infernal Tutor
1 Doomsday
1 Meditate
1 Ill-Gotten Gains
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Ad Nauseam

Mana Sources (32)
2 Chrome Mox
4 Lion’s Eye Diamond
4 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual
2 Cabal Ritual
4 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
2 Underground Sea
1 Scrubland
1 Tundra
1 Tropical Island
2 Island
1 Swamp
1 Plains

Sideboard (15)
1 Bayou
1 Doomsday
1 Sadistic Sacrament
3 Xantid Swarm
2 Krosan Grip
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Rushing River
1 Slaughter Pact/Deathmark
3 Carpet of Flowers

The sideboard above consists of options for dealing with problematic permanents, more disruption against counterspells, and the ability to switch to the Doomsday kill as your primary kill. Xantid Swarm single-handedly invalidates a lot of hate, and I think it is great for the Green splash, which you’re already probably going to have to be able to play either Krosan Grip or Reverent Silence. Dark Confidant was also seen in both Saito and David Do Anh’s sideboards in their GP lists, and I think that has merit and is worth heavily considering if Sadistic Sacrament catches on as a sideboard card. You can tailor this to meet your needs, but here is a brief rundown of how I would attack many common matchups with the deck and sideboard above.

Playing and Sideboarding Against Merfolk
Merfolk’s only real hard counter is Force of Will, but you still have to take Daze and Cursecatcher into account when doing the math before trying to combo out. Sensei’s Top shines in this match to help you dig for more Chants and to hit your land drops. Keep in mind they may have Stifle in their deck, but if you manage to resolve a Xantid Swarm or Chant effect you can obviously ignore this. Another thing to keep in mind is that they may be boarding in Spell Pierce. Here’s how I’ve been sideboarding:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Ad Nauseam
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Mystical Tutor
+1 Bayou
+1 Doomsday
+3 Xantid Swarm
+3 Carpet of Flowers

Playing and Sideboarding Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
There’s not too much thinking about this matchup, and you probably won’t encounter it very often. Orim’s Chant and Silence are key here in allowing you to combo out unimpeded, and also to prevent your opponent from going off. As mentioned above, it may be worth changing the sideboard around slightly to accommodate 3-4 Dark Confidants if Sadistic Sacrament or Extract starts seeing more play. Sideboarding currently looks like this:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
+1 Sadistic Sacrament

Playing and Sideboarding Against Dream Halls
Like the ANT matchup, you want to use your Chant effects to stop them from comboing out and to allow you to. I tend to side in Xantid Swarm here, but that’s up to you and if you feel comfortable siding out any mana sources:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Silence
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
+3 Xantid Swarm
+1 Chain of Vapor

Playing and Sideboarding Against Naya Zoo
The Zoo player will seek to aggressively burn you out, and will most likely be bringing in some combination of hate cards in the form of Gaddock Teeg and/or Ethersworn Canonist, and maybe even Mindbreak Trap, so I tend to ditch the Ad Nauseam plan and leave in a few Chants for the protection from Mindbreak Trap and them holding a lot of burn for after your resolve Doomsday. You will have to manage your Mystical Tutors and dig spells appropriately. I tend to side like this:
-1 Ad Nauseam
-2 Silence
-1 Lotus Petal
+1 Doomsday
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Rushing River
+1 Slaughter Pact

Playing and Sideboarding Against Goblins
Most Goblins players can’t do a whole lot to interact with you, especially game 1. After sideboarding they may have Thoughtseize or Cabal Therapy, or possibly Pyrostatic Pillar. I like to board in better bounce and an additional mana source here to help fight against Wasteland and Rishadan Port:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Silence
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Rushing River
+1 Bayou

Playing and Sideboarding Against CounterTop
When battling CounterTop the ultimate goal is to combo off without a Counterbalance in play, so to accomplish this I’ve been rotating back and forth between a main deck Wipe Away and Krosan Grip. Krosan Grip is the best at dealing with Counterbalance or the occasional main deck Chalice of the Void you’ll run into (from AggroLoam, for example), but Wipe Away can also hit a Reanimated Iona or some other problematic permanent, so that’s currently what I’m playing main. In the sideboard I have access to a couple more copies of Krosan Grip. An argument can be made for Reverent Silence in this slot because it costs nothing to play, but the problem is that the CounterTop player can still just Force of Will it, whereas they have almost no answer to Krosan Grip other than constantly floating a card with converted mana cost equal to 3 on top of their deck. In this matchup I also tend to ditch the Ad Nauseam plan, because you have are brining in cards that cost more mana which equals more life lost to Ad Nauseam, not to mention the fact that you’re probably going to be staring down a Tarmogoyf or something else nibbling at your life while you try to deal with Counterbalance. That’s debatable though, so here are a couple of different sideboard plans:
-2 Chrome Mox
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-1 Mystical Tutor
-1 Ad Nauseam
+1 Doomsday
+1 Bayou
+2 Krosan Grip
+3 Xantid Swarm

Playing and Sideboarding Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
The Ad Nauseam plan against Threshold is a struggle, as they often have a quick clock in the form of Tarmogoyf, along with Lightning Bolt, Fire/Ice, Nimble Mongoose, and sometimes things you’ll have to play around like Vendilion Clique (when Sensei’s Divining Top tricks are most important). After sideboarding they’ll often be bringing in something like Red Elemental Blast and/or Spell Pierce (more common now), but these can still be invalidated by Xantid Swarm. Because of this they may be forced to keep in their removal against you, and I would definitely force the issue because if they don’t have removal your Xantid Swarms are going to win you the game. You’ll have to battle through Stifle, Force, Spell Snare, and more so Xantid Swarm and Chant effects are the best path to victory. Another key resource here is Carpet of Flowers, which Wizards’ recently changed the Oracle text for during the January 2010 Update Bulletin. The new wording is as follows:
“At the beginning of each of your main phases, if you haven’t added mana to your mana pool with Carpet of Flowers this turn, you may add up to X mana of any one color to your mana pool, where X is the number of Islands target opponent controls.”

So this allows you to cast Carpet of Flowers during your first main phase and then get the mana during your second main phase the same turn. This is incredible, and it gives you multiple mana every single turn (albeit without upping your Storm) for a one time investment of a single Green mana. This can prove critical in playing around their mana denial plan, as will all of the basic lands we’ve conveniently included. With the battle raging for mana resources and the fight to resolve spells against Threshold I’ll often sideboard out temporary mana sources in favor of more protection and permanent mana sources like this:
-2 Chrome Mox
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Lotus Petal
-1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
-2 Cabal Ritual
+1 Doomsday
+1 Bayou
+3 Carpet of Flowers
+3 Xantid Swarm

Playing and Sideboarding Against Bant Aggro (ProBant)
This is an interesting matchup for you, because their deck can be all over the board. They may have Wasteland, Stifle, Daze, Force, or they may eschew the mana disruption plan altogether for stuff like Spell Snare. They can have a quick clock in the form of Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk, not to mention Progenitus if they find a Natural Order before you’re able to kill them. I can’t give you a solid sideboarding suggestion here, because a lot of it will come down to what you’ve seen from their deck. You’ll want Slaughter Pact/Deathmark for any potential hate creatures they may have (Meddling Mage, Ethersworn Canonist, Gaddock Teeg), or even to deal with a quick Rhox War Monk. You can look at the Threshold and CounterTop matchups for tips if you’re really clueless, but Xantid Swarm, Carpet of Flowers, and the Doomsday plan all have merit here depending on you’ve seen or suspect they might have, so play this one by your gut.

Playing and Sideboarding Against Dredge
I used to have random cards like Mindbreak Trap or Extirpate in my sideboard to Mystical Tutor for, but after testing against many different versions of Dredge I just found it unnecessary after a while. They will have Cabal Therapy and possibly Iona, Shield of Emeria as a Dread Return target main deck to interact with you, and that’s about it. After sideboarding they could have stuff like Mindbreak Trap, Force of Will, or Unmask, so I like to leave my Chant effects in just in case, which can also act as Time Walks against them and buy you more turns if necessary. Unless I see something really weird from their deck this is usually my plan:
-1 Plains
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-1 something else you don’t care about (depending on what you’ve seen from them)
+1 Bayou
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Slaughter Pact (if they don’t have Iona this probably isn’t justified)

Playing and Sideboarding Against Lands.dec
This is a pretty good matchup in general, and outside of an absolute bomb draw by them you should defeat them game 1 without problem, as they can’t interact with you outside of Wasteland and Rishadan Port. If you’re playing the list above you have 4 basic lands main deck so this isn’t much of an issue. The Lands player will know they are a massive underdog to combo, and will likely have some combination of Mindbreak Trap and Chalice of the Void, and if they’re really desperate they could try to bring in Leyline of the Void too, but they probably don’t have enough slots to side out for that many additional cards. For this reason I’d advocate keeping in most Chant effects to hedge against Mindbreak Trap, and I also board in some bounce like this:
-1 Wipe Away/Krosan Grip
-2 Chrome Mox
+1 Bayou
+1 Chain of Vapor
+1 Hurkyl’s Recall

Rather than hoping to be able to tutor or draw for Ad Nauseam and the accompanying Angel’s Grace after sideboard against a lot of decks where life is an issue, you can simply use the mana and Storm instead to leverage the power of Doomsday. I highly recommend reading Brandon and Michael’s Doomsday primer in the link provided earlier. I feel that this hybrid strategy is currently the best way to pilot a Legacy Storm deck, given what we’ve been seeing from late 2009 into early 2010. You can expect to face Zoo and Merfolk and a myriad of other decks in each tournament you attend, so this approach allows you to have a consistent manabase and to be able to easily shift your plan of attack. Doomsday is an important and powerful piece of the Storm players’ repertoire that should not be overlooked, and works exceptionally well in the context of this deck.

Vintage players have either grown to love or hate the card Gush, and the effect that it had on the metagame over the past half decade during the times when it was allowed to be played. When Gush (and Brainstorm, Flash, Merchant Scroll, and Ponder) landed on the Restricted List again on June 1 2008 many people were saddened by the news, as the “Gush Metagame” was one full of interaction, excitement, many interesting deckbuilding ideas, and of course the broken plays that Vintage players are accustomed to.

In January 2010 the Team ICBM Vintage extraordinaire tournament organizer and Vintage arms dealer Ben Carp decided to take matters into his own hands. He announced that in March there would be an ICBM Retro Vintage Open tournament using the old Restricted List and card pool, with the following rules to mimic the metagame from early 2008:
1. Gush, Brainstorm, Flash, Merchant Scroll, and Ponder are unrestricted. Gifts Ungiven is still restricted. Shahrazad is legal and unrestricted.
2. Time Spiral, Personal Tutor, Dream Halls, Mox Diamond, and Chrome Mox are still restricted.
3. The “M10 rules update” is NOT in effect. This means:
3a. Combat damage stacks.
3b. Tokens are “owned” by whoever controlled the effect that created them.
3c. Mana burn exists.
3d. No more simultaneous mulligans
3f. Wishes fetch RFG’d cards as well as SB cards.
4. All errata updates after July 2008 are NOT in effect. This means:
4a. Illusionary Mask works the old way.
4b. Oath does not target.
4c. Time Vault/Voltaic Key does NOT work.
5. Cards printed after Shadowmoor are not allowed. This includes Eventide, Alara Block, M10, Zendikar, and Worldwake.

Many locals were very excited about this, as the Key-Vault era has grown stale to a lot of people, and they enjoyed the Gush era. Deckbuilding strategy and technology is constantly changing and adapting, so it would be very interesting to see how the deckbuilding of today matches up with the metagame from nearly two years ago. Would the GushBond engine (Gush + Merchant Scroll + Fastbond) dominate, or would new technology and ideas trump the decks of yesteryear?

The tournament was hosted today at Milwaukee Magic Cards and Games in Milwaukee, WI (USA). Turnout was unfortunately only 11 people (to play for MOX SAPPHIRE!!), but it was a star-studded field with many of the Midwest’s best Vintage players, and a number of recognizable names. There were many different deck types represented, as most of the players seemingly had their own idea of how to trump the metagame.

After four rounds of Swiss the following gentlemen and scholars were left standing with the best record to square off in the Top 4 for the rights to own a nice piece of Power 9:
1) Ben Carp, playing DEEZ Noughts
1) Mike Solymossy, playing Tropical Storm
3) Jeremy Seroogy, playing Reveillark Flash
4) James King, playing GushBond Tyrant Oath

In the semi-finals Jeremy Seroogy took down Mike Solymossy in three closely contested games, and in the other bracket James King narrowly edged Ben Carp in an epic three game set. Seroogy then went on to best James King in the finals in three games, making Jeremy Seroogy and Reveillark Flash the winner of the first ICBM Retro Vintage Open!

We’ve provided the complete decklists from all 11 competitors below, so check out the technology. As Stephen Q. Mendendian would say, “That’s Gush, Boys!”

DEEZ Noughts, by Ben Carp aka Broodstar3000
Business (36)
4 Force of Will
4 Thoughtseize
2 Spell Snare
4 Stifle
1 Echoing Truth
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
4 Phyrexian Dreadnought
4 Dark Confidant
2 Dimir Cutpurse
2 Illusionary Mask
1 Engineered Explosives

Mana Sources (24)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
4 Polluted Delta
1 Flooded Strand
4 Underground Sea
1 Watery Grave
1 Island
1 Swamp

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Duress
1 Pithing Needle
2 Trygon Predator
1 Sealof Primordium
2 Sower of Temptation
1 Control Magic
2 Mystic Remora

Trinket Nought, by Ryan DuBois
Business (37)
4 Force of Will
1 Duress
3 Thoughtseize
4 Stifle
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Trinket Mage
1 Phyrexian Dreadnought
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Tormod’s Crypt
1 Aether Spellbomb
1 Engineered Explosives

Mana Sources (23)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Academy Ruins
1 Strip Mine
3 Wasteland
4 Polluted Delta
1 Flooded Strand
4 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
1 Bayou
1 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Duress
1 Pithing Needle
2 Trygon Predator
1 Sealof Primordium
2 Sower of Temptation
1 Control Magic
2 Mystic Remora

Confidant Remora, by Jason Jaco
Business (39)
4 Force of Will
4 Duress
2 Thoughtseize
3 Spell Snare
2 Mana Drain
1 Echoing Truth
1 Repeal
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
3 Mystic Remora
1 Time Walk
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Dark Confidant
1 Gorilla Shaman
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Tinker
1 Sundering Titan

Mana Sources (21)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Crypt
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Polluted Delta
1 Flooded Strand
2 Underground Sea
3 Volcanic Island
2 Island
1 Swamp

Sideboard A (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
1 Helm of Obedience
1 Darkblast
3 Threads of Disloyalty
3 Ingot Chewer
2 Magus of the Moon
1 Gaea’s Blessing

Jones Mind Trap (aka Dredge), by Tom Jones
Business (47)
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Unmask
4 Bazaar of Baghdad
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
3 Careful Study
1 Life From the Loam
3 Darkblast
4 Golgari Grave Troll
4 Stinkweed Imp
3 Ichorid
4 Narcomoeba
4 Bridge From Below
2 Dread Return
1 Angel of Despair
4 Serum Powder

Mana Sources (13)
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Cephalid Coliseum
4 City of Brass
4 Gemstone Mine

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
4 Oath of Druids
1 Gaea’s Blessing
1 Akroma, Angel of Wrath
1 Sundering Titan
4 Forbidden Orchard

Tropical Storm, by Jake Kempfer
Business (38)
4 Force of Will
1 Misdirection
4 Duress
1 Thoughtseize
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Gush
4 Brainstorm
3 Ponder
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Timetwister
1 Necropotence
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Merchant Scroll
1 Fastbond
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
2 Doomsday
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Research and Development

Mana Sources (22)
4 Dark Ritual
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
4 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
3 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Extirpate
3 Xantid Swarm
1 Thoughtseize
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Echoing Truth
1 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Swamp

GushBond Tyrant Oath, by James King
Business (38)
4 Force of Will
3 Thoughtseize
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Gush
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
1 Time Walk
3 Merchant Scroll
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Fastbond
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
4 Oath of Druids
2 Tidespout Tyrant
1 Krosan Reclamation
1 Brain Freeze
1 Flash of Insight

Mana Sources (22)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
4 Forbidden Orchard
3 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
2 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
2 Volcanic Island
1 Island

Sideboard (15)
1 Blazing Archon
1 Darksteel Colossus
2 Extirpate
1 Pyroblast
1 Ray of Revelation
1 Red Elemental Blast
2 Trickbind
1 Pyroclasm
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Tinker
1 Pithing Needle
2 Tormod’s Crypt

BrianDemars.dec (aka Confidant GAT), by Jimmy McCarthy
Business (39)
4 Force of Will
2 Duress
3 Thoughtseize
1 Echoing Truth
4 Gush
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
4 Merchant Scroll
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Fastbond
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
4 Dark Confidant
3 Quirion Dryad
1 Tendrils of Agony

Mana Sources (21)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
4 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
3 Tropical Island
2 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
1 Extirpate
1 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Oxidize
3 Seal of Primordium
2 Smother
2 Uktabi Oragutan

Reveillark Flash, by Jeremy Seroogy
Business (40)
4 Force of Will
1 Misdirection
4 Pact of Negation
2 Duress
1 Chain of Vapor
3 Summoner’s Pact
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Flash
4 Protean Hulk
1 Reveillark
1 Body Double
1 Mogg Fanatic
1 Carrion Feeder
1 Body Snatcher

Mana Sources (20)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
2 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Engineered Explosives
1 Tinker
1 Platinum Angel
3 Trickbind
2 Duress
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Echoing Truth

Tropical Storm, by Mike Solymossy
Business (38)
4 Force of Will
1 Misdirection
1 Pact of Negation
4 Duress
1 Thoughtseize
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Gush
4 Brainstorm
3 Ponder
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Timetwister
1 Necropotence
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Merchant Scroll
1 Fastbond
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
2 Doomsday
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Research and Development

Mana Sources (22)
4 Dark Ritual
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
4 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
3 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Extirpate
3 Xantid Swarm
1 Thoughtseize
2 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Slaughter Pact
1 Threads of Disloyalty
1 Swamp

Sliver Flash, by Shawn Brook Williams
Business (40)
4 Force of Will
4 Pact of Negation
1 Chain of Vapor
3 Summoner’s Pact
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Imperial Seal
1 Demonic Tutor
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Street Wraith
4 Flash
4 Protean Hulk
4 Virulent Sliver
1 Heart Sliver
1 Elvish Spirit Guide

Mana Sources (20)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Lotus Petal
3 Polluted Delta
3 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Dark Confidant
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Threads of Disloyalty
2 Echoing Truth
1 Tropical Island
1 Time Walk

TinkerGush, by Derek Wochinski
Business (38)
4 Force of Will
2 Misdirection
3 Duress
2 Thoughtseize
2 Spell Snare
1 Echoing Truth
4 Gush
4 Brainstorm
3 Mystic Remora
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Merchant Scroll
1 Fastbond
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Tendrils of Agony
1 Tinker
1 Darksteel Colossus

Mana Sources (22)
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
2 Island

Sideboard (15)
4 Leyline of the Void
2 Engineered Explosives
2 Phyrexian Dreadnought
2 Trickbind
3 Smother
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Spell Snare

Following our discourse on the potential Breaking of the Reserved List, the community and Wizards of the Coast seemingly need to contemplate a solution to the spiraling cost of older cards if Wizards’ feels that these prices are too high and would prevent a legitimate barrier of entry for newer players. If Wizards’ is going to respect the spirit of the Reserved List and not undermine it dramatically using the foil/premium loophole, what can be done to increase supply and thus lower prices on key Legacy staples? I would suggest that the first thing to do is to look at what cards are priced high, and look at those that are not on the Reserved List that could safely be reprinted without breaking the Reserved List.

So what are considered some Legacy staples that are not on the Reserved List that could theoretically be printed in future sets with little or no repercussion? There are quite a few cards considered staples that have risen to relatively high prices very quickly, so ignoring cards that have already been reprinted let’s look at some cards that I believe could all be reprinted in upcoming sets and aren’t too powerful for the current Standard and Extended constructed environments.
Force of Will – aside from Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Blue is relatively weak in Standard and Extended, and including Force of Will in a normal set as either an uncommon or rare would drastically increase the supply and reduce the price from about $35 to $5-10
Wasteland – with apologies to Ghost Quarter and Tectonic Edge, there isn’t very good land destruction available to mages right now in Standard and Extended, and by reprinting this as an uncommon the price would drop from the current $18 price tag down to about $2-3 (where it used to be for years), and would also help keep the overpowered Thopter Depths deck in check in Extended
Tarmogoyf – this beast is currently in the $65-70 range and isn’t even legal in Standard currently (when it was it tipped the scales at about $30)! It’s certainly not too broken for any constructed format, and as it was unveiled in Future Sight, the reasoning behind reprinting it could be that Future Sight was merely a preview of what was to come (more Tarmogoyfs, yippee!)
Orim’s Chant – while often decent and sometimes above average, Chant was never broken in Standard and Extended, and reprinting this would drop the price from about $14 to $5
Argothian Enchantress – certainly a powerful card, nothing about Enchantress would break Standard or Extended, but the price would certainly drop considerably if this $12 staple was reprinted
Exploration – currently hovering around $15, this would be powerful in conjunction with Life From the Loam in Extended, and could potentially be awesome with some kind of Landfall cards (which would actually make for a very interesting deck, but I wonder why we haven’t seen any of these interactions in Legacy if they had serious merit). Neither of these interactions would probably wouldn’t be format defining, and reprinting this Legacy staple would drop it to around the $3-5 mark I’d predict
Chain Lightning – if Lightning Bolt, Incinerate, and Lightning Helix are fine in Standard and Extended, I think it would be safe to say that Chain Lightning would also be safe (hopefully once something else rotated out), and reprinting this as an uncommon would drop this $10 staple into the $2 neighborhood
Imperial Recruiter – along the lines of Ranger of Eos, this card would be very fair in Standard and Extended, and reprinting it as a rare would probably drop the price from its current $120 price tag to about $5-10
Imperial Seal – Vampiric Tutor was not a problem when it was legal in Standard and Extended for the longest time, and a sorcery speed one would fit very well in today’s constructed environments. Reprinting this would admittedly do nothing for Legacy as it is banned there, but it would drop the price from $200+ currently to around $15, and would be a huge boon for Vintage players
Entomb – the unbanning of this Legacy bomb and recent success have driven this staple to around $30 and counting. This would not be too strong for Standard and Extended, and reprinting this in a future set would probably drop the price back down to around the $3-5 mark it sat at for quite some time prior to it’s unbanning for Legacy
Ancient Tomb – this could provide a useful but not broken accelerant in Standard and Extended, and reprinting this as an uncommon would drop the price from $5 to $1-2 moving forward

Reprinting all of the aforementioned cards fits would drop prices of these cards considerably, and I don’t believe any of them would be too powerful for Standard or Extended. That being said, here are a handful of cards that probably are too powerful for those constructed formats, but could be reprinted in a different way to ensure they are never in Standard or Constructed.
Loyal Retainers – this would probably be too good in the same Standard or Extended format where Entomb is legal (along with Iona), so I would lean towards making this Portal 3 Kingdoms uncommon a Friday Night Magic foil, which would heartily increase the supply and dramatically reduce the price, while keeping it out of those constructed formats
Price of Progress – I get the sense that the game’s designers have been trending towards getting people to play multicolored and rainbow decks in constructed formats, and with all of the other burn spells available right now in Standard and Extended I think this would be too good, so giving it out as a Friday Night Magic card instead would create foil copies of it and satiate the market demand
Dark Depths – having 20/20 indestructables crawling around Extended seems to be ok, but this would most likely be too powerful for Standard, so reprinting this as a Friday Night Magic foil would create plenty of copies, while reducing the price of this from $23 to about $5-10 in short order
Grindstone – having the Painter’s Servant and Grindstone combo running around a format like Extended would be too powerful and consistent, so reprinting Grindstone as a Judge foil instead would increase the supply enough to probably drop Tempest copies from $18 down to about the $6-8 range

So, what about all of the other awesome cards that are in Legacy that have high price tags? Running through Stephen Mendendian’s nice article The Complete Legacy Checklist, here are the main cards with a significant price tag that the Reserved List would preclude Wizards’ from printing:
Underground Sea
Tropical Island
Tundra
Volcanic Island
Scrubland
Bayou
Savannah
Taiga
Badlands
Plateau
Tabernacle at the Pendrell Vale
City of Traitors
Gaea’s Cradle
Undiscovered Paradise
Lion’s Eye Diamond
Mox Diamond
Moat

That’s only about 17 relevant cards with a significant price tag for the format that fall on the Reserved List. There are handful of other smaller cards that are on the Reserved List (such as Humility, Cursed Scroll, Volrath’s Stronghold) that don’t see too much play and can generally be had for $5-10, but these are relatively affordable already so their isn’t much necessity in reprinting them. Many of cards above are Dual Lands that are integral to the format, but by most people’s best guesses and calculations there are around 340,000-360,000 copies of each Dual Land in existence, which I believe is more than enough to support a burgeoning Legacy population. That’s a full playset for nearly 90,000 players as it currently stands. Yes, I know that some people are holding on to more than a playset, just like some people are holding on to 150 Force of Wills. Magic was intended to be a collectible card game as we all know, and these things come with the territory.

The entrance cost has already been paid by a great number of players who wanted to jump into the Legacy format with the announcement of the two Legacy format Grand Prixs in 2010 and the continuing StarCityGames $5K Legacy series, and these are the primary reasons prices for certain cards have climbed so rapidly. Grand Prix Madrid 2010 just set the Magic tournament record with 2220 participants, and Grand Prix Columbus 2010 will probably clock in with around 1000-1400 participants. But after most players have already jumped in it appears many prices have leveled off. Cards like Tarmogoyf have already kind of hit that threshold and have begun cooling a little bit, but that doesn’t mean other cards won’t gradually rise or occasionally spike like they do for other constructed formats when some new deck tech is found. But is a $29 Savannah or $40 Tropical Island really a terrible thing, especially in the face of $45 mythic rares like Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Baneslayer Angel that are commonly played in Standard? Is it a terrible thing to have a collectible card that you know will not be reprinted, and won’t rotate out of a format every two years and lose 85% of its street value (like most Standard cards)?

Every single card does not have to be affordable, nor has it been for about the last 10-12 years once more and more people started playing Magic. By slowly reprinting a large number of staples that are not on the Reserved List, Wizards’ can dramatically reduce prices for those staples while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to Eternal formats for a great many players. Doing this would allow for more player interest in older formats while avoiding a perversion of the original intent of the Official Reprint Policy.

Please let us know what you think in the comments section below. Thanks for reading!

Over the past couple of months there has been much consternation and discussion in online forums and articles discussing the rise of prices in older Magic cards. There has also been much discussion lately of the Reserved List on the Official Reprint Policy.

In Stephen Menendian’s recent article Visiting Wizards, Reprints, and the Reserved List he posits that “You could print a million new Underground Seas in M11, and Alpha and Beta Underground Seas would probably not budge in their value or collectability. In fact, they might become more valuable!” Frankly, more asinine words and a conclusion based on many unaccounted for factors have rarely been written. The basic laws of economics tell us that if demand is relatively even and supply increases, price will naturally go down. Time and time again, history has shown us that when cards are reprinted (and supply is increased) they lose value.

When the original Chronicles set was released Magic players and collectors alike were taken aback and shocked. A “collectible card game” was reissuing some of the game’s most sought after and expensive cards, setting an alarming precedent. Cards like the Elder Dragons (Chromium, Nicol Bolas, Palladia-Mors, etc.) from Legends dropped from $30-40 to $5-10 within weeks. Legends printings of these cards can currently be had for $1-5 each, and Chronicles and Timeshifted copies can be had for $.25 to $1. Carrion Ants (from Legends) was a $30 card (based largely on collectibility and not the amount of them being played) dropped to $2 in a matter of weeks. Today a Legends copy of Carrion Ants is about $1 and the Chronicles reprint versions are about $.25 each. Erhnam Djinn was once considered the little brother of Juzam Djinn, as was once worth about $35-40 for an Arabian Knights copy. After it was reprinted in Chronicles the value dropped considerably, with today’s prices ringing in at $5-10 for an Arabian Knights original, and a Chronicles reprint clocking in at a mere $.25.

Psionic Blast was originally printed in Alpha/Beta/Unlimited and for a long time was a very sought after item, typically priced at $30-40 for Alpha/Beta copies and $18-25 for Unlimited copies. After it was reprinted in Time Spiral’s Timeshifted subset those same original copies are now selling for $15-25 for Alpha/Beta and about $4-5 for Unlimited, while Timeshifted copies can readily be had for $1 each.

Pithing Needle, which Stephen himself has reviewed in prior articles and is intimately familiar with, used to be a $15 card (this price, and all others I’ll talk about here are what I’ll refer to as the “street value,” or how much they can regularly be had for on eBay/MOTL/etc.). Pithing Needle was originally printed in Saviors of Kamigawa, and demand has always been steady but not overwhelming. I would argue that demand is about the same today as when it was originally printed and is played a moderate amount in many constructed formats. When it was reprinted in Tenth Edition the value dropped to around $9, and it has once again been reprinted in Magic 2010 (M10) and the value has dropped to an astonishing $3 or less. Demand has stayed roughly the same, yet the supply has dramatically increased, leading to a dramatic reduction in price.

For quite some time Meddling Mage remained valued at $10-14, even when it’s popularity and playability waned in Standard and Extended. It was rotating out of Extended finally as part of the Invasion-Prophecy-Apocalypse block and started to slightly fall in price to around $9, but it was then reprinted in Alara Reborn. So what happened to the price? Well, naturally since the supply doubled and the demand remained about the same the prices came crashing down. Meddling Mage from Invasion can now readily be had for about $5-6 and Alara Reborn copies go for about $4.

I could continue to cite example after example of where reprints have crippled the value of original printings, but I think if you’ve ever picked up (and understood) an economic textbook or spent time seriously buying and selling Magic cards, you probably get the picture. To suggest that reprints of cards like Dual Lands and Power 9 wouldn’t cripple the value of the original printings is either an uneducated, disingenuous, or intellectually dishonest point of view.

Another issue that Stephen ignores in his quoting of prices for Alpha/Beta/Unlimited/Revised/10th Edition/M10 for cards like Shivan Dragon and Birds of Paradise is the fact that there is a major drop off from Alpha/Beta to everything else, including Unlimited. As my teammate Jason Pare pointed out to me, you can’t have a serious discussion about reprinting cards like the Power 9 without looking at the fact that roughly 82% of the Power 9 that are in existence are not Alpha/Beta, but Unlimited. You know, the same Unlimited that Stephen shows in his chart amongst all of other printings that represents a small percentage of the total pool in his Shivan Dragon and Birds of Paradise examples. If Power 9 were reprinted the value of these would drop like a rock, decimating the value of 82% of the Power 9 overnight. The set collectors will still want their Alpha/Beta Power 9, but most other people would gravitate towards a cheaper and also black-bordered foil version for a fraction of the price. This migration would also signal a reduction in the price of Alpha/Beta copies for this very reason, albeit not as devastating as the huge loss Unlimited owners would see.

Part of the reason the Power 9 has increased to dramatic prices is because aside from the fact that they are some of the most powerful and rarest cards, they have never been reprinted and are currently never slated to be reprinted according to Wizards’ own published Reserved List Policy. They have essentially become Vintage Gold because the consumer has placed faith in the manufacturer that a set number of these exist (solidifying their rarity and collectibility), and because of this they can be viewed as a valid investment vehicle. Without this assurance from the manufacturer they would not be worth nearly as much.

The function of the Reserved List is to assuage fears of players and collectors that their collectible card game will actually maintain some semblance of collectibility. Wizards’ formally acknowledged the giant mistake they had made by printing Chronicles and created the Reserve List as a response to grant the consumer some basic protections. It represents a contract with the customer meaning “we (the manufacturer) will not violate your consumer confidence in us.” This contract with consumers was necessary following the backlash and departure of players following the release of Chronicles. By altering policy and breaking the Reserve List and changing course, Wizards of the Coast would have lied to their customers for the past ten years and effectively reduced any incentive to consider Magic cards any sort of investment or an actual collectible card game, as it has always been marketed as. To this end the Reserve List is accomplishing exactly what it was created to do.

In the past few years Wizards’ has exploited a loophole in the Official Reprint Policy that states that “All policies described in this document apply only to non-premium, tournament-legal Magic cards. Wizards of the Coast has and may continue to print special versions of cards not meant for regular game play, such as oversized cards.” They have designated foil cards as premium cards to fit the bill and to create a loophole to essentially allow them to reprint whatever they want (see: Phrexian Negator, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Intuition, Survival of the Fittest, Karn, Silver Golem, Yawgmoth’s Will, etc.). But looking at the wording of the revised Reprint Policy it says “All policies described in this document apply only to non-premium, tournament-legal Magic cards. Wizards of the Coast has and may continue to print special versions of cards not meant for regular game play, such as oversized cards.” Does this sound to you like their original intent with that exception was to print foil cards used for tournament play and as a mechanism to reprint hard to find cards to increase market supply? I don’t think so. The original intent appears to simply allow them to reprint things like the oversized cards they used to print, or box-toppers, or promotional items, or things of that nature that would not be used for tournaments and by actual players. But by designating foils as premium they have created a loophole with which they can twist the Official Reprint Policy and effectively negate the entire thing.

By using a loophole to reprint cards on the Reserved List and simply designate them as ‘premium,’ Wizards’ is shaking customer confidence, and the outcry by many players can be heard on whatever message board you fancy. But the biggest outcry is the unspoken one, by players who believe that Wizards’ will do the right thing and respect the Reserved List, which is their contract to the consumer. This outcry will not truly be heard until the point when we see the Reserved List being violated in a notable way. Creating something like From the Vault: [Underground Sea and a bunch of other Restricted List goodies], and then following it up with a bunch of other similar boxed foil sets would create a terrible precedent and would achieve the same thing as just reprinting cards in a modern edition. The same could be said for creating all foil (i.e. premium) booster packs full of Reserved List cards. This would decimate the consumer confidence that the Magic brand has achieved, and I believe would lead to the departure of a significant number of players. Many people drawn to games are smart, and they can probably tell when something is going the way of the Dodo bird, or is in the process of jumping the shark.

So if cards like Dual Lands and others are rapidly rising with the increase interest in Legacy, what can be done to offset this and make Legacy more palatable to the wallet? Check out our next article in this series,

Normally on TP we focus on Magic for big boys, that being the Eternal formats of Legacy and Vintage. But that won’t stop us from dropping the knowledge about some Extended tech for our loyal readers who are trying to take their game to the next level by qualifying for the Pro Tour. Extended is almost as good of a format as Vintage and Legacy, but the power level of the cards is a bit less.

I played in an Extended PTQ in Madison, Wisconsin (USA) this past weekend, and 168 players showed up to battle for an invitation. I had been brainstorming some decks the night before, and this is what I rolled with to the tournament:
BUG Faeries 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-19-2010
Business (38)
4 Ancestral Vision
3 Bitterblossom
2 Umezawa’s Jitte
4 Spellstutter Sprite
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Vendilion Clique
3 Thoughtseize
4 Spell Snare
3 Mana Leak
2 Cryptic Command
3 Repeal
3 Smother

Mana Sources (22)
3 Mutavault
4 Misty Rainforest
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Watery Grave
1 Overgrown Tomb
1 Breeding Pool
6 Island
2 Swamp
1 Forest

Sideboard (15)
2 Extirpate
2 Shred Memory
2 Darkblast
2 Damnation
1 Deathmark
3 Kitchen Finks
3 Glen Elendra Archmage

I figured that Zoo and ThopterDepths variants would be the most played decks in the room. There ended up being a lot of those as well as everything else you could imagine. I ended up 4-2 then dropped to head home on a long drive. I beat Dredge, Tooth and Nail (with Iona+Painter combo), RW Landfall, and 4C Zoo (with Bant Charm, etc.). I ended up losing to another RW Landfall (he drew 4 burn spells in a row to kill me) and also lost to someone playing the Living End cycler deck (I drew ZERO counterspells of any sort in two games, although I had 3 Thoughtseizes in my two opening hands).

The deck is very good, and can play the aggro-control game very well. Smother is quite nice right now in such a creature heavy format, and can help you combat nearly every deck you’ll run into. I prefer this over Doom Blade because Smother also hits Dark Confidant and Vampire Hexmage, which is extremely important since I consider ThopterDepths to be one of the best decks in the format (and most played by those who have the cards). The protection package seemed very good, and I always seemed glad to have a counterspell handy to deal with things like Path to Exile or Lightning Helix. The Tarmogoyfs seemed better in theory than Mistbind Clique, as they cost half as much mana and are generally as big (although they don’t fly), but with four mana I often found myself casting a Tarmogoyf and protecting it with Spellstutter Sprite. The only drawback is that Tarmogoyf doesn’t fly and it doesn’t tap out your opponent’s lands. That slot is up for debate, but I felt the addition of Tarmogoyf main and Kitchen Finks out of the sideboard went a long ways towards helping combat the early rushes that aggro decks can present.

The sideboard was very good to me, but next time I would probably drop the third Glen Elendra Archmage and add the fourth Kitchen Finks to increase the odds of seeing those early against Zoo and aggro decks. I somehow didn’t get paired against ThopterDepths, but the Darkblasts are great at dealing with their Confidants and Hexmages, while Shred Memory (and even Extirpate) is good at dealing with the Thopter portion, and Glen Elendra Archmage is just fantastic in general against Blue decks. Damnation proved very useful against Zoo, as they almost have play out as many guys as possible against you to get through your creatures and Bitterblossom, and then you can just Damnation away a lot of their resources. Darkblast was the MVP against RW Landfall, and is also fantastic against Elves (which was everywhere after Matt Nass’ recent GP Oakland win).

If you are looking for something a little different, I think this deck is a viable option for the current Extended climate and current round of PTQs. If I was to play the deck again I would max out the number of Kitchen Finks available in the sideboard, but everything else seemed great at combating a field of ThopterDepths, Zoo, Elves, Dredge, and the combo decks out there (Hypergenesis, Scapeshift, Living End, etc). Good luck in your battles!

Following up on our previous Focus on Legacy columns Constructing Bant Survival and Playing Bant Survival, we can now look at some alternative sideboarding strategies with the deck. This can provide opportunities to shore up weak matchups, throw an opponent off guard, and take the deck in a new direction with different and unexpected lines of play for your opponent to account for on the fly during a tournament match.

In the previous articles I presented a version that is uncommitted to punishing against any one strategy and seemingly trying to guard against a very broad field. Spellstutter Sprite is a card that people will either love or hate depending on what they face, but as an experiment let’s drop the 2 Spellstutter Sprite from the main and replace them with the third Rhox War Monk and 1 Sensei’s Divining Top. While very mana intensive, Sensei’s Divining Top is one of the best cards in Legacy, and could potentially work very well with 8 fetchlands, 4 Survivals, and all of your other cantrips. With Top and all of your shuffle and manipulation effects you can see tons of different cards and really dig through your deck in no time, helping to find Survival or that key counter or removal spell. That would bring us to this list.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.1, by Jaco 02-011-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
1 Sensei’s Divining Top
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
3 Rhox War Monk
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
3 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
3 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

If we dropped the Spellstutters and added Rhox War Monk, this would theoretically give us a little bit better game against aggro decks, while slightly weakening our combo matchup. So what about changing the sideboard in accordance with this, and to potentially give us better game against other decks as well? Check out this sample sideboard:
Sideboard B (15)
3 Counterbalance
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
1 Meddling Mage
1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
1 Loxodon Hierarch
3 Relic of Progenitus

While I and many others don’t necessarily like diluting the power and focus of a Survival deck with the CounterTop package, it has a few interesting uses. First of all, it can really help to hammer the combo matchup, and can also aid against things like Loam decks, Burn, Threshold, Zoo, etc. With this sideboard you still have access to extra removal in the form of Path to Exile, as well as graveyard hate in Relic of Progenitus. You could also drop the fourth Counterbalance for another Meddling Mage, Path, or whatever else you’d find handy.

I won’t go as in depth as the previous article talking about matchups, but here’s a brief look at potential sideboard use with this version:
Sideboarding Against Merfolk
+2 Path to Exile
+2 Krosan Grip
+1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
-2 Ponder
-1 Sensei’s Divining Top
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Noble Hierarch

Sideboarding Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+1 Meddling Mage
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage
-3 Noble Hierarch

Sideboarding Against Dream Halls
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+1 Meddling Mage
+2 Krosan Grip
+1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
-4 Tarmogoyf
-4 Swords to Plowshares
-1 Rhox War Monk (or Ponder)

Sideboarding Against Naya Zoo
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-4 Force of Will
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Noble Hierarch
-2 Ponder

Sideboarding Against Goblins
+2 Path to Exile
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Sensei’s Divining Top

Sideboarding Against CounterTop
Totally dependent on what else is in their deck besides CounterTop, but your own CounterTop is pretty good here.

Sideboarding Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
-2 Ponder
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage

Sideboarding Against Dredge
+2 Path to Exile
+3 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
+1 Sensei’s Divining Top
-3 Spell Snare
-4 Noble Hierarch
-1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner

Sideboarding Against Lands.dec
+3 Counterbalance
+2 Sensei’s Divining Top
+3 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Meddling Mage
-2 Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf (depending on number of Blue cards you want for Force)
-1 Eternal Witness
-3 Spell Snare
-1 Swords to Plowshares
-2 Ponder

As you can see, your lines of play and defense will be slightly different in a number of matches. Counterbalance has value in about half of these matches, and in a few matches it will really shine. Its inclusion is definitely debatable, but it may have merit depending on your tournament scene.

The Natural Order + Progenitus Package
Another interesting sideboard (and possibly main deck) option is the Natural Order package, which allows you to cheat Progenitus into play. The usefulness or necessity of this is questionable when you have the Iona package, but it provides another angle of attack that your opponent has to take into consideration. Like Tinker in Vintage, Natural Order can be a fantastic topdeck or can be a card you actively search out with your Brainstorms and Ponders to serve as a trump card or provide a quick win, rather than struggling in a protracted battle of resources.

So what matchups does the Natural Order package actually improve? Well, that’s tough to answer, because getting Progenitus into play doesn’t guarantee you a win. What it does do though is put your opponent on a two turn clock, meaning they have to find an answer immediately or the game will be over, provided they don’t have lethal damage on board or have enough burn in hand to finish you off in conjunction with their existing attackers. This can be very daunting for the opponent to always have to simply worry about the threat of Natural Order into Progenitus once you’ve hit four mana, so the fear of this can also possibly lead to a change in how your opponent plays the game against you, what he counters, what he uses removal spells on, and more. A two turn clock can be very relevant against nearly every deck in the format, but it is not without problem. For one thing, you can often be stuck with a dead card in hand (either Natural Order if you are short on mana, or if your singleton Progenitus also winds up in your hand), although this risk can be mitigated by the ability of Brainstorm to shuffle away dead cards. If you are playing against a deck with a lot of counterspells it will be difficult to get Natural Order to resolve, and the loss of a creature and card in hand if it gets countered can really set you back.

The next logical question related to Natural Order is if it is good enough to play in the sideboard, is it or is it not also good enough to play in the main deck? I cannot answer that for you, but if you play in a field with a lot of aggro decks and little in the way of Blue decks or CounterTop variants the Natural Order package can be very effective at speeding the game up if you don’t have Survival of the Fittest. In a way it’s almost like a 5th, 6th, and 7th copy of Survival, because if either one resolves and you’re not facing lethal damage on the board you’re most likely going to win the game in short order. One advantage of not playing this in the main deck is that you can sideboard it in as a surprise to overwhelm an unsuspecting opponent, meaning their other potential hate cards (likely graveyard or enchantment hate) would be rendered useless. I can definitely see the reason that Natural Order Bant decks have become increasing popular and successful, so this is certainly worth testing and investigating further if you think it would be good in your area as a tweak to the Survival style Bant deck.

Generic Sideboard Cards vs. Narrow Sideboard Cards
When constructing a deck and sideboard, there seems to be a couple of different schools of thought which I’ll try to briefly outline here. One school of thought would entail constructing your sideboard with cards that might not be quite as potent, but have more general application against a larger pool of decks. Cards like Pithing Needle, Ghostly Prison/Propaganda, Meddling Mage, and Relic of Progenitus are pretty good examples of this. They can each answer different strategies effectively, even though their might be a more powerful but narrow card which would be sided in less frequently.

The other school of thought eschews having more generic answers for trying to isolate perhaps the most difficult matchups and give you stronger game against those decks you’re convinced you need major help against. The reasoning behind this is often that your main deck should be good enough to beat deck X and Y (or perhaps the players you consider to be easy), so you will devote specific cards to those matchups you know you’ll have to beat in the Top 8, or against those couple of really good local players who you want to have that ace up your sleeve for. Examples of this would be the use of Engineered Plague (at the height of Goblins’ popularity) and Mindbreak Trap (against Storm combo).

One card that has escaped serious discussion in Bant Survival sideboards could potentially fall into either of the aforementioned groups of sideboard cards above, and that card is Back to Basics. Many decks in Legacy run anywhere from 0 to 3 basic lands maximum, and Back to Basics can be crippling against these decks (a number of which are often difficult matches for Bant Survival). Decks like Canadian Threshold, Lands.dec, Mono White Stax (and WG Stax), Dredge, and many others usually run 0 to 2 basic lands maximum. Back to Basics has the potential to really turn the tide and shut down an opponent in a close game, especially if the opponent does not see it coming. For example, in game 1 if you play a couple of basic lands and a couple of dual lands, your opponent will likely never expect non-basic hate coming in. In games 2 and 3 you have the potential to fetch up to 5 basic lands and potentially ruin your opponent if you land a Back to Basics from turn 3 onwards after they have tapped out to play something important on their turn. If all of their lands are single usage only, Back to Basics has the opportunity to swing these matches far in your favor against an unprepared opponent.

Building the Unexpected
In a recent interview with legendary Magic player Kai Budde, who many consider to be the best player or constructed player of all time, I read a very interesting theory of Kai’s that I agree with. When asked for advice about succeeding in constructed Magic tournaments, Kai responded “The best strategy is to know what the others are going to play and come with something that nobody else expects.”

In terms of Magic theory this is relatively profound and often true. When people are accustomed to playing against commonly played decks they are able to predict what will come next, what your lines of play are, what your (and their) potential outs are, and so on. When you play unorthodox choices you take this advantage away from your opponent. That doesn’t mean you should play sub-optimal cards, but introducing uncertainty and uneasiness to your opponent in the middle of a potentially tense match just might gain you the edge you need to be victorious.

Cards like Counterbalance, Natural Order, and Back to Basics are a few examples of unexpected yet potentially very potent sideboarding strategies that you can use in your bag of tricks from tournament to tournament. Whether you choose to play more generic answers in your sideboard or to get creative and run with the innovative and unexpected, keep these options in mind when you build your next sideboard. If you play in an area with regular tournaments keeping a fresh or rotating approach to dealing with your opponents can give you an advantage and can lead to more wins, especially in corner cases.

In the previous Focus on Legacy column we analyzed the common choices for constructing Bant Survival. This companion article will hopefully shed some light on playing against some of the common matchups you might find to expect in your upcoming Legacy tournaments, whether it’s a smaller weekly tournament or a massive tournament like GP Madrid.

Here’s the decklist I presented as a suggested starting point for your adventures with Bant Survival.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-01-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Rhox War Monk
2 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
2 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

Sideboard A (15)
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Faerie Macabre
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Meddling Mage
1 Rhox War Monk
1 Loxodon Hierarch

As mentioned in the previous article, this is built for a mixed metagame where I’d expect to face a range of aggro, control, combo, and other random decks that always show up at Legacy events. The deck and sideboard should obviously be tweaked for what you expect to play against and expect to have trouble against. So for example if you think Naya Zoo and aggro will be heavily represented and you won’t be running into much Counterbalance, you could easily drop a Qasali Pridemage or Trygon Predator and ramp up the number of Rhox War Monks. Or if you think you’ll be playing against a lot of Storm combo it might make sense to leverage the number of Spellstutter Sprites or Meddling Mages to combat that.

So how exactly do you play this beast? Bant Survival has a number of methods to attack the opponent. It can play the aggro-control game by beating down with a (hopefully Exalted) Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk, and counter and/or Swords the opponent’s relevant threats. If it lands a Survival of the Fittest it can play the long game and just overwhelm the opponent with good creatures and an avalanche of card advantage created by Survival and Squee, or it can try to go the combo route by powering out the unfair Loyal Retainers + Iona, Shield of Emeria couplet to lock the opponent out. The addition of Loyal Retainers to the deck has really pushed the Bant Survival archetype into overdrive, and has also pushed the card Loyal Retainers into the $75-125 bracket, unfortunately. If you are unable or unwilling to obtain Loyal Retainers, you could also drop Retainers + Iona from the deck and load up on things that might be good in your metagame, such as more War Monks, Pridemages, Spellstutter Sprites, or other useful things like main deck Meddling Mage or Rafiq of the Many.

Playing Against Merfolk
Mono-Blue Merfolk is a relatively cheap and effective deck to build in Legacy, and for this reason it is one of the more commonly played decks. It has a tough time against Naya Zoo, but excels against Blue-based aggro control (such as Threshold and CounterTop variants), and also has decent game against combo. Bant Survival is kind of a Blue-based aggro control deck, but the flexibility outlined above is what gives it game against so many decks. It can be flexible in how it attacks or defends against the opponent’s strategy, and against Merfolk this is no different.

Depending on the build of Merfolk you run into, you will definitely see Force of Will and Daze, and could also see Stifle, Umezawa’s Jitte, and even Back to Basics. Getting a threat Force of Will’ed really isn’t that big of a deal, because you have a good number of threats and also have Force of Wills of your own if you really wanted to punch something through. I would always recommend taking your time if possible to play around Daze, because you’d rather slow play your threats to make sure they resolve rather than recklessly try to curve out as fast as possible. Umezawa’s Jitte is probably the best threat Merfolk has against you, so this should be one of the things that your Spell Snares and Qasali Pridemages are saved for, because an active Jitte can effectively render your creatures all but irrelevant. The second thing you really need to watch out for is Lord of Atlantis, because it provides all of their creatures Islandwalk. You will either want to keep Islands off the board on your side, or more realistically do everything you can to keep Lord of Atlantis off the board on your opponent’s side (Spell Snare, Path to Exile, etc.). All of their other Lords (+1/+1 creatures) are decent, but this is the one you really care about because it creates the ability for them to easily alpha-strike you to end the game in a single turn if the ground seems stalled with creatures.

When sideboarding against Merfolk with my list above, I’d lean towards the following:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Krosan Grip
+1 Rhox War Monk
-2 Spellstutter Sprite
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Noble Hierarch

Spellstutter Sprite won’t counter much against Merfolk and is smaller than all of their guys. Rhox War Monk is actually pretty good because of the lifelink to buffer against their attacks, and the fact that he’s generally bigger than their guys unless they’ve got a couple of Lords out. Having a total of 6 Swords and Paths will go a long way to keeping their board relatively clean, and Krosan Grip can aid your Pridemages to help out against AEther Vial, Back to Basics, and most importantly Umezawa’s Jitte. While I don’t like siding out Noble Hierarch in general, it’s the weakest remaining card in the deck against Merfolk. I realize that some people would argue for siding out Survival stuff here because of the mana investment, but I would argue that if a Survival sticks you’re going to win the game, by either overwhelming them with card advantage or landing an Iona naming Blue. You could also potentially remove Kira, but I would guess that my opponent would bring in their own Kira from the sideboard, so having your own could be helpful to Legend-rule theirs out of play.

Playing Against Ad Nauseam Tendrils
Depending on the build of ANT you’re squaring off against, you can be a real underdog in game 1. They could be sporting up to 6 Orim’s Chant effects main for protection, which is bad news for Bant Survival’s light protection package. There are really a lot of different permutations of ANT and Burning Wish hybrid decks running around now, so you could also see Duress or Xantid Swarm maindeck. If they don’t have Swarm main I would expect them to board it in against you. When sideboarding against ANT with my list above, I would do the following:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Ethersworn Canonist
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Rhox War Monk
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage
-4 Noble Hierarch

While Spell Snare might not seem great against them, it can still counter Infernal Tutor, Burning Wish, Cabal Ritual, and whatever else they might have in the 2 slot. It’s not the best option, but you need to assume a more controlling role here to try to stay alive. Similarly, Swords to Plowshares could potentially be dead, but you can’t run the risk of being overrun by a Xantid Swarm (or even a Dark Confidant), so I’d be leaving in 3-4 Swords. Noble Hierarch can provide you with acceleration here, but doesn’t really do anything else, and again is the weakest card. A lot of people will be loathe to side it out but you really would rather have every other card in the deck instead. Kira is decent in the deck here because when paired with Ethersworn Canonist it means your hate creatures can’t be removed by the Chain of Vapor/Deathmark/Slaughter Pact that was sideboarded in against you by the combo player.

When playing this match you need to assume the control role if possible and actively dig for counters with Ponder, while saving Brainstorms for hiding your counters if need be, shuffling away junk you don’t want, or to dig for a counterspell in an emergency. Play this slow and carefully, and if you can keep mana open and then land either land Survival or some Rhox War Monks ideally. Rhox War Monks can push your life to a problematic number for an opposing Storm player if they start swinging early. If you have the early Survival draw you can chain out an Iona to shut off Black or Blue spells from the combo player, and either follow up with your other hate creatures (Meddling Mage, Teeg, Canonist) in whatever order you see fit, or you can dig for Spellstutter Sprites to shut down things like Orim’s Chant or Dark Ritual.

Playing Against Dream Halls
This is one of the few matches where you’ll want to sideboard out Swords to Plowshares, as it does nothing against their deck. Spell Snare is also relatively weak here, countering only Lim-Dul’s Vault. They will probably have 8-10 Duress, Thoughtseize, and Spell Snare effects after sideboarding, as well as 4 Force of Wills, so you’ll have to try to do everything in your power to play the control role and prevent them from busting either a Show and Tell into Progenitus or Show and Tell into Dream Halls, or just hard casting Dream Halls and trying to go off. I would look at sideboarding with the above list like this:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Ethersworn Canonist
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+2 Krosan Grip
-4 Tarmogoyf
-4 Swords to Plowshares

Your anti-combo suite will function well here, as Spell Pierce will be very good at protecting you in the early turns and stopping a quick Show and Tell. If possible try to play around the opposing Spell Pierces and keep mana open. Tarmogoyf is just a random beater that does nothing else against this deck, and because of this all of your creatures that do something else are much better at limiting the opponent’s lines of play. Pridemage can kill Dream Halls, Gaddock Teeg can prevent them from going off with Dream Halls, and Meddling Mage can shut down Show and Tell. Your best bet is to go for the Survival into Iona package if you can find a Survival, and naming Blue will shut them off of both Show and Tell and Dream Halls. When possible keep your mana open to play around Spell Pierce and save your Brainstorms for hiding counterspells against opposing Thoughtseizes and Duresses, or to shuffle away junk you don’t want to see.

It is also worth noting that if you do have 1 Llawan, Cephalid Empress in your sideboard for Merfolk it would also be worth sideboarding in here as well, because it can bounce a Progenitus to the owner’s hand if they are able to force through a Show and Tell.

Playing Against Naya Zoo
Naya Zoo is both a popular and well performing deck, and because of the efficiency and speed of every one of their spells this can be a tough matchup if they get a fast draw. As noted above, if you expect a lot of Naya Zoo in your area it is probably worth ramping up the number of Rhox War Monks and maybe even Loxodon Hierarchs, as these can both present critical life buffers to swing games back your way after the Zoo player comes out fast and aggressive. Loxodon Hierarch in particular can be brutal when landing, because it effectively functions as a 3-for-1 against Zoo, because it negates 1-2 of their burn spells and will also block and kill one of their creatures (or draw a Path to Exile out). When sideboarding with the list above this is what I would recommend:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Noble Hierarch
-2 Ponder

Having access to as many Swords and Paths as possible for sideboarded games is important, as these can knock out early Wild Nacatls and Tarmogoyfs to buy you time to set up, or to clear an opposing Qasali Pridemage from the board if you have a Survival to drop and go nuts with. Kira is great in this matchup as they will have to use two removal spells to get rid of it if they want to be able to combat the rest of your creatures on a one for one basis with their removal spells. Spellstutter Sprite can be great at countering an important Path to Exile or Lightning Bolt from the opponent to try to remove your War Monks, so I would keep them in hand until necessary.

I like to leave in Qasali Pridemage in this matchup, because aside from the Exalted bonus it can provide to your Tarmogoyf or Rhox War Monk it can also destroy Sylvan Library or more importantly Umezawa’s Jitte if the opponent brings it in against you. Ponder is really your weakest card here, so while I don’t like siding out Blue cards that can find cheap answers, it’s actually better to just draw more threats and removal than to have to dig for it when you’re racing against the clock that Zoo presents. Along these lines one might ask why not side out Survival, but if you can land a Survival you should win the game, and Zoo has no counterspells to prevent you from landing Survival if you draw it. Chaining out War Monks or even the Retainers into Iona combo is fantastic here.

Another debatable sideboarding option here is to board out your 4 Force of Will and try to become the midrange deck and just have better threats than your opponent. Instead of siding out Ponders and creatures you could drop the Forces and then just play creatures, removal, and use your Ponders and Brainstorms to dig for removal and Survivals. Pitching any of your Blue creatures to Force can really suck your resources out on the first or second turn here, so it is worth consideration.

Playing Against Goblins
Like Zoo, Goblins is a fast an aggressive deck that you will need to fight to stay alive early and then stabilize by dropping creatures that are bigger than theirs. Tarmogoyf, Rhox War Monk, Swords to Plowshares, Qasali Pridemage, and Force of Will are all very good cards that you have main deck against Goblins, and with the list above we have some decent sideboarding options:
+2 Path to Exile
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Spellstutter Sprite
-1 Spell Snare

Depending on the build of Goblins you are facing Spell Snare can be very good or very bad. If they are playing some number of things like Stingscourger, Umezawa’s Jitte, Mogg War Marshall, or Warren Weirding in addition to the standard 4 copies of Goblin Piledriver this can greatly increase the value of Spell Snare. Siding it out or not will be based on what you’ve seen and what you expect, but in the example above I’ve sided out 1 copy.

Playing against Goblins is relatively straight forward. You obviously don’t want Goblin Lackey to connect and start dropping creatures in for free, so Swords, Path, and Force are your best friends here. Your opening hands will greatly dictate how these games play out, because for example if you have a Qasali Pridemage you may be far more inclined to let an AEther Vial resolve, or if you are on the play and have a first turn Noble Hierarch to power out a second turn Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf you will probably let a Goblin Lackey resolve and not blink an eye.

My main recommendations here would be to fetch basic lands whenever possible to play around Wasteland, and to use Swords and Paths to handle Goblin Lackey and Goblin Warchief. Try to save your Force of Wills for Goblin Ringleader if at all possible, because the card advantage it provides can really push the Goblins player ahead. Obviously if you have the Survival draw chaining Loyal Retainers into Iona naming Red can be backbreaking against the Goblins player, and if you have Survival and can buy yourself the turns I would strongly recommend this.

Playing Against CounterTop
As the weeks and months pass by there seem to be more and more CounterTop variants popping up, but not nearly as many people playing the deck in terms of a percentage of the field at large Legacy tournaments. Development is splintering into a lot of different directions, but not nearly as many people seem to be playing it or playing it successfully. The kill condition will almost always be Tarmogoyf plus whatever else (whether it’s Dark Confidant, Vedalken Shackles, Natural Order into Progenitus, etc.), and they will seek to lock out an opponent with Counterbalance coupled with Sensei’s Divining Top.

Against these decks your Qasali Pridemages and Trygon Predator will shine and you will obviously want to bring in whatever number of Krosan Grips you are packing, but what else? The answer is that it really depends on what you’ve seen or expect from their deck. The more non-creature spells they have the stronger Spell Pierce becomes, and if they are playing Natural Order your Meddling Mages can be more potent as well. Depending on your opening hand and how aggressive their build is this can dictate how aggressive you are. Major things to watch out for (besides CounterTop) are Threads of Disloyalty, Vedalken Shackles, Dark Confidant, and Natural Order.

One last thing to note about these decks is that they are relatively slow, and so if you think they are packing Daze it is worth keeping your mana open and playing around their potential Dazes to cut off half of their counterspells and to make sure your spells stick. If you don’t think they are packing Daze then you can push the envelope and try to resolve spells before they have CounterTop in play or maybe when they’re tapped out to avoid Spell Snare if they are running that. Landing a single Survival of the Fittest after baiting with stuff like Tarmogoyf and Rhox War Monk can be a very strong line of play for you that will lead to a quick win.

Playing Against Canadian/Tempo Threshold
Like Goblins, the Threshold player will try to attack your manabase, so if you can help it you should be fetching for basic lands whenever possible, and when fanning open your starting hands keep Stifle and Wasteland in mind when determining if your hand is keepable. Because of this and the Merfolk match I’m considering tweaking the manabase slightly to drop 1 Tropical Island and adding 1 more basic Forest, which will help make your manabase more bulletproof. You realistically don’t need to be fetching multiple Tropical Islands in a game very often, so it merits serious consideration.

Most of the Tempo Threshold decks are only playing Lightning Bolt and Fire/Ice for removal, so you need to be weary of how you engage in creature combat in these games. Losing two of your creatures to a Fire/Ice after combat damage can easily lose you a game. Another combat trick to keep in mind is thinking you’ll have a bigger guy than theirs and attacking, only to have the Threshold player Stifle the Exalted trigger from one of your Noble Hierarchs. Be careful and play cautiously here. Also be on the lookout for opposing Submerges from the Threshold player after sideboarding (if they’re good they’ll do it in response to you sacrificing a fetchland to shuffle away your dude). This is how I would sideboard with the list above:
+3 Spell Pierce
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Path to Exile
-2 Ponder
-1 Trygon Predator
-2 Qasali Pridemage

Some people will have a tendency to side in too many Swords/Paths against an opposing Threshold player. I don’t think you need more than 5 or a max of 6, because you can’t target their Nimble Mongooses and the only thing you’ll really need them for is Tarmogoyf and possibly Trygon Predator or Vendilion Clique. Some of the European builds are running Grim Lavamancer, and if you do see that then it will definitely be worth siding the additional Paths. Just don’t go overboard here and end up with dead cards if you can help it.

The Threshold player will have a counterspell base 4 Spell Snares and 4 Force of Wills to deal with your Tarmogoyfs and Survivals, and may be siding in Spell Pierce and/or Red Elemental Blast in lieu of Daze. You have a number of similar size threats to them, but if you can bait and then land a Survival it will push the game out of reach, so take your time in this match and play around Daze or Spell Pierce if you can afford it.

Playing Against Dredge
Similar to the Dream Halls matchup, Tarmogoyf is just a regular dude in this matchup and doesn’t really do anything to cripple the opponent or prevent them from going off like some of your other creatures can. He’s got a big backside and can block or swing through all the opponent’s creatures, but he doesn’t prevent the Dredge player from continuing their game plan. Noble Hierarch accelerates but doesn’t provide much else against a match that you generally don’t need much mana against. Outside of a Breakthrough for 2 mana Spell Snare is also pretty underwhelming in this matchup. With this in mind, this is how I would sideboard with the list above:
+3 Spell Pierce
+2 Path to Exile
+2 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Faerie Macabre
+1 Gaddock Teeg
+1 Meddling Mage
+1 Rhox War Monk
+1 Loxodon Hierarch
-3 Spell Snare
-4 Noble Hierarch
-2 Tarmogoyf
-1 Eternal Witness
-1 Trygon Predator
-1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner

Dredge generally needs their few creatures available to either beat you down or to start generating tokens with Bridge From Below. Your Paths and Swords can be really handy in removing their Ichorids, Bloodghasts, and Narcomoebas from the game to even prevent them attacking or getting tokens. Relic of Progenitus is probably the best anti-Dredge card available, and Faerie Macabre can remove critical cards and is obviously better than what you’re siding out. As for the other cards, Gaddock Teeg can shut down Dread Return, and Rhox War Monk and Loxodon Hierarch can provide a life buffer and a big backside to either hold off opposing creatures or to swing through with the win. Spellstutter Sprite isn’t great here, but it can counter the Chain of Vapors, Pithing Needles, Firestorms, or whatever opposing hate cards the opponent will bring in.

My plan in this matchup is most often to stay alive to either swing through with Rhox War Monk and gain a lot of life, or to land a Survival and pump out the Loyal Retainers into Iona combo and name Black to shut down or dramatically slow down the opponent. If you suspect they will be bringing in Leyline of the Void or Pithing Needle against you to shut down Survival you can always sideboard in Krosan Grip instead of something like Spellstutter Sprite or the 2 remaining Tarmogoyfs.

Playing Against Lands.dec
Depending on the opening hand for the Lands player they will try to come out extremely fast (first turn Manabond, dump hand, start dredging back Life From the Loam), or they will have to take a few turns to set up with Gamble and/or Intuition and start trying to grind out board advantage. In this matchup both Iona and Kira, Great Glass-Spinner are your maindeck trump cards. Kira prevents them from using Maze of Ith and Barbarian Ring effectively, and Iona can just name Green to shut off the Loam engine.

The Lands player will seek to drop their combo pieces and also seek to weaken your manabase. Fetch basic lands to play around Wasteland and use Noble Hierarch to try to play around Rishadan Ports. Their Tabernacle of the Pendrell Vale is obviously very good at tying up your mana resources, but it’s not backbreaking if you don’t overextend into it. Play smart and aggressively use your Ponders and Brainstorms to dig for a Survival to try to lock up the game. Here’s how I would look at siding against this match:
+3 Spell Pierce
+2 Relic of Progenitus
+1 Faerie Macabre
+1 Meddling Mage
-2 Rhox War Monk or Tarmogoyf (depending on number of Blue cards you want for Force)
-1 Eternal Witness
-3 Spell Snare
-1 Swords to Plowshares

Spell Snare is marginal here because the only thing it counters in their deck is Life from the Loam (which keeps coming back) and potentially Burning Wish if they play that (but that’s mostly relegated to AggroLoam nowadays). Spell Pierce does a better job in the first couple of turns by possibly keeping them off of an early Manabond, Exploration, Gamble, or Intuition. Spellstutter Sprite can also prevent their important 1 casting cost spells from resolving, so it also relevant here. Swords to Plowshares is hit or miss because it can only hit their man lands, but it removes a lot of their win conditions and also serves as land destruction, and can clear out a blocker at a critical juncture. I’m torn on its value because I don’t like sitting around with multiple Swords in my hand here, so I’m currently siding out 1, but that could change based on the exact configuration of the opponent’s deck and the better feel I get for how this plays out. Relic of Progenitus is obviously very powerful for you in this match, but keep in mind they’ll probably be siding in Krosan Grip for your Survivals and graveyard hate.

Other Tips and Strategy
You may notice that I rarely sideboard out Eternal Witness, and this is for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that Witness can easily get back a destroyed Survival once your opponent tries to get rid of it with the hate they have inevitably sided in. The second reason is that it basically acts like a Time Walk against a lot of decks, because it gets back a nice card for you (probably an important creature, a Swords to Plowshares, or a Force of Will) while acting as a blocker or can trade with the opponent’s attacking creature.

Your sideboarding will obviously depend a lot on how you construct your deck and sideboard, as well as what is very prevalent in your local metagame, but hopefully this article has served as an insight into playing against some of the most common matches you’re likely to see. For a lot more discussion on the subject check out the fantastic Bant Survival thread on TheSource, where posters Jak, Waikiki, Kuma, Windux and others have provided a lot of insight. Join us again next time as we’ll delve into some alternative and outside-the-box sideboarding strategies for Bant Survival.

Survival of the Fittest has long been one of the most powerful spells available in the Legacy format. Decks such as RecSur, Full English Breakfast, Angry Tradewind Survival, RGB Survival Advantage, Survival Elves, Welder Survival, and countless other variants have all utilized the powerful tutoring capability and overwhelming card advantage that Survival of the Fittest can provide. A relative newcomer to the scene, Bant Survival is the latest in a long tradition of decks that seek to abuse the powerful Green enchantment. Coupling the power of Survival with the strengths of the Bant archetype, this contender has been tearing up European tournaments for the past year and is starting to rear its head across the ocean in the United States now as well.

So what exactly makes up modern Bant Survival? Typically these decks are all Blue/Green/White (Bant) and utilize the most efficient spells Bant colors have to offer. Swords to Plowshares and Path to Exile provides the most efficient removal in the Legacy format, Force of Will and Brainstorm are some of the most efficient and powerful spells Blue has to offer, and no one could seriously mention creatures without bringing up Tarmogoyf. So what else makes up these decks?

Creatures
Most Survival of the Fittest decks have a tendency to be relatively light on lands, but be very mana hungry to power up Survival and power out creatures. For this reason the older variants often included some mix of mana producers and accelerants in the form of Birds of Paradise, Llanowar Elves, Wall of Roots, Quirion Ranger, and/or Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary. With the Alara Block came the printing of Noble Hierarch, who seems custom made for this deck, as it provides colored mana to accelerate spells out faster, pitches to Survival, and is equipped with the Exalted mechanic to make your creatures bigger in the omnipresent Tarmogoyf standoffs that frequent Legacy. Alara Block also brought another Legacy staple to the scene in the form of Qasali Pridemage, which has really single handedly changed the Legacy landscape. It also is quite mana efficient and equipped with the Exalted mechanic to make your creatures swing harder, but where it really shines is dealing with problematic enchantments and artifacts such as Counterbalance, Sigil of the Empty Throne, Seismic Assault, Survival of the Fittest, Vedalken Shackles, Phyrexian Dreadnought, Arcbound Ravager, Chrome Mox, and countless others. This has balanced the format and has brought back true aggro strategies from the face of extinction (Naya Zoo, for example).

Aside from these Bant staples, the deep card pool in Legacy has nearly limitless options when it comes to Survival applications, so let’s take a look at some of the other creature options when crafting a Bant Survival deck for our local scene.
Rhox War Monk – an efficient body with a big back side out of Lightning Bolt range, the lifelink and pitchability to Force of Will are the key factors that make this a near unanimous choice for Bant aficionados. The more Naya Zoo and aggro decks you see, the more Rhox War Monks you tend to include.
Spellstutter Sprite – while this will never have the power in this deck that it does in Faeries decks, Spellstutter can provide protection from key removal spells, and can also improve the match against Storm-based combo decks. Some oft-seen spells that can potentially be problematic for Bant which Spellstutter Sprite can help address include: Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Kird Ape, Wild Nacatl, Spell Snare, AEther Vial, Grindstone, Stifle (on Loyal Retainers, Qasali Pridemage, or Exalted trigger, for example), Dark Ritual, Orim’s Chant, Silence, Xantid Swarm, Pithing Needle, Relic of Progenitus, and more. The drawback with Spellstutter is that it requires you to keep mana open and not be as aggressive with the deck, but with the aforementioned list of spells that it can counter you can see why it is often included by Bant pilots.
Trygon Predator – this is an absolute beast against some decks, and can really help shore up some of the deck’s weak spots. While Qasali Pridemage is really good at what it does, what it doesn’t do is keep destroying cards every turn like this can. A lonely Trygon can single-handedly wreck the board of an opposing Stax deck, Enchantress deck, Affinity deck, Painter’s Servant decks, and turn around unfavorable matchups once he starts swinging. Predator can also help deal with cards like AEther Vial, Umezawa’s Jitte, and Back to Basics from an opposing Merfolk player, helping to even out an otherwise tough (and common) matchup.
Eternal Witness – card advantage is a key concept of both Magic and Survival decks, and Witness does a fantastic job of providing card advantage. It will most often grab a destroyed or countered Survival of the Fittest or other threat, and can be key in grabbing a timely Brainstorm or Swords to Plowshares.
Vendilion Clique – another efficient body with a useful effect, Clique often finds its way into Bant decks as a 1-2 of, and can help go aggro or fly over ground standoffs. It is very useful against combo and control, but less so against aggro when you’ve spent 3 mana for a creature and your opponent will just spend 1 mana to Bolt or Path it in response to the comes into play ability.
Kira, Great Glass-Spinner – the inclusion of this in any main deck serves as protection to removal heavy decks in the field (Naya Zoo, Landstill, Tempo Threshold, BGW, etc.), and it is fantastic at what it does, which is protect your creatures. One notable interaction is also the protection it provides your creatures from Maze of Ith, which is one of the main tools that the powerful Lands.dec has against you.
Loyal Retainers + Iona, Shield of Emeria – while these cards basically do nothing on their own, their interaction with Survival is what makes them extremely powerful, and can often turn losing game states into winning ones. Shutting off all removal from an opponent, or the ability of the Merfolk player to play Blue spells, or the ability for Loam decks to cast Green spells, or Storm combo to cast Black or Blue spells are all extremely powerful interactions that make the inclusion of this two card combo very strong.
Squee, Goblin Nabob – this is a staple of Survival decks as the ability to keep coming back and provide continued fodder for Survival activations means it’s an auto-include.
Genesis – like Squee, Genesis can provide card advantage and also provides a great long game against control decks by bringing back threats from your graveyard, but is relatively mana hungry in a deck without Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary. It also doesn’t do much to address problematic matchups and scenarios for Bant Survival in general.
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary – the mana boost that this card can provide is noteworthy, but it really only shines when used in conjunction with Anger, Masticore, and/or Genesis. The trend in Survival deck building theory lately has been to exclude as many cards that are Survival dependent as possible (unless the effect is truly broken, like with Iona), so you will rarely see people include Rofellos in their Bant Survival decks as they are currently constructed.
Gaddock Teeg – shutting down all X spells and spells that cost more than 3 mana (including your own Force of Wills) is a very powerful effect in Legacy, as this often cripples combo deck, control decks, Dread Returns, Engineered Explosives, and more. This is very good, but is best used when in conjunction with other hate cards to create a barrier against your opponent’s line of attack.
Meddling Mage – one of the most skill intensive cards in Magic, this can shut down entire strategies or specific lines of play and individual cards that can hurt you. Bant pilots will often include 1-3 copies of this between the main deck and Sideboard, depending on how they feel about using the card, and also how much combo they expect to face.
Ethersworn Canonist – another useful tool in shutting down combo, this can also be used in combination with Kira, Great Glass-Spinner to form a hard lock on any targeted removal of your creatures (but obviously does nothing against mass sweepers such as Firespout).
Rafiq of the Many – this card can often create wins out of nowhere, turning your otherwise 4/5 vanilla Tarmogoyf into a 5/6 double-striking behemoth, or can create single-turn victories by turning Iona into a 8/8 flying double-striking winner. While easily removed, the effect that Rafiq can have with a creature such as Rhox War Monk is undeniably powerful, and curries favor among many Bant players because of the ability to steal wins from otherwise losing positions.
Llawan, Cephalid Empress – while this card is very narrow in application, what it provides is incredibly powerful. The effect that Llawan provides against Merfolk or an opposing Progenitus can make this a very important sideboard card.
Jotun Grunt – the 4/4 body is a nice complement to the graveyard cleaning ability that Grunt provides. He can also recycle threats from your graveyard back into your deck, but is relatively slow at cleaning out an opponent’s graveyard, and does relatively little to prevent a Dredge or Loam opponent from dredging a lot in one turn.
Loaming Shaman – like Grunt, this card provides a powerful effect, but it simply does it once when coming into play, and doesn’t permanently remove Bridge From Belows, opposing Squees, or anything else. It merely pumps them back into an opponent’s library, which might be good for the surprise effect in a single turn, but is not very good over the long haul.
Faerie Macabre – this graveyard removal effect is permanent, and can’t be countered (only Stifled or Trickbinded), so while this relies on Survival being in play to find most often, it usually ends up in Bant Survival sideboards because the other options are also fundamentally flawed.
Trinket Mage – this can find a number of useful artifacts like Pithing Needle or Engineered Explosives (or even Grindstone if you wanted to include Painter’s Servant and really try to be cute), but as mentioned with Rofellos, the trend in Survival construction has been to move away from cute tricks and toolbox packages and towards making the deck more consistent and powerful when Survival is not in play.

AEther Vial, Daze, Spell Pierce, Spell Snare, or other?
There are a handful of available slots when looking at options besides creatures in Bant Survival, and some people will often fill these slots with either AEther Vial or another form of counterspell or protection. While AEther Vial is great at slipping creatures in under counters and creating cute combat tricks, it really doesn’t do much to advance the agenda of Bant Survival’s strategy, which is to either overrun the opponent with threats or to play out threats and protect them. Another counterspell will go a long ways towards protecting you from the opponent as well as increasing the number of Blue cards to potentially pitch to Force of Will. Daze, Spell Snare, and Spell Pierce are most often under consideration for slots in aggro-control decks, so let’s examine what they can each provide.

When choosing amongst the three options above for additional protection in the deck, one must ask what the spell must do and what it will accomplish in its role. Daze is often best within the first two turns of a game, when forcing through an important early spell or stopping the opponent from curving out an explosive draw in the early turns. This will force you into fetching a Blue producing land very early and set you back a land drop when cast, which must be carefully weighed in a mana hungry but land-light deck such as Bant Survival.

Spell Pierce is relatively limited in that it can’t stop creatures from landing on the board (which will nibble away at your life and thus provide you less turns), but it can also be used to force through an important early spell (like a Blue Duress, essentially), and can also stunt the development of important early plays from opposing decks (such as Counterbalance, AEther Vial, Force of Will, Manabond, etc.). It is naturally very good against combo decks, as they generally rely on either chaining together cheap spells or hitting a certain mana point and then casting a powerful spell (Show and Tell, for example). For this reason it would probably be better served as a sideboard card against these matchups, as Legacy is a creature-centric format in general and this does nothing to address that.

Spell Snare is relatively limited as a counterspell in that it can only stop spells with a converted mana cost of 2, but a large chunk of the Legacy format’s best spells are ringing in at the 2 mana slot. Problematic spells for Bant Survival that could potentially be solved by Spell Snare include: Devastating Dreams, Counterbalance, Qasali Pridemage, Fire/Ice, Hymn to Tourach, Smallpox, Dark Confidant, Engineered Explosives for 2, Umezawa’s Jitte,Tarmogoyf, Lord of Atlantis, Arcbound Ravager, Survival of the Fittest (mirror), Painter’s Servant, Standstill, and a few others. Because of this, I’ve chosen to go with Spell Snare in the listing I present below, as it just does the best job of dealing with these potentially problematic cards, and there is no playing around a Spell Snare like there is by waiting another turn to make a land drop and then play around Daze.

Mana Sources
As noted above, Noble Hierarch is a natural fit as a mana source for this deck, and can help reduce the number of lands to play. Most modern Survival variants play 18-20 lands, depending on what other search and accelerants they sport. In the version below I have 19 lands, which I feel is a good number with the amount of cantrips (Brainstorm and Ponder) also being employed. While any deck may occasionally get mana flooded, it is very important to hit your land drops early with this deck, and also to have enough basic lands to play around Wasteland, Blood Moon, and Back to Basics. There is little reason not to have a solid manabase, because extra lands can always be shuffled away with Brainstorm or Ponder, but lack of lands can lead to game and match losses.

With all of this in mind, let’s take a look at a sample decklist.
Bant Survival 20101Q 1.0, by Jaco 02-01-2010
Business (41)
4 Brainstorm
2 Ponder
4 Force of Will
3 Spell Snare
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Tarmogoyf
2 Rhox War Monk
2 Spellstutter Sprite
2 Qasali Pridemage
1 Trygon Predator
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kira, Great Glass-Spinner
1 Loyal Retainers
1 Iona, Shield of Emeria
1 Squee, Goblin Nabob

Mana Sources (19)
4 Misty Rainforest
3 Windswept Heath
1 Flooded Strand
4 Tropical Island
2 Savannah
1 Tundra
2 Forest
1 Plains
1 Island

Based on the options I’ve laid out above, this is a relatively straight forward main deck, balanced for an open tournament where I’ll expect to face against Aggro, Combo, Control, and any other random decks that you run across in tournaments. There is no over-reliance on Rhox War Monk, Spellstutter Sprite, or Survival, and the deck’s manabase is constructed to be able to fetch any basics I may need and also play very well with Brainstorm and Ponder. Here’s a sample sideboard to examine in conjunction with the deck above.
Sideboard A (15)
3 Spell Pierce
2 Path to Exile
2 Krosan Grip
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Faerie Macabre
1 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Meddling Mage
1 Rhox War Monk
1 Loxodon Hierarch

Spell Pierce, Canonist, Meddling Mage, and Gaddock Teeg is a nice suite of cards to bring in against combo, and things like Path to Exile and Rafiq are great against random tribal, aggro, and aggro-control decks. Hierarch is a pretty good card against aggro and combo alike, because the life boost is instant once it comes into play (unlike Rhox War Monk), and can really change the opponent’s calculations on how to deal with your life total. Other great sideboard options are extra Rhox War Monks, Relic of Progenitus, Llawan, Cephalid Empress, as well as catch-all answers like Propaganda, Pithing Needle, and Umezawa’s Jitte. Opponent’s will often target your graveyard and/or Survival of the Fittest, so options like a second Squee or more Eternal Witnesses can also provide value out of the sideboard to offset hate you might face. Like any deck, you’ll want to tailor your sideboard to shore up your weakest matchups that you actually expect to face that day in a tournament.

With these choices in mind you’re now armed with the knowledge of how to construct Bant Survival for your next tournament. Two massive Legacy Grand Prixs are on the horizon, as well as the StarCityGames $5K series, as well as countless large monthly tournaments across Europe and the USA. Join us again soon as we’ll take a look at how to actually play Bant Survival against common matchups you’re likely to see.