OK, so it looks like I have to eat a bit of crow here. In fact, I’ll order up a giant helping of the almighty Storm Crow in light of how seriously wrong I got this one.
Back during my set review for Khans of Tarkir, I majorly underestimated the eventual popularity of Treasure Cruise. I likened it to Skeletal Scrying, a card you could use maybe once per game to re-fill your hand in an attrition-heavy matchup. I also thought it would be too dangerous to play alongside Dark Confidant, which was the superior card in grindy matchups — perhaps I was right about that part, but I erred in thinking that a metagame full of grindy matchups was a prerequisite to people wanting this effect.
The Top 8 decks at Legacy Champs featured a whopping six Delver of Secrets decks with an incredible total of 18 copies of Treasure Cruise among them. The Top 8 contained every different flavor of Delver imaginable, from straight UR, to RUG (Temur), BUG (Sultai) and UWR (Jeskai). The decks running Young Pyromancer tended to want the most copies of Treasure Cruise. The RUG deck ran a full set of Cruise despite packing 3 Tarmogoyf, whereas the BUG variant ran only a single copy of Cruise alongside its playset of ‘Goyfs and Deathrite Shaman.
One of the axioms of deck construction I’ve long believed in is that card drawing spells gain power in proportion to the number of singletons you are playing. In Vintage, for example, the existence of the restricted list makes card-draw much stronger. Card-filtering spells like Brainstorm and Ponder are restricted in Vintage because they make it too easy for you to access your powerful restricted cards consistently, as are powerful card-drawing spells Thirst for Knowledge and Gifts Ungiven. At one point in recent history, Fact or Fiction was restricted as well. But all these cards have been considered “safe” for Legacy over the years. In Legacy, a draw-3 spell isn’t digging you toward your one copy of Yawgmoth’s Will or Tinker; rather you’re just drawing a land and two more spells similar in power level to the average spell in your deck. Unless incremental card advantage was relevant to the matchup, this may not always be worth your time and resources to do.
However, some decks really do just care about having a raw number of spells to advance their game plan. Burn decks have always been this way. If a Burn player can resolve six or seven spells, no matter what those spells are, he or she will hit the 20 damage mark and win the game. No surprise then to see that some Burn pilots — at least those without the budgetary restrictions often associated with Legacy Burn players — have adopted a blue splash for Treasure Cruise. Their cards have a flat power level, so drawing almost any three cards in their deck is pretty good.
Similarly, the adoption of Cruise in Young Pyromancer decks makes sense in hindsight. UR Delver plays very few singletons, instead opting for full sets of the most powerful burn spells, cantrips, and free countermagic available in the format. No matter what spells they draw, any of them will be worth damage with a Monastery Swiftspear or Pyromancer on the table.
Thankfully for those of us who like to go against the grain, many Legacy players over recent weeks have begun to explore fringe strategies designed to prey on Delver decks. In most cases, the centerpiece card making these decks possible is Chalice of the Void.
Resolving Chalice of the Void for X=1 will counter anywhere between 20 and 32 spells in a Delver deck. Think of it in the way that Moat provides virtual card advantage by blanking much of the opponent’s deck. If Moat resolves, the only spells my opponent plays that matter are spells that kill the Moat or creatures with flying. If Chalice resolves, the only spells that matter are spells that kill Chalice, or my opponent’s more expensive win conditions. As for spells that kill Chalice, only the BUG Delver decks will have anything that can handle one in the maindeck. Post-board, UR Delver will likely have only a couple copies of Smash to Smithereens, whereas the other variants might have additional spells such as Wear // Tear or Ancient Grudge.
Assuming the Chalice is relatively safe, all you really need now is a plan to deal with each deck’s 2-cmc win conditions: Tarmogoyf for the RUG and BUG decks, Stoneforge Mystic for the UWR lists, and Pyromancer in the pure Izzet builds. With Chalice in play, a Delver pilot’s access to cheap cantrips is cut off and they can only use their Cruises to dig for the small handful of relevant spells remaining to them. Of course, if you give them all the time in the world, they will eventually find something — a Pyromancer player can run all his 1-cmc spells straight into the Chalice just to generate tokens — so it would be nice if you could close the game quickly, perhaps with a combo kill.
This Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas deck from Legacy Champs puts all these elements together quite nicely:
UB Tezzerator by Zach Dobbin
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This build features two combos: Leyline of the Void-Helm of Obedience, and Thopter Foundry-Sword of the Meek. With Leyline in play, an activation of Helm (which must be activated for X equal to at least 1) will exile the opponent’s entire library, winning you the game unless he can kill you in his upkeep. Thopter-Sword is one of the more notorious combos of Old Extended, and saw a lot of play in Counterbalance decks before they evolved into the Miracles deck we know today. One mana will sacrifice the Sword (or any other artifact, if Sword is already in your graveyard) to the Foundry, putting a 1/1 into play, gaining a life, and returning Sword to play equipped to it. You can then repeat as often as you like, gaining life and creating an evasive fleet of tokens to easily race something like an opposing Young Pyromancer.
The knock against this kind of deck is that it’s notoriously inconsistent. I’ve played Chalice-Stompy style decks with Sol lands on many occasions in the past, and have been reluctantly forced to agree with that assessment. However, the several tutors appear to compensate for the decks swingy nature very well. There are 3 Transmute Artifact to trade off an unneeded mana rock and find a combo piece or a lock piece. Tezzeret, the Seeker can toss an Ensnaring Bridge, Trinisphere or Helm straight into play from your library. Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas can dig for combo and lock pieces, or make you some 5/5s to go crashing in for damage as a backup plan.
If you’re interested in this deck and want to check out more about it, there is a nice active thread developing the deck in the Legacy forums over at The Source. Players are experimenting with 3-color versions, more explosive versions running Mox Diamond, and ones running maindeck Blood Moon.
In a similar vein, we have this Forgemaster MUD deck from Grand Prix New Jersey:
Forgemaster MUD by Joseph Santomassino
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Although lacking the tutor ability of Dobbins’ Tezzerator list, this traditional Metalworker deck managed to fight through fifteen rounds of Swiss and over 4,000 players to make Top 8! Full playsets of the soft-lock pieces ensure early disruption, while the set of Kuldotha Forgemaster give you a “combo” kill by Tinker-ing up good ol’ Blightsteel Colossus — possibly winning right away via Lightning Greaves.
In Vintage, Workshops are a pillar of the format and everybody comes prepared with ample artifact hate. You’ll see maindeck Ancient Grudge and sets of Ingot Chewer in sideboards routinely in that format. Legacy, on the other hand, is not quite as prepared to hate this strategy out.
Moving to Magic Online, we have this… umm… interesting list, which finished 3-1 in a recent Daily Event:
Junk Stax by Lejay
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Hoo-boy! Wow. Where to even begin?
So, we have a hybrid deck crossing the Artifact Stax plan (sets of Chalice and Trinisphere plus mana acceleration) with a Green Sun’s Zenith toolbox. And then it gets even more interesting. Four maindeck Choke? Some folks feel like they have to make excuses for maindecking a couple Pyroblast, but this guy just lays it all out there and says, “I know you will all be playing Islands, and for this crime I will destroy you.”
The rarely-seen Rolling Spoil is a nice kick in the teeth to both UR Delver and Death & Taxes, though I’m not sure if destroying the land is worth paying a 2-mana premium over the more versatile Golgari Charm. It does help back up the mana-restriction plan, but still seems narrow, expensive and clunky. Of course, these decks are where “narrow, expensive and clunky” gets to shine…
…such as this doozy of a card. Titania, Protector of Argoth wasn’t really on my RADAR during my Commander 2014 set review. I usually like my 5-drops to do a bit more than this and not die to Lightning Bolt. The deck’s Chalices and 3-Balls do provide a bit of protection, of course. If you resolve Titania, you can get back a land you pitched to Mox Diamond, or perhaps a Wasteland to immediately kill an opposing dual land and get a second 5/3 for your trouble. I suspect this is a card he was just trying out for kicks, but it certainly seems fun, and that’s honestly one of the best-selling points for this kind of deck.
The sideboard is highly amusing. We have a sideboard Taiga in here to cast the two sideboard Pyroclasms, and that’s probably the most conventional choice in this motley crew of role players. I must confess that I love the idea of using Stingerfling Spider to knock off a Griselbrand or Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. But I have no clue what Giant Solifuge is doing in here. Is there a deck that has no creatures to block this and can’t interact with it? In theory, this sort of creature is nice against opposing planeswalkers, as I once used Falkenrath Aristocrat against Jace in Vintage. But Miracles has Terminus to deal with this, and everything else will either ignore it or block and trade with it easily.
Finally, we have an old favorite, Lands. This list finished Top 8 at the SCG Legacy Open in Richmond last weekend:
Lands by David Long
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Apparently 43Lands.dec has lost eight lands in recent years. Anytime a bunch of land goes missing, I usually rush to blame the people of Oklahoma, given their track record — Google what a “Sooner” actually is, you may be surprised. But in this case, the culprit for the missing land are playsets of Punishing Fire and Crop Rotation. Gamble has now replaced Intuition as the tutor of choice, giving you access to Life from the Loam whether it lands in your hand or your discard pile.
In years past, Lands often ran a full set of Chalice in the sideboard, owing to a legendarily awful combo matchup. These days, the plan is to race with your own combo, Dark Depths + Thespian’s Stage. This is not a particularly fast combo, so aiding the race is a full set of Sphere of Resistance to be brought in.
Lands absolutely demolishes creature decks and has always been fairly strong against countermagic. The Punishing Fire-Grove of the Burnwillows combo cements this strength even further. Older versions used to run a Zuran Orb to help out against burn spells, but David Long appears to be leaning heavily on the Glacial Chasm to buy him a temporary reprieve from direct damage long enough to set up the combo win.
If you’re interested in playing this deck online, the good news is that The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale is about 1/40th the price it is in paper. The bad news is… yeah, that’s a full set of Rishadan Port. Ouch.
Finally, I want to end briefly on a personal note. A couple weeks ago, my grandfather unexpectedly passed away. He fought for my country in Korea, and later fought to protect our streets from crime as a Captain Detective in the police department. He adopted my mom at a young age when a lesser man abandoned her, and he raised her as his own. He was a role model for me at every stage of my life, and helped shape how I thought about what it is to be a man, and what a man can be in this world.
My grandfather went to war as a teenager. He was being shot at by enemy soldiers at an age when I was doing keg-stands and girl-watching from a park bench all day at college. If anybody could have been expected to “put away childish things” when he became a man, it would be him. And indeed, I wouldn’t have wanted to try to explain Magic to him, with all these goofy dragons and elves and such.
But this is also the man who taught me to play poker, blackjack, euchre and rummy. He took us on cart-rides around the farm, taught us to ride ponies, and how to fish. He even laughed as we’d toss dirty socks at the ceiling fan hoping to see one go flying at somebody. He’d constantly joke with my grandma like they were Ray Romano’s sitcom parents. For a man everyone would describe as a pretty serious guy, I’ll remember another side to him. You can be an adult with all the complex and serious responsibilities that come with that, but still find charm in a few childish things. Thanks for everything pops, I’ll miss you.
This isn’t up to me to say, but thank you for the ending note about your grandfather, who from your very eloquent and descriptive memories comes off like an upstanding citizen, father, and the provider of many services. We all, man or woman, could learn something from reading just those few paragraphs, so thank you for writing them.
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As for the rest of the article, it looks like the meta-game is afoot.
Sorry to hear about your Grandfather.
Thanks guys, appreciate it.