Sinkhole used to be awesome. I suppose in hindsight, it was actually unrestricted Strip Mines that were awesome, and Sinkhole was made to look awesome by association. But it was still pretty darn good. What happened?
Over the years, several things conspired to weaken sorcery-speed land destruction, even a competitively-costed spell like Sinkhole. The printing of the Onslaught fetchlands played a strong role, allowing people to play around opposing land destruction. But more than anything else, perhaps it was just the nature of eternal formats changing. Twenty years of printings have given us so many efficient spells that permit Legacy decks to meaningfully interact with an opponent with just a single land in play.
This efficiency (somewhat compelled by the lack of decent artifact mana, when compared to Vintage/Classic) is one of the defining features of the Legacy format. Despite that fact, there are actually quite a few expensive spells being slung about in Legacy these days. So, where are the land destruction strategies? Though there remain some fringe tier 2 strategies employing a heavy land destruction element (Pox, for example), most Legacy decks these days are limited to Wasteland as their sole mana denial option. Yet just a few years ago, bombin’ lands was an integral part of a top tier deck that regularly won big Legacy tournaments: Team America.
Team America (or “TEAM” as it’s sometimes called for the sake of brevity) was, in some respects, the BUG version of the old Canadian Threshold decks, Threshold being the deck that would evolve into RUG Delver as we know it today. Both decks relied on cheap, efficient threats backed up by free countermagic, had a solid mana denial plan, and operated on a low curve made possible in part by the presence of eight blue cantrips. But despite having many of the same pieces, the actual game plan was much different for TEAM. Canadian Threshold decks would stick an early threat and ride it to victory, trading cards for tempo and just trying to hold onto their advantage for that one last necessary turn. TEAM has a ton of tempo elements, but traditionally ran fewer threats, and only Tarmogoyf was capable of coming down early to create pressure. TEAM played much heavier disruption elements. Those TEAM builds were capable of having hands that play out like RUG Delver or hands that play out like a pure control deck.
TEAM, or at least something still called “Team America”, continues to be played today, but in a drastically different form. For today’s article, I have revived and playtested an older model of the deck to give you an idea what it was all about. There are several core elements to the deck that are near-fixtures, and then some options for customization. Let’s take a quick look at the deck’s foundation and the choices I made:
- Threats (8-10 slots). These generally include Tarmogoyf and Tombstalker, with a few other options. Many decks cannot handle a Tombstalker. His high converted mana cost dodges Abrupt Decay and allows you to cast him through Counterbalance-Sensei’s Divining Top. From previous experience with similar decks, I believe eight threats is too light, even with eight cantrips. I cut one ‘Stalker and added two Vendilion Cliques for additional disruption and aggression. One weakness of the traditional mix of ‘Goyf and ‘Stalker is that graveyard hate such as Rest in Peace practically decapitates your threats. Thus, some experimentation with alternative choices is warranted here.
- Countermagic (8 slots). Force of Will in a deck like this is a no-brainer. You need to use all your resources to attack theirs, and still have a fail-safe button. The deck has a heavy mana-denial plan, so Daze is pretty solid here as well.
- Cantrips (8 slots). Full playsets of Brainstorm and Ponder. With the mana base heavy on fetches, these offer great card selection. Heavy use of cantrips is favored over a raw card advantage engine, such as Dark Confidant, in no small part because the deck’s curve hurts a bit too much for Bob.
- Mana denial (8 slots). Stifle and Sinkhole – along with Wastelands – present some extremely difficult traps for the opponent to maneuver, especially when you are on the play. Players may evaluate their hands for Game 1 based on an ability to beat an early Wasteland, since that land is more widely played, but those same Wasteland-proof hands may go down in flames to the player with Stifle or Sinkhole. Not that knowing what’s coming makes it much easier. If the opponent wants to play a Turn 1 spell, they can to run out a fetch and risk being Stifled, or else run out a dual or basic and risk being hit by Sinkhole or Wasteland next turn. If they do go ahead and run something out on Turn 1, you have several free ways to deal with it, minimizing the tempo cost of spending your second turn (or second land drop) on the mana-denial plan.
- Flex choices (6-8 slots). You can go a few different ways with these remaining spots in your 60. You are probably interested in at least a few creature removal spells, which should be cheap and versatile with a slight preference for cheap. Snuff Out was commonly used in the past, though it had mixed results in my own testing. I ended up opting for a split of Snuff Out and Innocent Blood in the final list. I tried a couple Abrupt Decay here too because it was too good not to include despite the BG casting cost being sometimes difficult on my mana. You are planning to be able to cast Sinkhole anyhow, so the BB for Hymn to Tourach isn’t a stretch, and many players opt for some number of those. I like the spell, but because it’s a poor topdeck much of the time, I prefer usually to run 3-4 copies or none at all. Hymn is widely utilized in the newer variants of this deck, but I passed on it here.
- The mana base is all duals and fetches, but I knew I would want a basic Island to fetch on Turn 1 in some matchups so I added it as a 21st land.
To some extent, the fortunes of this deck follow those of Stifle, which is perhaps the definitive spell of the deck. The problem with Stifle has always been that it feels totally dead in some matchups, especially against budget or mono-color lists which are sometimes played in the 2-mans online. But you’d be surprised how often you get a card’s worth of value from Stifle, even in the unlikeliest of places. Here’s a quick list of interesting things I Stifled during my testing for this article: Stoneforge Mystic’s ETB trigger, the living weapon trigger on Batterskull, the trigger allowing my opponent to cast a suspended Rift Bolt after allowing the last time counter to be removed, the imprint trigger on Isochron Scepter, a Helm of Obedience activation, and miracle triggers. All of these things are at least sometimes worth a full card to do. That’s in addition to the more commonplace anti-combo uses that come up a fair bit, such as countering your opponent’s would-be-lethal storm trigger or Goblin Charbelcher activation.
Here is the final list I came up with, after a few days of hitting the 2-man Constructed Queue on MTGO:
Old School Team America by RexDart
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During testing, I made a few adjustments to the deck, and the sideboard is a product of that. There turned out to be relatively few combo decks in the 2-mans right now, so I used the sideboard mostly to help shore up the match against aggro. I contemplated a planeswalker threat of some sort in the sideboard against control because I find control often has problems dealing with those. Garruk Relentless was the first to come to mind because he’s easiest on the mana in terms of color commitment, but his 4cmc scared me away. In an alternate version of the deck with Deathrite Shaman, I could see that being possible, and it’s something you could definitely try. Liliana of the Veil would have been castable, but without any obvious synergies, I passed on her as well. She is still a fine weapon against control, but not exactly what I was looking for.
I think the creature suite also needs some work. As alluded to above, I would love to hear some suggestions for some beatsticks to try in this deck that don’t rely so much on the graveyard for their efficacy. The Trygon Predators in the sideboard were partly in response to this problem. They don’t provide a very fast clock, but they are evasive and disruptive and help significantly against the W/x hatebear-style decks that would be running, not only Rest in Peace, but also a host of equipment as well.
The videos will give you a quick deck tech walking through some of the choices discussed above, as well as two complete matches featuring RUG Delver and a mono-white RIP-Helm combo deck.
What creatures would you try that I didn’t think of? How do you think the mana-denial plan worked out? How do you like Team America compared to the other BUG lists out there? Give me your two cents (or if you must, your buck-oh-five) in the comments!
You can find me on Twitter @cjwynes.
In terms of beaters, the Vend Cliques seem really good but really awkward to cast off of the same mana sources that can make a Tombstalker happen. Is it possible that Deathrite might find a home instead of the Tombstalkers? Maybe that’s silly. He’s not exactly a beater, but he can end the game. I guess RIP still hoses him, too. I’ll have to give it some more thought.
I don’t see how this can compare to the raw power of cascading into ancestral vision. But thanks for the legacy videos
You could add phyrexian dreadnought to combo with the stifle… or not.
I’m curious as to why you didn’t Clique your opponent on draw step in round one, after he searched up helm.
I would love to see you take your decks into Legacy DE’s as you will see real competition there.
You stated yourself that you are seeing a lot of fringe / budget decks in 2 mans which isn’t a fair shake at the meta game therefore dilutes the quality of the videos we are watching.
otherwise good article and I love me some Team America (Although I am Canadian!)
Canada is still part of North America, Montolio.
Well that is true PW. I suppose that makes me feel somewhat better, however I don’t think Canadian Thresh would extend the same courtesy to our friendly neighbor’s.
Hey guys, thanks for all the comments!
I saw the Clique play when I re-watched the match. I think I had become focused upon using the Stifle and Abrupt Decay I had in hand to deal with his combo, to the exclusion of other options — you know how it is when you start thinking of a card in your hand as “earmarked” for a certain purpose, you don’t always stop to reevaluate it as often as you should. In any event, those spells were going to prevent him from winning unless he’d had Abeyance or Orim’s Chant, in which case he could have cast that spell during his upkeep and prevented me from Clique-ing the Helm out of his hand during the draw step anyhow.
Stifle-nought combo is something I was avoiding because the Dreadnought is useless on its own, and many decks now have solid ways to deal with one in play.
The Shardless Agent deck is a wholly different version of BUG, and it may be more powerful in some respects, but it also puts design constraints upon you, such as creating poor cascades if you include any countermagic other than FoW. I like that deck despite the constraints, it just wasn’t what I was testing out here.
As for Legacy DE’s, they aren’t very practical for me, I’m afraid. I agree there would possibly be better competition, but they require that I find one at a reasonably convenient time, block out 4 hours for the event, and then hope it actually fires which is no guarantee. I do want to make sure I have quality opponents, but I think that if I record a higher volume of 2-man’s I can likely find enough good competition and just filter out some of the chaff. I had a couple other matches against more typical Legacy decks, but they weren’t interesting enough to make the cut. For example, I had a game against Dredge where he was shut down by Leylines in both g2 and g3 and it would not have been fun or informative to watch that. I’m not saying I would never do a DE, but it can’t be the norm, and I’ll try to ensure quality videos in other ways.
I love me some legacy content.
Sadly, I think the list is pretty weak. RUG delver can run a mana denial plan (wastelands, stiffle, daze) because it can opperate on so little mana, can cast 80% of its spells of a single trop, and ideally can kill an opponent while disrupting them. This BUG list can’t do any of that.
Your build seems to try to first to disrupt the opponent in order to inevitably kill them when they are disrupted. This sounds like a fine recipe to lose to basically everything. Aggressive decks will put you on the defensive and often opperate better under mana constraints. Vials out of vial decks or rug in general are both problematic, burn seems worse. Controlling (stoneforge/miracles, BUG, four color control) decks will have more power and when you get to the inevitable long game, they won’t be drawing dead dazes, stiffles or sink holes. A single resolved swords to plowshares can stop you from killing them for ages since you are so threat light and those you do have aren’t as easy get online, protect and ride home to victory as RUGs are. The denial plan might work against certain types of combo, I guess, though wether it is better then discard in that instance…
Team America seems like a thing of the past, the meta game seems to have moved on to bigger and better things as a whole. And while tombstalker might have gotten a little better with abrupt decay, the plan as a whole seems to have gotten worse with a little gem from the same set, Deathrite shaman.
Play: Your play seems to be right on the “random mtgo dude” level. Nothing wrong with that, most people are, but it does mean some niggles and mistakes do creep into videos like these. Not sure if you want comments on that, but some examples should you care: Not immediatly blowing up the weird scrying thingy land your first round opponent played was weird. With top that thing said: draw 2 cards a turn (or at the very least never draw a land again) and you did not even mention it. Your brainstorms (yeah, I know, brainstorms are hard) are also pretty suboptimal. Game 2 of the RUG match you should definatly have gotten rid of 1 of the snuff outs, for example, since you were never casting both.
That being said. love me some legacy content, even with a deck that I do not think is viable anymore. Keep it up, I’d love to be proven wrong
I don’t see why you shuffled away tombstalker in round 2 game 1. I’ve played with delver Team America for about a year and I’ve learned that against rug stalker is one of the few threats they cannot answer outside of two bolts. Resolving a stalker is your main goal to victory in that matchup. Just wait for them to go low on cards and play it out with 1 mana up and fow backup.