If you came looking for my ongoing MTGO adventures, you'd normally be right on for a digital read about the digital realm. This week, however, is a little different. Star City Games Open: D.C. was in my hometown this past weekend and, as I've shared before, I try not to miss chances to hit up the big shows. They're always a great time, and certainly a great way to meet folk and make trades. Standard stuff.

Except this time was a little different: I had come to game. No, you read that correctly and understood what I meant directly. I sleeved up a sixty-plus-sideboard and put my mettle to the test. Casual? Commander? Cube?

Did I go off the deep end?

In short, yes, but the story is more colorful than that. This won't be a normal, average tournament report or a comical bad- or sick-beats rundown, lampooning everything in reach. I'm still a casual guy and I still love casual Commander. I'm a man cut from a cloth of honor. I was there to pick up a few lessons and have some fun with the Magic equipment of high-powered rifles.

But it's the itch to push a little further that brought me to bat at the hometown event. That, and having an outlet for all the pent-up discard and land-destruction efforts I've restrained elsewhere can be a cathartic experience.

So there's no confusion there, it means I was playing Legacy.

The Diving Board

Legacy is a deep format with an incredible ecosystem of decks. There are a handful of powerful predators splashing around the top tier, with packs of smaller dangers lurking right behind them. Coming in cold is, generally speaking, a poor decision, except where player skill can compensate for prior experience.

Since I don't have prior experience, it's clear that I'm off my rocker. At least I brought a coin-flip win deck, right?

"Junk"

• Creatures (12)
• 4 Tarmogoyf
• 4 Knight of the Reliquary
• 4 Dark Confidant

• Spells (25)
• 3 Mox Diamond
• 4 Swords to Plowshares
• 4 Thoughtseize
• 4 Hymn to Tourach
• 2 Gerrard's Verdict
• 4 Vindicate
• 1 Pernicious Deed
• 3 Sensei's Divining Top

• Lands (23)
• 4 Wasteland
• 3 Scrubland
• 2 Bayou
• 1 Savannah
• 4 Marsh Flats
• 4 Verdant Catacombs
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Karakas
• 1 Maze of Ith
• 1 Horizon Canopy

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Engineered Plague
• 1 Pernicious Deed
• 2 Go for the Throat
• 1 Diabolic Edict
• 2 Duress
• 1 Bojuka Bog
• 2 Thrun, the Last Troll
• 3 Choke

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Well, that's . . . interesting.

Here's the deal: this isn't my list and it isn't my testing that contributed to it (and I'm sure I now owe Drew Levin my firstborn or something). But how Junk goes about the game is exactly the kind of approach I enjoy. Disruption, attacking hands and mana, followed up by beating down, is a consistent Cube draft strategy I follow.

No, I'm not comparing Cube to Legacy in the sense that playing the former gives you experience in the latter. What I mean is that the Green-Black-White strategies that are often found in Cubes share similar goals:

• Disrupt and prevent your opponent from interacting meaningfully
• Leverage powerful creatures for card advantage
• Attack with a difficult-to-answer threat backed up by more disruption
• Have the most universal answers available

It's a fairly straightforward and "honest" approach, at least as honest as play sets of Wasteland, Vindicate, Tarmogoyf, Dark Confidant, Knight of the Reliquary, and Swords to Plowshares can be. It's also an approach I truly enjoy.

Playing in a tournament doesn't have to mean grinding, testing, and picking only the best apparent deck, although that's certainly a powerful strategy to entertain. I wanted to have fun and I absolutely did. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Saturday: Crash Course

Saturday was quite an excellent day. Friend Eric Klug, of the @klug_alters fame, was around doing the painting things and picked up a few cards to do for me. I also had some of the usual trading and casual gaming throw-downs. Normal big event stuff happened, etc. Big events are awesome.

Two gaming sessions for Legacy occurred as well. The first was my freshly finished deck getting put through the grind of Next Level Thresh. Nothing like some tempo control to get your bearing set straight. His list was in a little flux as he was trying varying degrees of Red and/or White to go with the standard Blue-Green suite of Force of Will, Stifle, Daze, Tarmogoyf, and Wasteland.

While attacking the mana base through Wasteland and Stifle is similar to Junk's approach, the added benefit Stifle provides looked amazing in action, except when it spectacularly failed. Choosing what to Stifle and when is an incredibly complex series of evaluations that require both effective shortcutting of potential lines of play as well as a triggering recognition of when using it at all is wrong.

Guess what I plan to avoid piloting anytime soon.

To be fair, he felt very strongly that Junk was a difficult matchup for it. I lost most of the first half of games due to a combination of my inexperience and loose play. However, the second half of games (I flipped my sheet of paper over after six or so) I nearly swept, even winning a game where Gilded Drake resolved and took my Knight of the Reliquary.

What I want to point out here isn't my sick beats in casual Legacy (a doubly ironic idea in and of itself), but that he walked me through several decisions, discussed both my strategy and his, and helped bring me up to speed on some of the intricacies of the format.

Helpful players are helpful. If you are one, I thank you.

But unhelpful players can be just as entertaining. Consider the curious case of the all-in Standard Tempered Steel. Throwing Ornithopters and Signal Pests down, among other dirt-cheap Metalcrafty critters, and bashing in hard thanks to Contested War Zone and Tempered Steel.

I had some real trouble beating that deck. Ever. In, like, ten straight games.

Hyper-aggressive decks in Legacy are often geared around one creature type, like Goblin or Elf. And Engineered Plague is generally pretty sweet against these. Against the Standard deck, though, my normal recourse was worthless; Construct was the only creature type represented on more than four cards (in this case, eight).

While battling there wasn't helpful, it was a boatload of fun and a good lesson in both humility and why having byes at big tournaments is so useful. There are less of those wacky build decks the later you go—for a reason.

I wish I knew exactly why for each of those wacky decks.

Sunday Showdown

It was time to battle! As an added bonus, there were significantly fewer players on Sunday than the significantly-in-excess-of-posted-fire-code on Saturday. While that's usual, it's little consolation when there isn't any table to sit at; I enjoy the slightly slower atmosphere of the second day. It's great.

Round 1: Tom Swindell

Tom, it turned out, was a friend of a friend. He came in a car with a few others and happened to be battling with a Junk deck as well. His deck had two major differences:

• A suite of equipment
• Mirran Crusader

In case you forgot what one of the newest cards in Magic does, click on Mirran Crusader, then look back at my deck. Savagely, I had no creatures at all that could block it and, as an added bonus, was effectively immune to everything but Swords to Plowshares and the silver bullet, Maze of Ith.

"Junk and Taxes? by Tom Swindell"

• Creatures (22)
• 4 Mirran Crusader
• 4 Knight of the Reliquary
• 3 Qasali Pridemage
• 4 Tarmogoyf
• 3 Stoneforge Mystic
• 4 Noble Hierarch

• Spells (19)
• 4 Dark Confidant
• 4 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Umezawa's Jitte
• 1 Sword of Fire and Ice
• 3 Vindicate
• 4 AEther Vial
• 2 Chrome Mox

• Lands (20)
• 3 Horizon Canopy
• 2 Savannah
• 2 Bayou
• 2 Scrubland
• 1 Forest
• 1 Plains
• 4 Windswept Heath
• 2 Verdant Catacombs
• 3 Wasteland

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Gaddock Teeg
• 3 Krosan Grip
• 2 Path to Exile
• 1 Basilisk Collar
• 2 Bojuka Bog
• 4 Thoughtseize

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While I'm sure you may be expecting the obligatory "I rocked it out 2-0 baby!", the fact is that I got rocked 0-2. Mirran Crusader was a surprise in Game 1, catching me with my pants down when I was at lower life and without a Swords to Plowshares in sight after getting hit by triple Wasteland. Game 2 featured similar Wasteland action after he found double Dark Confidant and triple Noble Hierarch.

Woo!

In all actuality, Tom was a super-nice guy and playing against him was quite pleasant. I was really glad to face such a positive opponent to warm up.

Lesson: Junk is fun (for me)! His deck happened to get to do exactly what mine wanted. We had creatures battle, removal got slung around, cards were discarded, and some lands were binned, too. Everything I wanted to happen—happened.

I just happened to be on the "wrong" side. C'est la vie.

Round 2: Anwar Ahmed

Anwar was another friendly guy. His deck, however, wasn't as friendly. Hide Tide Combo is a silly time-intensive concoction leveraging Time Spiral for much of its value. Both games had only life loss due to fetch lands and him going off early. And despite bringing my copies of Duress, Bojuka Bog, and Choke for Game 2, I ran into the "I have to mulligan into lands on the play." Disappointment.

Anwar went on to rest just outside of Top 16, in eighteenth place.

Lesson: Deck-building in Legacy is easy! (Completely facetious statement. Really. Please don't make me repeat this one.) One of the casual formats my local game store ran for two months was multiplayer Peasant—decks of just commons and up to five uncommons—that excluded the preexisting banned list. What harm is there when there are multiple players?

"Peasant High Tide Combo"

• Creatures (8)
• 4 Cloud of Faeries
• 4 Mulldrifter

• Spells (29)
• 4 Frantic Search
• 4 Preordain
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 High Tide
• 4 Ponder
• 4 Snap
• 1 Feldon's Cane
• 4 Brain Freeze

• Lands (23)
• 23 Island

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The deck I built looked something like that. It needed to be tuned, and the original build was before Magic 2011 was out, but I'm sure Preordains and Ponders would make the deck today. I was able to nuke seven other players simultaneously by looping the deck back through with Feldon's Cane before casting all four copies of Brain Freeze, and I could reliably go off on turn five.

This is why Brain Freeze was banned when Peasant was popular. Now swap in Time Spiral, Merchant Scroll, Cunning Wish, Turnabout, and Blue Sun's Zenith where appropriate to visualize what Anwar had. "It's that simple!"

Round 3: Anthony Come

Anthony and I had an epic game . . . an epic forty-five minute game.

No, really.

He was playing Junk as well, along with most of the other players immediately adjacent to us at the bottom of the standings (a surefire sign of either "I picked the wrong deck" or "I don't know how to play Legacy"—likely both, in this case). Thanks to his plan to bump both Knight of the Reliquary and Terravore into astronomical-number territory, and my willingness to play along, his Swords to Plowshares kept my life total up as Dark Confidant eventually drew me out of the hole.

It just took a little while, and a lot of effort at not dying, to get there.

Lesson: Other players are usually pretty awesome. Going to almost time for just Game 1, and me wanting to sideboard before any Game 2, Anthony let me have the pass to continue battling. Like a boxer carrying the weight of defeated opponents in his gloves, I kept my very positive attitude going. Winning the day was likely out of the question, but losing completely wasn't happening.

Round 4: Eddie Davenport

Eddie knew his way around the board, having chosen Counterbalance as his deck. A veteran of many events, he was here to win but had fallen in a rough patch in the day. Thanks to some disruption on my part (Thoughtseize, Wasteland, and Vindicate) and some bad draws on his, I managed to get there for two games.

These two games went to time.

Lesson: Shortcuts of sorts exist at Competitive Rules Enforcement Level, but it's memorization that's important, as Eddie shared with me. Using a counter to mark the top of my library to remember to Top, not knowing immediately what land I wanted to fetch when cracking for them, and having to restate what I want to find when using Knight of the Reliquary's ability are all things that eat up time.

While I was clearly not trying to play slowly, which he pointed out to me, the lack of familiarity with my deck made me eat time hard. I wanted my games to go faster and, ultimately, I'm in charge of that. I don't like to waste time in multiplayer, and it's even more important in tournaments. I knew this already, but it wasn't until I was actually there that I felt it.

Round 5: Jarvis Yu

Like a video-game final boss, I knew this battle would be tough. Jarvis is a very good player. He's been around the globe playing Magic, and he's someone I have a healthy amount of respect for. In Scott Pilgrim terms, he's "that guy" for me.

And he came to battle too, packing Combo Elves.

Game 1 was a fine game. Despite a few missteps and misplays on my part, Jarvis almost decked himself. If I had drawn a Pernicious Deed against his swarm of little guys, I might have been in a little better shape, being able to fetch Maze of Ith and buy more time against Vengevines thanks to an active Knight of the Reliquary. Jarvis disagreed, and for you outside observers, I'd give him the benefit of the doubt here.

Game 2 was a bit of a stretch. Thanks to both Engineered Plague and Pernicious Deed, I was able to wrangle a little control of the board. Double Dark Confidant with an active Sensei's Divining Top helped, too. Despite some additional misplays on my part, Jarvis drew mostly blank cards long enough for me to beat down.

Game 3 started shortly before time in the round (see previous round for discussion) but Jarvis is a master-in-waiting and created a board position where I would be doing some dying shortly after the fifth extra turn, thanks to the foresight of Sensei's Divining Top without any shuffle effects available. I gladly gave Jarvis the go-ahead to battle on.

Lesson: Losing can be a great thing, too.

Jarvis was politely professional and provided insight as the games were played. He was also clear about what he was doing, and cleverly crafty in presenting it. He's the kind of player who serves as a role model to move after. Ending my day passing on the weight of those behind me to a man who could carry it much further is about as good as an ending can get.

And knocking down some writing so I could see the wife later on is pretty sweet, too. I'm only mortal, after all.

Make it Rain!

I loved playing a little Magic at a competitive event. It's certainly not something I want to do all the time, or even regularly, but continuing to practice (now that I have a complete deck and all) and learning even more about the game is something I'm always interested in.

I hope this little deviation from the digital realm was one worthwhile for you. I know I sure found it fun. Join me next week, when I'll follow up on some points raised in last week's comments, and get into some additional deck construction!