With a card pool as deep as Legacy’s, there’s all manner of wacky combo decks waiting to be found. Sometimes these combos are completely new, but sometimes new context can breathe life into cards and engines that have existed for years. This week, Sam Pardee shows off a deck designed by Greg Hatch that features a new take on a Legacy classic:

Artificer's Intuition ? Legacy | Sam Pardee

• Creatures (4)
• 4 Salvage Titan

• Enchantments (4)
• 4 Artificer's Intuition

• Artifacts (40)
• 2 Locket of Yesterdays
• 3 Altar of the Brood
• 3 Helm of Awakening
• 4 Chromatic Sphere
• 4 Chromatic Star
• 4 Conjurer's Bauble
• 4 Lotus Petal
• 4 Lion's Eye Diamond
• 4 Mox Opal
• 4 Serum Powder
• 4 Sensei's Divining Top

• Lands (12)
• 4 Seat of the Synod
• 4 Vault of Whispers
• 4 Darksteel Citadel

• Sideboard (15)
• 2 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Pithing Needle
• 4 Defense Grid
• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 4 Brain Freeze

Buy This Deck

The key here is Greg Hatch found a newer card that replaces the typical win conditions of Brain Freeze or Tendrils of Agony. The problem with those pieces is they aren’t really a part of the engine of the deck, and so you’re priced into filling your deck with cantrips in order to assemble the right combination of combo pieces. Instead, Greg has replaced the typical Storm spell with Altar of the Brood. This seems like a small change on the surface, but fundamentally changes how you can build this deck.

The key is now you can fully commit to the artifact theme and use Artificer's Intuition to assemble the entirety of your combo. Artificer's Intuition can find Sensei's Divining Top, Altar of the Brood, and Locket of Yesterdays to combo off. The commitment to the artifact theme allows you to play cards like Mox Opal or even Thoughtcast if you were so inclined. The Locket plan even allows the likes of Conjurer's Bauble and Chromatic Star to become free-ish cantrips as the game goes on.

The strength of this style of combo deck is that it is fast, consistent, and resilient to many of the soft counterspells in the format, given your combo pieces are individually very cheap. The problem is you are very weak to an awful lot of splash hate. Everything from Force of Will to Pyroblast and Pithing Needle to Stony Silence will shut this down. But if you’re willing to rely on being fast enough to win the first game and tricky enough to steal one of the other two in post side-board games — perhaps with Salvage Titan beatdown? — Then this might be an interesting deck to take for a spin.