Legacy has gone through a lot of changes in the last year or so. Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time did a lot to slow the format down, encouraging early interaction backed by powerful singletons and late-game haymakers. Because these cards helped you pull ahead on resources, the format boiled down to a lot of decks trying to trade single cards until they could gas back up. With those cards banned and the Eldrazi on the rise, tempo is at a premium. Consequently we see a large number of tempo decks, fast combo decks, and Counterbalance decks. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t decks trying to play along different axis:

U/R Standstill ? Legacy | Lam Phan

• Creatures (5)
• 1 Grim Lavamancer
• 4 Snapcaster Mage

• Planeswalkers (2)
• 2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

• Spells (28)
• 1 Stifle
• 2 Counterspell
• 3 Spell Pierce
• 3 Spell Snare
• 3 Sudden Shock
• 4 Brainstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 4 Lightning Bolt
• 3 Standstill
• 1 Engineered Explosives

• Lands (25)
• 1 Mountain
• 3 Island
• 1 Dust Bowl
• 1 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Wooded Foothills
• 2 Faerie Conclave
• 2 Wandering Fumarole
• 3 Mishra's Factory
• 3 Volcanic Island
• 4 Scalding Tarn
• 4 Wasteland

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Pithing Needle
• 4 Relic of Progenitus
• 2 Flusterstorm
• 1 Pyroblast
• 1 Red Elemental Blast
• 2 Pyroclasm
• 1 Izzet Staticaster
• 2 True-Name Nemesis

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This control deck is a flash back to a Legacy format a long time ago, where Hymn to Tourach was a premiere mechanism of interacting with your opponents. Standstill used to be a great way to cement a lead on the board. Decks would try to get ahead with Merfolk or other early creatures, or set up a board where you had both Standstill and Pernicious Deed.

This particular build is a controlling variant focusing on the powerful synergy between Standstill, Wasteland, and creature-lands. The ability to sit back behind a Standstill and hit land drops is enormously powerful for a control deck in general, but even more so when you have powerful spell-lands capable of threatening to both lock your opponent out of casting their spells or to end the game without having to break your own Standstill. Wandering Fumarole is a particularly powerful addition to this strategy, as it allows the deck to present a very fast clock and have access to a creature-land that can trump tokens in combat as well as threaten to trade with threats like Batterskull and Tarmogoyf.

The whole purpose of this deck is to use efficient interactive spells like Lightning Bolt and Spell Snare to stay ahead on tempo and find an opportunity to resolve a Standstill. You use the time gained by Standstill to sculpt your hand and find the answers you need plus Snapcaster Mages to re-buy those answers. Additionally, the extra cards help to fuel Force of Will. Perhaps most interestingly, you can resolve Standstill with a Jace in play to either force your opponent to let you win the game or to let you pull even further ahead.

In a format where everything is increasingly focused on tempo and efficiency, sometimes the best thing to do is to bring things to a screeching halt and grind your opponents out with raw card advantage backed by creature-lands. Personally, that’s my favorite kind of Magic, so I hope we start seeing a little more of Standstill in the coming weeks.