In the days before Planeswalkers, there were all manner of wacky card advantage and selection engines that saw enormous amounts of play. Things like Scroll Rack, Crystal Shard, and — my favorite — Astral Slide. Astral Slide was a particularly beloved control deck because it was able to effectively fight Affinity back in its day. You could use cycling lands to flicker Viridian Shaman, Eternal Witness for Oxidize, and much more in order to prevent your opponent from really gaining traction while you set up to win the game with Eternal Dragon. This week, morgan_coke has an interesting Legacy deck that asks one important question: is Astral Slide still good?

Four-Color Astral Slide- Legacy | morgan_coke

• Creatures (15)
• 2 Siege Rhino
• 3 Gilded Drake
• 3 Judge's Familiar
• 3 Tarmogoyf
• 4 Renegade Rallier

• Instants (5)
• 2 Gilded Light
• 3 Miscalculation

• Sorceries (9)
• 3 Edge of Autumn
• 3 Life from the Loam
• 3 Unearth

• Enchantments (3)
• 3 Astral Slide

• Artifacts (3)
• 3 Mox Diamond

• Lands (25)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Plains
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Savannah
• 1 Tundra
• 1 Underground Sea
• 3 Lonely Sandbar
• 3 Secluded Steppe
• 4 Ash Barrens
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 4 Wasteland

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Gilded Drake
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 2 Nihil Spellbomb
• 2 Qasali Pridemage
• 2 Rebuild
• 3 Meddling Mage
• 3 Surgical Extraction

Buy This Deck

With Astral Slide in the mix, you can start [card]Wasteland" href="/p/Magic+The+Gathering/Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wasteland">Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wastelanding your opponent multiple times per turn cycle, denying them the ability to ever cast key three-drops of their own. But that’s not the end of the Astral Slide tricks. You can use Gilded Drake to help deny your opponent their key creatures like Emrakul and Griselbrand. You can flicker your opponent’s creatures to let your Tarmogoyfs get in. You can even live the dream and flicker Siege Rhinos.

This deck has gotten a lot more powerful since Astral Slide plus Lightning Rift decks used to be a thing in Legacy. The addition of Ash Barrens as another one-mana cycler is a big deal, particularly given that it lets you execute your gameplan through [card]Wasteland" href="/p/Magic+The+Gathering/Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wasteland">Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wasteland and Blood Moon. Astral Slide lets you fight relatively effectively against Eldrazi threats, and is great against tokens. There’s even cute interactions like using Renegade Rallier and Unearth to keep Judge's Familiar in play to punish opponents who are trying to play mana-efficient combo decks.

There’s a lot of flexibility and cute interactions in this deck. I’m not convinced that the sum of those interactions is a real deck that can compete with contemporary Legacy, but I really want to live in a world where it’s enough. What this does showcase is that Renegade Rallier is a card that has Legacy potential, even if only as a Green Sun's Zenith target to rebuy [card]Wasteland" href="/p/Magic+The+Gathering/Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wasteland">Wasteland" href="/p/Magic%3A+The+Gathering/%5Bcard%5DWasteland">[card]Wasteland at key moments.