Over the last couple of weeks of Legacy, we've seen the domination of the format by various control strategies. There are plenty of aggro and combo strategies, and we've seen results put up by decks like Lands and Delver variants, but the decks that have been overperforming are Miracles and Grixis Control. So how does one go about gaining an advantage in these control matchups without giving up the ability to keep pace against the other strategies? Alvas has an idea:

Sultai Loam - Legacy | Alvas, 9th Place Legacy Challenge

• Creatures (8)
• 1 Phantasmal Image
• 3 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
• 4 Baleful Strix

• Planeswalkers (7)
• 1 Liliana, the Last Hope
• 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
• 3 Liliana of the Veil

• Instants (8)
• 4 Abrupt Decay
• 4 Force of Will

• Sorceries (3)
• 3 Life from the Loam

• Enchantments (2)
• 2 Search for Azcanta

• Artifacts (8)
• 4 Chalice of the Void
• 4 Mox Diamond

• Lands (24)
• 1 Forest
• 1 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Barren Moor
• 1 Bayou
• 1 Fetid Pools
• 1 Tranquil Thicket
• 1 Verdant Catacombs
• 2 Tropical Island
• 2 Underground Sea
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 4 Wasteland

• Sideboard (15)
• 3 Dread of Night
• 3 Flusterstorm
• 3 Maelstrom Pulse
• 1 Mindbreak Trap
• 3 Surgical Extraction
• 2 Toxic Deluge

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This deck is somewhat reminiscent of that, but adapted for the current pace of the Legacy metagame. There's no time to resolve a card like Intuition. Instead, you've got to leverage Mox Diamond to resolve an early Chalice of the Void or Leovold, Emissary of Trest to punish opposing control cantrip decks. Abrupt Decay is necessary so that you don't get locked under opposing Blood Moons, Counterbalance, or Chalice of the Void.

Intuition makes you a slower version of the lands deck, so instead you can play Planeswalkers to take advantage of your Loam engine. You don't have a ton of value lands; you don't necessarily need them. You can use Jace, the Mind Sculptor to Brainstorm extra fetches back into your deck to turn them into real cards. You can use Liliana of the Veil to discard excess lands while you whittle away at your opponent's hand. Eventually you'll find a cycling land or a Wasteland to start going nuts.

Abrupt Decay and Baleful Strix are the cards that let you have a reasonable aggro matchup, keeping cards like Delver of Secrets and Death's Shadow at bay while you get your Life from the Loams set up.

If you're looking for a deck that can grind with the best control decks, this seems like a good choice. You have no one-drops, so you get to leverage Chalice of the Void in matchups where it's enormously powerful, but you still have plenty of tools to play a long, resource-intensive game. What you don't have a ton of is disruption for combo decks. That's something that needs to be accounted for in your sideboard plans, if this is something that you're going to take into an open Legacy field. Beyond that, you've got a solid, flexible gameplan against most of the top tier strategies in the format right now, and this seems like it could be a really great choice.