Veteran Explorer is a super interesting card in Legacy. When Miracles was the best deck in the format, Veteran Explorer wasn’t really what you wanted to be doing, since they could take advantage of the additional lands. However, now that we’re seeing more and more greedy three- and four-color decks, as well as Ancient Tomb decks, it may be safer to assume that you’ll be taking better advantage of basics. So what does a Veteran Explorer deck look like in today’s Legacy metagame? This seems like a pretty good start:

Sultai Nic Fit - Legacy | Asmussen, 5-0 Legacy League

• Creatures (16)
• 1 Deathrite Shaman
• 1 Eternal Witness
• 1 Meren of Clan Nel Toth
• 1 Progenitus
• 1 Scavenging Ooze
• 1 Tireless Tracker
• 1 Titania, Protector of Argoth
• 2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
• 3 Veteran Explorer
• 4 Baleful Strix

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

• Instants (6)
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 4 Brainstorm

• Sorceries (15)
• 3 Natural Order
• 4 Cabal Therapy
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 4 Green Sun's Zenith

• Enchantments (1)
• 1 Pernicious Deed

• Lands (20)
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Forest
• 2 Island
• 1 Bayou
• 1 Dryad Arbor
• 1 Underground Sea
• 2 Tropical Island
• 2 Wasteland
• 4 Misty Rainforest
• 4 Verdant Catacombs

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Abrupt Decay
• 1 Collective Brutality
• 3 Flusterstorm
• 4 Force of Will
• 1 Pernicious Deed
• 1 Reclamation Sage
• 2 Surgical Extraction
• 1 To the Slaughter
• 1 Toxic Deluge

Buy This Deck

Once you reach the mid game, you can start grinding out card advantage with things like Eternal Witness and Tireless Tracker, or locking your opponent out of their cantrips with Leovold, Emissary of Trest. Later in the game, you can set up a turn where you can get Titania, Protector of Argoth to rebuy a Wasteland and generate a 5/3 or find a Meren of Clan Nel Toth to start working up some experience counters and burying your opponent in cards. This attrition-oriented gameplan is backed up by Baleful Strix and Jace, the Mind Sculptor.

The other plan is to just accelerate into Natural Order, particularly given that you can use your Cabal Therapys to make sure that the path is clear. The preferred Natural Order target will typically be Progenitus, but could occasionally be Titania or even Meren depending on the matchup and how likely you think Edicts or Terminus will ruin your day.

If you want to start throwing around haymakers without just conceding to fast combo decks, this is not an unreasonable way to do that. You even have the possibility of playing more hand disruption or counterspells maindeck, rather than the full set of Baleful Strix and some of the Green Sun's Zenith singletons.