Over the past few months, I have talked about the best ways to invest in certain formats over time so as to allow your hobby to pay for itself. This week, I will be continuing that series by covering Legacy, the most popular Eternal format. Unlike Standard, Legacy never rotates and rarely is shaken up, leaving you with a far more consistent market that can be tracked through the course of years—not months. Though this means you are far less likely to have a strong number of cards spiking in a particular month, it does mean you are presented with a market in which the cards are unlikely to drop—outside of reprints and bans. This makes the idea of placing your money in Legacy cards much more alluring to long-term investors. This week, I want to concentrate on not only utilizing Legacy to turn a profit but how to also use the format to slowly grow your own collection to make the format much more accessible. That being said, this week, I will be primarily covering the subject as though you currently have a very small number of Legacy cards and are looking to expand. In the future, I will return to Legacy and talk about individual shifts and how to watch the long-term market to identify where to place your money.

Earlier this week Sam Black wrote a thought-provoking article refuting the long-held notion that there is always a “correct” play. His point was, given that we are all imperfect players, we are better off making a play that utilizes our strengths rather than an abstractly better play that runs contrary to our strengths. For example, even if a control deck is the best deck, if you are much better at aggro decks and there is a somewhat-weaker-but-still-good aggro deck, the decision that will maximize your chances of winning is to play the aggro deck instead of the abstractly better control deck. He goes even further to claim that if we have lots of success drafting monoblack and little success drafting white decks that we should take Tormented Hero over Elspeth, Sun's Champion.

While the takeaway message of playing to your strengths is certainly worthwhile, I disagree with his assertion that there is fundamentally no such thing as a “correct” play. Over the years I have given quite a bit of thought to understanding what constitutes a “correct play.” Whether I am right or Sam is right, I would like to take this opportunity to discuss many of the thoughts I've had on this subject in hopes that they will be helpful to you as a player just as Sam's article was very instructive regardless of whether his theory ultimately proves to be right or wrong.

I like playing creature decks, specifically ones with sweet synergies that sometimes are super apparent. My local shops are having their own invitational tournaments, and Modern is a part of both of their multi-format structures. Earlier it was said that Modern would be the PTQ season coming up, but it was changed to Standard. In anticipation of the "Modern season," the local shops made Modern a big part of their tournaments, so that's what I've been focusing on lately. Today I'd like to introduce a couple combo-oriented creature decks that I've been working on.

It was the last day of 2013.

Heliod gently put down his iPod, a smile slowly creeping across his sun-drenched face. "Now that is some of the freshest, dopest, most illest beats I have ever heard." He quickly sprung into the infamous stance. His left foot was poised as if coming down to smash through a city while his arms spread out to his sides, left hand clenched into a fist. It had been over two decades since Straight Outta Theros, but it wasn't uncommon to see kids still jump into the popular "Polis Crusher" pose.

Heliod chuckled quietly to himself. "I'm pretty sure nothing could possibly ruin this awesome day," he said to no one in particular. "I've got my sweet-ass music, my charming, devil-may-care attitude, and the kind of rugged, chiseled look that only an Orcish Lumberjack crossed with a male model could possess. How could it go wrong?!" He grinned sheepishly as he flexed his muscles, way too satisfied with himself.

"Well, for one, the Devil doesn't care," said a soft voice behind him.

Heliod quickly spun around in shock. He was usually quite vigilant. It wasn't every day that someone was able to sneak up on him. Especially not today. Especially not here.

I'm going to kick off 2014 by analyzing mana bases. The creation of a solid mana base is one of the most important aspects of deckbuilding, and today I'll try to answer questions like, “how many sources of black mana do I need to be able to consistently cast Thoughtseize on turn one?” and, “how many sources of white mana do I need to be able to consistently cast Supreme Verdict on turn four?” These questions are relevant if, for example, you are building an Esper deck with 27 lands, but you are still wondering how many Temples to play, how many basic lands to play, which ones, and whether or not you can fit in Mutavault. This article will provide guidelines for those kinds of challenges.

I decided to look at Modern this month instead of Legacy, as there were not many Legacy tournaments in December. Legacy fans shouldn't panic though—I expect to be taking another crack at the Legacy metagame in February.

Before I begin, I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts on Modern. It’s almost universally panned by Legacy players because the Modern banned list is constructed from a very different philosophy. Legacy players want to play the most powerful cards, and they’re okay with turn 1 combo decks (Belcher, Oops All Spells) coexisting with glacially slow control strategies (Life From the Loam, Miracles). Wizards wanted an alternative to Legacy with Modern, not Legacy-lite, so they chose to ban a variety of cards in Modern that would prohibit consistent turn-3 kills. As such, all of the competitive combo decks in Modern generally aim to go off on turn 4 or 5, and mostly with creatures (Pod, Twin). Wizards also wished for Modern to be highly interactive, so they’ve weakened non-interactive strategies like Eggs and Storm with bannings. This leads to a lot of midrange vs. control in the format, with most of the combo decks being combo-control as opposed to pure combo. I find most Modern matchups to be highly interactive on a variety of axes related to creatures and removal, whereas Legacy matchups are more interactive on the stack. I personally enjoy Legacy more, but I’m beginning to see a reason for why Modern is the way it is, instead of Legacy-lite.