I really like Legacy as a format. The banlist bothers some people, but I really think it must be doing its job since the format diversity is gigantic. You can metagame like a champ but you can also be Feline Longmore and just jam High Tide all the time and do very well with it. Any player who understands their deck well, has a sideboard that shores up their bad matchups, and gets lucky a little bit can win a Legacy tournament and I think that’s true moreso in Legacy and Vintage than any other format. You don’t see people with pet decks in Standard as much and things change so often that it’s difficult to really learn a deck the way a Legacy player knows their deck. Also, Legacy is full of straight cheating at Magic and that’s what I want to talk about today. Cheating at Magic by doing dumb shuffle tracking or other cheats that will get you castigated by the underground dojo KEYBOARD cagefighters of the world isn’t what we’re after, though. We want to pay three mana for a 15-mana creature. We want to put their entire army on the bottom of their library for a single White mana. We want to put ourselves ahead, put them behind and we want to use the best Magic cards ever printed apart from a few that are deemed to be injurious to the format. In other words, Legacy and Commander aren’t that different.

When I saw Max Kahn tweet this picture, I was instantly interested.

It’s a little bit hard to see but what you need to know is that this is Eldrazi and Taxes with some very spicy inclusions in the form of two maindeck Palace Jailers. My Commander sense began to tingle — becoming the Monarch is one of my favorite things to do in Commander and someone doing it in Legacy seems even spicier. It’s tougher to have it wrested from you with only one opponent at the table and some of the slower, control matchups all but feed you a ton of extra cards that you can use to pick their hand apart, play another Chalice of the Void or find some equipment to make your creature(s) hit harder. I saw this and thought “I love seeing people do Commander stuff in Legacy.” Commander is a very, very powerful format — it’s mitigated by a lot of other players who can keep you in line and it’s mitigated by a lot of our super powerful spells being too expensive to cast super early before people can stop us. Legacy plays Shardless Agent — you can’t tell me Rishkar's Expertise isn’t a card they would play if games didn’t basically end before anyone got that much mana. Being able to do your stuff early is what matters most in a quick, powerful 1v1 format like Legacy. They managed to figure out how to do powerful things for fewer mana, so surely there are some lessons we can learn from that format and try to apply to Commander. If we’re going to win ever with a 75% deck, we’re going to need to do things that are powerful and we may need to do them earlier than anyone is expecting. I want to look at some Legacy decks and see if there are some things we can glean. After all, Palace Jailer as removal and card advantage in a Legacy list shows that Legacy players are willing to use “our” cards when applicable so there have to be some instances of the Legacy informing what we do in Commander.

The Deck: Sneak and Show

The Lesson: Paying Mana costs is for suckers.

I found a 75% Braids list someone else came up with and I mostly agree with the card choices and I agree that building a 75% deck takes restraint sometimes. We can still do very powerful, degenerate things and do them early, and this deck does that. If our opponents aren’t set up to play as big or nasty of a creature as we are, we’re putting ourselves ahead even though we’re giving them an opportunity to play something for free as well. In Legacy, I liked to run Knight of the Reliquary so I could tutor for a Karakas to foil their Emrakul. In Commander, I think our opponents are equally under-equipped to deal with a free Blightsteel or even Jin-Gitaxis, Core Augur if we do this early enough. So, I think a Commander Sneak and Show (or just Show) approach is perfectly potent and perfectly 75%.

The Deck: Maverick

The Lesson: Hatebears and Lands are sometimes all you need

Maverick isn’t just a Knight deck, however. Hatebears and utility creatures to do double duty by carrying equipment can really throw a wrench into the works for your opponents and with a 100 card singleton deck, you can still double or triple up due to how many different ways they’re printing hatebears. Everything from Gaddock Teeg to Vryn Wingmare is fair game in a deck that can run Knight and Maverick decks in Legacy are expanding from being 2-3 color to being 3-4. Having access to Leovold, Emissary of Trest is pretty clutch in a Brainstorm format and while we can’t do that in Commander, we can run Black hatebears like Yixlid Jailer, for example. I see plenty of Gaddock Teeg and Dragonlord Dromoka and Sigarda builds that remind me of the Maverick deck I used for a long time in Legacy. If you want some lists that look a lot like Maverick, I would recommend this Karametra Landfall deck as a starting point or try a spicy Dromoka build. Both could use some tuning but they’re great places to start and they have the spirit of Maverick in mind, even if they aren’t jamming the original Punishing Fire/Grove of the Burnwillows combo that I was so fond of back in the day.

The Deck: Stoneblade

The Lesson: Sometimes an equipment is as good as a creature

The Deck: Lands

The Lesson: The simplest resource can be the most important

There are still so many Legacy archetypes we can adapt! I think we can put a pin in this and come back in a few weeks (I basically promised to cover Tishana next week) but this is a great topic and all of the lists we adapted ended up both doing powerful, Legacy-tier stuff but also being nice 75% Commander builds. Talk about synchronicity. I hope you enjoyed this break from my usual fare. If you loved it or hated it, that would be good to know. So, let me know in the comments section. That’s all for now, join me next week where I’ll talk about a certain Merfolk. Until next time!