Introduction

What deck should I play? I find myself saying that nearly every week now. I openly ask all of my friends who seldom fail to offer an entirely futile idea and I ask it of myself. It's a big question and there are a lot of variables to choose from: I can play a deck that uses some of my favorite cards (Although not Land Tax or Balance, my two favorites because those are both banned.) I can play a deck that will play on auto-pilot or one that I really need to think about. I can even make the decision to play a sub-par strategy or use cards that are going to be humiliating to be beaten by, like the time I won with Squire dealing lethal poison counters. (This is funny because Scars of Mirrodin isn't released yet.).

For many other people, this question is much deeper, as they are considering what kind of an investment they are going to make in the format. Picking a good fit for a new player to Legacy, or any format can be the difference between loving and continuing on with the format or game, or ended up feeling disappointed, underpowered or bored. Because it is so important for a new player to find a good fit they are going to ask that question quite a bit before they even start taking their first few steps to looking at a deck, borrowing multiple decks to test with if possible. That is why this week I would like to share some of my thoughts on what deck you should be playing.

Play What You Like

There are only two major reasons I can see for playing in a Magic tournament. I feel the most common is to be around friends and spend the night in what is likely a very cheap way to spend a few hours in camaraderie, playing a game that they presumably all enjoy. Of course when you're with your friends, winning probably isn't going to go any distance to make the night worse, but not winning won't ruin the night as that is not the clear objective. The second is to win, most people read strategy articles and spend a lot of time thinking about and working on decks to achieve that goal.

While it may be a far cry from my standard content, I'm not going to dedicate time to discussing the winningest strategies at the moment. I feel idea of playing a deck concept or at least with cards that you enjoy rather than playing with the abstractly best deck possible is an idea that is reduced to casual discussion and should likely be discussed away from those lines of thinking. This idea especially holds merit if the best deck available is something that is boring or aggravating to the pilot, such as was the case when the field was filled with Affinity or Faeries mirrors. The philosophy behind this isn't to suggest that you should play an inferior deck or card choices to lose more games, bur rather that you should do whatever is reasonably possible to be happy with the deck choice that you have. The goal is to keep morale reasonably high and that will lead to more victories, even if the deck isn't the best deck in the room. There is no better way to be defeated than for you to allow yourself to feel defeated. Being aware and constantly looking for answers (or problems for your opponent to answer) is going to result in winning more games, and the easiest way to keep that feeling is to be playing a deck that doesn't bore or frustrate you.

I have to tell you, I'm a carb fiend and I like croutons quite a bit. I know that if I'm going to eat a salad, croutons will make me love any salad twice as much as if it didn't have them. Some mornings I'll wander around the kitchen and stumble upon a bag of croutons, that is a good morning. However, when there are no croutons [or Caesar dressing] available the thought of eating a salad is really difficult for me, I seldom am able to even bring myself to think of making one. I'll start thinking of what else I could eat and sometimes I get fixated on the idea of eating a salad, but can't bring myself to do it, as it is simply too bland without that twice-baked crunch.

To put this into context of how it applies to Magic, I've stated numerous times how I have a bias as a control player. At this point the mindset is deeply ingrained into not only how I play Magic, but how I approach other competitive games as well. I've experimented and tested with a lot of decks and any of the times I've played Zoo or Goyf Sligh things simply do not go favorably. I don't enjoy attacking with creatures, I gave it up when attacking with Quirion Dryad was no longer the best thing you could be doing. The lists I've played were reasonably sound and the matches were never terrible, but because I hated playing the deck to such a strong degree, I was in a mindset where I simply wouldn't allow myself to win games, missing opportunities to take advantages of the deck's strengths or walking into traps that I knew better than to avoid. It felt like because I was playing a deck with aggressive creatures, the entire cosmos decided to twist reality against my favor. Even when I had won a game, I was dissatisfied with the performance of the deck and the basic mechanics behind the deck. For me, the mindset is, "Why play burn spells when you can counter spells?" and "Why attack with guys when you can play a Moat?" It becomes impossible to be successful when you hate the deck you're playing because it snowballs into bigger problems.

Of course, when croutons are available, things go well for me. And the same applies to Magic. There have been times that a friend has challenged me to build a silly combo deck. There was even a time that the store I frequent had a list of achievements to meet. I built Battle of Wits which I went undefeated with that week, or I would build a combo deck that was trying to do at least six different things, using cards that seldom see the light of day in any format. I had a lot of fun with the decks and because of which I was also able to keep my wits about me and win more games than you would think those sorts of decks would be able to. I do wish I could say something about the demoralizing effects that those deck choices had, but that isn't a subject I'm familiar with.

Play What You Know

If you've ever looked into writing, the first tip that is ever given is to "write what you know." The advice is frustratingly simple for me, because I feel that it would be impossible for me to write about anything that I have no knowledge of. Pondering more on that advice, it then results in a deeply introspective event when I have to consider what I really know. But in the context of Magic, this is a much more finite and definable quality.

Because I am so experienced with control, I am going to have a strong advantage with the deck when playing it. Because I am so well versed in all the options and lines of play with my build of Landstill, I'm going to have a big advantage playing that deck over a Counter-Top Thopter deck. While my heavy experience with a control deck will carry over, this is not the same game plan on the approach I generally take and it isn't a list that I've tuned so it isn't going to have all the options that I want. Even worse is if I play a deck like Dredge where my muscle-memory of drawing a card for the turn is exactly the wrong thing to do, there are no control elements and experience from other major archetypes barely carries over. Dredge is not a deck that I should play because not only do I hate it, but nothing I've learned about Magic translates well to playing Dredge.

This isn't to say that you shouldn't learn Dredge or an aggro or combo deck, but when a player is attempting to get his bearings in a format, it is going to work out best if they are able to to start from some sort of familiar ground.

There are numerous accounts of players who were talked into switching decks at the last second before heading into an important tournament. Even in the situations where the newly suggested deck is superior, the player will nearly always have a noticeable stumble because of general unfamiliarity with the deck's interactions with itself, let alone the complexities of its interactions with the rest of the metagame. From Grand Prix Columbus there is a report of a player using both Pernicious Deed and Jace, The Mindsculptor in the same deck. He is in a situation where his back is against the wall with both of those cards in play. He decides that he needs Jace in play so he doesn't blow the Deed at four. The problem here is that, while the player was reasonably familiar with both Jace and Pernicious Deed, he failed to realize that Pernicious Deed can never destroy a Planeswalker (unless, of course that Planeswalker has an additional type.) The player laments that this oversight likely cost him the opportunity to do much better in that tournament.

Of course there is also the story of the previous Grand Prix Columbus where a pro player plays Flash and shows his opponent a Protean Hulk and asks if his opponent will concede, his opponent, being unfamiliar with the combo says, "No, show me the combo." Then it is revealed that the pilot himself doesn't know how the deck wins. There are dozens of reports with even bigger mistakes than that, and this isn't counting the players who play decks that they are generally unfamiliar with and do so poorly that they don't tell anyone about it.

Having at least baseline knowledge over what you are playing is essential to success. Even if someone offers you a different deck that is strictly superior to the one that you are currently piloting, there is going to be a large chance for failure. I feel that playing a deck with 100% power at 70% of his ability is riskier than playing a deck with 70% power at 100% of his ability. Even though sometimes the deck at full power is just going to win on the back of card quality, the familiarity with the less powerful deck and experience of using that deck against other decks means that you are going to produce fewer mistakes. And making fewer mistakes seldom causes a player to lose more games.

Play What You Are the Luckiest With

I feel that in many ways, as far as Magic players go, I am far less logical than most people. Generally when someone asks me what they should play, I reply with something along the lines of, "Play what you draw the best with." As time has gone on, that went from being a joke to an actual belief that players develop relationships and rapport with decks. It is inherently flawed thinking, but I know that when I draw a hand with some decks, it will pull through most of the time, examples of these decks are Life.dec, (Nomands en-Kor + Daru Spiritualist + Worthy Cause) Landstill and Goblins. There are also decks where I cannot keep shaky hands. A friend of mine that I've discussed this with loves storm decks, but he consistently draws the worst hands with the decks which leads him to now avoid them in any kind of competitive play. Another friend of mine who has just picked up T.E.S. is encountering a problem where he is consistently drawing three lands in his opening hand with the deck, it plays 13.

I knew I couldn't lead this article with the breaking news that you should play what you are the luckiest with, because there is no real way to quantify that. You cannot measure luck. This isn't a suggestion that you should build unstable combos that can only come together once in twenty-draws, although I have done exactly that and won with it, but that any player is going to be naturally drawn to the deck that they fit the best with, and luck of the opening draw is a big factor in that.

I am reminded of watching the Semi-finals for Pro Tour Hollywood in 2007 where Jan Ruess is playing Merfolk and he needs to draw a Lord to win the game, anything else and he loses. He in fact does draw it, but there were literally seven left in the deck, so drawing it at the end of the game isn't too unreasonable. But one of the commentators says something about how lucky that was and the counterpart says, "Well, I guess that's why you play cards like that, so you can draw into them." This in turn reminds me of a joke where an old woman prays that she will win the lottery, every night. And finally, one night, God says back to her, "C'mon lady, meet me half way and buy a lottery ticket." While I feel that luck is a heavily denied and largely unavoidable aspect of Magic, there is a phase of deck building and deck choice where you allow yourself the opportunity to play a deck that has something to draw into. If you want your deck to do good things, you need to optimize the chances that deck has at doing those things.

Avoid Ideological Pitfalls

I want to close this week by talking about what I see as a large failure in logic that I see happening with Legacy becoming an increasingly popular and competitive format. In the Magic community there is an identifiable group of competitive-minded people that when thinking of what they are going to play for the next tournament are convinced that they are going to play the best deck. There is no problem with this, as they have a clearly definable goal of attempting to win the tournament. An example of this kind of player is someone who was playing Faeries in Standard and then moved to Jund in Standard, someone who played Next Level Blue or Dredge in Extended. Just whatever deck was generally accepted as the best. The problem develops when a player has a history of playing whatever the established best deck is, establishing a pattern and then making the assumption that the next deck they pick up in a format, mostly blindly, is going to be the best deck.

This is exactly the kind of trap that had convinced some people to play Dredge in Grand Prix Chicago, or some other people to play a deck that was poorly positioned in the metagame such as Counter-Top Thopters or 43 Lands that they were also likely unfamiliar with in Columbus. While Dredge may have been amazing in that previous Extended seasons, the experience simply did not translate to Legacy, the same thing applies to Faeries. The era of old Extended decks simply being able to be ported to Legacy is long over.

The thought that I would like to close on for this is that while we only have past experiences to cite and work with, making good decisions, we should really be looking at the context of these decisions and performances. This context is lacking from many competitive articles and especially those that touch on Legacy.

A Look at the Metagame After One Month

As of now we're about one month after the Grand Prix and starting next week, I'd like to go through the process of trying to build a control deck or two for what metagame has evolved into after Columbus. This is the data set that we will be working with:

Bold entries are new

x = Denotes 2nd-8th in a 64+ event or 2nd-4th in a 32+ player event.

1 = A first place finish.

• Zoo (14)

  • Traditional Zoo: xxxxxxxx (8)
  • Big Zoo: 1xx
  • BRG Aggro: x
  • Cat Sligh: 1
  • Survival: x

• Merfolk (13)

  • Mono Blue: 1xxxxxxxx (9)
  • U/b: xxx
  • U/w: x

• Goblins (5)

  • R/b: xxx
  • R/g: x
  • R/b/g: x

• Combo (16)

  • Belcher: xx
  • TES: 1xxxxx (6)
  • DDFT: x
  • Reanimator: xx
  • U/R Painter 1xx
  • Solidarity 1
  • Elfball x

• Counter Top (8)

  • NO Counter-Top: 1xxx
  • UGr x
  • Supreme Blue: x
  • Ugwb: 1
  • Dark Depths x

• Survival (12)

  • GWb: xx
  • U/G Madness: 1xxxxxx (7)
  • G/W: x
  • Elves: 1
  • GBwr Combo 1

• UG/x Aggro (10)

  • UGR Tempo Thresh: x
  • Team America: x
  • New Horizions: 1xxxxxx (7)
  • Aggro Bant +NO: x

• Emrakul Decks (5)

  • Sneak Attack: xxx
  • Eureka: x
  • Aeon Bridge: x

• Control (8)

  • Landstill U/W: xxx
  • Landstill U/b/g: x
  • U/W Control: x
  • U/g/r Control: x
  • Dreadstill: x
  • Faeries: x

• Loam Decks (2)

  • Aggro Loam: x
  • 43Lands.dec: x

• Midrange (1)

  • B/w Deadguy: 1

• Chalice Decks (4)

  • White Stax: 1xx
  • Mono Green Chalice Aggro x

• Other

  • Burn: xx
  • Enchantress x
  • Life.dec x

Christopher Walton

im00pi at gmail for Eletronic Mail

Master Shake on The Source