MTG Salvation

Following last week's initial attempt at Legacy Valakut, Sarah and I have now taken the deck to two local 4 round tournaments, each with slightly different builds. She went 2-1-1 in each tournament, fairly decent considering the experimental nature of the deck.

After testing last week, we eventually cut the Burning Wish package. It simply slowed the deck down a little too much. We've also moved all alternate win conditions to the board, and left game 1 as a completely Valakut based win condition. In other words, we've gotten more reliable at actually winning with Valakut, which I think is a plus.

Here is the decklist that she played in the first tournament.


We took some of the notes from that tournament and played again the next night (with no testing, because these were on back to back weeknights and there wasn't really time.


Given those two tournaments, we've tested some more, and have a new build that focuses on being a combo deck. Here's where we are right now, although I expect there will be a few changes before our next tournament, this coming Wednesday.

Notes and Remaining questions:
- The final sideboard will need to feature two ways to handle Choke or Leyline of Sanctity. Most likely this will be Into the Roil, but it's possible it'll just end up being Nature's Claim. I don't know what will get cut, but I expect one of the Pyroblasts is first on the list to go, because I think we can get away with 3. 4 is very nice though, so we'll have to see. Karakas and Bojuka Bog may just not be worth it.
- The second Life from the Loam has been decently nice so far. I'm far more likely to just draw loam and start the engine without an Intuition. However, sometimes Loam by itself isn't any good or just takes too long to get useful.
- Worm Harvest may find it's way into the deck as a one-of, replacing the second loam. It's a way to win games that valakut just won't win. I don't know if it's necessary main or not, but it could be worth having around.
- I think we may need to cut a fetchland for an 11th mountain either, probably another Stomping Ground. The increased focus on Scapeshift from our earlier builds has left us far more likely to need additional mountains in the deck.

I hope you're enjoying watching the brewing process for this, I know I'm having fun documenting it and trying to make it work.

Jeff

Welcome to the first part of my attempt to turn Valakut, the Molten Pinnacle into a winning strategy in Legacy. Valakut is a powerful card that Sarah and I both enjoy and have had success with in the past in other formats, and we're hoping to turn some heads and win a few rounds with an offbeat deck in the coming months.

We were originally inspired by this list from several months ago. It needs some changes based on the current metagame, and there are a few things we'd like to do differently just because we think they'll work better, but that's where we started.

I'll explain some of our choices after the break, but here is our current list.

Obviously, when looking at the list, this looks like a complete pile of garbage. Let me assure you that in our testing, it has a significantly better than 50% matchup against both U/W stoneforge and G/W/r Maverick. The Canadian Threshold matchup isn't as good, but it's nowhere near unwinnable.

Deck Identity
The best part of this deck, in my opinion, is the versatility of the ways it can win. This is not a Scapeshift deck, simply because resolving a 4 mana sorcery with 7 lands in play isn't the best plan for winning a legacy match. Sure, you can do it, and we have the Forces and Pyroblasts to back it up, but counting on that seems like a horrible plan.

The first comment by many people seems to be to point me towards lands builds and suggesting I build from there. To be honest, I think Lands is a good deck, and that adding scapeshift, omen, or valakut won't make it better. It'll just end up being a bad lands deck. I don't want to build a bad lands deck, I want to build a good Valakut deck.

There are 4 ways to win with the deck.

- Burning Wish for Scapeshift, cast Scapeshift
- Use Life from the Loam to constantly replay lots of lands with Valakut in play. Works best with Prismatic Omen also in play
- Use Life from the Loam with Seismic Assault to do damage direct to an opponent
- Burning Wish for Devil's Play. Will probably have to cast Devil's Play twice. Generally a way to win once other ways of winning have been nullified, but hopefully after they've already done some damage.

Importantly, I do not consider Jace a way to win with the deck. Sure, you could do it, but it's pretty unlikely. This deck simply doesn't have the means to protect him for a protracted length of time while he ticks all the way up. He's there because he can do things like dig for pieces, bounce goyfs and kotrs, and slow down opponents by filtering their draws. Also, he pitches to force.

Winning through hate
The biggest problem we had to consider initially was that the list we built from had absolutely no way to win against a Leyline of Sanctity. Beyond that, we also had to consider that with Surgical Extraction's popularity, we needed a way to win with no Valakuts in the deck. The original deck ran 4 Jaces and the punishing fire combo, but this deck doesn't run enough permission or removal to really make that an effective winning strategy. It takes way more time to win with fire/grove than this deck can legitimately buy, and protecting jace is much harder than you'd think.

Our current plans for winning with Valakut invalidated (through surgical, or runed halo, etc) involve Seismic Assault or Devil's Play. We've also considered Worm Harvest for the spot Devil's Play is in, but the mana cost is actually a little awkward, and it isn't exactly a reliable win condition.

The other big hate card we have to consider is Price of Progress. With this card gaining in popularity following Andrew Shrout's U/R delver deck, we absolutely have to be able to interact with it. The four Forces maindeck hopefully fight the maindeck copies, and postboard we're currently experimenting with Hydroblast in that role.

The Burning Wish Package
We're currently testing Burning Wish, but we're not absolutely sold on it. The main reasons for testing it are below
- Hull Breach gives us an out to troublesome things like Leyline of Sanctity without having to anticipate the hate during the sideboarding process.
- Moving Scapeshift to the board when we don't consider it a reliable win condition means we're never drawing it when we don't want it. It's great against zoo and maverick, but not nearly as good against anything running blue, because we're unlikely to win many counter wars.
- More ways to access life from the loam without having to play 4 of them is nice. Plus, having one in the board means it's protected from Surgical Extraction
- We've chosen to run Slagstorm over Firespout because RR isn't an issue, and being able to hit an opposing Jace if necessary is better than Firespouts irrelevent options in this deck. We're testing a singleton Pyroclasm because it's better against every aggressive deck except zoo

The Intuition Package
Intuition typically tutors for Loam plus two cards (often the singleton cave or the singleton tabernacle), but with Noxious Revival, we can actually tutor for Seismic Assault or Jace when we haven't drawn them, or it helps tutoring for Prismatic Omen or Exploration when some of them have been countered or dredged away. Still not sure about the revival, but it seems worthy of consideration.

The Sideboard
Right now half the sideboard is the burning wish package. The rest is more creature kill (extra slagstorm/pyroclasm that can be sided in), and the playsets of Hydroblasts and Pyroblasts. We're testing right now to see whether we actually need all of the pyros and hydros. I expect we'll probably cut a Pyroblast or two, but the Hydroblasts are probably vital to counter Price of Progress and deal with some of the red creatures in zoo.

Remaining Issues and Closing Thoughts
The biggest remaining issue is our complete absence of resilience to Blood Moon. Because of timestamping, we can't make Prismatic Omen beat Blood Moon, since we can't ever cast Prismatic Omen once Blood Moon is in play. Fortunately, Blood Moon isn't seeing much play right now, and we're building this deck to be good now, not to be good forever. Still, if we could come up with some way to beat blood moon, it'd be pretty awesome. Right now we have to counter it (postboard if we have Hydros we have 8 ways to do that).

This is absolutely a work in progress. Here's what we're currently looking at.

- The Burning Wish package is a work in progress, and may go away entirely. Still, the ability to have Hull Breach available without ever needing to side it in seems huge for this deck
- We've gone back and forth between 4 ponders and a 2/2 split between Ponder and Jace. I don't know if Jace is worth it, but we're currently testing him
- The Noxious Revival is a new card we're looking at. It provides options, but the deck is so tight I don't know if we wouldn't rather have a blue card in there.
- Is Devil's Play actually worth it? How many games will we have where Valakut is gone, Seismic is gone, and we're actually able to win with Devil's Play? It seems like that's not a particularly high number of games, but I could be wrong.
- Should we have a Regrowth in the wishboard?
- How many REBs do we actually need? We're testing vesus U/W stoneforge now, hopefully we'll get answers to that question soon.

I'll be back later with some more results! If we're able to make this competitive, Sarah may play it at SCG: DC, so we'll be playing multiple weekly legacy events with it leading up to that. Here's hoping it does good things.

Jeff

I'm working on my first post, but I didn't want my introduction to be a part of it, so I figured I'd go ahead and make a separate one that outlined what I'm trying to do here.

First, an explanation of myself. I'm a magic player who plays almost exclusively legacy, living in the Washington DC area. I've been playing magic for 3 years or so. I've yet to experience real success, but in the past year my results have really started to move forward. I've won several local tournaments for Duals, but I haven't yet seen good results in a SCG Open or Grand Prix.

I tend to play real decks most of the time (my deck of choice is usually Team America), but I have an insatiable urge to brew. Fortunately, my girlfriend, who is also a talented legacy player, likes brewing and playing offbeat decks, so we tend to brew together, and then she usually pilots our brews while my internal Spike won't let me commit fully to our silly deck.

With this blog, I hope to highlight not only my journey as a legacy player, testing and building on established decks and playing them in events like SCG Opens and Grand Prixs, but the brewing process Sarah and I go through to build our fun decks. I hope this will provide some level of interest for both existing legacy players and those looking to get into the format, and I hope our brews will at least be fun to look over.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy whatever gets plastered on these pages.

J