Wow.
What an adventure.
I just finished a 3-day trip to Providence with Frank Richard, Mauro Bongiovanni and Mathieu Roberge. It was fun and I am here to tell you all about it.
The fact of the matter is, the trip had a hilarious twist before it even got started. Because of events happening around the city during the weekend of GP Providence, all of the nearby hotels were booked solid. Mauro was responsible for helping us find a place to stay. He told me he had found a nearby location. It was one room with no washrooms. He asked me what I thought.
What?
One room with no washroom? With four guys? Are you nuts? And what’s this? We have to get the room keys from a tent?!
I know we are trying to save money but…
Eventually, Mauro successfully won a bid for two rooms at the Westin hotel, which was literally connected to the site of the event. Way to go Mauro!
Brewing
Of course, one of the major things I want to talk about is how we brewed up my Legacy deck. Maybe how we came up with the deck will inspire each of you guys to do the same thing. There’s a lot to learn about how we pieced together our final product. Despite my poor result, I figure an inside look at our deckbuilding process would prove interesting.
I am going to to refer it to my list because I was the only one playing the exact 75, but that is not to say that it was designed completely by me. My good friend and co-host of the Crazy Talk podcast, Alex Hayne, contributed to my 75 more than anyone, including myself.
The idea of brewing for Legacy was alien to me a week ago. Really? Were we actually going to brew in a format that each of us had a lack of experience in? Maybe not a lack of experience relative to the players of the local scene, but I definitely would not put us anywhere near the Hatfield brothers, for example. I am friends with Legacy legend Mark Sun however, so I guess anything can happen.
The brew was inspired by our Tuesday Night Legacy tournament here in Montreal at Face to Face Games. I decided to sleeve up Caleb Durward’s BW Discard deck that night.
[deck title=BW Discard by Caleb Durward]
[Lands]
1 Plains
2 Swamp
1 Fetid Heath
3 Bloodstained Mire
1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth
3 Wasteland
4 Scrubland
4 Marsh Flats
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
3 Phyrexian Obliterator
2 Mirran Crusader
4 Dark Confidant
4 Stoneforge Mystic
3 Gatekeeper of Malakir
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
3 Vindicate
2 Umezawas Jitte
1 Senseis Divining Top
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
4 Hymn to Tourach
4 Thoughtseize
1 Bitterblossom
2 Chrome Mox
4 Swords to Plowshares
3 Dark Ritual
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
1 Batterskull
1 Sword of War and Peace
2 Shriekmaw
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
1 Phyrexian Revoker
2 Bitterblossom
1 Darkblast
2 Tidehollow Sculler
2 Pithing Needle
2 Perish
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
Caleb had mentioned in his article that his deck was good against the field, so I decided to go for it. After my experience with Merfolk, I wanted a deck that could hold its own against rogue decks. I was tired of losing to Elves and Mono Red on Tuesday nights, but as it turns out, I did not like Caleb’s deck either. You can hear more about how I feel about this deck along with Adam Barnello’s thoughts on it on Crazy Talk #12.
I was testing against Alex who was piloting Merfolk and he was winning the first couple of games. We decided to switch decks to see if the result was skewed by my skills as the pilot, but Merfolk was still winning. It came to the attention of Alex in our test games that if the lone [card]Bitterblossom[/card] in the main deck was a [card]Batterskull[/card], he would have won some of the games that he lost. We played more games and he proved correct. [card]Batterskull[/card] literally won him games he had no business winning had it not been available for him to search.
[card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] became a dangerous creature to attack into, because [card]Batterskull[/card] might already be in Alex’s hand. You think you are winning when you attack with a bunch of [card]Cursecatcher[/card]s and [card]Silvergill Adept[/card]s into a lone [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card], but down comes [card]Batterskull[/card] and you have now just been blown out.
The set of games made us wonder if it was possible that this [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] and [card]Batterskull[/card] duo was underrated in Legacy. You saw none of it in the top 8 of the SCG Opens and in the deck that [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] did show up in (Caleb Durward’s deck), it was in the sideboard! Alex saw this as an opportunity to take advantage of an underrated concept.
This would not be the first time a concept was ported from another format into Legacy. Not that long ago, my sensei, Mike Flores decided to port Cephalid Breakfast from Extended to Legacy. Of course, Cephalid Breakfast has yet to put up results that would classify it as a tier 1 deck, but most pros I have talked to consider it a legitimate archetype.
Rob Anderson ended up winning the Tuesday Night Legacy tournament with a UWR control deck with you guessed it, the Stoneforge/Batterskull duo. He took Joseph Keaveny’s pre-NPH deck from SCG Charlotte and streamlined it. The original list only had 3 Stoneforge Mystics. That’s not enough!
At this point, Alex, Rob and I were all thinking the same thing. Stoneforge with [card]Batterskull[/card] is where we wanted to be at, because not only is the combination good against aggro, it is also extremely annoying for an opposing control player to deal with. With Rob focusing his attention on UWR and Alex hoping to test an Esper configuration, I set out on a path to see if a UW Stoneforge deck was possible. It reflected my feelings on Caw-Blade in Standard. I have never liked the Dark-Blade variant and probably never will. Disagreeing with Gerry Thompson is something I rarely do, but it’s good to be able to have my own voice.
Speaking of Gerry, he was definitely the inspiration of my initial build of UW Stoneforge. Everyone was talking about how the main weakness of his Landstill deck in Legacy was due to its extremely slow clock. Why not just remove the new kill condition he hated in [card]Decree of Justice[/card] and go for some Stoneforge [card]Batterskull[/card] beatdown? I think it is always interesting to be able to go behind the scenes and see how a deck came about. Here’s a snippet of a Facebook thread that I started the next morning after Tuesday Night Legacy:
If you look at my initial sketch, it looks extremely familiar to Owen Turtenwald’s deck in the top 8 of GP Providence. In the Facebook snippet above, you also see me exploring an old archetype. I loved the look of it because it reminded me of the UW Faeries deck I took to a PTQ top 4 finish not so long ago. That’s another concept I am starting to use in my deck brewing. Taking an old concept and seeing if it will work in the new jungle of the format. Who knows right? Maybe Counterbalance is slowly forgotten until it is the best deck for next year’s Legacy GP.
Speaking of UW Faeries, I had brewed up a variant for Legacy and decided to ask various team members what they felt about the list. These conversations (recorded Wednesday night) make up what was posted yesterday as Behind Mana D #1: GP Providence. If you are interested in listening to a team debate card choices, then these files are a must-listen!
Final Deck Choice
When we arrived at the event, I met up with Adam Yurchick who gave me the inside scoop. He told me word was out that the pros were high on the [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]/[card]Batterskull[/card] combo. I was both happy and sad. Happy that our crew came up with something that the pros were leaning towards, but sad that it was no longer going to be an original idea. I am not suggesting it took a genius to figure out the existence of a UW Stoneblade deck in Legacy. I was merely hoping that they did not think it was a legitimate top tier strategy for the format, while we, in fact, did.
In our interview with PV in Eh Team #37, I told Paulo about how tech always seemed to leak the day before the event. On the Friday before Pro Tour Paris, even though I was in little old Canada, I heard about the Caw-Blade deck and that some of the French players were on a GW Quest. GP Providence was no different. It didn’t take long for people to confirm what Yurchick had told me.
At one point, I was sitting down at a table staring at my deck face-up to see what to cut. A Crazy Talk listener sat next to me and said it looked a lot like what Chapin was testing with during the day. I imagine pros are a lot more tight on tech when it comes to Pro Tours.
Let’s fast forward to what I ended up registering:
[deck title=UW Stoneblade by Kar Yung Tom]
[Lands]
4 Island
1 Plains
3 Scalding Tarn
4 Tundra
3 Mutavault
4 Flooded Strand
4 Mishras Factory
1 Celestial Colonnade
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
4 Stoneforge Mystic
2 Vendilion Clique
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
4 Swords to Plowshares
1 Batterskull
4 Brainstorm
4 Mental Misstep
2 Counterspell
4 Spell Snare
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
4 Force of Will
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
1 Enlightened Tutor
1 Energy Flux
2 Pithing Needle
2 Relic of Progenitus
1 Sword of Feast and Famine
2 Llawan, Cephalid Empress
3 Ethersworn Canonist
1 Path to Exile
2 Misdirection
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
Chapin’s main deck and mine share many of the same card choices. The Innovator has already written an article explaining the inclusion of every card in his deck. Instead of duplicating his work, I will just focus on the differences between his list and mine.
The first obvious different is my omission of [card]Wasteland[/card]. Once we decided to jump on the [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] bandwagon, my team’s opinion was that I needed to add more creatures to my list. The logic was that it would increase the value of having Equipments in the deck.
Vendilion Cliques in the main deck is a straight port from my Extended deck. If the mirror becomes more popular, sometimes you will be able to catch an unprepared opponent off-guard. They play [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card] for [card]Batterskull[/card]. On a future turn, they might try to cheat the [card]Batterskull[/card] into play with the Mystic. At this point, you can Clique them to get rid of the [card]Batterskull[/card] from their hand. Unless they have another Equipment, you have just successfully caused your adversary to tap the Mystic and two mana for nothing.
The main deck [card]Elspeth, the Knight Errant[/card]s were Alex’s idea. He had tested a few games against Team America and said “How does Team American deal with a resolved Elspeth?”. I was reminded of the time in Standard when both Jace and Elspeth were legal to be played in Standard. Who kept Jace in check back then? Elspeth. As a matter of fact, if you read Brian Kibler’s article on Next Level Bant, he said “Elspeth is the planeswalker that beats all the other planeswalkers in a fight”.
With the format slowing down and with more Legacy decks opting to include a playset of Jaces, now is probably the time for Elspeth to come out and play. She’s the true Jace killer. The only problem is that she is sort of awkward on the mana as she requires double W. Maybe including an extra [card]Plains[/card] would be advisable moving forward.
Going back to the Facebook snippet one last time, you can see Bryce’s suggestion of putting the [card]Stoneforge Mystic[/card]s in the sideboard. This would have allowed us to play a creature-less main deck and provided us the ability to surprise our opponent post-sideboard. Ultimately, I opted against this plan because the Stoneforge package was so effective against Merfolk, which I expected to be the most popular deck.
The Main Event
The event went extremely poorly for me. I started off with a bye. I then proceeded to lose to Merfolk, the mirror and Affinity. I played one more match against a Bant [card]Stifle[/card] deck that went to time with me having superior board state. It did not bother me because I was not going to make Day 2 anyways, so I decided to draw with my opponent and drop from the tournament to get some much-needed food.
I might be the host of a Legacy podcast, but talking about the format cannot replace the experience of playing games. I made various mistakes, such as performing a bad [card]Brainstorm[/card] that might have cost me the game against my Merfolk opponent, but I am not the only one. I feel like there’s so much to keep track of that it can even cause insane players like Yurchick to make silly-looking mistakes.
I was watching Yurchick with a hand that included 2 [card]Brainstorm[/card]s and a [card]Thoughtseize[/card]. He had an [card]Island[/card] and a fetchland in play. Naturally, if this is all you knew about the board state, you would [card]Brainstorm[/card] and shuffle away 2 bad cards, but as soon as Adam resolved the [card]Brainstorm[/card], he noticed that the opponent’s land was an [card]Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth[/card]. He made a hand motion as if to smack himself as had he known Urborg was on the table, he would have led with [card]Thoughtseize[/card] instead.
In Patrick Chapin’s book, Next Level Magic, the author suggests coming up with mental shortcuts to prevent these types of mistakes. I’m going to need a long list of mental shortcuts before I am even competent at this format, let me tell you that!
Future Changes
I was pretty happy with the deck when taking account my misplays. The main thing I would need to take a look at is adding back the [card]Crucible of World[/card]s and [card]Wasteland[/card]s, because that’s the card that killed me in the mirror match and the mirror could be prevalent from this point forward. With Crucible in play, you usually get a ton of card advantage and with fetchlands to bring back, your [card]Brainstorm[/card]s are extremely powerful. All my man-lands in play were rendered useless and all the ones I would draw would end up bring dead draws. I could hear my opponent saying “Nice man-lands, brah!”.
The sideboard was obviously rushed, so I will have to do a lot more testing before I recommend which 15 I would play. I was talking to Adam Barnello who decided to go with an [card]Enlightened Tutor[/card] type of package. I don’t know if that is the right approach because that man is extremely biased towards that card. I look forward to seeing his article on the deck this week over at Channel Fireball.
Focus
One of the main things I am going to need to work on is my level of focus in future tournaments. I can now understand why you rarely hear about content managers doing well at a tournament. My mind was cluttered with wanting to do well at the GP and desiring to film some interviews with some of the pro players. For the future, I need to decide what I wish to accomplish and focus on that objective. I can’t do everything.
Go Canada!
Canada did not crack the top 8, but there was a decent amount of Day 2 players. Samuel Tharmaratnam, better known as Sammy T, is a well-respected Canadian deckbuilder and he had a hand at getting a few of us Canadians into Day 2. Eric Gaudreault finished 31st with Sammy’s UW Merfolk deck, while Dan McDonald ended up in 32nd place with a Sneak Show deck, also of Sammy’s design. We will definitely try to showcase these decks on Mana D sometime this week.
If you thought we were just joking about Hulk Rebirth deck on Crazy Talk, hopefully the coverage of GP Providence changed your mind. Felix was able to win a grinder with it while Jeremie went to the finals of one on Friday. Jeremie also made Day 2, finishing in 58th place. They were also both in a feature match. We might joke around on the podcast a lot, but we never joke when we believe a deck to be for real. I was rooting for either of these two gentlemen to make top 8. You can expect some sort of content from the originators on Mana D soon.
For those who missed it, here’s the Hulk Rebirth decklist:
[deck title=Hulk Rebirth by Felix Lapan and Jeremie Ross-Latour]
[Lands]
3 Ancient Tomb
3 Bayou
2 Dryad Arbor
1 Forest
1 Gaea’s Cradle
2 Misty Rainforest
1 Phyrexian Tower
1 Savannah
3 Verdant Catacombs
2 Windswept Heath
2 Wooded Foothills
[/Lands]
[Creatures]
1 Academy Rector
4 Birds of Paradise
1 Body Double
1 Carrion Feeder
1 Fauna Shaman
1 Mogg Fanatic
1 Progenitus
2 Protean Hulk
1 Reveillark
1 Starved Rusalka
2 Tinder Wall
1 Viscera Seer
1 Wall of Roots
1 Wild Cantor
1 Xantid Swarm
[/Creatures]
[Spells]
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Gitaxian Probe
4 Green Suns Zenith
4 Natural Order
4 Pattern of Rebirth
[/Spells]
[Sideboard]
4 Carpet of Flowers
2 Krosan Grip
2 Null Rod
1 Qasali Pridemage
4 Slaughter Pact
1 Sylvan Library
1 Xantid Swarm
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
Most of the established players already belong to a clique that they discuss technology exclusively with. For those of us looking to join a group, I advise associating yourself with some of the underrated names that I just mentioned. Associate yourself with the better players in your local area before they become big names.
Next Level Tip: associate yourself with Mark Sun.
Leaking Tech
I am going to be vague about this, since this is now in the past, but I want to let my readers know something that happened to me this week, so that they never have to go through the same thing. A few days before GP Providence, I was discussing Legacy technology with a good friend, who also happens to be a well-regarded Legacy expert.
He revealed his sideboarding strategy against a specific matchup to me. It was an idea that could be applied to my deck, so I shared this technology with the few people I was working on my deck with. The problem was that I also cited whose idea it was. I did it because I wanted to give the idea more credibility, but it proved to be a costly mistake.
Long story short, word got out and my friend was contacted regarding his sideboarding strategy by other players. Like I said before, technology spreads extremely fast on the Friday of a major event, but it sounded like I was clearly responsible for the leak. I felt like complete garbage Friday night as my friends tried to cheer me up at the pub. Don’t let this happen to you. Keep your sources anonymous.
Shout-outs
– Frank Richard: My MTG dad. There’s no words to describe how happy I am to have you as an MTG friend. #NoHomo
– Mauro Bongiovanni: You have either changed a great deal or you have always been misunderstood. You are quite the character and it was a pleasure to travel with you, even though the others say you are only tolerable for a weekend.
– Mathieu Roberge: Discussing decklists with you is always a hilarious experience because you try to over-attack the metagame.
– Alex Hayne: I can’t wait to see you breakthrough, First Mate. Thanks for essentially building my deck!
– Rob Anderson: Your humor is dry, but I just realized you might be the funniest MTG player that I know.
– Nick LeBlanc: You are simply “Jokes R Us”. Too many exaggerated stories of things that happen to you. Keep them coming!
– Justin Richardson: You will get there next time. You are definitely one of the best Constructed players that I know.
– Dan Lanthier: Keep being this new crazy “you”. VEN-GE-VINE! -waves hands in the air-
– Eugene Ho: You annoy people like crazy, but as time has gone by, I consider you a good friend. Come back safe and let’s crush Worlds together.
– Felix Lapan: Out of everyone on Team Canada, believe it or not, I wanted to see you succeed more than anyone else. You are pure class and the deck is the real deal.
– Jay Elarar & Dan Kramer: You guys are probably the best couple in Magic. The interactions you have with each other: second to none.
– Adam Yurchick: You are my closest friend on the Pro Tour circuit. I think you might have no idea how cool of a person you are.
– Bryce Menard: You are just an awesome awesome guy. Thanks for all the time you used up testing with my on Cockatrice.
– Mark Sun: Asian brothers for life! You lived up to how I expected you to be: easy-going and hilarious. I am still waiting for the Return of a Legend, though.
– Adam Barnello: You were an amazing guest on Crazy Talk and thank you for spending the time to quickly discuss deck ideas with me. Color me a Barnello fan!
– Drew Levin: I always knew you to be the real deal. People are labeling you as a Legacy expert, but I know you have the skills to take down not only Nationals, but Pro Tour Philly.
– Bill Boulden: You are the definition of friendly in the MTG world. It is always a pleasure to chat with you.
– The Eh Team: My brothers and my biggest supporters. I love you guys.
Take extra care guys,
KYT (@manadeprived on Twitter)
Kar Yung Tom (KYT) is the Digital Content Manager for Face to Face Games. He oversees the F2FTour.com and Magic F2F websites.