So, during my time hanging around a friend of mine who played Legacy, he had three decks: High Tide, Manaless Dredge, and Shardless BUG.
So, Manaless Dredge is out for me. It looks fun, sure, but I really don't have all the cards for it. I have a few, but it would require a bit more money. Shardless BUG is great... if you have four Shardless Agent, 4 Baleful Strix, and the ABU & Revised Dual Lands. So what does that leave us with? High Tide.
Now, High Tide is a deck that utilizes, you guessed it, High Tide. It also needs a way to boost your mana (so... a land untapper). My friend utilizes 3 Candelabra of Tawnos.
See the combo? Your Islands now tap for 2 blue mana each, and with that, you tap two Islands, tap Candelabra, and then you untap 4 lands. Candelabra is a "Mono Artifact" which back then meant it was one use per turn (meaning tapped). So... that's how that works. But... let's look at the prices:
Low: $255.00
Median: $307.49
High: $399.98
Those are from TCG Player. Even if I wanted badly damaged cards, I'd need to pay $255, or else open 200 boxes of 1st print Zendikar or several boxes of Antiquities, and for both of those, to do this economically, I'd need a time machine. So what do we do now? The next best thing...
Sure, it can be killed pretty easily, but you can play this deck on your opponent's turn. Kinda. So far, I have 4 Magus of the Candelabra and 4 High Tide (one of each art, the three from Fallen Empires and the IDW promo from the Theros #1 comic).
I got these from Star City Games during their holiday sale. The 3 old High Tides were $0.99 each, and the promo was $5.99 (my comic was given to me by my friend who plays Legacy because he only wanted the promo), and I got each Magus at half price. So each one for me was $0.49, but they can be bought for $0.99 now. Or you can go to TCGPlayer and get them cheaper or something. I went with SCG because they had other things I wanted and they are nearby. Either way, if you're keeping score, and we only go for the old High Tides, we've only spent $7.92 on cards, minus tax and shipping (SCG charges tax for Virginia purchases). 8 cards... But, most of our mana is covered. I have my 4 Breeding Pool and I have a lot of Zendikar Islands, so we're almost done there. However, I'm changing things up. I need a Tropical Island.
It's a shockland without the shock part. It's a Forest Island which comes in without tapping or any of that nonsense. These are staples in EDH, Legacy, and Commander, but with my brew, I only need 1. So, now you see why I need these. I need the green and I need them to be Islands, which is why I brought in the Breeding Pools. Once you use a High Tide, it taps for 1 green or 2 blue. So you have the green you need or all the blue you could ever want. So far so good. But how much? They're expensive, but the Revised version (which is above) is the cheapest. We don't want Alpha, Beta, or Unlimited. They'll fetch between $100 and $1800. Revised is $80 to $120 which is easier to obtain. So... I need one of those. Need to figure out where one is and get it as cheap as possible.
Anyway, that's all for now. Next time we visit the Legacy format, we'll check out what we'll do with all the blue mana and how we'll always set it off.
a few questions, one why did you only copy some of your friends decks while there are some "cost efficient" deck in legacy (cough cough Merfolk cough cough) while running breeding pools in legacy is all fun and dandy they are just a death wish. Now onto the magus of the candlebra, while is does let you ramp some the goal of the deck seems to be get infinite mana laugh at opponent that is all my notes thanks
ReplyDeleteThe deck I'm working on/modifying is similar to one that was a deck on DailyMTG.com last year (plugged into SCG's deck builder, the total at the lowest cost would be $23 since I had Ponder and Breeding Pool). Since I'm familiar with how a High Tide deck works because I've watched it played enough, I figured I'd start with what I know. Had I not even seen the blue/green deck from Wizards, I would have continued avoiding Legacy. I stayed out of Modern long enough, and I started out with a very budget deck, just what I had from Innistrad Block, 4x of each of the Guildpact commons, and then what I pulled from Modern Masters. I'd like to be able to do an Affinity deck that lets me win in 3 turns, but I can't even do that yet. If I stayed out of Standard a year, I could afford a competitive Modern deck, and if I stayed out of Standard for three years, maybe I could afford a decent Legacy deck. I won't do that because I like Standard too much... Breeding Pool is because I have them and they were in the WOTC deck I saw. Of course they also had 8 fetches, but that's not going to happen because they're too expensive. Besides, the goal is to hopefully finish up in 3 or 4 turns, so taking 2 damage turn 1 for a Magus won't be a terrible thing. I'm also trying to avoid Force of Will, etc but I know if I were to go to a tournament, that's exactly what I'd need. I'd hardly call Merfolk "cost efficient" though. The first few decks I looked at required 4 Mutavaults, and several of them require 4x True-Name Nemesis. They also each require 4x Force of Will. Just the Mutavaults alone are more expensive than the entire deck... But since I'm new to the idea of Legacy, I didn't research too much about the various deck types, just what I new from experienced Legacy players. I'd like to know about the "cost efficient" Legacy Merfolk you know of though.
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