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The Prosecution Would Like To Call Its First Witness!

Hey Ya’ll

Welcome to the first ever article on Deck Construct regarding the Eternal formats! I am really excited to be writing about my favourite card game and my favourite formats!

Ok, a little about me first, just to kick things off, and then we will get onto the more interesting stuff! I  live just outside of London, UK and play both Legacy and Vintage and maybe a little EDH. I have been playing since Mirrodin and then took a break when I moved to London during Ravnica Block and then started again during Lorwyn. One of the reasons I stopped playing was that I was heavily into Standard and couldn’t justify the cost of playing it any more, with having to invest in new sets every 3 months. When I came back to the game, I had a look round at what I could play and what formats were doing well and I stumbled across Legacy.

Legacy was interesting, because I had always fiddled around with Vintage (or Type 1, as I knew it) and I had lots of staple cards that I could play right away without any investment. I came back with a Mono Black Control deck (with Duress, Dark Ritual and suchlike) and discovered a wonderful world! I got totally destroyed, as I didn’t know about cards like Tarmogoyf and Counterbalance, but I totally loved playing competitive Magic again! I then started building my collection, buying Dual Lands, and other staples. It’s not an easy investment, but the rewards are well worth it! I will talk about this as part of this series also!

So, onto the more interesting stuff! This series of articles will, hopefully, share my experiences learning about Legacy and Vintage and growing as a player, as well as giving deck and meta game advice and, with some luck, entertain you along the way!

Now, when I started playing Magic and was introduced to the older formats of Type 1 and 1.5 (which is what Vintage and Legacy were called Way Back When), I was mesmerised by all the broken cards and powerful plays you could make, sometimes winning as soon as the first turn! As I learned about the games, I have found that while decks can and do win on the first turn, its often much later in the game that players finally kill their opponent. That said, I do love me some combo and am known in southern England as “the Belcher Guy” and have made top 8 in 3 of our larger UK Legacy tournaments playing something like this:

This is a typical build, although you can play a 2 land version that includes Black and has Dark Rituals in it. It looks to generate 7 mana to drop and then activate Goblin Charbelcher to Belch your opponent for up to 104 damage on the first turn or use Empty the Warrens with a Storm Count between 5-8 (sometimes even more!) to generate 10 to 16+ 1/1 Goblin tokens on the first turn. Most opponents will struggle to beat something like this first turn, especially if they do not know what they are supposed to counter. This deck is a true Glass Cannon and rolls over to several different types of hate, but your worst, worst, worst Enemy is Force of Will! This card will put a crimp in your game all day long, so this is only a deck to be played when you play in a meta that you expect lots of Aggro or other versions of Control such as Lands! and Enchantress.

Once I started playing the Eternal formats more seriously, I learned that a lot of games, especially in Vintage, often consist of several turns of Draw, Go, before someone resolves a win condition (Wincon) and something like Oath in Vintage can do either:

This deck was played by Vintage Legend Rich Shay at an event at the beginning of the year and won the event quite easily. It can be very explosive and can lay a turn 1 Oath of Druids, using Forbidden Orchard and a Mox. This can then lead to a turn 2 Iona, Shield of Emeria, shutting off your opponent’s main colour. You can also take infinite turns using Voltaic Key to untap Time Vault or Tinker up the Robot of your choice (robot is an affectionate term for an artifact creature). If this plan doesn’t work, you can also play the control game and wait for your opportunity to strike, sculpting your hand into the perfect win!

Many decks will be built to be controlling, using Force of Will, Daze, Mana Drain and even perhaps Thoughtseize or Duress to slow down or stop your game plan in order for them to resolve their threats and win the game. Some of them use almost all of these and can be very successful and a complete pain to play against! I love playing these decks, but am not very good at them, so I will use this column to see if we can track my improvement and maybe learn something together.

I will be testing and posting about almost every type of deck in the coming weeks and months, so don’t worry if you aren’t 100% up to date with the Eternal formats and decks, me and you can learn together! I know I am excited about this!

As a final note, I haven’t managed to think of a cheesy tag line yet, so I am going to run a little competition for it. The one the makes me cringe the most or burst out laughing will get the contributor a mention in my next article. Entries close on Sunday, the 27th of June at Midnight GMT. Please post your entries in the comments section below!

Thanks for reading! (See, how awful is that as a tagline?!!?!)

Tags: eternal, Eternal Witness, legacy, vintage