#pt25a

I know, with reasonable certainty, when I played my first game of the Legacy format. I didn’t know that much about Legacy, in fact I’d only just started playing magic a few months earlier, but the players at my local store wanted to drum up support for Legacy, Vintage and our home grown Australian 7pt Highlander (its pretty cool; I’ll tell you about it sometime). To do this, they decided to run an Eternal Format league that would pay out its prizes in staples for those formats, cards like Force of Will, fetchlands, etc. At the time, the original dual lands weren’t quite as prohibitively expensive as they are now, so those were on the table as well if you did well enough. Even though I wasn’t that invested yet, I really liked playing MtG and these players were allowing any number of Proxies for this unsanctioned casual league, and it like a really cool way to try out these formats and maybe make some progress on a magic collection.

So, like I said, I didn’t know much about Legacy. I did a bit of research, and understood a few things pretty readily - the most important one was that people liked casting Brainstorm.

A week or two before this league, the set Born of the Gods had been released and with it a card that was particularly good against Brainstorm; Spirit of the Labyrinth. If they try to Brainstorm with the Spirit in play, they loose between 2-3 cards in their hand, and that sounded great to me. But no one was going to just cast a Brainstorm into my Spirit of the Labyrinth, so I needed to figure out a way to get it onto the battlefield unexpectedly. My answer to that question was AEther Vial. 

So what’s the natural pairing of AEther Vial and Spirit of the Labyrinth? Maybe Mother of Runes, Thalia and the rest of the Death and Taxes gang? I’m pretty sure I knew about that deck, because it was definitely around, but for some reason that wasn’t where my mind went. Instead, I decided that I wanted to play the best 2CMC creatures I could to get the most out of my AEther Vials, and since I’d be casting my creatures through it, I also needed some great spells to spend my mana on.

I ended up with a pretty amazing cast of creatures - Tarmogoyf, Stoneforge Mystic, Dark Confidant and Spirit of the Labyrinth, with Deathrite Shaman and Knight of the Reliquary playing outside the Vial. Along with that, I was slinging some pretty great spells in Hymn to Tourach, Abrupt Decay and Thoughtseize. It was a pretty sweet pile, and in retrospect I think its pretty funny that my brew of choice was some weird Dark Maverick variant based on the type of Magic I’d go on to pretty exclusively play afterwards. I didn’t do too well with it, but it lit a fire under me - I’d played against a lot of different decks in this legacy league, and so I started reading articles about legacy decks, watching coverage videos and trawling through page after page of forums so that I could be better prepared next time. That was how I came across a video of Joe Lossett playing Miracles. I saw him dismantling his opponents with clever interactions and sequences, escaping from certain doom by cleverly cantripping into answers or locking them out with weird Karakas-based sequences. That was what I wanted to do in Legacy.

Fast forward a year and I’d saved up, traded for and won pieces for the deck that I wanted to play. I took it to the biggest Legacy event of the year organised by the local community, at the capital cities annual gaming convention (CanCon, its pretty cool). 

I did okay.

I played Legacy whenever I could after that, and I kept up with reading, watching, researching. I loved the format, I loved playing my deck and I loved casting Brainstorm. That part of my assessment had definitely been correct. 

Eventually, Sensei’s Divining Top’s crimes finally caught up to it. During my time with the deck, the rest of the world started to realise that Miracles might have been the best strategy the whole time. It weathered Treasure Cruise and Dig Through Time unflinchingly, and came out the stronger. It was winning all the time, and inexperienced players were slowing down tournaments because of how many complicated manual actions the deck would take every single turn. Something needed to be done, but it still made me sad to see Top go. 

I kept playing Miracles, but not as often, not as joyfully. You needed to work a lot harder, and you were never as secure when you started to pull ahead. I was never going to be happy registering Portent, either. But I still liked Legacy, for the most part. 

When we were preparing for the Pro Tour, it was decided almost without any discussion that I’d be playing Legacy. I was the only one on my team that really liked playing it, and I was by far the most knowledgeable about it. We tested other decks, and there were times that we said to ourselves that Death and Taxes, or Moon Stompy or whatever else would give us the best matchups against what we thought the Pro Tour field would be. But I always knew that, if I pushed for it, they’d defer to my judgment that Miracles would be the best call for me to play. I was quietly confident that my skill, experience and knowledge would make up for the deck not quite being powerful enough, or fluid enough. When it came to the day of registering our decklists, the Wednesday before the PT itself, I knew that I would be registering Miracles.

We looked at competitive league results on MODO, and I saw the Grixis Control decks that were going 5-0 and understood that I’d be at a major disadvantage facing them. I still knew I’d be registering Miracles. 

We looked at my 75, and I knew that it wasn’t completely tuned - I was still playing some cards that I knew were weak, my sideboard wasn’t that good. But I still knew that I was going to register Miracles.

I wanted to do well at the Pro Tour, I wanted to win... but apparently, doing it with my deck was more important. I can’t even say that I’ve learned from that, because I just went to a weekend of PPTQs with a deck that I know wasn’t the best choice, wasn’t even the best choice easily available to me, but it was mine. 

I’m not saying that to complain or anything. We did our absolute best, but we weren’t going into this as professional magic players; we spiked a Team Grand Prix together. We got really lucky, and we tried our hearts out to do that, but that didn’t hold through for the big day. We made mistakes, and I don’t know if we prepared as well as we could have. I played in our Legacy seat, and I played the deck I had for it even though I knew deep down that it probably wasn’t the right choice. Its been a long time since Miracles was top dog of that format.

I’ve thought about the Pro Tour a lot since it happened, even though the MtG world has moved on from it. But it was awesome to be there, it was awesome to take part and it doesn’t matter that we didn’t do well or that maybe it’d be better to spend my time and energy on something else, because that’s the dream, isn’t it? Ever since I watched Yugioh before school in the mornings, I’ve wanted to play card games on the world stage. I’ve wanted to be the King of Games, and even though I’m playing the wrong card game to really have that world out for me, it still feels like it counts.

I’m still deciding what to do with this blog, if anything. I’m thinking, over the next few days, that I’ll talk about what I did at the Pro Tour a little bit, then more importantly what I’m doing to get back there. Its hard to do that here in Australia (how the bloody ‘ell are yah, mates?), because there are so few opportunities to qualify - two Grand Prix, one Regional Pro Tour Qualifier, a few more if I’m willing to get on a plane. Online RPTQs, but I don’t have a MODO account so that’ll be a bit of a barrier to qualifying for those right now. Scraping together a lot more Pro Points.