Miracles for Legacy @ SCG CON
This is the final article in my testing series for SCG Con. If you missed the previous 2, you can find part 1 here and part 2 here.
As for this week, we’ll be talking about the final deck I needed to test, UW Miracles, and then discuss what my final decision is.
Here’s the list I was playing:
The first thing I noticed was that this deck is extremely different from the Miracles decks I have played in the past. Even the most recent list I played a few months ago is a far cry from this version. This version of Miracles does 1 thing, and does it incredibly well: Draw cards.
This is a pure draw-go control deck. Just about a third of the deck is entirely dedicated to drawing cards, which allows Miracles to be hyper consistent. All you need to do in most games is establish a solid manabase and you will likely find what you need.
It is incredibly difficult for opponents to overcome that type of card advantage because the rest of the deck is pretty much answering what they’re trying to do. 1 for 1 answers like Swords to Plowshares and Counterspell easily allow Miracles players to survive because so many of the other cards are generating 2 for 1 value or more. On top of this, Terminus is a major source of card advantage in it of itself, and continues to be one of the most powerful Wrath effects of all time.
Because card selection and advantage is so easy for this deck, there isn’t much need to play more than a few cards that win the game because you don’t want them until the game is in complete control. If you do want to deploy them earlier than turn 15, you can always cantrip into them and have access to Jace and Mentor when they are most convenient.
Finally, Back to Basics is an incredibly powerful card. Not only does it completely end a real percentage of games in which it resolves, it totally warps how opponents have to manage their manabase in the early game. If it isn’t good, it is trivially easy to get rid of it with cantrips or even as Force of Will bait. Basic lands have always been very strong in Legacy and Back to Basics is a huge reason this deck has been so successful recently.
In the end, I found this deck to be incredibly good. It was powerful in a vacuum, and well positioned against what the rest of the Legacy metagame looks like. I was winning a lot with it, although not any more than I was winning with UW Delver and Grixis Control, but it definitely performed extremely well.
However, it didn’t take too long for me to decide that I wasn’t going to play it. I think I spent a lot of my early Magic career thinking I was a lover of this style of deck. Drawing cards, countering spells and doing a whole lot of nothing seemed really appealing to me. These days, it actively turns me off from a deck, and I didn’t enjoy playing it at all.
Miracles consists of far too much fluff for me. I’m looking to play a deck in which more cards do something to impact the game. So primarily due to personal preference, I am not going to play this at SCG Con. I would recommend it to anyone looking to play a pure control deck, as it is definitely good, but i’ll stick to something else for the time being.
What To Play
So to recap, I started out with 4 decks I was considering: UW Delver, UW Miracles, Grixis Delver and Grixis Control. Grixis Delver underperformed for me, UW Miracles was too fluffy for me, and I liked UW Delver and Grixis Control.
Both had features that I was really into. I liked how linear and consistent Grixis Control’s game plan is. Every game pretty much involves doing a lot of the same thing, and a lot of edges come in the small decisions. There’s a constant effort to extract the most value out of every card and really make the cards work for you.
On top of this, Liliana, the Last Hope is an absurd Magic card. It applies pressure while maintaining the board, it dodges a lot of commonly played interaction at the moment, and it even generates serious card advantage. While it isn’t quite as versatile as Jace, which is the primary reason there are far fewer of her, I think she’s a big part of the reason that Black has been so good in Legacy recently.
As for UW, it’s kind of the opposite experience. I like how malleable the deck is. Every turn involves shifting from one plan to the next, and how you play your cards totally influences your gameplan. You can Daze to protect a Delver, Pitch that Jace to Force and suddenly you’re the aggro deck. On the other hand, you can just let them kill all of your creatures and plan to play a game that will go on for 7 or 8 more turns and have the tools to manage that. Not many decks that I have played recently have that kind of versatility and that’s really nice.
This does result in inconsistencies, though. Things don’t line up so perfectly every time so sometimes your hand is being pulled in two directions and neither one is fully supported. This can definitely lead to non-games where you flounder around and fail to do anything meaningful.
While the decision was pretty close between the two, I opted to go with Grixis Control. This is mostly because it is a far more consistent deck, able to enact its gameplan in almost every game. I think I actually enjoyed playing UW Delver more, but I want to make sure I have a chance to play Magic in every round and not lose to my deck’s inconsistent draws.
Again, here’s the relatively stock decklist I am going to play:
The biggest change from the norm is including a Toxic Deluge in the main deck. I think simply having access to a single copy can go a long way, and will allow me to win some less-than-winnable games in the pre-board games.
My sideboard used to have even more graveyard hate, but I settled on 4 pieces. Spellbomb is pretty strong in the mirror, but mostly I don’t want to give up too many games against he dedicated graveyard-based decks.
The event I’m going to play in is in just a few days. I’m excited, and hope I have made the right choice. Next time, I will go over what happened at SCG Con and talk about what worked and what I could have done differently!
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