Hello everyone!

I had a small “vacation” recently meaning that there weren’t that many important tournaments going on for me so I figured that I will just focus my playing time on Legacy since that is going to be the format I will be playing at the upcoming PT. I am also planning on spending a couple of weeks in Tokyo soon and I imagine that I will not have that much time to practice so I thought it would be quite useful to put in some games before I leave.

As most of you propably know, I am a citizen of Czech republic so it shouldn’t be that hard to figure out what my weapon of choice is: the Czech Pile.

Czech Pile

Now I am going to be completely honest here: I think that in the world where you are capable of doing everything properly, Grixis Delver is most likely a slightly better deck, but that is just not the way things are. Legacy is an extremely difficult format to play: you have a lot of decisions from turn 1 – not only which card to play, but also which land to play. As the game progresses you are faced with infinite deck manipulation decisions and doing all those things right requires a deep understanding of what is important.

Even if you are experienced Legacy player, you can’t just pick up any deck and expect to play it well on the first spin – every deck has certain intricacies to every matchup and knowing how do games usually play out is something that is almost impossible without a lot of practice. The fact that you see so many cards in every game means that a lot of key scenarios repeat themselves and it also means that even 1-off sideboard cards comes to play way more often and you have to be aware of all of those.

For example I’ve been shuffleing away a lot more lands in the Pile vs. Grixis Delver matchup in the fear of flooding out, which is a pattern that you use in most of the other matchups, but I was just keeping on getting “unlucky” when my opponent double 《Wasteland》 me right after and I’ve learned to value those extra lands even in middle stages of the game way more highly.

This is the list that Brian Braun-Duin used to crush the Team Grand Prix with in Toronto.

I haven’t played a lot of Legacy recently so I just started with Brian’s list to see where it leads me. I did like some of the changes that he has made to the deck, but not all of them. What I have liked the most is the changes he has made to the manabase – the bacics, second 《Badlands》 and 《Bayou》 has been all extremely good for me in a lot of different matchups and scenarios and I highly advise you to play this exact manabase if you are interested in trying out this deck.

The other (and way more significant) change he has made to the deck is that he built in a way to be in the best possible position in the Mirror and against Delver, which he has accomplished by cutting all the clunky 1 mana discard spells while adding more power to the deck.

The fact that you have access to these cards in your deck with additions of all these draw spells and 《Snapcaster》 means that your win% against decks like Reanimator, Show and Tell or ANT just skyrockets and I think that it is worth it.

OK, we have established that we want to access to the discard spells in our deck, which brings us to another problem – how do we build our deck to still function properly so that we don’t lose THAT much in the grindy matchups – well I think that you just have to cut some of these cute cards like 《Abrupt Decay》 etc. And play 3 《Kolaghan's Command》 and 3 《Jace》.

In fact I am convinced that playing any smaller number of these cards is just a huge mistake which you should definitely avoid – the way this deck works is that you are trying to trade resources early against every deck and then eventually win by just having way more cards than them, but you can easily flood out if you don’t have enough lategame power in your deck.

I understand that you might feel ‘safer’ if all of your angels are covered and 《Decay》 sounds like a card that solves a lot of problems (《Blood Moon》, 《Chalice》 etc), but that is not the way Magic works. You have to understand that in the actual game, you don’t really care if your angles are covered or not, you just want to win and topdecking such an insanely powerfull card like 《Jace》 on a mulligan to 6 can be the difference between winning and losing.

I have been talking to my friend and the original founder of Czech Pile Tomas Mar during the past couple of weeks and he has actually won a huge Legacy tournament in Italy with a list based on our conversation this weekend.

This is a deck he played and also something really close to a list I would submit if I were to play a Legacy tournament tommorow:

3 《Ponder》 certainly looks weird, but I actually don’t mind it – There is a card 《Preordain》 that is almost as good as 《Ponder》 and noone is playing it. Let’s just assume that you could play 8 《Ponder》. Why is the number 4 the right number? Well it is most likely not – I personally don’t know what the right number is – it could be 3, it could be 5 – I really don’t know, but what I am trying to explain is that it should not be automatic to play 4.

1 Card that Tomas didn’t play and a card I like a lot is 《Liliana, the Last Hope》 – what I like about the card is that it’s extremely powerfull both in slower midrange matchups as well as against the small creature decks like Death and Taxes or Elves. I will most definitely ask Thomas why he decided to not run this card.

There are infinite decks in Legacy right now to list them all, but I thought it could be useful to do a little sideboard guide against some of the most played decks.

Sidebording Plans

That will be all for today!

Thanks for reading,

Petr Sochurek