Lately I’ve been pretty vocal about GW Maverick being the by far most underrated deck in Legacy right now. I’m strongly convinced that it is a tier 1 choice and you should play it. So last night I transitioned from “Do as I say” to “Do as I do” and registered it for a Legacy League on Magic Online.

I’ve been working on a list with Marius Hausmann for almost 2 months by now. Note that I made one change from Marius’ preferred list, which has +2 Stoneforge Mystic and -2 Aven Mindcensor, which I ran this league:

The deck performed really well and there’s just a couple thing I’m still not 100% satisfied with. One of them are the Oblivion Rings in the sideboard because they’ve kept me wondering whether there’s really nothing better we could put in their place. Marius insists we want these two slots versus anything Show and Tell and I agree with him. It’s just…is there really nothing better in the year of 2018? We ran those O-Rings back in 2010, are they still good enough? I should probably do dedicated testing versus the most played Show and Tell variants to find out.

The Aven Mindcensors weren’t exactly great in this league, even though they ended up having a couple of uses. A major aspect of them is the ability to come down at instant speed and then pick up an Equipment and get in with evasion. As Flyers, they’re also naturally good with Exalted. Exalted in general has been really good int his deck and I wish we could play more reasonable creatures with that ability.

And then there’s Sigarda, Host of Herons. She’s occupying what back in 2011 was our Thrun, The Last Troll slot. Her ability to stop sacrifices is actually just a secondary bonus, as she’s playing the “Big, Fat, Green Wedding” slot. Marius insists we want an evasive and untouchable creature to top out the curve that can be Green Sun’s Zenith‘ed. Thus far I haven’t been thrilled with Sigarda but I also haven’t done too much research trying to come up with something better. If you got a suggestion that ticks all of those boxes and doesn’t cost more than 5, I’d be happy to hear about it in the comments or on Twitter. (My social media team tells me it’s better if you answer in the comments, to generate the impression that this website was highly frequented.)

On the option of a black splash: I’ve never liked the black splash in Maverick in the first place. One reason you can outright disregard because it has no competitive value is ideology. To me, Maverick is a GW Midrange deck that utilizes all the tools in those colors arsenal: efficient removal, mana denial, acceleration, tutoring, good flyers and the best hatebears of the format. Black as a color always felt like it added little to that and was only really played because Deathrite Shaman was just miles better than Noble Hierarch. And with Deathrite Shaman came the option to play other black cards, that however didn’t add too much to the deck that wasn’t already possible in GW in the first place. Except for Zealous Persecution, which is the only black card that would have me interested in the black splash in the first place.

One particular thing that doesn’t excite me at all is the option to splash for discard. If you’ve been following my Elves streams you probably already know that I consider discard to be quite weak against current day combo decks. ANT especially is very well-equipped to just play through quite a lot of discard. Show and Tell-based combo on the other hand has long evolved from the A+B deck it’s used to be; in-between its namesake, Sneak Attack, Omnscience, Cunning Wish, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and Griselbrand (and Flusterstorm) the deck is surprisingly resilient when it comes to playing around both discard AND hate bears. Discard is still okay against this kind of deck, especially when paired Surgical Extraction but Thoughtseize is not as great as it used to be several years ago.

My biggest problem with discard though is the inherent loss of tempo. Having to play turn1 Thoughtseize over Noble Hierarch weakens your turn 2, 3 and often even 4 significantly as it hinders your mana development. It also can make the sequencing really bad. Do you eschew that turn1 discard in order to set up that turn2 Green Sun’s Zenith for Gaddock Teeg? And wouldn’t I want to first play my discard spell in order to protect my hate bear? But what if they already have the kill on their turn2? There’s context-dependent answers to all of these question, but all of them leave a lot to be desired. I think discard works best in decks that have 1) a quick clock, so the combo deck doesn’t have a lot of time to recover and 2) play some sort of free countermagic, so you can bridge the gap in the first two turns, where you would rather be doing something else instead of playing discard spells. That’s why I think discard spells work really well with Mindbreak Trap AND hatebears, which unfortunately is a luxury we don’t have because of sideboard limitations. In general, I would rather be playing hatebears + Mindbreak Trap (especially since we have Mother of Runes for removal) and sleeving them up alongside discard spells, when up against ANT. Show and Tell is a different beast and I’m very open to hearing suggestions for what else to run in the Oblivion Ring slots.

One thing I LOVE discard against: control decks. When up against Miracles, I would love to play Discard and take our any of their card advantage, to slowly grind them into oblivion. Granted, this doesn’t work as well in Maverick as it does in Elves, but it’s still a strong approach – especially when you have cards that provide a huge pay-off in the short-term, such as Sylvan Library and Sword of Fire and Ice. The information you get from seeing the opponent’s hand is also highly valuable and lets you shape your game accordingly. To me, it’s just not worth the extra sideboard slots, since I don’t see anything I’d really want to cut for it, while also weakening my manabase against Death & Taxes and Delver in the process.

So without further ado, here’s the VOD of our Legacy League run from last night:

Watch 5-0 League with GW Maverick from itsJulian on www.twitch.tv

Hope everyone enjoyed themselves watching this as much as I did playing. I certainly didn’t play this 100% correctly, so there’s a ton more potential to unlock. Like I said in the video, GW Maverick might actually be my favourite Legacy deck of all times (shout-outs to Elves, Bant Survival and NO RUG) and it actually carried me to my first Day2 GP finish back in Amsterdam 2011. The deck as a ton of play and tricks to it, which makes it a blast to play. If you wanna hear more about my thoughts on why I would choose GW Maverick over Death & Taxes and 4c Loam, check out the most recent episode of Everday Eternal, in which Bob Huang, Phil Gallagher and I discuss these decks.

So long,

Julian

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