June 8th Deck Tech [Legacy Merfolk]

June 8, 2012

Let’s continue our adventures into Legacy.

Last week we talked about Combo, this week we’re going to play tempo. So listen to that song from the sea and play some Merfolk

Tempo is a companion concept to Card Advantage. With Card advantage you seek to use your cards efficiently and maintain advantageous options compared to your opponent. Examples of card advantage are getting 2-for-1’s and spells that improve the quality of your hand. Cards like Arc Trail are a good example of card advantage in red, allowing you to remove two of their cards with only one card. Other card advantage is usually achieved through drawing extra cards or cantrip spells that replace themselves in your hand, Ponder is a good example of both cantripping and setting up your draws for virtual card advantage.

The other major piece of Tempo is the mana curve. A deck that does as much as possible with all of it’s mana will run much faster and more efficiently than one that does nothing on several turns. Tempo is important in every deck and can be used in different ways, but we will use our very efficient early plays to capitalize on tempo. We also have a small control suite so that once we have an advantage, we can keep it long enough to finish the game.

The core of our deck comes down to our high Lords count, 16 in total. This stacking benefit gives us very efficient and large creatures, and can buff our utility creatures into decent beaters as well. Lord of Atlantis is our main and cheapest lord. As an added bonus he grants Islandwalking, making a matchup against an opponent who runs Blue more favorable. Merfolk Sovereign is the queen of atlantis, and while she only gives evasion to one creature and must tap to do so, it is unconditional and effective against every opponent. Merrow Reejerey is a utility lord, with each new merfolk spell you cast you get the option of tapping something down for control, or untapping something for aggression. Coralhelm Commander is our last lord, it takes a bit longer to get going, requiring an extra 4 mana invested before buffing our other Merfolk, but he does beat like a beast.

To accompany the royal collection, you have a school of other merfolk. Cursecatcher acts as a great control threat, you effectively put your opponent an entire turn behind you when you get this out. Judging when to correctly pop Cursecatcher is important, the more your opponent’s mana base develops the easier it will be for them to play around it, but the importance and power level of spells will go up as well. Silvergil Adept is a nice little 2/1 creature cantrip, you get to develop your board while maintaining card advantage. Be mindful on what you reveal, any time you give your opponent extra information they can play differently to account for it. Wake Thrasher is probably our best beater, when it attacks it should be at least a 4/4, larger if other permanents are untapping. Without fear of mana burn, at the end of your opponent’s turn you can simply tap all of your lands to get as many untaps as possible, you can also do a few untap shennanigans with Reejerey for some extra buffing.

While powering out our synergistic and aggressive board presence, we have a small control suite to accompany it to help maintain our early board advantage. Counterspell isn’t the optimal choice, but since Force of Will is a bit out of our price range it does the job in a pinch. Vapor Snag is an interesting card, bounce effects are inherently card disadvantage in the long run, but since we want to capitalize on the early benefits and out-tempo our opponent we benefit greatly from spot removal that slows down their board presence. Preordain is our last spell, it helps level out our draws, lets us draw the things we want, and hide the things we don’t. This is superior to Ponder and Brainstorm, ponder works best when we need to know what is next on the deck, such as with Delver, and shuffle away when we don’t see anything we want. Brainstorm works best with Shuffle effects, such as fetch lands, that let us hide the two cards we put on top to find later. While Preordain doesn’t let us dig as deep, we don’t need the deep manipulation, we just care about hiding what we don’t want (usually extra lands) and making sure we have what we do want (everything else).

To make this deck more competitive, important inclusions are AEther Vial and Daze, AEther Vial let’s us gain big early tempo by giving us an extra creature for the next 3 turns. Daze helps us stop early drops, and is almost always cast by returning an island, without the tempo advantage of AEther Vial putting us a land behind is very risky and not quite worth it, but with Aether Vial it can be huge advantage. Mutavault is also an amazing man-land, able to take advantage of your high lord count, while dodging sorcory speed removal and counterspells, colorless does hurt your mana base, but the benefits are hard to deny.

This deck is also very easy to update for Modern, Preordain (banned) and Counterspell (not available) are the only changes required. Modern staples like Mana Leak, Rune Snag, or Spell Snare work well. Preordain is hard to replace, but other card advantage generators like Sygg, River Cutthroat and Merfolk Looter can work.