This week I have a brew as a special tribute to a buddy of mine, Jerry Mee. You might have seen him with a few Top 8 appearances playing 62 card Delver of Secrets variants or Sneak and Show. If you aren’t familiar with that he and a couple of friends host the podcast “Leaving a Legacy” on mtgcast where they talk mostly about Legacy as well as some chatter on Sealed, Spoilers and other semi-related and unrelated topics. Jerry was speculating on Squandered Resources since seeing The Gitrog Monster spoiled and came up with no one knows what for a brew. Naturally given what I do every other week here on Hipsters, I stepped in to give him help, bringing us to my brew for this week.
Squandered Jund
Creatures
To lead off our creature package I would like to point out the obvious—we have Veteran Explorer for the Nicfit package that we are running. Nice little piece of ramp that allows us to curve into our threats much sooner than the average Legacy deck.
We have some protection for our creatures in Sylvan Safekeeper which plays along very well with The Gitrog Monster and Titania in order to gain massive value. It is worth noting that this will protect both from being bounced with Karakas, while providing the value that they are meant to give us.
For threats we start from the top with Broodmate Dragon. Giving us two 4/4 flying creatures all for six mana is definitely valuable in a format like Legacy where five mana needs to give you the ability to win a game. Broodmate Dragon certainly provides us with that.
Huntmaster of the Fells is no newcomer to eternal formats. He is seen in Modern Jund, Legacy Nicfit and on occasion Legacy Jund as well. His front side gives us two 2/2 creatures as well as two life which can certainly be useful in blunting the assault from aggro decks. His flip side can remove a Delver of Secrets from the board, Shock our opponent and swing for decent damage. If we need life odds are we could potentially flip him back given the nature of our deck.
Inferno Titan is a large top end threat for us. This titan can answer most of our opponents threats and punches through for some decent damage in the meantime. Since we are a ramp deck the fact that it has fire breathing is nothing short of awesome here.
Mina and Denn, Wildborn has been a pet card of mine since being spoiled when Oath of the Gatewatch came out. I am sure many of you have read Kate’s article about her addiction to 12 Post. This past week she talked a bit about the GR list that I put together for her. Mina and Denn are in my opinion the poster children for that deck. The extra land drops are very relevant to both decks, this one obviously since we are a ramp deck that is trying to cycle our lands by playing out as many as possible and getting rid of them for as much value as possible.
The Gitrog Monster and Titania, Protector of Argoth play very similar roles here by giving us all the value by having lands go away. The monster draws us cards, Titania spams us 5/3 tokens. What more could a brewer want when trying to design a deck of this nature? I am not sure that the 2/1 split is correct or if we should be going all in on a 3/2 split dropping some of the cuter options for this deck such as Courser of Kruphix and Anger.
Courser of Kruphix is here to gain some life as well as access our top decks so that we can minimize how many draws steps we have to draw land as opposed to action. Courser combined with Sensei’s Divining Top also allows us filtering for when The Gitrog Monster is online and we are trying to maximize the card advantage as much as possible.
I have the lone Anger in here in the event that we are set up and we can use Titania alongside Squandered Resources to make five or six tokens with haste to close a game.
Spells—Land fun
Obviously here we talk more about The Gitrog Monster and Titania, Protector of Argoth since they are our main win conditions. But we have to mention that card, that does that mana thing with the lands. Squandered Resources is the main sacrifice outlet in order to get all the value from both closers. The Monster allows us to play extra lands as well as draw cards when lands go from anywhere to our graveyard and Titania spams 5/3 tokens when lands we control get put into the yard from the field. Squandered Resources allows us to get additional mana by sacrificing lands and in turn drawing cards we can use that mana towards with a Monster in play and spam the tokens with Titania in play.
In order to gain additional value from our sacrificed lands we have Crucible of Worlds to work out of our graveyard. This allows us to keep the engine online despite what we are drawing.
Spells—Removal
Abrupt Decay was a natural inclusion given that we are running both black and green. It is one of the most efficient removal spells currently in Legacy and has the upside that it can’t be countered.
Punishing Fire is the other selection for removal as it can be recurred with ease and answers a lot of the creatures played in Legacy. Given the ramp of our deck it is not unlikely that should we need to cast it multiple times a turn that we could.
Spells—Planeswalkers
Arlinn Kord is another newcomer that I found to be very intriguing. Her abilities are relevant in Legacy mostly. Her front side gives a pump plus haste and vigilance which can be great for when we want to push through damage but need to leave behind a blocker or when we are top decking and need a hasty threat. Making a token can protect her from creatures for at least a turn. On her flip side she can give trample which can allows our larger threats to push damage through chump blockers. Her -1 allows for her to kill creatures or potentially deal the last few points of damage to our opponent. Her ultimate combined with our larger threats allows us to push damage over the top and close a game without having to enter combat.
Liliana of the Veil is a great anti-control Planeswalker. She tears apart hands, answers creatures not caring about protection and her ultimate limits our opponents resources allowing us to limit their answers to our threats.
Sideboard
The sheer power of Blood Moon as well as the fact that we run a lot of basics and the ability to get them out quickly and early means this was an auto include. It cripples a lot of decks. Oddly enough including Miracles taking away their ability to increase card selection having access to shuffle effects through their fetchlands.
The four Duress are there for the combo match up which can be tough for this style of deck. Surgical Extraction and Extirpate also have some value against combo by removing key combo cards from our opponents deck.
Pyroblasts are relevant versus combo and give us some action against cards like Jace, the Mind Sculptor.
Toxic Deluge is here for swarm strategies like Elves, UR Delver as well as Monastery Mentor based strategies.
Happy brewing to each and every one of you. If anyone has an idea for a brew that they would like to see, I will gladly take requests and challenges in the comments. 🙂
Aaron Gazzaniga manages a restaurant and in his off time has been an avid magic player/brewer since 2003. Having begun in Odyssey Standard Block and always favoring control and prison style decks, we come to this moment in time where Aaron finally gets to talk about and share his ideas.