Welcome back! So today, I decided to make my entrance into a new format of Magic for me: Legacy.
Legacy is a sixty-card Magic format that lies on the scale of expensive decks between Modern and Vintage. Modern includes cards from this list of sets - from Mirrodin to the current set. Because of this wider selection of cards available, modern is a lot more expensive than standard, which is only the last few most recent sets. Legacy, on the other hand, has every card in Magic available, with a banlist of cards that aren't allowed. This means that you can play cards that are much older and more expensive; for example, the dual lands I mentioned in my last post. Vintage, finally, has every card available, and no banlist, except for a few cards that are restricted - you can only run one of each in a deck instead of the usual four.
Now, I've been looking into getting into a more competitive format for a while. At first, I looked at modern, and had a lot of fun with a proxied affinity deck. The problem, though, was that the deck costs roughly $1000, with the downside that the cards can be reprinted; they're not on the reserved list.
Last night, I was looking at events coming up that I could play a modern deck at and meet up with some of my friends from college. We noticed that there was an event in Worcester, MA in two weeks. This was both nearby several of my friends, and had the added benefit of being a team format - each team of three has a standard, a modern, and a legacy player. One of my friends wanted to play modern, the other wanted to play standard. I also wanted to play modern, so we considered asking some more of our friends to start another team. But then I started looking at legacy decks and found reanimator.
Reanimator is a legacy deck that wins by putting a Griselbrand into your graveyard, and then reanimating it onto the battlefield turn one. Then you have a 7/7 flying lifelink on the field, and an additional 14 cards in hand. If that ends up working, you've probably got a decent chance of winning the game.
The deck is more expensive than Affinity, mostly due to the dual lands. I already had a Badlands, though, and I realized that I could get the deck for much cheaper if I borrowed or traded for a few of the cards and replaced some others with ones I already owned.
As of now, I have all of the cards in the deck available to me, for a fraction of the price, and will go up to Worcester two weeks from now to participate in my first major tournament. See you next time!