There’s always been an interesting tension in Legacy between decks that are trying to do powerful things and decks that are trying to do efficient things. Occasionally, as in the case with Miracles, there’s a deck that can do both, and that deck will quickly emerge as a top tier contender. More often, this tension manifests as a battle between various Delver of Secrets decks that try to Stifle and Wasteland opponents out of the game versus opponents trying to cast high impact spells like Show and Tell or Jace, the Mind Sculptor. We almost always see people opt to play either lots of colors or “Sol lands” like Ancient Tomb, but what happens if we just ignore the non-basic hate altogether?

Four-Color Thopters ? Legacy | VoxVornVoltair, 5-0 Legacy League

• Creatures (5)
• 1 Breya, Etherium Shaper
• 4 Baleful Strix

• Planeswalkers (7)
• 3 Dack Fayden
• 4 Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas

• Instants (4)
• 4 Force of Will

• Sorceries (2)
• 2 Transmute Artifact

• Artifacts (18)
• 1 Crucible of Worlds
• 2 Dimir Signet
• 2 Ensnaring Bridge
• 2 Sword of the Meek
• 3 Thopter Foundry
• 4 Chalice of the Void
• 4 Mox Diamond

• Lands (24)
• 1 Swamp
• 2 Island
• 1 Academy Ruins
• 1 Badlands
• 1 City of Traitors
• 1 Inventors' Fair
• 1 Scalding Tarn
• 1 Scrubland
• 1 Tundra
• 2 Volcanic Island
• 2 Wasteland
• 3 Ancient Tomb
• 3 Underground Sea
• 4 Polluted Delta

• Sideboard (13)
• 1 Damnation
• 1 Engineered Explosives
• 1 Notion Thief
• 1 Phyrexian Revoker
• 1 The Abyss
• 1 Toxic Deluge
• 1 Trinisphere
• 2 Blood Moon
• 2 Flusterstorm
• 2 Lodestone Golem

Buy This Deck

We’ve seen builds similar to this before, where people tried to lead with Ancient Tomb to cast Dimir Signet and start casting Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas on the second turn of the game. This deck is looking to be a little more midrangey, and is focused on artifact-based haymakers rather than Planeswalkers.

Tezzeret is still the Planeswalker of choice, since it finds Crucible of Worlds, Ensnaring Bridge, Chalice of the Void, and the Thopter Foundry combo all while functioning as a way to pressure opposing Planeswalkers or quickly threaten to end the game. Dack Fayden does a reasonable job of playing backup to this, since he lets you filter through your deck quickly and get Sword of the Meek into the graveyard

Mox Diamond is one of the most important cards in this deck, since it shores up a shaky four-color mana base and lets you cast powerful haymakers like Dack Fayden and Breya off of relatively few colored mana sources. Mox Diamond also gives you the ability to cast powerful 3-drops on turn one and increases your ability to cast 4-drops on turn two.

The advantage to this deck is that you’re playing four copies of Baleful Strix in a format where people are returning to playing four copies of Nimble Mongoose, Tarmogoyf, or Gurmag Angler, which is a great place to be since it nets you cards to help hit land drops, is an artifact, and even a creature that re-buys Sword of the Meek.

If you’re looking for a powerful deck with a lot of interesting interactions, this seems like a shell with a lot of potential in the current format. You’re certainly going to lose some number of games to just getting Wasteland ed out, but in exchange you get to play a lot of powerful, synergistic engines as well as plenty of cards that just end the game on the spot against some portion of the format.