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Hardened With Age

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As Hardened Scales begins to solidify its status as the next evolution of Affinity decks, it's no surprise that people would try to port the deck over to Legacy to find out what it can do. While you don't get as many new toys in Legacy as one might hope, the ones you do get substantially increase the consistency of the deck's explosive starts. Let's take a look at what yukynag01 has going on:


Hardened Scales
The core threats of the deck are largely the same as the Modern counterpart for this deck. You're still looking to lead on Hardened Scales; you still want to use that card in conjunction with Arcbound Ravager, Hangarback Walker, and Walking Ballista to make combat math very difficult for your opponent. Steel Overseer is a great backup to Hardened Scales and still plays great with the deck's namesake card, and all of these +1/+1 counter synergies allow you to steal games out of nowhere with the likes of Inkmoth Nexus and Walking Ballista.

The key difference between the Modern and Legacy version of this deck is the lands. The Modern version needs to play Darksteel Citadel to power up Mox Opal and allow for explosive starts. The high density of colorless lands can lead to issues casting cards like Hardened Scales and Ancient Stirrings. The Legacy version of this deck can play Tree of Tales instead, maintaining a high artifact count while allowing for colors to be accessed more easily. Additionally, you get more explosiveness and disruption in the form of Ancient Tomb and Wasteland. Frequently, this deck only needs one or two big attacks to close out a game, so the ability to setup those turns more quickly and prevent your opponent from interacting effectively via Wasteland is an enormous boon.

Affinity had already begun to make its way onto the Legacy scene, with colorless decks featuring City of Traitors and Chalice of the Void on the rise in recent weeks. If you're looking to eschew some of the more traditional disruption in favor of dominating the combat step and the potential for explosive, combotastic kills, this seems like a really interesting archetype to explore in Legacy.

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