This weekend is the AZMagicPlayers Legacy Championship at Desert Sky Games on Saturday, September 6th. If you’ve seen the infographic that the Abongs put out showing the various statistics for these events, you may have noticed that the various Loam decks that I tend to play have the nefarious ranking of most played, but least Top 8s. Fear not! Sometimes the metagame doesn’t pan out the way that I think it is going to. Other times you play against an unknown deck that your deck has no answer to. This doesn’t mean that the deck is bad, or a bad choice even. I still feel that the various Loam decks are very good calls in larger formats, our Legacy metagame just tends to get inbred pretty often. The sheer amount of Death and Taxes decks that appeared at the beginning of the format is a huge indicator of this. Is DnT a strong deck? Yes, it’s also a good way to get used to the format, but when there is a large amount of DnT in the metagame, sometimes you need to resort to more drastic, devastating measures.
Like Burning Wish into Devastating Dreams for instance.
The original Wishes (Burning, Living, Cunning, Death and Golden) are some of my favorite kinds of cards that were ever printed. I have only really played Cunning and Burning in tournaments in the past, but that doesn’t mean the others are slouches.
The primary reason for a player to choose to play one of these wishes is to make their deck a bit more robust and be able to get access to some pretty powerful spells at will. My personal favorite is Devastating Dreams, although Council’s Judgement out of the board is equally spicy now. This is the deck that I’m looking into running for this weekend.
Most of the cards are fairly obvious what you want to be doing. Council’s Judgment to clear off a troublesome permanent, whether it’s a Progenitus, planeswalker or a True-Name Nemesis. The Zuran Orbs in the sideboard are pretty crucial against any burn opponent. The planeswalkers in the main are making their appearance to fight off any miracles that could show up. The Worm Harvest out of the board is also to fight off from those troublesome board sweeper decks.
Knight of the Reliquary definitely puts in a lot of work in this deck as well, due to the sheer utility she gives the deck. She can tutor up the Dark Depths/Thespian Stage combo, or stick around after a large Devastating Dreams to kill your opponent in a turn or two.
The usual Life from the Loam suspects are also present here as well – Punishing Fire to slowly grind your opponent out, Maze of Ith to keep a large attacker from reaching you, or to give your Knight of the Reliquary vigilance by activating during the end of combat after damage has been dealt. Dryad Arbor + Green Sun’s Zenith also allows you to churn out your 3 drops a turn earlier and with some help from Mox Diamond, Daze is pretty terrible against this deck.
There’s plenty of ways you can build Loam decks, and Wish decks, I just happened to have combined the two into a deck that I definitely enjoy playing.