Welcome to another installment of Running the Legacy Gauntlet! For this week, Adam suggested testing one of Nic Fit’s bad matchups, which posed a bit of a problem. Since the deck is a glass cannon, designed to beat other fair decks, most bad matchups are terrifically lopsided. Up to this point, I had been avoiding them for the same reason I’d been avoiding the deck’s great matchups like Maverick, that being that there’s not much to learn from a slaughter.
Against Reanimator, however, I had a plan post board, which could lead to more of a pitched battle. Even better, the plan was largely untested. My sideboard for Nic Fit changes drastically before every event, since there’s a lot of space to tackle whatever unfair deck I expect to see. At the invitational I dodged graveyard based decks, so most of the board never saw play.
Going into the matches, I expected to get annihilated preboard. In all the time I spent running Nic Fit in random tournaments, I have never taken a match from Reanimator, and for a while in there I was on the four [card]Leyline of the Void[/card] plan. Starting from a turn zero Leyline, I had losses to [card]Echoing Truth[/card], [card]Show and Tell[/card], and one cunning opponent who [card]Thoughtseize[/card]d away my [card]Grave Titan[/card] and then [card]Reanimate[/card]d it.
Here’s the deck I faced Adam with:
[deck]
1 Wooded Foothills
1 Phyrexian Tower
1 Dryad Arbor
4 Bayou
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Misty Rainforest
4 Forest
3 Swamp
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kitchen Finks
1 Wickerbough Elder
1 Thrun, the Last Troll
1 Wall of Blossoms
1 Deranged Hermit
2 Scavenging Ooze
4 Veteran Explorer
2 Grave Titan
4 Cabal Therapy
4 Green Sun’s Zenith
2 Sensei’s Divining Top
2 Dismember
1 Go for the Throat
3 Maelstrom Pulse
3 Pernicious Deed
2 Liliana of the Veil
2 Hymn to Tourach
1 Skeletal Scrying
Sideboard
1 Eternal Witness
1 Kitchen Finks
2 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Tormod’s Crypt
2 Extirpate
1 Liliana of the Veil
1 Gaddock Teeg
1 Damnation
4 Mindbreak Trap
[/deck]
Preboard: It was as I’d feared. No, feared is the wrong word. Rather, my sense of foreboding was not without merit, and I was lucky to steal a game. The deck has a bit of graveyard hate in the form of [card]Green Sun’s Zenith[/card] for [card]Scavenging Ooze[/card], but this is much slower than Reanimator’s plan, which reliably has an unbeatable Iona in play by turn two or three. Thus, the best plan of stealing a preboard game is by drawing [card]Cabal Therapy[/card] and using it well.
Sideboarding:
Out: -3 [card]Pernicious Deed[/card], -3 [card]Maelstrom Pulse[/card], -1 [card]Wall of Blossoms[/card], -1 [card]Kitchen Finks[/card]
In: +2 [card]Nihil Spellbomb[/card], +2 [card]Extirpate[/card], +2 [card]Tormod’s Crypt[/card], +1 [card]Eternal Witness[/card], +1 [card]Liliana of the Veil[/card]
Postboard: After a game or two post board, my confidence rose, and my Cabal Therapys improved. Liliana, while not enough by her lonesome, worked fine with other disruption. Overall, I’m ecstatic with the results.
On paper, it’s easy to be dismissive. Of course the matchup is going to improve, look at all the slots I’ve dedicated! In reality, quantity of hate is not as important as having hate cards that fit the game plan of the deck. Leyline of the Void might be a fine card for the Dredge mirror, but here I’m playing a control deck that expects to go long. Eventually, my opponent will draw an out to the troublesome enchantment. A critical mass of effective, varied hate is much more difficult to answer.
Thanks for watching!
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