Modern Horizons 2 introduced a number of high power level cards to Legacy. It gave us, among other things: the multi-format powerhouse of , the revitalization of dead archetypes like Affinity with and , and the boost UR Delver needed to finally be playable with … and … and .
Card evaluation can be hard, so I wanted to break down some of the options D&T received in the new set, and touch on some older tech possibilities to keep an eye on as the new meta develops.
Kaldra Compleat
is a card that I had fairly low expectations of going into release. It had big vibes: cheating in a big flashy piece of equipment with a huge mana value using was generally perceived as “winmore” or “magic christmas land.” This could not be further from the truth.
A common misconception starts with people comparing to . The real comparison is with . With being better at handling creatures, and being better as a stabilization tool, has long been stuck in an awkward middle ground where you usually only wanted it as a card advantage tool vs old control decks, a clock vs combo, and the ability to attack through .
Fun fact, DnT used to only play + in the deck until got printed, and sofai became a mainstay in the deck ever since.
really excels at a lot of what sofai did, with a loss of a primary card advantage tool vs control. But with the advent of both and in control shells, is already losing a lot of points as a card advantage tool vs control to options like , pushing further in the lead as the new beatdown tool of choice.
The biggest benefit for DnT is quite simply the clock. is without question the fastest clock DnT is capable of, for an extremely low mana investment. and clock in at 4 damage a turn, with skull having summoning sickness and sofai needing 4 mana to achieve “haste” damage that turn. When unchecked, can deal 10 damage by the time the other equipment deal 4.
This is a huge game changer primarily vs uninteractive strategies like storm or show & tell or doomsday, where D&T can commonly lose by giving the opponent too much time to escape the soft lock pieces it uses to gum up their strategy. In these matchups your also generally gets by unchecked, letting you grab with minimal concern, and putting pressure on your opponent much faster than D&T normally could.
The second piece of the puzzle is 's immunity to common forms of anti SFM sideboard options. I did not expect to be a card I wanted vs Delver at all, but something I didn't account for before testing the card is the immunity to shatters.
In postboard games, many decks will lean on artifact destruction to handle equipment packages, be it , , , , , etc. is both indestructible and gives the germ token indestructible, making it rather difficult for a lot of non base-white decks in legacy to deal with once in play.
Decks like Gaak and Green Post could really punish DnT's clock potential by firing off a FoV, and postboard vs creature decks like you can't just windmill slam a jitte and start taking over the board every time. With Kaldra as an available option you can sniff out when your opponent is trying to line up a shatter to set you back, and potentially grab a Kaldra instead.
This all being said, is a card that you really have to know how to pick your spot with. It's exceptionally punishing to just jam t2 SFM for in interactive matchups, given her propensity to be instantly killed if you tutor up even a .
7 mana is no joke, making it near impossible to cast in anything but the most drawn out of games. But alongside cards like and , you can maneuver quite well across a variety of matchups, and pulling out this sledgehammer of a card to beat people to death has been an excellent tool in DnT's toolbox so far.
Solitude
is another card I wasn't incredibly keen on. I expected it to make its way into DnT as a medium 1 of removal option and tech bullet with . Something that went under the radar with a lot of the free evoke elementals is just how good they are on rate. DnT is a deck that's quite happy going late, and a removal spell that doubles as a flash lifelink is something the deck is very onboard for, commonly getting to 5 mana in most creature based matchups.
Even control decks in the format have gotten more and more creature dense as time passes in legacy, and D&T has been leaving in some number of plows since the days of miracles, with that plan becoming more and more reasonable as cards like and (and more recently ) have entered into the equation. We begrudgingly leave in some number of to handle the powerful creature options the control decks have access to, but oftentimes it just leads to having dead cards in hand on turn 15. lets you plow an early threatening creature when you need it, and produce a body lategame when a plow is otherwise fairly dead.
The secondary upside to is the more obvious one: Force of Plow. It's nice to have a 0 mana plow in the chamber when you need extras to shoot a t1 or or . It also works around tax, which lines up nicely in matchups like Delver, Infect, or Depths.
Additionally, Legacy contains a fair number of creature based combo decks that tend to go off very quickly: Reanimator, Elves, Hogaak, etc. In a lot of these matchups, mana is easily the biggest bottleneck for DnT. Most of these matchups involve D&T desperately trying to cling to life in the first turns of the game, while also needing to deploy its hate pieces to try to disrupt the opponent.
pulls a lot of weight here by way of being 0 mana to cast, giving you extra interaction while you also advance your gameplan. Tapping out for turn two vs elves, or a vs reanimator, is so often just a death sentence, but every single removal spell you throw in their way in these sorts of matchups is one step closer to enacting your endgame goals, without the use of extra mana you so desperately need.
There's also a handful smaller upsides to : breaking , surprise reanimation off an , exiling an from SnS, vialing in after freecasting it for infinite value, things of that nature. These are relatively fringe applications but all pull their weight, making an important role player across a surprising amount of the legacy field.
Esper Sentinel
is a card that is very hard to evaluate at first glance. Punisher mechanics are generally regarded as fairly weak. Giving your opponent options doesn't usually feel like a good thing. After playing it in a fair number of different lists, I landed on the assessment that it's much more powerful than it appears. In most fair blue matchups, the tax can weigh heavily in the early turns.
It acts very similarly to a 1 mana -Lite, either netting you a card or 2 or putting pressure on their early game development and being a lightning rod for removal. Against the slower combo decks the effect more prominently nets you cards, as these decks are less able to afford to pay that extra tax, but as was touched on in the section, the biggest pressure on DnT in these matchups is mana, not cards. Without the ability to draw into free interaction like , the extra cards will often do nothing because DnT lacks the speed to deploy them.
Additionally, the card exacerbates the problems DnT has in matchups where Thalia is bad, adding extra cards with little to no text into your deck in matchups where you were already struggling. Overall, I found the card to be very powerful in fair blue matchups, some of D&Ts already solid matchups, and not helpful in the harder matchups like combo or creature based deck. I think the card's power level is on the table, but not really what the deck is looking for, at least right now.
Sanctifier En-Vec
is one I think I appropriately rated: extremely niche, close to unplayable. The two sets of abilities don't particularly mix well. The best decks to hit with graveyard hate don't really look to take a 2 mana creature off the table already, so the protections are close to irrelevant.
While it at least hits decks like Dredge, Gaak, Reanimator, and Oops (Gaak in particular is a matchup where DnT has been kind of in the market for a serviceable recruiter bullet), it has a notable miss as gy hate vs lands over , and GSZ hate over .
On the other hand, a protection from red/black creature was intriguing at one point in legacy's existence, but Grixis Control is more or less dead, and an unboltable 2/2 isn't what D&T is looking for. Also a note that many evaluators overlook is the mana cost. As a mono white deck, we like to pretend DnT has a reasonable manabase, but WW on turn 2 is pretty strenuous on the 16 (or less) white source deck. Against powerful unfair graveyard strategies, you really can't afford to not cast your 2 drop hate card on turn 2.
Overall, I really don't see a home for this card in DnT unless your local meta has a lot of decks like Gaak to hit.
Sword of Hearth and Home
Elite Spellbinder
While not in MH2, I wanted to touch on briefly because it's a recent option that has been seeing play in some lists lately. I've tried this card in a variety of lists, and found it very lacking in traditional DnT shells.
The card is designed to be aggressive and DnT is an extremely slow deck. The more turns you give your opponent, the less relevant a 2 mana tax on a single spell is going to be. In addition, 3 mana spells have to be very good to make the cut in current DnT lists.
I find much more prevalent homes for this card to look like human tribal decks, where you're turning the corner faster with cards like and , with Spellbinder as a piece of disruptive top end to close out the game in the next few turns. While there are some niche interactions like putting Spellbinder in off and stealing their fattie when they put into play, I really don't find this card particularly good for DnT's normal gameplan.
Older Options in a New World
Amongst all the new cards, it's easy to forget that other decks are changing as well, and we can play old cards to react to these changes. The biggest metagame shifts are probably the deck construction of Bant Uro and UR Delver, and the addition of Affinity to the meta.
The Affinity craze took legacy by storm during its first weekend on Magic Online, winning the Saturday Legacy Challenge, before being chokeslammed back into reality on Sunday, with everyone and their dog packing s, s, and even s.
That being said, I think this deck might be one that waits in the shadows of legacy and pops out if people don't give it enough credit. With that in mind I wanted to touch on a couple of options DnT has to combat this menace. The cards that immediately come to mind are powerful sideboard options like and .
These cards are quite narrow, and I wouldn't expect to want to play them in the average sideboard (I'm not even convinced Kataki is what we would want to be doing against Affinity anyway), but they're good cards to keep in mind if and when the deck rears its head in large quantities. More generally, broadly applicable tools like can come back to decklists as a maindeck tech piece that interferes with their gameplan.
Another card I'm particularly fond of at the moment is . While a strictly worse at first glance, 's specific text lets it blow up artifact lands in addition to all the 0 mana value creatures and artifacts Affinity generates, like constructs, Germ tokens, s, and s. This card is also a reasonably powerful tool vs current delver configurations, which I will touch on later, making it a better option to respect Affinity while not playing needlessly narrow cards.
With regards to Bant, the question I see posed a lot is “can we play again to attack through all these s and Uros and s?” To which I answer: no. I think crusader has pretty long overstayed its welcome in DnT, and is likely to not show up in reasonable capacity unless a powerful fair BUG shows up one day.
As I mentioned before, we live in a post era of DnT deck construction, where 3 drops have to make quite an impression to be playable. Crusader just doesn't fit that bill to me. Bant lists are on 6+ plows main with the addition of maindeck , and sideboarding in plenty of sweepers.
I find more useful cards for DnT are ones that interact with Bant, like or even . also occupies the “impossible to block threat that's answered by all their white removal” slot quite well over crusader, being easier to tutor and pick your spot when the time is right, as well as being able to reuse it with .
Against new UR Delver iterations, I don't think much changes from the DnT side. I was briefly interested in trying , as Path was always at its worst vs Delver with basics, and now that the decks are maxing out on a pile of 3 or less toughness threats, I felt the time might be right for it to come back.
However, quickly dashed those hopes, putting me back on and extra copies of as my spot removal spells of choice. One thing to take advantage of, however, is the abundance of 1 mana value creatures the deck now plays.
Something like /, or even possibly , could serve quite well as a 2+ for 1 vs Delver, while pulling double duty in matchups like Elves and Affinity.
I hope this debrief helps people get settled as the current meta develops. I actually really like where D&T is in the meta currently. It feels favorable vs the fair blue decks, and some of our worse matchups have been beaten back.
The gaping hole in our defenses continues to be Elves, and that deck has been rising quite a bit in popularity, thanks to every blue mage's favorite elf . Outside of that, I think DnT is poised to do very well, and I'll continue to test and tweak and keep an eye on things as the meta shifts.
If you're looking for a starting point, here's a list I played in the challenge this past Sunday to a 5-2 record. I think it's an excellent jumping off point currently.
Creatures | Spells | Lands | Sideboard |
4 | 4 | 1 | 1 |
2 | 4 | 3 | 1 |
2 | 1 | 12 | 2 |
4 | 1 | 4 | 2 |
4 | 1 | 4 | 1 |
3 | 1 | ||
2 | 1 | ||
1 | 1 | ||
2 | 1 | ||
1 | 1 | ||
1 | |||
1 | |||
1 |
Also, if there was a card that you think should be on this list but isn't, just know this: it's probably bad.