Much Abrew: Hatchery Smallpox (Legacy
Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of Much Abrew About Nothing! Eternal Weekend—the biggest Legacy event of the year—happened a couple of weeks ago, and a spicy Smallpox deck caught my eye. So today, for the first time in a while, we're going to play some Legacy and blow up some of our opponent's lands! Perhaps the most interesting part of the deck is that it's built around a land from Edge of Eternities Commander: Eumidian Hatchery. Eumidian Hatchery is about the perfect land to sacrifice to Smallpox. If we can play it early in the game and build up some hatchling counters, when we sacrifice it, we'll end up with a massive horde of flying Insect tokens to close out the game! Can Eumidian Hatchery make Smallpox into a real deck in Legacy? Let's jump into a league and find out!
Much Abrew: Hatchery Smallpox
Discussion
- Record-wise, we ended up going 3-2 with the deck, which is a fine record, although a bit disappointing considering we started off 3-0 before dropping our last two rounds.
- Overall, Hatchery Smallpox is a mana-disruption deck, with Smallpox being the key card in the strategy. For two mana, the sorcery makes each player sac a land and a creature, discard a card, and lose a life. While the is absurd value for just two mana, the challenge of Smallpox is that it's symmetrical, so we also need to sacrifice, discard, and lose a life. As such, one of the goals of our deck is to break this symmetry so Smallpox benefits us more than it does our opponent.
- We have two plans for this. The first involves Life from the Loam, which lets us return lands from our graveyard to our hand. This means we can sacrifice a land to Smallpox but eventually get it back on the battlefield, which presumably our opponent can't do. Loam also works super well with Wasteland and Ghost Quarter, which give us even more ways of disrupting our opponent's mana. While most decks can survive losing a land, losing a land each turn to Wasteland is much harder for decks to overcome. Combine this with Smallpox, and, if things go well, we should mostly be able to keep our opponent from having many (or even any) lands on the battlefield.
- The second way we break the symmetry of Smallpox is by having a land that we actively want to sacrifice in Eumidian Hatchery. The EOE Commander land is absurd in the deck. Every time we tap it, we take a damage and add a hatchling counter. Then, when it goes to the graveyard from the battlefield, we get a 1/1 flying Insect token for each counter on Eumidian Hatchery. Ideally, we'll draw it early, build up a few counters, and then make a massive board of fliers when we destroy it, although even just a couple of Insects is still great since it is essentially free value from our mana base.
- Rounding out the threats in our deck are Orcish Bowmasters to shut down card draw, Barrowgoyf to gain some life, Grist, the Hunger Tide for removal and token production, and a couple of copies of Hogaak, Arisen Necropolis. If you remember the old Turbo Hogaak Modern decks, our deck is nothing like that. We're not especially focused on finding Hogaak and getting it on the battlefield. But by the midgame, we usually can cast it for free and get an 8/8 trampler, which is still solid value.
- Otherwise, we have Mox Diamond to speed thing up, and it's especially good in our deck since we can always get back the land that we discard to it with Life from the Loam. It also headlines a small Urza's Saga package that also contains Lavaspur Boots for haste, Nihil Spellbomb for main-deck graveyard hate (which is especially important considering that Reanimator is the top deck in the format at the moment), and Pithing Needle as a catch-all.
- Overall, I have to say that I really enjoy playing Legacy. I feel like I say this every time I do a Legacy video, but it's still true. While the formats feel like it's in a pretty unfair and fast place at the moment, it was still a blast to play, and Hatchery Smallpox generally did a good job keeping up with the meta, although it does seem like some matchups are harder than others (with fast combo feeling especially rough pre-board).
- So, should you play Hatchery Smallpox in Legacy? Discounting the fact that the deck (like most Legacy decks) is absurdly expensive in paper, I think the answer is yes, assuming you like grinding out wins from the graveyard and blowing up opponents' lands. I will say that the deck is tricky to play—I punted a few times along the way—so if you do decide to pick it up, get in some reps because Legacy is a hard format, and tiny decisions end up having massive impacts on who wins or loses the game!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
