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Much Abrew: Legacy Curses (Nyx Fit)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Last week, we had an interesting scenario as far as our Instant Deck Techs were concerned, with Modern Shaman and Legacy Curses (which is apparently called Nyx Fit) essentially being tied for most popular. So, how do we resolve a tie? The correct answer is, we don't. Instead of playing one deck or the other, we're actually going to have two episodes of Much Abrew this week! We had Shaman on Sunday night, and today we have Legacy Curses (Nyx Fit).

As for Curses itself, the deck looks pretty interesting. While it's built around the Nic Fit shell of using Cabal Therapy to sacrifice Veteran Explorer to ramp into huge threats, rather than playing Thragtusks, Grave Titans, and other more common Nic Fit finishers, we're looking to ramp into some Curses in either Overwhelming Splendor or Cruel Reality, while we can also hard-lock non-creature spells from the game with the combo of Curse of Death's Hold and Dovescape. Having a ton of enchantment-based finishers is where the Nyx Fit name comes from, since Nyx is the enchantment-God-infested sky of Theros. 

Before getting to the videos, I should warn you: it's been a while since I've played Legacy, so I'm sure a few plays were less than optimal. Legacy is a great but extremely punishing format, where searching out the wrong land on Turn 1 can be the difference between winning and losing a game. Having every decision matter is what makes the format exciting and skill intensive, but this also makes it hard because small things that don't usually matter in Modern and almost never matter in Standard end up mattering a lot in Legacy. Anyway, let's get to the videos and see if Curses has what it takes to compete in one of the most powerful formats in Magic!

Just a quick reminder: if you enjoy the Much Abrew About Nothing series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish YouTube channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.

Curses!!! (Deck Tech)

Curses!!! vs. Four-Color Delver (Match 1)

Curses!!! vs. UW Miracles (Match 2)

Curses!!! vs. UWr Miracles (Match 3)

Curses!!! vs. Opalescence (Match 4)

Curses!!! vs. Maverick (Match 5)

Curses!!! (Wrap-Up)

 

Discussion

  • First off, the record. We played a competitive league because that's the only way to really play Legacy on Magic Online (the two-player queues often take a long time to fire) and ended up 2-3, which obviously isn't what we were hoping for. However, we can learn a lot by delving into our matches and seeing what went into the record.
  • In round one, we played Four-Color Delver, and after winning game one, we lost game two because we fetched out the wrong land on Turn 1, which ended with us being blown out by Wasteland and never recovering. The big problem was indecisiveness. Rather than thinking through our turn all the way, we started to go down one line (which required fetching out a dual land) and then changed midstream to another (which didn't require a non-basic) and were punished for it. 
  • In round two, our UW Miracles opponent got a bit lucky. We presented a lethal board after making sure our opponent didn't have an answer in hand and had just shuffled their library, and they happened to shuffle into a Terminus to sweep away our board and win the game. It was a literal Christmas miracle! 
  • In round three, we finally picked up a win against UWr Miracles, mostly because our opponent didn't manage to find a Terminus at the right time. 
  • Round four was really close, but in game three, our enchantress opponent had two leylines to start the game: Leyline of Sanctity and Leyline of the Void. Both of these cards absolutely wreck our deck, with Leyline of the Void shutting down Veteran Explorer and Academy Rector and Leyline of Sanctity shutting off all of our Curses. While we theoretically have an out in Pernicious Deed, for all intents and purposes, the game ended on Turn 0. The lesson here is that in Legacy, all decks (even weird rogue decks built around Opalescence) are doing very powerful things that can run away with the game if they happen to get the right draw, especially after sideboarding.
  • In round five, we pretty much crushed our opponent. Fair creature decks like Maverick seem like great matchups for Curses, especially when the opponent doesn't use Deathrite Shaman to fizzle our Academy Rector tutoring. 
  • As for the deck itself, it's trickier to play than it looks. At first glance, it seems like you just ramp into huge things, but a ton of tutoring actually takes place, which means learning the lines and the right order to tutor up pieces is really important. 
  • Maybe the biggest frustration I had with the deck is that we have a lot of dead draws in the late game. Only having Veteran Explorer and Dryad Arbor as Green Sun's Zenith targets was especially annoying, since we would have won some games easily if we had a single Thragtusk to tutor up in the late game. While limiting the number of different creatures in the deck makes sense thanks to Evolutionary Leap, maybe some hybrid between Nyx Fit and normal Nic Fit could work. 
  • Another problem we ran into was drawing our finishers. We almost never want to draw a card like Cruel Reality or Dovescape because if we try to hard-cast our big enchantments, our opponent can just counter them (while getting them with Academy Rector is uncounterable). This lead to some strange games where we literally ran out of finishers, since once we draw a Cruel Reality, we don't have any way of shuffling it back into our deck. We also had a game where we assembled the Dovescape lock, with the plan being to use Academy Rector to tutor up Curse of Death's Hold the next turn to hard-lock our enchantress opponent, only to draw Curse of Death's Hold for the turn and not be able to cast it thanks to Dovescape
  • Overall, Curses (Nyx Fit) felt competitive, and I definitively feel like I didn't do the deck justice. If you decide to pick it up, make sure to put in a ton of reps because it's harder to play optimally than it looks, both because it has a ton of tutors and because Legacy is such a punishing format when you mess up even a small decision. With practice, I'm pretty sure the deck will be good enough to win a reasonable number of games and maybe even compete on the tournament level, although it can be inconsistent, and graveyard hate is very hard to beat. 
  • So, should you play Curses (Nyx Fit) for Legacy? If you like the play style and are looking for a cheaper-than-average entry deck to Legacy, it seems like a reasonable choice, although one of the downsides of making Curses your first Legacy deck is that most of the cards you need for the deck aren't used in any other archetype. If you're looking to build a Legacy collection, it might be worth starting with a Force of Will deck, since so many Legacy decks want the counterspell. But if you just want to have some fun and play a really unique take on Nic Fit, Curses is a great option!

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. Don't forget to vote for next week's deck by liking, commenting on, and subscribing to Instant Deck Tech videos! 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.



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