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Much Abrew: Turbo Depths (Legacy, Magic Online)


Hello, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Much Abrew About Nothing. Our Legacy kick continues this week! Last week during our Instant Deck Techs, our budget-friendly Legacy option Turbo Depths came out on top, so we're heading back to Legacy today to see if we can win some games by making a 20/20 creature as early as Turn 2! The deck is basically an all-in combo deck, with every single card in our main deck being part of our Dark Depths combo, a way to find combo pieces, or a way to protect our combo from our opponent's disruption. Is going all-in on the combo of Dark Depths, Vampire Hexmage, and Thespian's Stage a legitimate budget plan for Legacy? Let's get to the video and find out; then, we can talk more about the deck!

One last thing before getting to the videos: Legacy has been pretty popular lately—so popular that I'm thinking of making a series specifically for eternal formats (mostly Legacy but some Vintage as well). This would give us a chance to feature the format on a regular basis but still leave Much Abrew open for other things (like Modern and, starting next week, Ravnica Allegiance Standard). Is a regular eternal series a good idea? Would you watch regular Legacy and Vintage content on the channel? Let me know in the comments!

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.

Much Abrew: Turbo Depths (Legacy)

Discussion

  • All in all, we finished our competitive Legacy league with a 2-3 record, which isn't especially exciting. This being said, I think the deck is better than I made it look. One of our losses came because we thought our opponent was playing Omni-Tell (which doesn't have Sneak Attack), but they were actually playing a weird take on Sneak and Show (which does have Sneak Attack), and we tapped our Karakas, thinking we were safe, only to have our opponent Intuition for three Sneak Attacks and kill us with a hasty Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (which we knew about because we had bounced it the previous turn). Even beyond this match, every one of our matches went the full three games. As such, with a bit more Legacy experience and more experience with the deck specifically, we would have definitely won at least one more match and might have ended up 4-1. 

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  • Speaking of experience: Turbo Depths is a surprisingly hard deck to play well. At first glance, it looks easy: you tutor up the combo, make a quick Marit Lage, and kill the opponent. When this plan works out and our opponent doesn't have any interaction, Turbo Depths is easy. The hard part of the deck is figuring out how to play around potential disruption like Wasteland, Karakas, and Swords to Plowshares. Do we wait until we find a discard spell to make sure the coast is clear? Do we just rush to the combo as quickly as possible and hope for the best? Is it even possible to play around all the possible outs our opponent has in their deck? All these questions (and more) make the deck really tricky to play right, especially without a lot of experience.
  • A part of the reason why the deck is hard to play optimally is that, unlike Legacy Lands (basically the control build of Dark Depths combo), we don't have any way to get lands back in from our graveyard, which means if we spend a Dark Depths and Thespian's Stage to make a Marit Lage and our opponent has an answer, we need to find both combo pieces again, which can take a long time. Meanwhile, Legacy Lands can afford to just make Marit Lage and hope it works out, thanks to cards like Life from the Loam to return combo pieces from the graveyard. While the upside of Turbo Depths is that we're much more likely to get free wins by comboing off quickly, the downside is that it can be really hard to recover if our first Marit Lage is dealt with.

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  • One aspect of the deck that was problematic is the fact that it has zero basic lands. I assume the theory is that we can never beat a Blood Moon anyway, but a basic land or two could help us survive Back to Basics, which caused us to lose our match against UW Control. Playing one Forest and one Swamp so we can potentially Abrupt Decay with a Blood Moon or Back to Basics on the battlefield seems like a low-opportunity-cost way to improve the deck.

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  • Speaking of the mana base: Khalni Garden is a lot better than it looks, since along with giving us edict protection for Marit Lage, the token allows us to flashback Cabal Therapy. Otherwise, our budget-friendly mana was mostly fine, although we did lose our matchup to Storm because of two damage we had to take off of Llanowar Wastes. While cracking a fetch land would also have killed us, if we had an untapped free dual land like Bayou, we would have almost certainly won the Storm match. Still, the situations where our mana is problematic are few and far between—it's not necessary to spend thousands of dollars on Bayous to make the deck work.
  • Overall, Turbo Depths seem like a competitive budget option for Legacy. While our 2-3 record looks not so great, when you consider we would have beaten Sneak and Show if we were more familiar with the format and were two points of Llanowar Wastes damage short of racing Storm, we were extremely close to finishing 4-1. If you do decide to pick up the deck, just make sure to practice a lot because it's way harder than it looks, especially if you're not familiar with the Legacy format and all the answers opponents could be packing for the Dark Depths, Thespian's Stage, Marit Lage combo.

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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