Legacy Weapon - 0 - Know Your Enemy

This is the first post of hopefully a weekly series on my exploits through Legacy, alongside theory involved in such.  The quick hits for anyone who has no idea about what goes on in this format:

1. Legacy has the 'widest' card pool of all the formats.  This doesn't mean what some people assume it means, the subset of cards that one should be playing is still around the size of the Standard formats, it means that the cards you choose for your deck are either the best, or the best for the job (many times this is the same, but sometimes you want something incredibly specific).
2. Eternal formats are as interactive as you choose for them to be.  You can design your deck to ignore your opponent and deal 20 as fast as possible (Goblin Charbelcher, Spanish Inquisition, whose kill happens most on turn 1.5, or Burn who kills on 3.5), or you can build a control deck who wants to play the game for an extended period of time (Landstill, Counterbalance Top whose fastest kills are turn 5 or 6, Quinn the Eskimo or Trainwreck who will be killing much much later).  Tempo, a word thrown around by a lot of writers meaning very different things, is a very big topic and I will talk about it in another post.
3. Thinking about your plays rewards you as much as any other format.  Decks are very powerful, but some are unforgiving.  You may find yourself in much stronger positions if you consider more of your options.
4. Every deck has weaknesses.  Everything can be metagamed against.  There is nothing that is so oppressively powerful that it cannot be beaten. You may need to look for narrow cards to beat it, but if something needs to be beaten, nearly every deck and color has answers.
5. You cannot beat everything.

With this information in mind, let's take an example of my gauntlet Zoo list, and consider the card choices.  This list is not revolutionary, and the card choice selection is very basic in nature.  But for every card that I label as a flex slot, consider the other options.

4 Wild Nacatl
4 Tarmogoyf
4 Qasali Pridemage
4 Kird Ape
4 Grim Lavamancer
2 Knight of the Reliquary

4 Lightning Bolt
4 Path to Exile

3 Chain Lightning
2 Lightning Helix
2 Fireblast

2 Sylvan Library

3 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Arid Mesa
3 Taiga
2 Plateau
1 Savannah
3 Horizon Canopy

1 Mountain
1 Forest
1 Plains

Creatures for cost/size, as this is a beatdown deck:
4 Wild Nacatl - best power for cost
4 Kird Ape - second best for power/cost/drawback, chosen over Steppe Lynx for consistency reasons/Flex
4 Tarmogoyf - best 2 mana creature for cost
2 Knight of the Reliquary - flex slot used for opposing aggro

Utility:
4 Qasali Pridemage - Tarmogoyf combat, beats random artifacts/enchantments
4 Grim Lavamancer - Weak in multiples, but very easy to kill - almost always want to see one live


Removal in Zoo is normally aimed at creatures:
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Chain Lightning - Flex slot, used as Lightning Bolts 5-7
2 Lightning Helix - Flex slot, used for opposing aggro
2 Fireblast - Rhox War Monk/Small Tarmogoyfs/dome/Flex

Larger creature removal:
4 Path to Exile


Card Quality/advantage wins long games:
2 Sylvan Library

Access to basics is 7 forest, 6 mountain, 5 plains:
3 Windswept Heath
4 Wooded Foothills
2 Arid Mesa

Your most important duals are Taiga and Plateau, so that you can play a green guy and follow it up with red and white removal spells.  There are situations where you draw a Mountain and need to grab your other colors, so Savannah is a necessary evil.
3 Taiga
2 Plateau
1 Savannah
3 Horizon Canopy

A set of basics allow you to play through Wasteland-lock.
1 Mountain
1 Forest
1 Plains

What if you wanted your 'Zoo' list to be more explosive and move the fundamental turn versus a goldfish up a turn, and be better suited for a metagame where there was a lot of Ad Nauseam Tendrils (ANT)?
Add in some Steppe Lynxes, take out Paths, play a mainboard hatebear (Gaddock Teeg, Ethersworn Canonist), add more burn.
What if you wanted to handle opposing Zoo players, and other creature decks?
Take out the Chain Lightnings and Fireblasts and add more larger (Knight of the Reliquary) or card advantageous (Ranger of Eos) creatures.

What if you wanted to handle control decks that intend on playing bigger and better spells?
Punish them for their manabases (Price of Progress), for how long it takes them (Sulfuric Vortex) or for their spells (Gaddock Teeg).

This isn't even making a mention of what your sideboard can look like, which is, again, another article entirely.

-G