My first Legacy attempt

[niickopotamus]

I was just fiddling around with some cards online and play testing a little and came up with this RDW legacy deck. There is no sideboard yet for it because I literally just finished coming up with the main deck.

Lands:
24 Mountain

24 Lands


Other Spells:
4 Increasing Vengeance
4 Reverberate
4 Red Sun's Zenith
4 Fireball
4 Comet Storm
4 Flame Javelin
4 Hidetsugu's Second Rite
4 Lava Spike
4 Lightning Bolt

36 Other Spells

[Travis Lannoye]

Not a bad start. RDW is certainly a viable deck choice. However, I would start by suggesting that you take some time to read through a couple of the other budget articles we posted here. There should be a couple of example RDW lists in there for you to model after.

EDIT: The most recent post I added in the "Cheap Legacy" thread has a pretty cheap RDW deck in it. Notice how that deck only runs 19 lands, and all 41 spells are either 1-drops, 2-drops, or Fireblast (which requires no mana to cast).

[Travis Lannoye]

Some other helpful pieces of advice for you, from someone else who recently got into Legacy with almost no prior knowledge:
- Legacy is a very diverse format. If you browse through the last two months of Legacy tournament results on StarCity or any other website, you will often see well over a dozen deck types, each one capable of winning on any given day. Compare that to Standard, where the format is generally dominated by one or two deck types (currently Delver and Wolf Run).
- Legacy is also a very well-developed format. A lot of the quality ideas in the format have already been tried. This means that, unless thousands of Magic players around the world have completely missed something, you aren't likely to come up with anything REALLY new (the exception being something like the Zombies list that Sam Black wrote about, which uses quite a few cards from newer sets).
- Legacy is also a very tight and efficient format. Playable cards in the format usually cost three mana or less. Anything that costs four mana or more has to compete with the likes of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Sneak Attack, Elspeth Knight-Errant, Natural Order, etc. Anything that costs more than four mana is usually going to get cheated into play (either via alternate costs like Fireblast/Force of Will, or by using alternate means to get it into play, such as casting Exhume on Iona or using Sneak Attack to cheat Griselbrand/Emrakul into play).
- Finally, Legacy is a format that has lots of overlapping. This means that a lot of the more expensive pieces can often be used in multiple ways. The more expensive a card is, the more likely it is to have multiple uses in the format. The only reason that dual lands and fetch lands are so expensive is that they go into EVERYTHING. Same goes for things like Force of Will, Wasteland, etc. Not to worry, though...even the cheap stuff has some overlap. You can find Lightning Bolts in RDW and RUG Delver and even in Zoo, for example.

One thing I discovered that worked very well for both of the decks that I'm currently playing (Maverick and Dredge) is this:
- Start out by picking a style of play that you enjoy, and then finding an established deck that fits your style. If you like playing burn spells, look up RDW. If you like cheating fatties into play, try either UB Reanimator or Sneak and Show. If you like small, efficient beaters, try Maverick. If you like small beaters backed up by counters, try RUG Delver. If you like...well, you get the point.
- Once you've figured out a strategy you like, do some research to find out what some other well-known players have already done. Again, most of the core concepts in this format have already been figured out by thousands of other people.
- Finally, put a proxied deck together and try to goldfish a few games by yourself, or with someone else, just to get a feel for how the deck actually works and see if you actually like playing it. That way, you don't have to drop a couple hundred bucks on expensive, older cards only to find that you don't want to use them.

Hope this helps you out. If you have any more specific questions, please post them.