This Four-Color Legends deck is one of those lists that you look at and think, “What the heck is going on here?” However, it piqued my interest when I saw that this made the top eight of a sixty-player RCQ this past weekend, so the deck has to be somewhat reasonable. This pile includes a total of ten different Legendary creatures, and the most interesting thing about this deck is that it excludes the color white.
This deck features no Skrelvs, Dennicks, Thalias, or Raffines, all of which make up the core of Esper Legends, one of the most powerful decks in Standard right now. Instead, it runs a strange combination of creatures not typically seen in Standard, including Rona, Inti, Slogurk, and Titania.
So, what is this deck trying to accomplish? While it may not be apparent at first glance, the cards in this deck can create potent engines that will drown your opponent in card advantage.
The core of this deck revolves around the interaction between Rona and Inti. Whenever you activate Rona with Inti on the battlefield, not only do you get to loot, but you also get a free card to cast from Inti. If you manage to exile a legendary creature with Inti and can cast them, you get to untap Rona and do it all over again, leading to crazy combo turns where you get to dump a bunch of creatures onto the battlefield.
The third card that gets this combo going is Relic of Legends. Not only does this help with mana fixing, but it allows your combo to keep going off. Every time you play a new legend, you can immediately tap it for mana. You can also tap Rona for mana, cast a legend to untap her, and tap her for more mana, as long as you have enough legends to cast.
The rest of the deck is filled with cards that benefit from this interaction. Ashnod lets you exile your discarded creatures to create an army. Slogurk gets bigger each time you scrap a land card and can refill your hand with utility lands when it dies. Titania gains you life every time you discard a land, making it hard for aggressive decks to kill you quickly.
The mana base of this deck looks a little iffy; I'm curious how it can run thirteen single-color lands in a four-color deck. I’m sure that Plaza of Heroes and Relic of Legends help a lot with that, but I can see this deck running into mana issues often.
I can see this deck being a good matchup against the Midrange decks that are flooding Standard right now since those matchups are usually decided by who can gain card advantage over the other player first. If this deck can have one good turn that puts a couple of legends onto the battlefield, it could easily overpower decks like Esper Midrange, which are usually constricted to playing only one card a turn.
I am worried about the Domain and Burn matchup for this deck. Flooding the board with creatures against Domain is rarely a good idea, since a well-placed Sunfall can quickly turn the tides against you. I know this deck plays mainboard Titania for the Burn matchup, but I don't think Titania is enough with Burn running plenty of Witchstalker Frenzys.
That said, I still think this could be a solid tier-two deck. Graveyard synergies have always been a powerful part of Magic, and this deck can harness that power in a way that no other deck in Standard right now can do.
This deck is very refreshing to the Standard Meta, showing that the format is not figured out yet, and plenty of decks are just waiting to be discovered. I hope this deck continues to produce results since a diverse meta is a happy one!
You can also find the decklist here.
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