May You Live in Interesting Times: The 2022 Doomsday Review

Preface

Hello!

It's been awhile since the last article posted on here and as a result there has been a lot of things that have been worked on in the community. As there have been so many changes in terms of subarchetypes of the deck, favouring of certain cards, disfavouring of others and a few other miscellaneous items to cover I thought it prudent to try and collate them into one handy mini-review to try to keep everyone up to date with what people have been trying to play around with and what discussion has been happening.

I won't have covered everything discussed but hopefully all the main salient points that have enacted permanent or at least semi-permanent changes across multiple pilots will be presented here. The order of presentation is literally what is listed on my little notebook in front of me and has no bearing on scale, timeline, significance or any sort of sensible narrative.

Changes in 2022

Card-Specific Discussion

In this section we shall talk about key deck building considerations related to single cards (or card groups) that have been varied or talked about heavily this year.

Shelldock Isle

The first one we'll touch on comes in two parts. The first part is related to a rules change that was enacted with the release of New Capenna in how Hideaway as a mechanic now works.

... Exile one of them face down and put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.

The change was instead of cards being replaced to your library in an order of your choosing, instead it is now randomised. This doesn't seem like much but it can have some significant impact if going for a classic Shelldock Isle and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn pile.

Traditionally vs. a based control shell you might build something like this:

Pass the turn

The idea here is you draw Shelldock, play it and trigger putting Emrakul underneath it. You would then likely stack so that you can then access the Oracle next with the idea being you have the opportunity to cast it the next turn. Either that or you could set up ready with the Pyroblast and source in the same turn thanks to the extra turn trigger. Now you receive the final 3 cards in a random order so might be put in an awkward situation because of it.

Overall this is a small change and doesn't impact the deck too heavily in terms of the relative favour of using Shelldock Isle as a sideboard strategy. What is more impactful is how based control decks have evolved and what their toolbox looks like these days on how effective this plan is.

Nowadays if you sit across from a Grixis Control player, a Jeskai Pile, a Bant deck or even Stryfo himself you will expect to face many of the following cards:

All of these are both common, and completely stop the Shelldock gameplan from working. Teferi prevents the casting of Emrakul, Wasteland, Boseiju and Back to Basics can all effectively remove the Isle itself, and Karakas / Dress Down both stop Emrakul doing what it does best and turns it into a glorified Time Walk.

I personally think running this sideboard plan is too narrow as the matchups it historically shone in have more than enough tools to deal with it and dedicating 2 pile-specific slots as a result is just too many. It can still be run if you really want to but I would not advise it and the majority of pilots have left it by the wayside.

Deep Analysis

This time last year Consider was the new hotness and as a result Deep Analysis was allowed to hold the spotlight once more in Legacy. Obviously we wrote about this a lot and the 2 cards in collaboration enabled the most mana and card efficient piles you could find. Over the last year though it has been noted that most of the time, these piles just weren't as effective as one would hope being too fragile to too many common tools in the format including Endurance, any countermagic or just being on too low life.

Consider has been an all star card and has established itself as a very effective tool to the deck. Deep Analysis however is proven to not be worth the deck slot, even as a potential grinding tool, and the majority of quick or efficient wins it enables can be mimicked (at least to a degree) through other means.

Like with Shelldock, you can still run Analysis but it likely won't give as a much as a benefit as would be wanted for its inclusion.

Cabal Ritual

Cabal Ritual is by no means a new card to the format. It has been explored in Doomsday previously on and off since 2020 but didn't really take off in popularity with either minimal payoff being present for any extra it produced as discard numbers were quite low, or it just seeming like superfluous with 4 Dark Ritual and 4 Lotus Petal already being played.

In 2022 it has become a lot more popular. Why is this? Well I see there are two main reasons, one of which is often mis-cited.

The first and easiest reason is that people just want more consistency in being able to jam a quick Doomsday. With many being up to 8 copies of the namesake card (4 Doomsday and 4 Personal Tutor) then want to enable casting them as fast as possible and boosting the number of ritual effects facilitates this, even in the face of Chalice of the Void set to 1. With 8-Cast being a popular deck in the format alongside classics like Moon Stompy, this can be quite significant.

The second reason and the one that I see as mis-cited is the impact it has on being able to aggressively fetch for basic lands or at least one land in particular. Many people see this as a card that only rewards the playing of basic Swamp as you can grab Island on turn 1, Personal Tutor for Doomsday and then fetch basic swamp on turn 2 and Cabal Ritual into Doomsday. In this scenario, barring the presence of Blood Moon it actually only truly enables the use of basic Island with the Swamp being a dead land here. Let me explain why.

Pre-Doomsday you may have concerns about being Wastelanded which are well founded. Your deck boasts a high number of based tutors and based cantrips and you need these to find what you are looking for. Other than if you are running a very heavy discard suite, the only time you really need is to enable the casting of Doomsday itself. After that you need to achieve to cast Thassa's Oracle. Because of this general play pattern the Cabal Ritual allows more aggressive fetching of Island early but you can still happily grab Underground Sea as the source. Once Doomsday resolves Swamp doesn't help cast the majority of the deck. Only discard spells or for taxing effects like Sphere of Resistance. As a result it basically acts like a non-land not contributing to the win.

If you had a Sea there then yes, it may be Wastelanded but this then makes it the same as a the non-land Swamp. If it survives however then you now have an additional source with which to make use of.

If people do include Cabal Ritual it tends to be as a 1 to 3-of and normally replaces 1 Petal and some number of extraneous Preordain slots or maybe some interaction slots. It is certainly not a requirement, expecially if you aren't keen on including basics in your list but it is a useful tool for consideration.

Daze

It wasn't until around April 2020 with the work of Jax that Daze became a mainstay tool in Legacy Doomsday lists and from that point on it was almost always a guaranteed 4-of in most decks. Recently the popularity of Daze in Doomsday has dropped with many pilots no longer opting for the full playset but dropping down to sometimes 3, 2, 1 or even 0 copies. Some people have looked to use it as a 2-of with another 2 in the board. Some like having just the 1 to present to the opponent so they have to fear its presence if they see it when scanning the exiled deck in game 1. Some feel it no longer does enough to justify the slots and instead wish to rely more heavily on discard spells or even maindeck Flusterstorm to win the game.

So why has Daze seemingly become perceived as less worthwhile in Legacy Doomsday?

Let's think about the matchups Daze shines in vs. the ones it is weak to.

Daze shines when you have a mana efficient start and need to buy just a little bit of time. It works really well against decks like Stompy and Death and Taxes where they have to try and play on curve threats to retain parity with the unfair strategy you are aiming to progress. Daze allows you to turn land light hands with Rituals into fast wins whilst preventing the playing of cards like Trinisphere and Spirit of the Labyrinth.

Where Daze is less effective is against decks that either don't present the chance for it to work such as control decks which can just play a land "say go" strategy or that utilise low resource plans more effectively than Doomsday does such as Delver. It can help if you are on the play and have a turn 1 combo turn but other than that, in these styles of matchup it can be more of a liability than a help.

Comparing these 2 main groups we can already see the former includes many decks that Doomsday can already fair pretty well against whilst the latter includes archetypes that the deck struggles against or are closer to 50-50. With this in mind it seems, to some, that shoring up the matchups where the natural archetype advantage is not as prevalent is more useful than retaining something that wins more against decks we might already be favoured against.

Daze is still a very powerful card and running it, even as a full playset is still very effective. Whether you do play it at all, and how many if yes, really depends on your own gameplay preferences and the mental list of decks you want to tailor yourself towards beating.

One small bit of fun is with many pilots now varying the numbers of Daze present in their lists, non-Doomsday players are now forced to keep guessing about whether they need to be playing around it or not. The best Daze is always the one you never have to cast but instead just the passive threat of it maybe being present can be enough to buy time when needed.

Ideas Unbound

Ideas Unbound has been a staple since before Sensei's Divining Top got banned (too soon). Amongst itself, Night's Whisper, Predict and other multiple draw spells like Jeska's Will it has always come on top as the most efficient way to safely dig multiple cards into a pile and have extra resources for later. Some people have been cutting this card in favour of simply relying on cycling effects and Consider to enable multi-draw piles. Some piles like those using Brainstorm can be mimicked without the need for Ideas.

Let's take a look at this example from the Brainstorm chapter of the Wiki:

+ Brainstorm + X

You can simply change a couple of cards and it still works:

+ Brainstorm + X

Let's look at the steps to complete the pile:

1. Cast Brainstorm and put back X then Consider on top.
2. Cast LED, cycle Street Wraith cracking LED for and draw the Consider.
3. Cast Consider, mill X, drawing the Street Wraith.
4. Cycle Street Wraith and use the remaining to cast TO with an empty library.

This shows one example where people have thought Ideas is maybe obsoleted. In some of these discussions regarding the usefulness of Ideas Unbound, the word crutch has been thrown about a lot in relation to Ideas giving some people the false impression that it is a card for new players and isn't actually good.

I want to clarify this is not true. There are a number of piles that only Ideas can facilitate and plenty of examples where it shines.

Take this example playing around Endurance:

3 producing lands in play.

Here you can win against an opponent who has double Endurance available.

1. Draw Ideas for turn.
2. Cast Ideas and draw Street Wraith, Oracle and Cavern.
3. Play the Cavern and Cast Oracle.
4. Oracle will trigger with 1 card remaining in library.
5. If they Endurance, allow the trigger to resolve and you will have 3 cards remaining in library.
6. Before the Oracle trigger resolves, cycle Street Wraith to draw the second Street Wraith. 2 cards now remain in library.
7. If they Endurance again, allow the trigger to resolve and once more cycle Street Wraith.
8. Oracle trigger resolves with 2 cards left in library.

If you run Pact of Negation then Ideas also is the easiest way to enable a pile to draw Oracle, mana and protection all in one go.

The main takeaway from this is as follows: you don't have to run Ideas Unbound however it is still a powerful tool in the Doomsday arsenal and should not be disregarded lightly.

Basic Lands

Basic lands have always held an interesting deckbuilding space in Legacy. They dodge a lot of strategies usage of cards like Wasteland, Blood Moon or Back to Basics but can really hinder your mana development, especially in a deck like Doomsday that needs to pivot from to to . Certain styles of Doomsday, especially the slower styles of the deck tend to run a high basic land count compared to faster versions of the deck (and yes we do think of 2 as a high count).

This year there has been a lot of discussion on whether 0, 1 or 2 basics is correct to run. Some people think the game should end before it matters and thus have tried a 4 Seas, 2 Watery Grave mana base whilst others want to be able to cast all their spells in the face of denial heavy Delver so opt to run both basic Island and Swamp.

As with many of the deck building decisions I don't think there is a default correct answer however I would advocate at the very least most people to justify the cutting of the Island from any list. The efficacy of Swamp has been discussed above already around the impact of Cabal Ritual and although is needed to cast Doomsday, Island is more important to the deck as it is the land that casts the card with "Win the game" printed on it. Many strategies like Lands have a hard time beating a resolved Doomsday but the one way they tend to be able to do it is to deny mana, specifically mana and prevent the casting of Oracle. Island protects against the aforementioned Wasteland and Boseiju aggression and can partially insulate against Ghost Quarter too.

When writing up any list you need to decide how many turns you want to be waiting until you cast Doomsday, how much you want to rely on Ritual effects to do so, how heavy your metagame is full of mana denial and various other factors when deciding whether to run basics and if so, how many and which ones to run.

General Subarchetypes and Nomenclature

In this section we shall talk about the different flavours of Doomsday lists and the innovations that have been worked on some of them.

This year saw a lot of nomenclature thrown around for Turbo Doomsday and the newly dubbed Tempo Doomsday alongside a myriad of others which we shall discuss in a moment however people often get concerned as to what happens when their list doesn't fit into any of these common labels. First of all don't worry too much. It might be you only own a single Personal Tutor thus you probably aren't going to be finding early Doomsday kills as often as a traditional Turbo list which runs 4 of them but you don't want to splash for an Esper list and aren't into playing a fairer game like a Tempo list. This is totally fine. Doomsday is still a flexible shell and just because your list doesn't conform to one of these listed subarchetypes, doesn't make it immediately inferior in any way. The only reason the below subarchetypes are being highlighted is simply because they have been either the most popular variants or to most novel for 2022.

Turbo Doomsday

The label Turbo has now become pretty accepted to mean Doomsday running 3-4 copies of Personal Tutor. It tends to want to win faster often sacrificing later game selection (normally running only 0-1 Preordain) in favour of early game consistency. Likewise these lists tend to run around 15 lands and normally stay or occasionally splash but almost never touch onto or with the sideboard often being the only home of the splash cards and lands.

The main changes to these lists have been the general adoption of 2 Oracle main, the general reduction in the use of Daze and the increase in the use of Cabal Ritual and Discard spells like Duress and Thoughtseize mainly thanks to the Ragavan ban from earlier this year.

Here is an example decklist from a recent 5-0 posting by Alex2.

You can see the changes mentioned alongside a common adoption of a 2:2 split of cycler cards and the inclusion of just the basic Island.

ABCD Doomsday

ABCD has become a community favourite saying this year with it standing for Always Be Casting Doomsday. This started as a way to advise people they should be trusting in the power of the card and jamming it early and often however a variant of the more common Turbo lists has appeared with this moniker applied to it as a naming convention.

The main differences between a Turbo list and an ABCD list is the latter is even more geared towards resolving early Doomsday often. It tends to have a higher fast mana count, sometimes forgo some pile cards like Ideas Unbound and runs a reduced interaction suite assuming you only need a single piece often to jam early. As part of the interaction arsenal it often removes Daze entirely but does include additional pitch protection in the form of Misdirection. One way these lists have been described is as if they are pre-boarded vs. decks like 8-Cast and Delver but will maybe not be as well geared against other archetypes as a result.

Here is an example decklist from a 3rd place Challenge result in April by Wonderpreaux.

This list still has an Ideas Unbound in as well as retains a single Daze but others elect to run things like Preordain or Pact of Negation instead.

Tempo Doomsday

A new label for a previously explored concept appeared this year. Tempo Doomsday basically indicates any Doomsday list that shares its deck space with another plan, normally a creature based fair one. Previous examples of this concept have included the use of Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath or Delver of Secrets as additional threats to either provide alternatives or to try and synergise with Doomsday itself. Baleful Strix is often a staple inclusion in this style of deck acting as a speedbump to facilitate either side of the deck.

This year has seen the design space of this half and half combo vs. fair plan explored in a much more in depth fashion to a lot more success and popularity than before. This is largely thanks to the inclusion of new creatures like Malevolent Hermit, Murktide Regent and Dragon's Rage Channeler. All these creatures have been tried and found to incorporate into helping the Doomsday plan as well as being powerful in their own right for the potential of a fair game plan.

The advantage of these lists is they can pivot between a pure combo deck and a pure control deck with the latter being strong against the traditional Doomsday nemesis of Delver. The downside of the list is sometimes you draw half of one plan and half of the other or the wrong plan for the wrong opponent in game 1 and this can cause some friction. Despite this a lot of people have put up strong results with this style of deck and it has proven itself worth the time to try.

Here is an example decklist from the winner of the August Game Taitan Legacy for Real Estate event by RoseIsland.

This list really leans into the true Grixis aspect with an incredibly greedy manabase. Very cool to see!

Grief Doomsday

Something that sort of falls into the Tempo concept but not fully involves the use of the card Grief. Grief was explored as a potential interaction spell following the idea of maximising turn 1 interaction to enable early Doomsday but, just like in Deadguy Ale lists, it was found to be very effective when paired with Ephemerate. This 2 cards combo shreds opposing hands by causing 3 instances of the Grief discard triggers and leaves you with an aggressive creature to either block or start pressuring the opponent with.

The lists are less reliant on the creature plan as a joint primary method of winning and instead use them to help push forwards a slightly later Doomsday turn. The lists include a higher land count, lower interaction count and use less of the standard toolbox pile cards but can still try the full plan switch vs. decks like Delver to remove the combo element.

Here is an example decklist from a 5-0 in July by Monkeyscantcry.

It's an interesting take on the use of a creature plan to support the Doomsday element of the deck but sometimes falls prey to its own mana requirements.

Esper Doomsday

Although we have technically already discussed lists and subarchetypes in the Esper colours , we haven't properly talked about Esper Doomsday yet. Esper Doomsday is a much more controlling variant of the archetype that, again is not new to 2022, but has had a lot of work put into it.

Esper lists tend to be characterised by a high land count, the common use of Predict over Ideas Unbound as a draw engine and the use of Teferi, Time Raveler as an interaction piece. They aim to run a slower, more controlling gameplan but are still able to jam an early Ritual into Doomsday if need be.

Oftentimes the Esper lists will have a transformational sideboard turning them into pure control decks and using either creature or planeswalker threats like Jace, the Mindsculptor or Stoneforge Mystic to try and circumnavigate the hate that may be brought in post board for the main Doomsday plan. As with all the subarchetypes, there is a lot of flexibility available to any pilots that wish to give this style a go and plenty of toolbox to work with.

Here is an example decklist that recently won the 4Seasons paper event in Italy by Dalibor Szegho.

There are some really cool cards in here including the use of Sevinne's Reclamation and Entreat the Angels to help fortify the grind plan.

Final Thoughts

That just about wraps up the current year in summary. Hopefully it has provided a snapshot glance that allows you to have got a feel for the type of innovations and discussions that have taken place within the community. As always do feel free to try things out, ask questions and just generally have fun tinkering with the best archetype in Legacy (totally not biased).

Until next time, make sure to stay healthy both physically and mentally. The world is a shit show but at least we can all try and have a nice Dooms-day together xxxx

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