Tips on playing Izzet tempo
I played my first game of legacy yesterday at my LGS and I didn’t win a single game. I expected this because I’m new to the format. I’ve played quite a bit of Timeless on arena, but I know Legacy is very different. I made a lot of mistakes I think. Mostly I think I kept bad hands that were too slow. I’d like some advice on what I could have done differently in future games. I’m planning on playing again this weekend. I don’t remember all of the games exactly, but I’ll include as much detail as I can remember.
My first match-up was against a mirror match. I played DRC and they took out my DRC pretty quickly. After that they started playing DRCs of their own and I was struggling to find removal. I was trying to get them down on lands using wasteland but I think I made a misplay by playing Daze to counter a flow state they played. I think they ended up returning their land that was going to be destroyed by playing a daze of their own. I forget how the sequencing went exactly but I know I should have destroyed their land first before playing any spells. My understanding is you should probably save your counterspells for protecting your creatures and countering their threats and not on their cantrips. Second game I felt like I was playing way too slowly. I think I made the mistake of not sideboarding out FoW. I did sideboard in hydroblast and pyroblast though, which did allow me to remove their DRC but they were able to protect their Murktide which costed me the game. During game 2, I was about to recover at the end of the game by playing Murktide to block their DRC but they top decked unholy heat and I didn’t have a counterspell to protect it.
Second game wasn’t against a jeskai blink deck. Again I felt too slow here. I was doing a good job of beating them down on game 1 but they stabilized by playing phelia and riddler. They also had 4+ lands and I didn’t draw wasteland until late game. They managed to kill all my threats as well. Game 2 I think I just kept too slow of a hand. I didn’t have any threats in hand but I had a ponder so I figured I’d be able to find one early enough. I think it was a mistake though on my part.
Game 3 was against a smallpox deck. Game 1 I had a DRC out and a FoW in hand, but no blue spells so they were able to cast smallpox. They also generated a lot of insects with hatchery and had multiple urza’s sagas on board. I made a mistake of using wasteland on the hatchery game 2 instead of the urza saga which I think cost me the game. I was able to get rid of their hogaak with surgical extraction, but I had to also force of will it because I didn’t know that if it’s already on the stack that playing surgical extraction on it wouldn’t remove it. Knowing that now I would have just played surgical on my turn so I didn’t have to waste a force on it.
Anyway I’m just looking for advice on how to play against these types of decks and how to sideboard against them. Any advice is greatly appreciated. I don’t know if the meta will be the same next weekend, but I suspect it will be similar. The first guy I played against was absolutely loaded and had beta volcanic islands in pristine condition. He said he changes decks a lot so next time he’ll likely be playing something else. I’m not sure if the other players will be playing the same decks, but I suspect they will be. I know one other person that I didn’t play against is playing sneak and show and 2 other players were playing a mono black midrange deck and another looked like he was playing a golgari cradle deck from what I could tell. Advice on playing against those decks is also appreciated.
Edit:
Some things I’m going to try for next weekend is running delver over 4x copies of cutter. I feel like cutter was too slow especially with flow state. It was hard to get value from it. At most I was creating 2 monks per game. I think I’m going down to 2 cutters. I’m also thinking about running a copy of chain lightning as well for extra removal. For my sideboard I’m taking out pyroclasm which felt useless and instead run another price of progress. I think I’m also going to take out grafdigger’s cage and play another copy of surgical extraction instead.