Building Legacy Snow from the ground up

The motivation for me wanting to play Legacy 'Snow' control decks is four fold:

1) I think Dead of Winter is a powerful effect, (it actually says nonsnow creatures on it, of which I found out many people did not know). That's less relevant for Grixis, but more relevant for Sultai. I mostly view Dead of Winter as a Toxic Deluge that does not cost you life.
2) Basic lands line up very well versus the current metagame of Wrenn and Six / Wasteland.
3) Arcum's Astrolabe is sort of a busted card. Prophetic Prism has always been close to playable, but two mana is a tad too much to pay for that effect. {s} is a reasonable amount.
4) I really enjoyed playing snow draft decks in Modern Horizons.

Given those factors, and wanting to start with a Grixis Control style list, I looked at old shells to get an idea.

The spells that normally form Grixis Control as we know it are approximately the following:

Brainstorm
Ponder
Force of Will
Hymn to Tourach
Kolaghan's Command
Narset, Parter of Veils
Jace, the Mind Sculptor
Thoughtseize/Inquisition
Fatal Push
Lightning Bolt
Snapcaster Mage
Baleful Strix
Gurmag Angler
Toxic Deluge

Taking that into consideration, you can see that the deck is normally base blue-black with a small splash for red (red might be a heavier demand postboard because of Blasts), and deciding what spells I wanted to cast:

cmc 1:
2 Fatal Push
2 Lightning Bolt
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
3 Arcum's Astrolabe
1 Thoughtseize

cmc 3:
3 Hymn to Tourach
4 Snapcaster Mage* (not really 2, but...)
4 Baleful Strix
1 Liliana's Triumph

cmc 3:
1 Dead of Winter
2 Narset, Parter of Veils
2 Kolaghan's Command
2 Back to Basics

cmc 4:
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

cmc 5:
4 Force of Will

So I started out with a manabase of this to try to address the requirements at the various spots on the curve.
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Polluted Delta
3 Prismatic Vista
1 Bloodstained Mire
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
1 Badlands
3 Snow-Covered Island
2 Snow-Covered Swamp
1 Snow-Covered Mountain
3 Arcum's Astrolabe

It is crucial that you count Astrolabe as part of your manabase!
a) because you need to make sure you can cast it
b) it literally lets you be super liberal with your mana if you draw 1.

10 fetchlands + 6 snow basics is definitely enough to cast Astrolabe on turn 1 (you want around 15ish for a t1 birds of paradise by comparison).

However, I noticed some problems (thanks to twitch chat and playing some games).

a) There should be 4 Polluted Delta given you're a base UB deck (cantrip / set up for hymn on t2), aand frankly, the fact that you want to fetch basics liberally every game means you probably want 4 Prismatic Vista to keep your options the most open.
b) The third Arcum's Astrolabe seemed a little excessive, and I noticed a small number of games where I'd just have too much air, so I ended up cutting it for another spell.


That and a few other changes later, I ended up with the following list that I played in a Win-A-Tabernacle at MTGFirst this past weekend:

2 Scalding Tarn
1 Bloodstained Mire
4 Polluted Delta
3 Prismatic Vista
3 Snow-Covered Island
2 Snow-Covered Swamp
1 Snow-Covered Mountain
2 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
1 Badlands

2 Arcum's Astrolabe
1 Dead of Winter
4 Brainstorm
4 Ponder
4 Force of Will
4 Hymn to Tourach
2 Fatal Push
2 Lightning Bolt
2 Narset, Parter of Veils
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Kolaghan's Command
1 Back to Basics
1 Angrath's Rampage
1 Magmatic Sinkhole

4 Snapcaster Mage
4 Baleful Strix

Sideboard
2 Plague Engineer
2 Pyroblast
1 Red Elemental Blast
1 Blue Elemental Blast
2 Nihil Spellbomb
2 Liliana's Triumph
2 Surgical Extraction
1 Back to Basics
1 Liliana, the Last Hope
1 Force of Negation

The deck performed extremely well, and here is a short rundown of the matchups I played:
R1 Burn WLW
R2 UR Delver WW
R3 Hogaak LWW
R4 UW Blade WW
R5 Eldrazi Stompy WW
R6-7 Draw
R1 T8 Goblins LL

The major changes were addressing the slight vulnerability to a planeswalker that snuck into play, and me noticing that Hymn to Tourach was good in most matchups nowadays, hence the addition of Magmatic Sinkhole/Angrath's Rampage.

Props to Lawrence for telling me I should put Back to Basics into this deck given the plethora of basic lands / ways to find basic lands.


I tried a Sultai version yesterday built in almost exactly the same vein, and you can find the youtube stream here along with the decklist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF_16LplqZo

I believe Sultai Snow is a little worse than Grixis Snow currently but it does do some other things well.