Discussion Forum

So I took a look at your deck and here's what I think:

1) If you can't get the duellands because they are out of the budget get the next best thing if not better, the fetchlands. Initially I was against these cards and thought going all duels might be the way to go but as you pointed out this is a) costly and b) doesn't look at later rounds when you may want to weed land out of your deck. By adding fetches, you can drastically increase your odds of getting the kill cards you need in your later rounds rather than drawing into land, they are cheaper than most duel lands especially the big ones from pre revised, and they should help with mana color issues, so definately worth the investment.

2) one other idea i had was looking at belltower sphinx and animate dead. The belltower sphinx is nice as its pretty good blocker and you will be milling your opponents deck if they actually attack you. Animate dead goes with your reanimator theme, however it will also give you the option of going after your opponents creatures if in the event they have something nicer than you quicker. Coupled together you should have a bit to choose from in your enemies graveyard and they should be rather cheap adds for your deck. Food for thought
- J Dudes

also you might want to look at Ponder instead of or in addition to Lim Dul's Vault

Some other cheap cards that might fit into your theme are:
Jace's Archivist: Will allow you not only to speed up your draw, but get your creatures into your graveyard through discarding. Read the Runes, or Magus of the Bizzar would work in the same aspect.

Disrupting Shoal: I know you said FoW was out of your price range but some other cards that might work the same dynamic (ie discard a card from your hand,counter a spell)are Disrupting Shoal, and/or Foil.

As far as your chances in Legacy tournys, I am about to play in my second this weekend with either a burn deck or more likely an elf tribal deck. In either case the decks are designed to hopefully have my opponent in a kill condition by turn four/five no later. If you check out my thread titled "what i learned at my first legacy tourny in a decade...." you will see that the tourney's now a days (at least in my neck of the woods) can move extremely quickly with kill conditions being in place as early as round four. As far as deck types I saw, there were a lot of combo based decks floating about and a few scattered other types. If you don't feel your deck is going to be able to kill your opponent by turn five, don't expect to get far at your tourney this weekend however take it as a learning experience as to a)how to improve your deck b) learn your opponents decks as you will probably see them again either at that same location or a similar deck by different opponents and c) make new business partners as far as being able to trade for cards you may potentially need to improve your deck (i know i have been able to through the tourneys i have been attending)

can you play through

3x Spell Pierce
4x Force of Will
4x Grafdigger's Cage
2x Surgical Extraction

That's what most decks these days pack against decks like yours. The graveyard hate Surgical Extraction and Grafdiggers Cage is usually a mix of the two (the numbers vary depending on the type of deck and the personal taste of the pilot) but most decks do pack between 4 and 6 such dedicated graveyard hate in sideboard. Some decks also play Leyline of the Void.

Man i as gonna throw in the Leyline of the Void card as i know that has been used quite a bit in graveyad manip decks to fight against em.