Legacy Dreadnought

I really like this concept, but I think in order for it to be Legacy viable, it needs a lot faster mechanics and filtering/drawing abilities. A lot of Legacy decks find ways to combo out cards at crazy speed, so simply using Lim-Dul's Vault and Ponder may not be enough. I would suggest starting with some land changes. This is one of the key pieces of a successful Legacy deck, and unfortunately the most expensive as well. You need to have a consistently flexible land base. One thing that seems to be a staple are the fetch lands (in your case, Polluted Delta) because it allows you to get land that you can use immediately as well as thin your deck. I would also add in the shock land from Gatecrash called Watery Grave. This counts as both an island and a swamp, so it is searchable with Polluted Delta as well. Obviously also including Underground Sea (Alpha/Beta/Unlimited dual land) would be advised, but that makes this really expensive. I would also try to find more ways to get Phyrexian Dreadnought into play safely. One card I would add in here would be Stifle. It fits well in the colors, and allows you to have another option beyond Torpor Orb and Vision Charm. Next I would try to find other ways to get the necessary combo cards into your hand faster, rather than just having them in place to draw. Some options would be cards like Sleight of Hand, Anticipate, Diabolic Vision, Impulse, Plunge into Darkness and Strategic Planning (which can be used to combo with Unearth). I like some of the cards you have in your sideboard, and would consider mainboarding some of them like Trinket Mage, Hunted Horror and Reconstruction. These allow you to do more searching and recovery and can allow you to use other searching cards that dump cards into your graveyard like Careful Study and Forget. Other than that, I think you have a great deck here. I hope this helps and best of luck :)

Thank you very much for the reply! I agree that the lands are the most important. Unfortunately, right now they are a bit out of reach. I'm lucky to already have the high dollar cards (FoW, Dreadnought) from twenty years of collecting. If only I had started a couple years earlier. I did make some land changes and a land gamble. I figured the Vivid lands could serve me well very early on. Hopefully I don't need their counters past the first couple turns. The gamble is going down to 16 lands. Is that at all viable? Mana costs are so low that I am hoping so. Otherwise, I'm at a loss as to what to cut.

I did take your advice and add some filtering cards that actually draw. I happen to have playsets of Diabolic Vision and Impulse, so they are in there. I also added a couple Stifles to have more Dreadnought cheating options.

My hope is that I get a 12/12 out so fast that they spend their time either answering it or dying instead of going with their game plan. Then, I plop it right back out with Unearth or Reconstruction.

Thanks again!

Ok, this looks a lot better but I do have a few other suggestions for you but it's just my opinion and I don't want you to feel pressured to make the changes if you don't want to. You made a good call to drop some of the land, because you have to also remember that the lotus petals are pretty much lands too. To be on the safe side, I would drop the trinket mages (I know I said I like them, but they're your only 3-drop and with less land, you may not be able to get them out anyway). I would also take out 1 more lim-dul's vault. In place of those 3 cards, I would add 1 more reconstruction (blue card for force of will) and 2 not of this world. This gives you more chances to save your dreadnoughts since they are your only creatures.

Back to land.... I don't like the "come into play tapped" lands when you need to play things out so fast. I would try to swap them out. You have City of Brass in your sideboard which is a great replacement for some of the vivid lands, and if you have any others like that, I would suggest adding them in as well. I'm assuming at this point you don't have polluted delta or watery grave, which is unfortunate. If you do decide to play with "come into play tapped" lands, may I suggest bad river as a substitute and put in basic land that you can search for. Deck thinning through land grabs really helps you get the cards you really need faster.

I can't really think of anything else off the top of my head at this point. If I do think of anything else, I'll be sure to post. I really do like this deck and I hope it works out for you. Let me know how it goes with play testing :)

Eeeee... I did not read the Vivid lands very closely. I skipped right over the "enters tapped" thing. They are gone. You're correct on your assumption with Watery Grave and Polluted Delta. I moved the Cities of Brass up and added Undiscovered Paradise. I figured with my mana costs topping out at 2 (I'll never actually pay the cost for FoW and NoTW) the drawback of it bouncing back to my hand wouldn't be severe. I only seeing it being a problem if I end up only having two Undiscovered Paradises as the only lands I draw.

I have a playset of Bad River and a couple copies of Thawing Glaciers, but deemed them too slow. Do you think the filtering outweighs the speed setback? Amulet of Vigor?

Other than that, I took your advice on the other changes. I'll keep playests of all the cards I have on the list and play with the amounts I include/exclude to see what runs the slickest. Thanks for all the help. When I'm able to get to a tournament, I'll let you know how I fare.

OOOOOO! I like the idea of Thawing Glaciers, and with Amulet of Vigor, you could really benefit from that. HOWEVER...... I get the feeling that if you did that, you'd be focusing too much on land and not enough of on actually playing your combo (since nothing else you have comes into play tapped). Plus, you'd have to get rid of some of your better land to do that. If you want, you could take away the 4 darkslick shores and 2 of the undiscovered paradise and add in 2 thawing glaciers and 4 basic land (probably 2 of each). Up to you - I personally do think that the filtering is really important in Legacy as many players will have the fetch lands. The benefit of filtering means that the chance that you draw a key card is higher because you have 1 less land in your deck to worry about. I think the rest of your deck falls into place well once you have the land settled. I think you should play test it with multiple different land bases and see what seems to be more consistent and what you prefer more. Websites like Tappedout.net allow you to build your decks and then try them out, so maybe give that a shot. Alternatively, you can just use the "draw sample hand" feature on this site and see what kind of draws you come up with. It allows you to mulligan too which is great. Once again, all the best, and keep me posted. I'm actually really excited to see how well this works!