Angry Birds--Legacy for $150 (Legacy)

This is an update to a classic budget Legacy archetype, Angry Birds. Community interest in the deck has waned, but I think card support for the deck has grown, with several printings in recent sets giving Angry Birds new and powerful tools.

Power here is a relative term, of course. The best budget deck in Legacy is Burn, which only costs a little more than this deck and is far more competitive. But not everyone is a red mage, and unlike Burn, this deck can gradually upgrade with more expensive Legacy staples (Mother of Runes, Stoneforge Mystic w/ package, Flooded Strand, Tundra, Force of Will, Jace, Teferi, etc.), making it a feasible entryway into a blue/white Legacy collection.

Besides, Angry Birds has a fun, unique gameplan. Not unlike traditional Goblins, this deck is a creature pile designed to grind. Its creatures are below rate, sometimes horrifically, but they gain card advantage and make opposing spot removal inefficient. Unlike Goblins, which is a blocking and then counter-punching deck, or D&T, which is (more or less) a resource denial deck, Angry Birds stays alive with Island Sanctuary and then pecks its opponents to death in the air. Sky Hussar (played almost exclusively for his Forecast ability) and Squadron Hawk combine to provide the cards Island Sanctuary deprives you of.

To go with Island Sanctuary are several new Monarch cards that synergize with the deck's creature+pillowfort plan: Fall from Favor and the finisher Court of Grace. Fall from Favor has the added bonus of shutting down an opposing flyer that has been cramping your style.

I replaced the traditional MVP of the deck, Pride of the Clouds, with the new Watcher of the Spheres. Previous advocates of the deck billed Pride as Angry Bird's "Tarmogoyf" because it scales into a sky-dominating clock for two mana. Watcher ain't got that same swole, but he does clock in heavy when you play flyers. The huge difference is the cost reduction. Making Cloud of Faeries, Squadron Hawk, or Spellstutter Sprite cost one mana is a huge difference in power and playability. This isn't Goblin Warchief levels of explosiveness--imagine if this gave flyers haste--but combining an enabler with a hard hitter into one piece of cardboard seems a real upgrade to me. (And playing both Pride of the Clouds and Watcher of the Spheres alongside each other makes both worse because of the double mana cost crimping side-by-side deployment.)

Our mana base is cheap as dirt and far from up to the standards of Legacy. Multiple deck decisions have been made to play around the poor mana--for instance, playing Faerie Seer for early filtering over something like Siren Stormtamer. We use this to our advantage by playing Back to Basics from the sideboard--at ten dollars a pop, the biggest investment this deck makes.

The OG MTG Salvation primer on the deck is here: https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/the-game/legacy-type-1-5/budget-legacy/186113-primer-updates-to-the-primer-as-of-may-24th-2013
And the last version I could find made by the deck's longtime advocate, MadCatSowega, significantly de-budgetized, is here: https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/the-new-angry-birds/