This is a Food Chain deck that I have been working on for the past year to use in Legacy competitive play. I just don't like Elf Ball (nor NO Elves/Aggro Elves which seem mediocre for Legacy) that much and wanted to run something different.
Food Chain as a card really intrigued me and while most Legacy Food Chain decks are not elf-based, Food Chain Elves is a thing that people have worked on and piloted in the past. If you search through MtG Salvation and The Source, you can find these old lists. However, my problem with those is that they are slow and inconsistent thus requiring them to be more heavily aggro oriented. There's nothing wrong with that aside from the fact that they are weaker than Elf Ball.
So I set about building a new Food Chain list that borrowed from the really //really// old builds that splashed white for Enlightened Tutor. I threw in Griselbrand (a card I never understood why no other Food Chain Elves players really considered), tuned it and had a consistent turn three combo deck. Sweet. Unfortunately the deck was fragile and the final nail in the coffin for that deck was Abrupt Decay. It relied on Food Chain to combo and if you couldn't you were left with a very sub-par aggro deck.
So I retired the deck, out of ideas for some time. I re-approached Elves later and built a new combo deck for kicks using Priest of Titania and Elvish Archdruid with cards like
Collective Unconscious
and Concordant Crossroads for the win. It was able to run more elf lords and generally better creatures for a better alternate aggro plan than my old Food Chain list.
Honestly, though, I had built the deck as a joke, something to play around with casually. Somewhat by accident and through tweaking, I discovered a decent aggro deck that super-consistently comboed out on turn four. I started to wonder about Legacy play but felt that a fundamental turn four combo was too slow and not relevant for Legacy. Why run that over Elf Ball, right? So I put the deck away again for a couple months. Then one night I had the crazed idea to mash the Food Chain list which comboed in a completely different way together with this new deck. Why hadn't I thought of it before? Well they were both radically different and didn't share many of the same elves for one. I messed around with that for quite some time and came up with lists that were absolutely terrible.
Then I landed on the fundamental shell for the Food Chain list you see here today. I've been tweaking and tinkering with it ever since but the basics are here and it's a solid playing deck. I managed to keep most of the consistency of the
Collective Unconscious
deck but sped the deck up to where it is not uncommon to drop Emrakul on turn three. In my opinion, this deck provides the best of both worlds and offers uniquely different combo experience from the typical Elf Ball lists.
This list has no card choices spared for budgetary reasons aside from Gaea's Cradle. So in the testing I've done, these cards are in the deck for a very specific reason -- because they offer the most power and consistency to the deck that I've yet tested. It's just a benefit that the deck is so inexpensive. Cradle would benefit the deck but is definitely not necessary.
I'm still working on the sideboard but I will be taking this to a tourny very soon.
