Six… Okay, imagine this: You have a 99 card deck, which you divide into groups of six randomly. How many hits do you need in the deck to make sure that each of these groups has at least one? Actually, in this case, where you will have one pile of 3, the answer is 98. That’s not exactly something you would be interested in doing. What is the probability we are happy with? I’d say 80%. What’s the number of legendary creatures we would need for that? I’ll just pull out the ol’ trusty hypergeometric calculator, punch in some numbers and find out that the answer is 42, in which case the probability is 81.07%. Let’s start with that.
There’s 101 potential candidates for this (as of this writing), which isn’t much, when you take into account that there are many that are pure elf tribal or are there to support themes we are not playing. Let’s start with the no-brainers.
That’s not a good start. We are just over one fifth of the way there. Also, it’s easy to see even at this point that keeping the curve low is going to be problematic. Anyhow, two things emerge: There is a fight theme, even if Polukranos doesn’t technically fight nor does Halana cause fighting, and we are going to need a lot of mana production.
The next set:
That’s 25 cards and with the nine from before makes 34 all in all. That means that to hit our goal of 42, we have to dig deeper. Sure, there’s several Eldrazi Titans not yet in the deck, but I don’t think that’s the way we want to go, because of their cost (and the other Kozilek requires those pesky diamonds). Instead, I’m just going to put in cheaper legends to keep the curve at least somewhat manageable.
I guess some of these are pretty good, actually. Hua Tuo can guarantee a hit with Kolvori, for example.
Since I do want to play 40 lands, we still have room for 17 other cards. Some of these should be ramp. We have some of that in the deck already, but I do like to have around 50 sources of mana in my deck. However, Kolvori can handle this as well. This is kind of complicated. Do we want to play Kolvori as [scryfall]The Ringhart Crest[/scryfall]? I do think that should be kind of last resort, unless we expect her to go back to the command zone soon enough.
For the 10 remaining cards, let’s bolster the fighting theme, just for fun.
Top that off with 40 lands and that’s a deck. Of sorts. I can’t promise it’s any good, but it’s a list. If you want to make changes, I would suggest trying to lower the curve to make sure you don’t spend much of the game waiting to find something to play.