Cracking The Vault
Paul’s Perspective
March 26, 2010

Welcome back readers today I’m devoting an article to a card that I feel is underappreciated and has powerful constructed applications for legacy. An article entitled “Cracking the vault” would often times entice readers with the promise of the discussion of Open the Vaults or Time vault and what they were capable of in various formats, no readers this article focuses on  a card whose power I recently experienced playing casually with my friends, that card is Lim Dul’s Vault.  For those of you unfamiliar with Lim Dul’s Vault here you go. Lim Dul’s Vault allows you to look at the top five cards of your library as many times as you wish and rearrange them. You lose 1 life for each time you rearranged your deck then you set your top five aside shuffle your library then put those five on top. An extremely verbose card, Lim Dul’s Vault is none the less a powerful tutor card for any deck utilizing a mana base that can handle its cost. I having witnessed the power of the vault can attest to its power, adding four copies of the card to my Cephalid Breakfast deck variant increased the speed considerably. I averaged a turn 3 kill most of the time and could win between turns 1 and turn 4. Without the addition of the vault the deck goldfished poorly and had no reliable way of tutoring except for poor card draws such as Ponder and company. The ability to search for any one card you need at the expense of a mild life loss is not something that should be overlooked in both competitive and casual decks. In the realm of competitive legacy, I being a neophyte in regards to the metagame and such know that powerful tutoring abilities are at a premium. Cards such as Worldly Tutor and its ilk can only fetch a single type of card from your library, narrowing what types of build which tutors can go into.

The tutors are just that tutors they excel at one particular subject, Lim Dul’s Vault however is filled with all types of knowledge and you can get it for a price. The flexibility of the vault and the types of decks it could be put in are staggering, primarily it could be used as a tutor to search for combo pieces in a deck. It could just as easily be utilized as a way to fetch silver bullet cards for a particular situation and insure you have the right card or combination of cards during your next draw steps. Requiring one mana of both blue and black isn’t entirely unfeasible considering the gold bordered mana bases available to players. Lim Dul’s Vault acts as a tutor for almost any card in your library with the absence of Vampiric tutor in legacy decks; the power this card can offer for a minimal investment of life is too powerful to pass up. If your running a dedicated combo deck or looking to fetch silver bullet answers, Lim Dul’s Vault may just be the necromantic tool you need to add to your planeswalker arsenal.