Legacy Dirt deck
Overview
Dirt is the first successful Black-White-Green control deck developed for Legacy. The deck wins by using efficient discard such as Hymn to Tourach, land destruction (Sinkhole), and pinpoint creature removal in the form of Swords to Plowshares as well as mass permanent removal like Pernicious Deed while building card advantage over time. When it works, this eventually forces the opponent into a state of unrecoverable board position, and it ultimately wins with a lethal Eternal Dragon or similar big creature.
Strengths
While the deck may or may not be as good as its creators would have the world believe, it is undoubtedly difficult to fight. It's agile defense has answers for nearly every conceivable strategy, made even more versatile due to the inclusion of Living Wish. This combination of elements gives the deck enormous inevitablilty.
Flaws
The tight management of resources required to play the deck properly gives it a sharp learning curve. And Dirt is slightly less consistent than the very best Legacy has to offer, largely due to the strains on its mana base. Consequently it loses its edge in larger tournaments when mana problems become more apparent.
Effects on the Environment
In the Summer of 2005, a spoof deck called Thunderbluff (after the World of Warcraft locale) aimed a lot of negative attention at Dirt, and the veracity of its results were brought into question. The practical joke and subsequent infighting seems to have taken the wind out of the sails of an otherwise gung-ho bunch of developers. Still, the fiasco seems to have sparked interest in the genre. Shortly after, very similar decks began popping up, in some cases by the very same people who debated its merits in the first place. The Truffle Shuffle, created by Jack Elgin, is one such example.