Understanding the Legacy Metagame, part 3: Unfair Decks

I tend to put unfair decks into 3 categories: Non-blue Combo, Blue Combo, and Staxx decks.

Non-blue Combo

These decks typically go for speed over consistency.

Belcher - I already discussed Belcher in the first post so I'll keep this brief. Basically, you either win very quickly, or you don't win at all.

Elves - This deck is a bit of an oddity. It runs more creatures than your average aggro deck, but it's definitely a combo deck. You win by casting Glimpse of Nature, then casting a truckload of elves, then casting Craterhoof Behemoth. You generate obscene mana with Gaea's Cradle, as well as Heritage Druid. The real powerhouse of the deck is Nettle Sentinel, which, in conjunction with Heritage Druid and Birchlore Rangers, makes a lot of mana very quickly. This is one of the hardest decks in the format to pilot; it's very unforgiving to screwups, but very rewarding to skilled play. Plus, even if they counter your Craterhoof Behemoth, you're left with like 30 elves just sitting there waiting to untap and attack.

Blue Combo

Blue combo runs cantrips. Lots of cantrips. It runs Brainstorm, Ponder, Gitaxian Probe, and sometimes it even runs Preordain. Besides that these decks don't have much in common, but they do play surprisingly similar.

Sneaky Show - Sneaky show gets its name from Sneak Attack and Show and Tell. The deck is very straightforward; you play cantrips and sculpt you hand, then you cast Sneak Attack or Show and Tell, then you win with your big creature. Sometimes you get Griselbrand and draw 14 cards before you win, other times you just get Emrakul, the Aeons Torn and smash their board. A very strong deck and a fairly easy deck to pilot, this is the deck that popularized the term "unfair."
The Epic Storm (TES) - Deriving its name from the Vintage deck "The Perfect Storm," which itself gets its name from the storm mechanic and the movie by the same name, TES wants to play nine spells in one turn and then cast Tendrils of Agony for 20 damage. It accomplishes this by casting Ad Nauseum and drawing like 20 cards, then casting them all. It can't run more than one Ad Nauseum though, or else the you might take too much damage from Ad Nauseum! So it only runs one, and it fetches that singleton AN by casting Infernal Tutor. But what if you can't get Hellbent? Not to worry, Lion's Eye Diamond has you covered! What sets TES apart from old school storm decks like IGGy Pop and Spanish Inquisition is that it protects itself with Cabal Therapy and Duress mainboard to rip those pesky counterspells out of your opponent's hand.
Now if you're clever, you were probably wondering what you do when you don't have enough life safely cast Ad Nauseum. The answer is Burning Wish! You Burning Wish for Past in Flames and storm out of what's in your graveyard.
This deck is super fun and very resiliant, even to hand disruption and counter spells. The one card it has monumental trouble beating game 1 is Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, but that's what Chain of Vapor is for.
High Tide - High Tide is a very cool deck, and I'm throwing it in here because it's one of my favorites, even though it's neither tier 1 nor particularly popular. (The only top player who ever does well with it is Feline Longmore, and she is the definitive High Tide master.) High Tide wins by playing maybe as many islands as it can, then casting its namesake card, then making obscene amounts of mana with Candelabra of Tawnos and Time Spiral and Turnabout and then casting Blue Sun's Zenith for huge numbers and forcing your opponent to draw their whole deck and promptly lose. It's hard to explain all the nuances of this deck so I suggest watching Feline play it. Here's an example.

Staxx

The original legacy Staxx deck was monowhite and ran Somestack, Chalice of the Void, Trinisphere, and several ways to play those cards on turn 1, usually City of Traitors and/or Mox Diamond. That deck's not very good anymore but there are similar decks out there that are pretty good. These decks are also relatively cheap. None of them are tier 1 since they're too inconsistent, but they're still worth a mention.

Red Stompy AKA All In Red AKA Dragon Stompy - Go back and look at the manabases of the decks in this post and the last one. You'll notice that very few of them run any basic lands. Now look at Blood Moon. Now think of how devastating a turn 1 Blood Moon would be against BUG delver. The truly ridiculous part of Blood Moon is that there is one red card in the entire game that can answer it: Chaos Warp. That means that if you don't counter it, and you don't run basic lands, you cannot cast nonred cards for the rest of the game. And if you don't run red... well, you lose. Chalice of the Void and Trinisphere are also devastating on turn one.

Red Stompy is the only really playable Staxx style deck at the moment, but there are other really janky variants like Sea Stompy (monoblue, runs sea drake) and green stompy (runs green sun's zenith and elvish spirit guide).

The problem with these decks is that if you're winning, your opponent isn't playing, which is kinda rude in my opinion. But to each his own. If you like decks that lock your opponent out of the game you can also look into Pox, which is a more fair deck that's usually mono black and runs Smallpox and Pox.