One mic drum recording...again.

[inasilentway]

Any suggestions on initial placement? It's a 4 piece kick, he plays hard, and there's a good amount of floor tom in almost all of the songs.

If there's a lot of floor tom carrying the song, you might not want to do the daptone style with just a 57 alone. those songs are very oriented around kick-snare-hat beats, but you'll notice the tom fills move away from the mic.

I do but didn't intend to use it unless the 57's were out of the question for the one mic I need to use.

I hear that the mxl 770 is mostly junk. I've only ever used it to record spoken word to a laptop.

don't rule out the 770. if you haven't even tried the MXL on an instrument how can you judge whether it's out of the question or not??? judge what you hear with your ears not what you hear on a message board.
I don't know that mic at all but I got quite a few useful sounds out of a similar 990 onto a Tascam 424. The high end that's harsh on digital actually let me get a better signal-to-hiss ratio, which in turn made it less dull when I rolled of the high end (similar to the trick of boosting the highs on the way in and rolling 'em off at mix as a lo-budge NR solution).
if anything I found that the 990 (rather than cut layers of mesh off I took the grille completely off mine and it opened up the sound a lot, wouldn't be surprised if the trick works for the 770) was really useful for making a sound stick out amongst the tracks of 57 and random yard-sale omni dynamic, the only 3 mics I had at the time. it wasn't a million dollar drum sound but it was better by far than either dynamic on its own, just by virtue of the extra high end making it sound a little less lo-fi. of course YMMV but the same could hold trule on the 1/4" 8-track format.

If I were you I'd probably put one 57 either as a kick mic or in a position similar to Daptone but oriented more towards kick, and then the 770 somewhere above that picks up the floor tom. Check phase, move mics around so you get enough snare and hat bleed between the two to make a good solid drum sound, and if you really need to only use one track submix both to one.