A Pleasurable Dilemma

So there’s a Vintage tournament on Sunday:

The Soldiery
4256 N. High St.
Columbus, Ohio 43214

It’s a $15 entry for infinite proxies and the chance to win a Mox Pearl.

I dare you to build Vintage Battle of Wits.

Registration starts at 12:30 p.m. so you should be able to make it home in time for a late dinner, if you’re not planning on going to Thurman’s.

Anyway, the last tournament they had like this attracted 28 people and was a buttload of fun. I recommend it highly, and a change of pants.

I love it when Word underlines a word like “buttload” to let you know you spelled it wrong.

Right now, I’m trying to decide between two decks: One, my home-built UB Fish that I’ve been improving since last fall, and the other, a Gifts list similar to Meandeck Gifts (i.e. running more than two Merchant Scrolls, at least two Misdirections, and a full suite of Gifts) that I built last week. And if I get some cards I ordered in the mail by today or Saturday, that might give me even another choice, but I’ll stick with these two for now.

Basically, it’s a choice between stable, non-explosive familiarity and a very powerful deck on which I’m still green.

It’s a total toss up.

Goldfishing the Gifts list lets you know there’s almost unlimited potential in that deck. The first two games I tested I would have won on third turn with counter back up, and the second game also saw me put half of my library into my graveyard and another quarter of those cards into RFG land. Moving that many cards around in so short a time is the concept of “velocity” in a nutshell.

However, those two games are maybe 20% of all the games I’ve ever played using Gifts. I haven’t even played against it that often, only one or two matches. (Not to mention that the one match I know I played, I won handily with UB Fish and lost my only game to a turn two Tinker that I didn’t have an answer to). It’s just not a deck that I’m very experienced with, which is a bad thing with a very skill-testing card like Gifts Ungiven and its piles of broken goodness.

The other games I’ve played have all been against Fish, mostly because I want to be able to play Fish better against better decks.

I think they’re about even in those games, and they go about as expected. When Gifts wins, it completely overwhelms Fish with its power advantage. Sometimes I play two or three Gifts in a game, and that’s gigantic even if they’re not all going to get game winners. Though I’m sure it doesn’t always work out (and I wouldn’t know if it wasn’t working out anyway), I try to keep myself unbiased when I test, yet I still seem to have a decent intuition when it comes to making up a Gifts package.

For example, one of my favorite early gifts is for control, so I’ll often get Force of Will, Misdirection, Merchant Scroll, and Mana Drain. That sets me up to play a better Gifts, Fact or Fiction, or tutor at the next available opportunity without worrying too much about my opponent’s in-hand disruption.

Sometimes I even Gifts for more cards: Ancestral Recall (if I haven’t already used it), Thirst for Knowledge, Fact or Fiction, and Gifts.

Gifts is nicely explosive too, any draw spell or mana boost (like Tolarian Academy, Mana Vault, or Black Lotus) can easily take the game from a losing proposition wherein I have two lands and two moxes against Fish’s four creatures, Null Rod, and Wasteland, to winning in a turn and a half.

Gifts me: Tap my mana, Chain of Vapor my moxes and your Null Rod, replay my moxes, play a land, play Lotus, play a broken draw spell, play a tutor, play mana, Yawgmoth’s Will, Burning Wish for Tendrils, Tendrils for the win?

Fish me: I scooped while you were playing Fact or Fiction.

Gifts me: Oh. Good. Uh, I gain 28 life.

Yeah, anyway. It turns out that Fish has a strong game against Gifts what with not having expensive spells to Mana Drain and having its own group of counters and control.

UB Fish, well, my build anyway, runs Forces of Will, Remand, Stifle, Duress, and Withered Wretch (to make Yawgmoth’s Wills less effective). That’s a lot of things that will directly stop a Gifts combo, unless they decide to Tinker up Darksteel Colossus, which is, uh, real bad.

That is really the crux of my problem with UB Fish right now. I like my game lots of decks that don’t use creatures. Oath gives me trouble, Darksteel Colossus gives me trouble, and any form of aggro that’s not a weenier Fish gives me problems. It frustrates me greatly, especially because Oath and Gifts Tinkering for Colossus can overcome my counters.

So, I have three cards in my maindeck: Repeal, Echoing Truth, and Diabolic Edict. Echoing Truth and Diabolic Edict are supposed to save me from Colossus and Angels; however, they have proven themselves not enough. I’d like to find one card that can fill those three slots and solve all my problems, but I’m not sure how feasible that is.

There are a few answers, though.

Chain of Vapor is the obvious one. It returns any kind of permanent for one mana, which is awesome. The drawback, of course, is that my opponent can copy it and spit it back at one of my permanents. That might actually be my best option, though.

Another decent choice, though, is Curfew. The problem is that it only returns creatures, which is bad because sometimes Chalice of the Void can give me problems, especially if it gets set at 2. Curfew, though, works against Colossus because Gifts usually doesn’t run any other creatures. It also works against Oath because I can either return one of my actual creatures if need be or I can just return one of their Orchard tokens. It’s a novel idea but one I think is ultimately too narrow.

I could always go with Unsummon straight up, but, like Curfew it seems fairly narrow. It’s narrow like Swords to Plowshares is narrow, though, and I know that gets played all the time.

After that I have two creature answers: Trickster Mage and Waterfront Bouncer. The benefits to these guys is that they are more permanent solutions (albeit card disadvantageous ones). Bouncer is clearly the better of the two since I won’t necessarily have to discard one card every turn, just the turns the big creatures are on the board. Trickster Mage has the benefit of being a one drop, which makes him five or six times more synergetic with Ninja and less affected by the Chalices of the Void that hurt the rest of my deck.

I don’t know.

I’ve got a couple of days to work on things, though, and I’ll have it figured out. I’ll either feel proficient with Gifts or get my UB Fish together and ready to go.

Either way, I should be an easy target, and you should show up to beat on me.

Until then, bide your time and wait for my tourney report.