The Gamers Lounge tournament is just a week away. You’ve got your proxies made up, right? You’ve been practicing your moves? You can Stifle a Tendrils from 50 yards with Force of Will backup?
Aww, yeah!
Wait. You’re confused by the new look? Right, well, the Hero Zone is changing its webhosting, and whither the Hero Zone, thither Magic to the Nth Degree. I’ll get the old blogs uploaded to this new site as I get time, and as I do you can review them with me, re-experience the highs and the lows, and see what craziness I’ve come up with over the past half-year or so.
Right, so practicing your Force of Will quick-draws, right?
Okay, I know you really haven’t been doing any of that. I probably haven’t even been doing that much of it.
In my final effort to get you to play something good and Vintage rather than just regular Vintage, I present you with this, my Very Brief and Inconclusive Overview of Piles of Cards that Just Might Succeed at a Vintage Tournament.
The thing about Vintage is that you really can play just about any deck you want. I mean, you can’t have Unglued or Unhinged cards or anything weird like that (Falling Star, I’m looking in your direction!), but if you really want to play ElfBall and hope that your Fireball (why aren’t you using Kaervek’s Torch again?) doesn’t get Misdirected at your face, go ahead.
The VBIOPCJMSVT is just meant as an introduction to the various, well known decks you might see at a typical Vintage tournament.
They’re in no particular order, the deck name is linked to SCG’s lists, and to introduce each one, just for giggles and my own tribute to the half-year of St. Patrick's day: a limerick.
Stax
During your upkeep, I say,If someone just says Stax, they’re usually referring to the 5-color brand that uses Cities of Brass to fuel a huge compliment of broken cards while keeping opponents in an artifact prison. There are lots of options in Stax, but the typical 5-color build will use Strip Mines effects and Crucible of Worlds to keep you off mana from your lands, Smokestacks to keep you off your permanents, and Tangle Wire to tap down the permanents you do happen to draw. It uses Goblin Welder to manage all of these things and might employ Sphere of Resistance and Chalice of the Void as well, just to make things extra painful. When it finally feels ready to kill you, it will do it with Goblin Welder over 20 turns, or it will summon up Karn or some other artifact beastie to thump you quick.
My artifacts will make you pay.
Sack and then tap.
It’s like having the clap.
Workshops ruin your day.
I haven’t seen a lot of Stax recently because it has a tendency to lose in the combo environment where I play, but don’t get me wrong it’s a powerful deck and can be annoying to play against.
Fish
With weenies and counters, it’s Fish,You can look back through these posts and see lots of entries on fish—blue-black, blue-white, blue-white-green, blue-green, I think that Paleo-Fish deck I built was even blue-red. They all have their positives and negatives. Blue-white is the most popular right now because it can run the best control and creatures, namely blue cards, Swords to Plowshares, and Jotun Grunt.
And its options are always delish.
You start off with blue,
But add white or black too,
Perhaps red or green if you wish.
Whatever colors it is, Fish wins because it’s too relentless and redundant to handle all of it. It keeps opponents off their mana with Wastelands, Null Rods, Chalices of the Void, and Stifles while countering their threats with Force of Will and playing disruptive creatures. Then, before the opponent really knows what’s going on, they’ve taken 20 damage and died.
Gifts
Fueled by blue’s Mana Drain,Gifts Ungiven is really good in Vintage because of two cards: Yawgmoth’s Will and Recoup. If you put those two cards in the same gifts package, you’ll be able to cast just about everything else in your graveyard, hopefully in the same turn for a quick Tendrils of Agony kill or a double Time Walk with Tinkerlossus. Don’t let this simple plan fool you, though, there are a lot more tricks to Gifts than just Will and Recoup: you can get mana, counters, more cards, whatever you need to help you win.
The counters like jump-shots will rain.
Put the gas into Gifts,
Which gives your foes fits.
The packaging taxes your brain.
Best of all, your deck is backed up by the best counter suite in Vintage: four Mana Drains, four Forces of Will, and three Misdirections, any of which can be fetched by Merchant Scroll. That’s right, Merchant Scroll, from Homelands. It’s huge. It also gets answer cards like Rebuild or Chain of Vapor, Gifts Ungiven, and Ancestral Recall.
Control Slaver
Some say Goblin Welder’s a bore,There are multiple versions of this deck, all with varying degrees of combo and control nature. The Slaver player’s ultimate goal is to win either by denying their opponent a useful turn and eventually attacking with Sundering Titan or by comboing out with Tendrils. The major players in this deck are Mindslaver, which is usually game-wrecking in Vintage, and Goblin Welder, which abuses the number of quality artifacts in the deck (e.g. Mindslaver, Memory Jar, Black Lotus, Sundering Titan et al.) to go broken or lockdown the game.
But he helps me out with my chores.
My cards don’t do much,
Just counters and such.
I think I would rather use yours.
Control Slaver has counters and card drawing similar to that of Gifts, but can so effectively use Thirst for Knowledge that it’s not even funny. However, because the deck is so filled with expensive one-ofs, it’s a difficult deck to pick up and go with. Every once in a while, though, you’ll slaver someone with a Necropotence and a Dark Ritual in their hand. I’m pretty sure that’s a game win.
UbaStax
In Standard the Uba was jank,For some reason this deck hasn’t caught on in a big way. It has numerous benefits over regular Stax because Welder, Bazaar, and Uba Mask are broken when any two are used in conjunction with each other, and all of them can be run as four-ofs. Like Stax, the idea is to pin the opponent under a mountain of artifacts and then find a win condition and kill them. That win might come on the back of any of numerous artifact creatures, or it might just be from recurring Barbarian Ring with threshold a bunch of times.
But once inside the Think Tank,
It was broken in half
(Goblin Welder just laughs)
And now Bazaars are mad bank.
The mana base is more stable than 5-color Stax because the deck is mono-red, but you can use the same artifact pieces as a lock and you can use Null Rod or Jester’s Cap on top of it because you’re not reliant on Moxes to fix your mana. I’m seriously surprised this isn’t a more popular deck.
Ichorid
It’s combo, it’s aggro, it’s both!Proving that aggro is still a viable strategy in Vintage, Ichorid throws itself into its own graveyard and spits out numerous 3/1 hasty creatures every turn. Ichorid has its lovers and haters. Tormod’s Crypt and Leyline of the Void love it even though both of them can be overcome by a skilled player. Counterspells hate it because it just doesn’t care; after the second turn, it might never play another spell.
So nobody’s sure of its growth.
It attacks from the yard,
Where disruption is hard,
But new players to test it are loath.
Is it hard to disrupt? Sure, sometimes. Now, every deck plays something against it, but they still need the opportunity to use those weapons, and before Ichorid drops a Pithing Needle on Crypt or finds a Chain of Vapor for Leyline. Ichorid players have to fight through a field of hate, but sometimes they just dredge 30 cards into their graveyard turn one and accidentally win next attack phase.
Oath
You just have to play an enchantment,There’s a lot of people who refuse to admit that the color green actually exists in Vintage, but it does, and Oath is the major reason why. Oath of Druids allows a player with fewer creatures than his or her opponent to pull a creature out of his or her library for free. When you only play two creatures in your deck, and both of them cost at least six mana, are hard to kill, and have haste, that ability is broken. So, all you really have to do, is cast Oath, protect it, and make sure your opponent has a dude (hello Forbidden Orchard!).
Give opponents a dude in a light glint,
Reveal Akroma,
And take it on home-a.
After that you won’t need any hint.
Oath is actually a blue deck so it can run a bunch of counters, but it splashes green for its namesake enchantment and for Crop Rotation and sometimes for other things like Regrowth. There’s a Gaea’s Blessing in there too, but you’re not actually supposed to cast that ever. Some versions run black for Duress and more tutors, and it might run Wastelands too to slow the opponent down more. It’s a fun deck but I have terrible luck drawing my angels and not drawing Forbidden Orchard.
PitchLong
If you want to win like a racehorse,I would list GrimLong too but all indications seem to be that PitchLong has taken its place at the top of the Vintage combo charts. It’s consistent, powerful, and can be played in a two-color mana base. As with any storm combo, the goal is to play nine spells in one turn and have mana left over to play Tendrils of Agony on the opponent for the win. As such, this deck has lots of card drawing and tutoring, and plenty of blue cards to protect itself with Misdirection and Force of Will.
Just tutor for YawgWill of course.
Play out of your graveyard
And Tendrils will hit hard.
Got Stifle? Pitch a card and play Force.
I haven’t played this deck yet, or even seen it played against me, but I’m eager to try it. It’s definitely a deck I considered playing at the Gamers Lounge on the 23rd. If you want to try it, I recommend lots of goldfishing, especially ones where you pretend your opponent has a Force of Will or a Stifle at a key moment.
Dragon
I can combo you out on turn two.Dragon is another deck you don’t see very often, but when it’s around a lot of times, it can put up very solid numbers. Like Oath, it focuses on meeting certain conditions and playing a two-mana enchantment with a bunch of counters for backup. It’s slightly weaker, though, because one of those conditions is having a useful graveyard, which means it might need to lose card advantage at some point to do that.
With some cards in my graveyard you’re through.
Worldgorger is scary,
But things can get hairy,
If respond to the trigger you do.
Essentially, with lands in play, the Dragon gives you infinite mana, and if one of those lands is Bazaar of Baghdad, you also have a full graveyard. And if one of the cards in your graveyard is Eternal Witness, you can have any other card in your graveyard, which might just be a win condition. But if someone Stifles the leaves play trigger or removes the dragon from the game with Swords to Plowshares, the dragon player will be left without permanents in a bad way.
Sullivan Solution
It’s blue and black and has creatures,The Sullivan Solution, named after its creator, Adrian Sullivan, is a relatively new deck that falls somewhere between Stax and Fish in theory. It uses cheap creatures and mana denial (most notably Stifling fetchlands) to keep the opponent off his game and then gets them under a vicious lock of flipped Erayo and Dimir Cutpurse. Drawing one card per turn is very bad under Erayo, and Dimir Cutpurse makes sure that’s the only card the opponent ever sees.
But a permanent lock is its feature.
Cutpurse and Erayo
It’s like being in jail
Somebody go get a preacher.
I’ve played against this deck once, and I wasn’t impressed. I know a lot of people are, though, and in theory it’s very strong. Dimir Cutpurse’s card advantage alone is like casting Ancestral Recall every turn. Erayo’s Essence has some game against all decks, but can eat Stax alive if it’s in place after Stax empties its hand. Basically, whenever I talk about this deck, I get the feeling that the version I played against wasn’t the Sullivan-approved Solution. It just looks so good on paper.
Bomberman
Classic Nintendo is bestBomberman is probably the most misunderstood deck in Vintage. Some people think it’s a combo deck, but really, it’s pure Mana Drain control. There’s a toolbox of cheap artifacts that can be accessed through a playset of Trinket Mages and refilled with Auriok Salvagers. And if you’re playing blue/white, you’re probably playing Meddling Mage as well. This deck is pretty much Gifts’s lovechild with a Fish.
When put in a Magic card vest.
With this you can combo
LED and Spellbombo,
You’ve got control for the test.
The question is how you should win with this. There’s the full control option, where you just accidentally win by attacking with Mages and Salvagers. You can include a Pyrite Spellbomb and win at sorcery speed as soon as you can recur Lion’s Eye Diamond or Black Lotus with Salvagers for infinite mana. Or you can do the cool thing: combo for mana and to draw your deck, play all your creatures, play Time Walk once or twice, and fill your hand with control to keep a handle on the game while you attack for twenty.
So that’s it—the VBIOPCJMSVT.
Like I said, it was pretty brief: eleven decks in six pages really can’t cover a lot. There’s probably decks I missed, too, or major strategies or something.
And I made no mention of Black Stax.
Anyway, I hope this is a good introduction to the decks available in Vintage. For more information and actual decklists, please check out Star City’s deck database. It’s a great reference and fairly easy to navigate.
And be sure to check back here for future Magic needs. Things might be slow for a little while as I get things transferred from the old blog, but I’ll keep you up to date on the tournament. Especially for next time as I tell you all about proxies!
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