Getting Back Into Vintage!

The Berlin Legacy crew’s trip to Prague Eternal back in November had one unexpected and very satisfying side effect. After seeing the sweet Vintage action
happening on Saturday, a number of our players suddenly found themselves hot enough to play Vintage that they’ve started to actually buy into the format.
Our local trader, extraordinary Tobias, has been one of the driving forces behind this too, and he has managed to convince our local game store to be
holding Vintage FNMs at least once a month come next year. In short, I’m gonna get to jam some Moxen again. If that isn’t sweet news, I don’t know what is!

That also means that after a long stretch of abstinence, I’ll have to figure out a real deck I want to be playing again instead of just picking something
that looks cool for the one event I get to play every half-year at best. Vintage has one big thing in common with Legacy: in spite of being a lot more
broken, the games are as similarly complex and decision driven as Legacy games are, so it pays quite a bit to really learn to master a particular deck.

While I doubt I’ll strictly stick to any one archetype in the long run – it’s just FNMs after all, the perfect time to play some random brews – I
definitely want to make sure I really know the ins and outs of one deck so I have something I can rely on when I feel like “being serious.” I’m pretty sure
I know which one that is going to be barring some sweet unrestrictions (can I have Gifts Ungiven back, please?) so what I want to talk about today is how I
went about making that choice and what list that resulted in after figuring in what little experience I have from the two Prague Eternal events I played
this year. I hope you’ll enjoy the excursion into the oldest and wildest of the Eternal formats.

Choosing a Deck

There are two ways to choose an archetype you want to move in on. The first is the rational one. Check the internet and scour the forums, playtest a bunch,
and pick the deck that seems like it has the highest win-rate in all this testing. However, that doesn’t take into account something important: why I play
Vintage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m spike enough to play a clear best deck if there is one, but for as long as I’m under the impression that a multitude of
archetypes will give me similar chances at winning in the long run – and I am – I’ll choose by a completely different metric: the way I like to play
Vintage.

You see, the reason I’ve always loved Vintage is the way the mana artifacts and broken blue cards allow you to play the game. My favorite archetype of all
time is combo-control – basically what you do is contain your opponent early in the game while drawing a bunch of cards, and your opponent will die along
the way incidentally. So this is the kind of game I want my deck to be able to play.

That instantly eliminates two pillars of the Vintage format from consideration for me. Both Dredge and Workshops are very strong decks, easily able to
match the blue decks I want to play for raw win percentage. They definitely don’t fit what I want to be doing though, so they’re out.

With the – for me – obvious decision to play a blue deck out of the way, it’s time to figure out which blue deck I want to play – because while they share
a lot of cards, there is a vast variety of Vintage blue decks with very different fundamental gameplans going on. So far, my clear favorite there is
something similar to the GushBond deck I played in the second Prague Eternal event:

Gush Bond

Carsten Kotter

13th Place at Miscellaneous on 09-11-2014

Vintage

Creatures (1)

1 Blightsteel Colossus

Planeswalkers (1)

1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (13)

Spells (45)

Sideboard

While I didn’t do too well with the deck in Prague, I threw away two of the three rounds I lost so that definitely doesn’t keep me from wanting to commit
to this archetype. The Fastbond plus Gush engine just delivers the gameplay experience I want out of my Vintage games – lots of dancing for position, lots
of drawn cards, and a thought-intensive combo turn to end the game on the spot once you’ve managed to secure the correct position.

However, there were a couple of things I didn’t like about my Prague list, and the best way to fix those would probably be to check online to see what
others have done. I really don’t want to do that though. I (arrogantly, maybe) believe that I know enough about how Vintage works on a fundamental level to
be able to get to a reasonable list that does the things I want to be doing just by working on my own, starting the tuning, and checking out other’s work
once I have already gotten my own list to work from. Hey, I mentioned often enough that I enjoy brewing, and brewing in Vintage is just awesome because you
get to plan on doing such busted things. Not gonna take that joy away from myself if I can help it.

Working From The Bond Base

Having figured out which engine I’ll want to be relying on, I now considered what I liked and disliked about my list in Prague. Here’s a rough
approximation of my thoughts.

Likes:

– The Tendrils of Agony gives the deck a really easy way to just end the game. Between Gush-Bond, Yawgmoth’s Will, and the ability to Hurkyl’s Recall and
Chain of Vapor your own artifacts, it’s a very reliable single slot way to end games on the spot once you’ve managed to grind your opponent’s disruption
out of the way. I can’t imagine not having access to a copy in any deck with Gush and Will.

– The whole Gush, Preordain, Dig Through Time engine does exactly what I want to be doing. It draws a lot of cards (while allowing me to see even more) for
very little mana, it means a lot of blue cards to pitch to Force of Will, and it’s powerful enough to fluently slide into a combo-turn once you hit a
Fastbond or just a critical mass of artifact mana and card drawing combined with a tutor to find Yawgmoth’s Will.

– The Thoughtseizes were awesome for disruption. Vintage is tough to play so seeing your opponent’s hand is very powerful, and taking out a key piece –
like say, that Ancestral Recall that was the reason they kept – can’t often completely collapse an opponent’s hand.

Dislikes:

– Just like every time I’ve played with Tinker + Blighsteel Colossus after the Brainstorm restriction, I’ve hated this win condition. Drawing the
Blightteel is just terrible, and the whole thing isn’t even that good against most decks after turn 2 or maybe 3. Everybody knows this stuff can happen so
most people have some way to fight it. Instead I’d have liked to just have some win condition that will randomly be good if I draw into it, be cheap enough
to smoothly slide into what you want to be doing anyway, and powers up to a real wincon if you happen to go into Fastbond overdrive while having access to
it.

– Tolarian Academy, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, and Lotus Petal are another facet I didn’t really like. It feels awesome when you draw all that acceleration
early on, but given how little actual mana this deck needs to operate most of the time, having all that mana often didn’t translate into much of anything
happening, but it reduced the number of effective cards in my hand quite significantly. I wished I had just played more actual spells, even if they’d just
been more cantrips.

– Dig Through Time was awesome every time I could fire it off, so I really would have liked more copies in the deck, however, given that the deck also
wants to set up a decent Yawgmoth’s Will turn, it actually felt a little light on spells that efficiently move into the graveyard that you didn’t want in
there for later anyway. That meant I really wanted to find a way to both play more Digs and support them better.

– Gifts Ungiven is one of my absolutely favorite cards to play with in Vintage, and yet, I really didn’t like it in Prague. Gifts wants you to do a couple
of things to your deck to maximize its potential (in particular it’d like you to have a Recoup), but doing those just isn’t worth it for a single copy.
Without those though, it’s been pretty tough to make Gifts worth the four mana investment.

– The Oath sideboard package is another thing I thought would be great but that I learned to hate throughout the event. First, it forces you to take a lot
of cards you kind of want out of your deck for game 2, moving you somewhat all-in towards the Oath strategy (not completely, but enough that you’ll notice
the decreased effectiveness of the deck’s plan A). This would be okay if the plan caught anybody off guard, but given how much the deck already abuses
Yawgmoth’s Will, everybody I boarded the Oaths against had Grafdigger’s Cages in already in game 2. I don’t think committing that much sideboard space to a
plan that people already incidentally board for is worth it.

– Finally, I really missed access to Mental Misstep. Free countermagic is just so good, and there are such great one mana spells to hit with it that I want
to have at least three of those in my deck in the future. Vintage is all about surviving turns 1 and 2, and Misstep is just too good at helping you do that
to ignore.

Forging These Into a List

From these considerations, that led to me wanting to have the following packages in my deck:

Disruption:

These are all the disruption spells I would want to play with a couple of Mana Drains to lock things up if you’re still in the control role on turn 3. I
believe that the old Gifts.dec gameplan against Workshops – set up until you’d die, Hurkyl’s your opponent during their end step and win on your turn – is
the best a combo-control deck can adapt in the maindeck, so that’s why the Hurkyl’s Recall is there. The Chain of Vapor is a nice split card that either
solves whatever random permanent you have trouble with or acts as a storm engine with the Moxen. Absolutely bare-bones removal, sure, but that’s how I like
to deal with threats in Vintage – kill my opponent so their threats don’t matter anymore.

Broken Shenanigans:

Broken blue stuff, Will, and Fastbond as the engines you use to fully go off, and all the reasonable tutors to help find them (or, in Merchant Scroll’s
case, more Gushes).

Draw engine:

1 Ponder

4 Gush

Well, I mentioned I wanted to have as many cantrips as possible to fuel a full playset of Dig Through Time. That’s what this is, plus the obvious four
Gushes, Brainstorm, and Ponder.

Win Condition:

1 Tendrils of Agony

4 Young Pyromancer

Young Pyromancer fulfills all the criteria I want from my win condition. It’s cheap, low commitment, and goes completely nuts when you start going off.
Between it and Tendrils of Agony, this deck suddenly gains the ability to truly play like a Gro-A-Tog deck, either dropping an early threat that
incidentally grows out of control or going towards setting up a true control into combo mode game with the Tendrils.

Broken Mana:

1 Mox Jet

As mentioned above, I imagine this deck playing out a lot like GAT did back in the day, and that also means limiting how much fast mana I force into the
deck. Also, checking the colorless costs I’m planning to play, half the mana Sol Ring or Mana Crypt would produce would likely go to waste a lot of the
time, which makes them expendable. Mana Crypt in particular tends to be quite the liability when you aren’t playing an easy way to get rid of it (aka
Tinker), and I really don’t want to play that card.

Lands:

1 Island

This is the bare-bones manabase I can imagine. You have two duals for every splash color, a basic Island to help you with Wasteland, and seven fetchlands
to find the correct colors at will while also helping fill the yard for Dig Through Time. I think I want twenty mana sources over all, so fourteen lands it
is. The fetchlands are these so far because I haven’t settled on a sideboard yet, and depending on what I decide to do, there might well be a basic
Mountain or Forest sitting in those fifteen.

So that leaves us with the following tentative decklist:

Gush Bond

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 12-24-2014

Vintage

Creatures (4)

4 Young Pyromancer

Lands (14)

Spells (49)

Sadly, that’s also 67 cards, a few more than I’d be comfortable running. Time to start trimming. The part of the deck I’m most happy to start trimming from
is the disruption. I knew when collecting all of those that having this much going on there was vastly optimistic given how much card drawing I want to be
playing. Reducing the Thoughtseizes and Missteps by one each should leave me with a reasonable amount of turn 1 interaction anyway, and Mana Drain is a
luxury I might simply not be able to afford space-wise. So out go both Mana Drains, a Thoughtseize, and a Mental Misstep.

Next up is the part of the deck I always try to keep as small as possible anyway – dedicated win conditions. I hate cards that don’t do anything but end
the game, so that’s the natural place to skimp. I sang the praises of Tendrils of Agony above, so clearly I’m not going to touch that, but the deck
shouldn’t miss a single Pyromancer too much, right? Out it goes.

Two more cuts to make and nothing I want to take out any more. Too bad, but that means looking at the weakest individual cards remaining. Imperial Seal was
solid in Prague but was also clearly the weakest of the broken shenanigan pieces I was running. Now that I have Pyromancers to reduce the necessity to find
Fastbond somewhat, cutting the worst tutor for it seems defensible.

That means one more card needs to go, and I think it really wants to come from the draw-engine section as much as that hurts. The weakest piece there is
Gitaxian Probe, so that’s where I shall shave.

That would leave us with a final decklist now, however, at this point I realized I might be spending my life points a little too freely even by Vintage
standards. We’ll need some life to abuse Fastbond, after all, and at this point there are six Phyrexian mana spells in the deck, as well as three
Thoughtseizes, Vampiric Tutor, and seven fetchlands. That seems a little hefty. The easiest way to address this without having to rethink the deck set up
as it stands is to make Thoughtseize not cost life. How do you do that? By running Duress instead and accepting that you’ll once in a while lose to not
being able to take a creature. Given how this deck is planning to operate, I don’t think this will come up often enough to matter as much as the extra life
loss would.

Here’s the resulting list I’ve been happily playtesting about once a week for the last couple of weeks:

Gush Bond

Carsten Kotter

Test deck on 12-24-2014

Vintage

Creatures (3)

3 Young Pyromancer

Lands (14)

Spells (43)

The deck has been performing well, though you need to remember that my opponents were far from experienced Vintage players. They know their Legacy, but
this format is a new country for them, much more so then for a returnee like me – at least I know what might happen on turn 1 and 2 already, while they are
still wrapping their heads around the possibilities.

As a result, I don’t have an actual (tested) sideboard for the deck yet, though this is what I’ve sketched out in my mind:

1 Pyroclasm

2 Pyroblast

2 Flusterstorm

Some ways to fight Delvers and blue mirrors, with Pyroclasm as the most obvious way to contain Young Pyromancer to tutor for. Lightning Bolt might be
another useful tool here.

4 Ravenous Trap

2 Grafdigger’s Cage

I still think Ravenous Trap is basically the best thing to be doing against Dredge because it’s untelegraphed, immune to most of their answers, and can be
drawn into when needed. I’d fill up with Grafdigger’s Cage in spite of how badly that synergizes with my own Yawgmoth’s Will-centric plan because I’m
pretty sure Oath and Dredge will be hampered quite a bit more (and might not expect it out of Gush Bond and be unable to deal with it in Game 2).

Workshop hate:

2 Nature’s Claim

2 Ingot Chewer

2 Engineered Explosives

1 Hurkyl’s Recall

1 Rebuild

As mentioned above, I didn’t like the Oath plan, and I’m reasonably sure I’d have won my matches against ‘Shops if Oath had simply been more removal, so
this is what I’m trying to implement here. Explosives is great because it essentially ignores Sphere-effects (just lower the X, you’ll get the sunburst
anyway) and can also blow up an Oath of Druids, which is also why there’s a split between Claims and Ingot Chewers. I’m also considering Abrupt Decay for
the same flexibility, as well as Ancient Grudge for the obvious two-for-one. Rebuild and Hurkyl’s Recall would help reinforce the game 1 bounce and win
plan, though I’m not sure yet how necessary that is when you have actual artifact removal. If I decide to favor either Claim or Chewer, I would probably
add the corresponding basic to the board too.

As you can see, this sideboard is already bloated up far beyond the necessary fifteen, but personally I consider this list actually rather restrained. I
haven’t started playing postboard games yet, so this is what I’d like to run – and I generally end up with 30 card sideboards at that point. I
can’t in good conscience suggest a sideboard I’d rely on if I were you, but if I had to cut this down to play in an event tomorrow, this is what I’d end up
with:

2 Engineered Explosives

1 Hurkyl’s Recall

Some cards to help fight counter wars against Rituals and other blue decks, Ravenous Trap to cover Dredge (that and just racing), and Nature’s Claim and
Explosives over other artifact removal to make sure Oath and Shops are both covered. Sounds reasonable to me at least, not sure if it’s good yet.

The Beauty of the Beast

Just playing those essentially casual playtest matches with this deck throughout the last weeks has really driven home to me how much I’ve been missing
Vintage Magic. Don’t get me wrong, Legacy is an awesome format, but it’s really hard to beat the exhilaration provided by casting the Moxen, Black Lotus,
Ancestral Recall, and Yawgmoth’s Will. The power level of the things they let you do in Vintage is just so awesomely out of hand, it’s impossible to
resist.

Getting to play again and realizing that this is very likely going to become a regular thing has been an early and unexpected Christmas present for me, one
not even actually intended to just make me happy. Thanks to all of you guys who actually started buying in and got the ball rolling – you know who you are
– I can’t wait until we actual play an event every month. To everybody else reading this, I hope you get just as brilliant a Christmas present (or present
from a non-denominational seasonal wizard, I guess). Maybe you can make that present happen yourself and for others by starting a local Vintage FNM too –
there isn’t even anything to keep you from allowing proxies the way things are set up now.

Trust me, it’s gonna be sweet.

Either way, I’ll see you next week. For now, it’s Merry Christmas everybody!