First off, I’m not going to try to slay any sacred cows here. All of the cards that I’m going to talk about are all towards the top of the power level for Vintage (and thus for Magic in general – The Ferrett), and all of them still belong in your decks. The problem comes when these cards are relied on too much, or their support cards aren’t chosen properly.
Cunning Wish
Cunning Wish is played in just about every control deck, and that’s as it should be. It’s a natural fit in most of them. In most decks (and especially control decks) in Vintage, you have a large core of integral cards that you can’t really side it. This gets you into sideboarding situations where you can only take out a card or two. Because of this, you can actually run out of relevant cards to put into your sideboard fairly quickly. Cunning Wish is strong here, because it lets you utilize that extra space that you wouldn’t be able to make effective use of otherwise by adding cards that you can Tutor for but not necessarily want to draw. Wishes have also let players streamline decks by removing cards that they didn’t want to run main, but oftentimes needed to avoid being caught unprepared.
This interaction between maindeck and sideboard can cause you to get lazy when constructing both. In the maindeck, it’s easy to get lazy by cutting many, if not all, of your answer cards with the assumption that “I’ll just Cunning Wish for them.” It is very common, though, to not have the time to Wish for important sideboard cards when you’re staring down some of the format’s most efficient threats, like Oath of Druids or Crucible of Worlds.
This gets into the two biggest differences between Wishes and Tutors: Wishes are more expensive, and the cards that you fetch with Wishes are cards that you can’t normally draw. Between a maindeck copy of a card (let’s say Rack and Ruin), a copy of Demonic Tutor, and a copy of Mystical Tutor, you will have the same frequency of drawing your Rack and Ruin or a Tutor as of drawing one of your three Wishes. Granted, you have a higher chance of drawing one of the tutors or a Wishes than of drawing a Tutor or the Rack and Ruin – but I excluded this because that would require even more mana than the five to six mana that you already need and might not have. It’s really easy to get lazy here, because it’s much easier to find a slot in your abundant sideboard space than to have to cut a card from your maindeck (or worse yet, go to sixty-one cards) in order to find room for your answer.
The second place where Wishes can cause you to get lazy is in the sideboard. Like I said before, you’ve got a lot of empty space in your sideboard; this makes it really easy to get sloppy with your Wish targets. Creature removal is usually the biggest culprit. If you only have two slots in your maindeck to side in creature removal cards, you are wasting at least one (and more likely two) slots if you have two Swords to Plowshares and two Fire / Ices in your sideboard. At most, you’ll need three cards – and that’s only if you want to still be able to Wish for an answer. You might not even want to do this, though, if now you know what deck your opponent is playing since you can probably just board those cards in.
Using creature removal as an example again, it becomes easy to add redundant Wish targets to your sideboard if you don’t think about how your cards overlap. Let’s assume that we’re building a control deck that does not have white in it, and thus can’t run Swords to Plowshares. We have the following Wish targets so far:
Red Elemental Blast
Blue Elemental Blast
Rack and Ruin
Echoing Truth
Fire / Ice
None of these cards say “target creature” on them – but together, they can handle most of the creatures in Vintage. REB can kill Ophidian, most of the Fish creatures and Psychatog (and it can counter Morphling before it gets on-board), Blue Elemental Blast handles Goblin Welder and Gorilla Shaman, Rack and Ruin stops artifact creatures, and Echoing Truth can (temporarily anyway) deal with Oath creatures. It might be tempting to add say to add Smother to the sideboard – but that doesn’t really stop very many of the remaining creatures (Wild Mongrel and Quirion Dryad, I guess) and misses a few important ones like Exalted Angel.
Diabolic Edict is another option, since it lets you kill Exalted Angel and Oath creatures (at least temporarily), but is bad against the aforementioned Wild Mongrel. Thus, the best card is probably Rend Flesh, which can clean up any remaining creatures that your cheaper-but-narrower removal spells can’t hit.
Mana Drain and Force of Will
Running eight counters makes it so that you’re almost certain to get one in your opening hand and have a pretty good chance of getting two. What eight counters do not give you is the ability to counter at will. (They give you the ability to counter with Will, but that’s a different thing – The pun-lovin’ Ferrett)
You need to run almost twice as many counters to ensure countering on demand, and preferably you’ll have a fairly strong draw engine or deck manipulation. When you only need to deal with threat A, an eight-counter setup as your only protection is usually fine – but when you also need to deal with threats B and C (or when you have to not only deal with threat A, but also force those eight counters through Force of Will, Duress, and friends), you begin to notice really quickly how insufficient your counters are. This actually is less of a concern for the established control decks like Control Slaver and 4CC because they have other options in them (like Mindslaver, Cunning Wish, and Balance) that they can use to deal with troublesome cards.
This comes up more when you’re building rogue control decks. When Meandeck first started building various Oath decks, for instance, we noticed that we would just lose to Platinum Angel or Mindslaver (and naturally, the Tinker that could fetch them as well) when playing against Control Slaver. Our eight-counter builds were getting blown out, since they could just match us counter-for-counter. Our Cunning Wish or Echoing Truth-packing versions fared a little bit better – while Platinum Angel wasn’t a problem, Mindslaver was still usually lethal – but our fourteen-counter version was able to have an even-to-favorable matchup. At that point, we could answer the Tinker with a Mana Drain, their Mana Drain with a Mana Leak, and their Force of Will with a Misdirection and – hopefully! – we’d be in the clear.
While you can emulate the effect of packing many extra copies of utility cards by running plenty of deck manipulation to ensure that you will always have the cards you need in hand, it’s important to remember that this is only a temporary solution. If you give your opponent too much time after sandbagging away counters, they’ll be able to draw into a roughly equal number of counters – and may also be able to do this by using fewer manipulation cards, giving them a faster shot at recovering after both of you blow your hands trying to force through/prevent a major threat.
Fetchlands
Fetchlands are good. Most decks run them. Even mono-colored decks often run them. They’re so good, though, that you can often times just build your mana bases on autopilot without paying any attention to what colors you really need in what amounts at what times during the game. They also have extreme versatility because they can find dual lands, allowing you to use say, Windswept Heath to get black mana by fetching a Bayou. They also let you cheat on your land counts. By running four Polluted Deltas and one basic Island, you can make it seem like you have five Islands when you need an Island, but one Island when you don’t.
The heavy use of Crucible of Worlds and Back to Basics in recent months caused everyone to look at their mana bases. Some decks, like Control Slaver, were able to adapt by focusing more heavily on their primary colors and cutting tertiary (and in some cases, even quaternary) colors. Other decks however, like 4-Color Control and Tog, were hit hard and have been played significantly less frequently than they were six months ago.
My first instinct was that those decks had to lose at least one color. Tog, for instance, still had sporadic success (with UBG in the US and UBR in Europe) after cutting a color, but it still lost a lot of game by having to give up key sideboard cards like Red Elemental Blast or Berserk.
Then I thought about mana bases in formats without dual lands but with land fetching effects that got basics (primarily Extended and the current Standard). A Goblin deck, for instance, often splashed green for a few sideboard cards like Oxidize for the Arcbound Ravager matchup, but it wouldn’t try to support a huge green complement. It would be able to accommodate this simply by running four Wooded Foothills and a Forest or two. Why not make a Vintage mana base that way? Instead of starting with dual lands, I’d start with basics and then use duals as a last resort, such as to fetch an off-color mana using a fetchland. Here are two sample ones:
Tog
5 Island
4 Polluted Delta
2 Bloodstained Mire
1 Volcanic Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
1 Swamp
1 Mountain
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Pearl
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
4-Color Control
3 Island
3 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
3 Wasteland
1 Volcanic Island
1 Underground Sea
1 Tundra
1 Swamp
1 Plains
1 Strip Mine
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Ruby
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
Worse than Fish (courtesy of Jacob Orlove)
4 Island
4 Wasteland
3 Wooded Foothills
3 Forest
2 Flooded Strand
1 Mountain
1 Tropical Island
1 Volcanic Island
1 Strip Mine
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Ruby
1 Black Lotus
4 Grim Lavamancer
4 River Boa
4 Gaea’s Skyfolk
2 Gorilla Shaman
2 Call of the Herd
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
3 Back to Basics
2 Annul
2 Stifle
2 Naturalize
1 Artifact Mutation
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
These aren’t perfectly-tuned mana bases, partially because they are primarily designed to show off how many basics and Wastelands you can fit into your deck without sacrificing color consistency. It doesn’t ask whether or not they actually want (or need) Wastelands or a multitude of colors. They also show that you will need to change around your original decks slightly in order to fit you new mana base. You will probably need to use Tinker and Decree of Justice as your kill cards in 4CC.
Therefore, using of Decree of Justice in the 4CC list is an obvious, but still slightly subtle, example of how easily you can work effectively with a mana base like this. It’s obvious that you can’t use Exalted Angel reliably with so few white sources – so you need a new kill card. Decree is an obvious choice, because it only costs one white mana. The subtlety here is that since you’re planning on powering your white mana off of your one sturdy Plains, you can safely assume that after you Seal of Cleansing that Crucible of Worlds or Swords to Plowshares that Grim Lavamancer, that Plains will still be there when you plan on cycling your Decree ten turns later.
Switching to Tog as an example, you need to carefully figure out the correct number of cards like Duress in order to get away with this sort of mana-tweaking. You can’t rely on just a Swamp if you want to cast a turn 1 Duress and be able to cast Mana Drain on turn 2. Thus, you shouldn’t run four copies of Duress, or you should make sure to include an Underground Sea. You could, however, go down to two or three (or possibly even one, simply so you could Duress to see that the coast is clear before using Tog or Will) and still be able to cast Duress reliably on turn three or four when you might want to cast say, Intuition or Crucible with a Mana Drain backup.
You have to plan very carefully in order to make this sort of mana base work. Tog can get away with it because the deck is almost entirely blue and only plans on casting a few off-color spells per game (for instance, Tog and a Wished-for Berserk, or a Wished-for Rack and Ruin and then a Duress and Will).
4CC doesn’t have as much of a problem, either. Admittedly, the deck runs more off-color spells, than Tog does – but they are in blue’s allied colors so you can fetch either Plains or Swamps using the blue fetchlands. The Tundra and Underground Sea here serve mostly just in case you need to get a white source but only have a Polluted Delta or a black mana with a Flooded Strand.
I listed a full WtF deck (rather than just a mana base) because the deck is not a very standardized deck like Tog and 4CC are. This list shows that you can run this type of mana base even if you are running colors that oppose your main color, but you have to remove any cards that cost two mana of a single color. It becomes very difficult to generate the UU for Mana Drain if the other six cards in your opening hand are, say, Grim Lavamancer, Forest, Flooded Strand, Mountain, Force of Will, and Brainstorm. However, you can run gold cards (allied or opposing) easily. If that Mana Drain were an Artifact Mutation or Gaea’s Skyfolk, it could come out on turn 2 off of two basics.
Jacob played this list in a tourney recently – and while he didn’t T8, he told me that, “Almost every match, I was able to have all three basics out by turn 3. All of my opponents assumed that I had a mana base that started with duals instead of basics, so they all thought that I was a total lucksack to be able to have all those basics out so early.”
Scrutinize those “obvious” choices. It might give you those few percentage points that you need to turn around a tough matchup.
JP Meyer
jpmeyer at gmail dot com