Video: BUG Oath In Vintage!

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

BUG Oath

Drew Levin

Test deck on 08-07-2014

Vintage

Creatures (2)

• 2 Griselbrand

Planeswalkers (3)

• 3 Jace, the Mind Sculptor

Lands (16)

• 4 Forbidden Orchard
• 1 Island
• 3 Underground Sea
• 2 Tropical Island
• 1 Library of Alexandria
• 1 Tolarian Academy
• 3 Misty Rainforest
• 1 Scalding Tarn

Spells (39)

• 1 Sensei's Divining Top
• 1 Brainstorm
• 2 Mana Drain
• 1 Show and Tell
• 1 Vampiric Tutor
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 4 Oath of Druids
• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 4 Force of Will
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Gaea's Blessing
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 1 Time Vault
• 1 Voltaic Key
• 1 Black Lotus
• 1 Mox Emerald
• 1 Mox Jet
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Ruby
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Thoughtseize
• 4 Mental Misstep
• 2 Abrupt Decay
• 1 Swan Song

Sideboard

• 1 Forest
• 1 Rebuild
• 1 Tormod's Crypt
• 4 Leyline of the Void
• 1 Thoughtseize
• 1 Tezzeret the Seeker
• 2 Nature's Claim
• 2 Flusterstorm
• 1 Abrupt Decay
• 1 Swan Song

I like this Oath deck much more than Burning Oath. Part of what I love about this deck is that Oath feels like a gameplan that can be built toward rather
than Just Another Powerful Card. To be clear, Oath is a one-card Show and Tell, so it’s way up there on power level. Still, having a bunch of cards dealing
me damage for playing Magic isn’t great when combined with Forbidden Orchard’s Spirit tokens.

The power of this deck is obvious, but what appeals to me the most is its versatility. You don’t have to just slam Oath and hope that it plays. You don’t
have to slam Jace and hope that it plays. You don’t have to do anything. In that sense, it is becoming clear to me that I am biased toward Vintage decks
that allow me to time my powerful spells rather than casting them at the first availability.

The other thing that is becoming clear to me is that I like decks that can win topdecking wars. In relatively few games of Vintage, someone gets blown out
on turn 1 or 2 by a combination of restricted cards. That’s fine. In some others, one person gets ahead early and grinds the other down. Also fine. In
many, many others, people trade off cards and start looking to their draw step to find powerful cards. Oath is a deck that is capable of both attrition-ing
someone down to nothing and outdrawing them going into the middle turns of a game. Having three Jaces and two Griselbrands plus the usual suite of tutors
and recursion is nothing to sneeze at. Being able to pull ahead in a stalled game is a Big Deal, and I think it’s a meaningful part of what differentiates
the reasonable blue decks from the excellent blue decks.

If I end up playing more Vintage next week, I want to go hard with Time Vault — people don’t seem to be playing it that much. It’s a phenomenal proactive
strategy, and it fits into an Accelerated Blue shell quite well. If anybody has a list that they’d like me to tinker with, hit me up in the comments or on
Twitter.