Vintage Variety Hour

The Showcase events on Magic Online, especially at the end of a season, display a strange tension. On the one hand they have higher stakes and stiffer competition than almost any other open (or QP-gated) event on the platform; on the other, they are essentially free if your QPs are about to expire and your mind buys into whatever that fallacy is called. 

Thus I found myself playing a Vintage Showcase that I absolutely would not have ponied up 30 Tix or 300 Play Points for if it was a regular Challenge, with a deck I built on the fly after looking at recent lists for inspiration, to qualify for another event that threatened a scheduling conflict that would have stopped me from playing the Showcase at all if I had been aware of it.

Naturally I found myself in the Top 8, kicking off a bizarre month that saw me Top 8 Vintage events on four consecutive weekends - the Showcase, a weekend Challenge, the Showcase Playoff, and the ManaTraders Monthly Series - and make my peace with the format.

Along the way I learned lessons about Vintage that I hope are useful to the format's existing or new fans and had another opportunity to prepare for a small, exclusive event where metagaming is all-important. 

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My problem with Vintage was that most games were doomed from the outset. A match where one or both players had Mishra's Workshop or Bazaar of Baghdad would likely end in a boring disaster; the unfair blue decks at least pretend to interact while trying to highroll each other as fast as possible. The most interactive games come from the fair blue decks like BUG or Jeskai, which I don't find engaging in the slightest and which don't have the raw, exciting power that is the main selling point or redeeming feature of Vintage for me - and these matchups are still often decided by who draws Ancestral Recall or swingy sequences that don't involve much agency.

That perspective would inform my deck choice for this and subsequent events - I thought it was likely that BUG or Jeskai was the best choice for each of the pre-ManaTraders events but I was realistically always going to play an unfair blue deck that I would have the most fun and comfort with. Unless a format is highly imbalanced, I think you are generally best served finding a strategy that you enjoy piloting rather than defaulting to something that may have a 3% higher winrate in the abstract (though actually quantifying this well is notoriously difficult) but which is so alien or unengaging to you that you are less likely to play it at full capacity.

After a month exploring decks in that space, I still think my diagnosis was broadly accurate but was able to find my niche in the format and - not coincidentally, I think - have a lot of success. 

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Modern Horizons 2 was a game-changer for every format it's legal in and Vintage was no exception. Master of Death/Blazing Rootwalla/Fury spawned a new twist on Bazaar/Hollowvine with a critical mass of free interaction while Grief powered up existing Bazaar decks like Dredge even further. With that in mind, Endurance was an even more vital pickup for BUG as a hate card for Bazaar that incidentally covers cards ranging from Dreadhorde Arcanist and Tarmogoyf to Underworld Breach and Mystic Sanctuary. 

The big wildcard was Urza's Saga. It quickly found a home in various builds of Shops as a sorely-needed additional threat (that works with Golos/Crucible of Worlds) but its role in blue decks was unclear at first. Justin Gennari was sceptical of the card in PO and I agree that it's worse than it looks there - you can't cut into your already low land count to add Saga and the artifact mana is all necessary (with Mox Opal bloating this figure) so you have to cut spells, but at that point your deck has a lot of air and you are even weaker to Force of Vigor and Collector Ouphe as well as Wasteland.

The key to Saga's success in other shells is treating it as mostly a spell rather than a land. It's much safer to lean on Saga in the face of these cards if you can afford to trade it for a Wasteland and still cast your spells (or lose another land to clear the way for Saga). Saga goes from a liability against Collector Ouphe/Null Rod to one of the best tactics against them if you have enough non-artifact mana sources.  

Against the blue decks that can't interact with it directly, Urza's Saga is a superstar. These matchups often revolve around fights over big plays (Tinker, Hullbreacher + Wheel/Twister, PO) with Flusterstorm as a key reactive card that usually wins a fight over an opposing threat if they don't have their own copy. Saga evades Flusterstorm, Pyroblast, and everything else while creating a fast clock (at instant speed, letting you hold up these reactive cards yourself) and finding a relevant card with the final chapter. Sometimes this is a silver bullet - you rarely have time against Bazaar decks for Saga finding Pithing Needle or Soul-Guide Lantern to be a realistic strategy but having that option gives you a form of inevitability, and there are odd dynamics in Saga mirrors where the person who played their Saga first often wants to find Needle to stop the opponent's Saga making a second Construct - but more often it finds you artifact mana to unlock your hand, Sensei's Divining Top to find more action, or Manifold Key - not just a way to force a Construct through or draw extra cards with Top but part of a compact two-card combo with Time Vault which is now much more consistent and adds a new angle to the deck at low cost.    

Urza's Saga also plays well with Tinker - the most powerful tactic in the format IMO and the main reason to play a big blue deck. As a high-investment, relatively expensive blue sorcery, Tinker is at its worst against the interaction-heavy draws where Saga is at its best. Saga makes hardcasting Citadel scarily realistic as the final chapter can find Black Lotus - an opening hand with Saga + Citadel can get there on Turn 3 and I'm often happy now to see Citadel in my hand. Finally, the Vault-Key package allows Tinker to find Time Vault as a guaranteed win when Saga fetches Key in spots where Citadel or something like Sphinx of the Steel Wind is unreliable. 

Here's the deck I played in that first Showcase:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4212057

Followed by the list I Top 8ed the Challenge with the following week:

https://www.mtggoldfish.com/deck/4230150


The Hullbreacher package broke out again around this time as a response to the rise in Bazaar - notably, it's much worse against Dredge (as the opponent can choose which replacement effect applies to their additional draws, allowing them to Dredge as normal) but lights out against the other Bazaar decks if they don't have a board presence already. Big blue decks, most notably PO, were picking up as well thanks to Saga and general metagame positioning and Hullbreacher is excellent in the (pseudo)-mirrors. With no testing, I settled on a theorycrafted Hullbreacher list for the Showcase and was mostly happy enough to run it back the following week for a Challenge I saw as a dry run for the Showcase.

Over time, I soured on the Hullbreacher package - cutting the secondary Wheel effect and just keeping Timetwister, shaving a Hullbreacher, and eventually cutting them all once I realized I still had them more because I didn't know what else to do with those slots than because I was enthusiastic about them. The big blue share of the metagame was moving towards the mirror, where Hullbreacher was fine but not the game-changer it was against PO. Pyroblast, which had been mostly absent from the format, started to creep back in with a dominant Challenge performance by Jeskai (which also featured the innovation of SB Alpine Moon as an answer to Bazaar of Baghdad and Urza's Saga). Going into the Showcase, I expected my known/likely Bazaar opponents to be on Dredge where Hullbreacher is often a marginal card. 

If I didn't want to play Hullbreacher, I needed other ways to round out the deck:

https://twitter.com/dominharvia/status/1429199198864482317/photo/1


I'm generally not a fan of the 'big' card draw spells like Gush/Treasure Cruise/Dig Through Time in these shells as they are weak in the low-resource games where you struggle most and there's some conflict with Saga but I figured I could afford one and Dig seemed like the best as it can help to assemble the many A + B combos in the deck or dig for restricted cards. 


Imperial Seal is the card that will raise the most eyebrows. Many Vintage players have an open disdain for the 'topdeck tutors' like Mystical Tutor, begrudgingly accepting them as necessary in a Tinker deck. That is a strong enough case by itself for me - Tinker is your best plan and main tactic against many opponents - but finding Hurkyl's Recall or graveyard hate is essential against specific pillars of the format. The ability to find Ancestral Recall or Time Walk (or Mentor, Vault/Key etc with Vamp/Seal) means you always have a good proactive use for these cards. Picking up Flusterstorm or Force as a defensive line can lock up the game when you're ahead or need an emergency measure against Doomsday/PO/etc, but I also very often search for those cards to have a(nother) layer of protection to let me jam Tinker or another threat. 

Seal is such a rough commitment at sorcery speed (even with immediate access via Sensei's Divining Top) that it probably isn't worth it anyway. That said, I stand by my active enthusiasm for the topdeck tutors in general. 

Yawgmoth's Will rounds out the list as another high-impact tutor target which has a higher floor and ceiling now thanks to Urza's Saga (as a free threat to rebuy and with the final chapter finding Black Lotus to power Will turns). It's easier to pick and lose a fight over Tinker or Mentor or similar knowing that the follow-up Yawgmoth's Will now or eventually will be devastating. 

4 Flusterstorm MD may seem extreme but it's an important trump card in blue mirrors, great against Doomsday, and the best way to defend your threats from Force of Vigor or other pitch spells against both BUG and Bazaar decks. Most other interactive cards you play in that slot will be equally weak vs Shops but, even if that's not true, I'll gladly take the card that is better against everything else. 

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Small, invite-only events present a unique challenge for preparation. You have a much greater ability to predict what you will play against and can make choices accordingly but often with swingy results as your predictions being just slightly off can massively change the expected payoff of those choices. This is especially true in Vintage, where your cards are heavily polarized in their effectiveness - Flusterstorm/Pyroblast against Workshops vs blue decks, Bazaar vs non-Bazaar or Shops vs non-Shops in general.

This also makes switching to something unexpected appealing on two fronts - there's a high upside to playing Bazaar, even with little experience, if it's the 'right weekend' for Bazaar (this weekend was not it; Bazaar decks collectively posted a ~30% win rate) and an opponent keeping a slow hand that's good in blue mirrors because that's what you've played previously only to find you're on Bazaar is going to have a bad time. 

With this in mind, I did my due diligence and balanced my range a little by going 4-0 in a Prelim with Golos Stax. The deck felt powerful and most of my games weren't close in either direction. The common complaint is that Shops doesn't give you much agency, but this is more of a psychological hangup than a strategic one especially for a tournament where I have less Vintage experience than most competitors and am likely in the middle of the pack in playskill. With only a handful of Shops players in the projected field, I didn't expect much hate and switching to Shops to prey on the Bazaar decks was tempting if the blue matchups (particularly BUG) were manageable. Unfortunately I didn't have time to stress-test this theory before the event but in the time I've put off writing this Golos Shops has risen up to become the most popular deck along with BUG.

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I had a holiday booked for the weekend of the playoff so I lost the last few days of valuable testing time. One idea that came to me just before I left was to incorporate my lessons from the big blue decks into an Oath of Druids shell. As a cheap threat that dodges both Flusterstorm and Pyroblast, Oath was highly dangerous in blue mirrors as well as an ace against BUG and a source of free wins against Shops and Bazaar. 

Traditional Oath is reliant on its namesake, which creates cascading issues for the rest of the deck. Forbidden Orchard is unreliable as a land but you need it for Oath; you want all the artifact mana to enable fast Oath starts and playing enough non-Orchard lands to have an otherwise stable manabase leaves you prone to severe flooding. Urza's Saga lets you artificially inflate your mana count while being an ideal alternate threat - in creature-heavy matchups like BUG you can shave Orchards and board up to 4 Saga and another basic to give you a functional manabase, while against Shops you can board up to all your lands and more reliably cast your spells through Spheres/Wasteland. 

It's easy to look at the overlap in card types between Saga/Oath and assume this deck must fold to Force of Vigor but that card is going to be strong against you no matter what and this gives you the option to overload it by presenting several must-answer threats one at a time. The card Oath is exceptional vs BUG and Bazaar but being all-in on Oath can set you up for failure given how much interaction both decks have - the addition of Saga may seem odd at first glance but makes you a more cohesive deck. Meanwhile, the combination of Oath and Saga makes you exceptional against other blue decks.

Here's what I registered for the monthly ManaTraders event in August, making it to the finals and losing only to eventual winner and multi-format crusher Matthew Vook (Ozymandias172):

The deck felt excellent all weekend and should be even better now with the format's move towards Shops. I would add a reshuffle effect (Gaea's Blessing, Memory's Journey, or the new Turn the Earth) but the rest should be good to go.  

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The more lasting takeaway from this experience was a lesson in how to enjoy competitive Magic more reliably. Over the past few months I've had the opportunity to help others prepare for their own high-stakes events, which is something I can dedicate myself to without worrying about the emotional impact of the results of that one tournament. It's easy to say that you should care about the process rather than the results but hard (and not even necessarily desirable?) to conform to that in practice - helping others prepare lets you refine your process while taking pleasure in others' success. This can lead to its own problems or unhealthy thought patterns - being jealous of their success or unhappy about the relative levels of effort that people are contributing to the process - but it has offered me a way to double down or dial back on my engagement with the game without feeling like I'm missing opportunities to chase the high of tournament success or ending up in the rabbit hole of playing more when I'm playing at my worst out of a misguided quest for redemption. 

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