Null and Void

Welcome back, comrade. Chalice has been gone one week, and the world is still here. Stax is back, at least in part... Stay thirsty my friends, thirsty for knowledge...

Magic is a fickle beast, and preconceived notions are easily overturned. The day that Chalice of the Void was restricted, I read several Facebook comments regarding the Mishra's Workshop pillar that had a grim forecast for the archetype's future. Apparently Keith here did not get that memo...

I mentioned last week that Workshop decks would adapt, and it appears that they have done so swimmingly. "Mr. Grim" was in first place following the Swiss portion of this event, obviously this list has some serious game. There was already a precedent for this type of deck, and some people were cutting some number of Chalices already. The simple truth is, other than perhaps Mishra's Workshop itself, these decks don't rely all that heavily on just one card. There is a ton of overlapping, synergistic, or just plain redundant effects in the average Workshop deck that restricting one card isn't likely to hurt all that much. I don't wish to minimize the effect of restricting Chalice too much, but to me it is clear that these decks aren't going anywhere.

I've used the word "Shops" as a blanket term, covering every single one of the various Workshop builds, but each one is different enough to be treated differently. Some decks, like Martello (Kuldotha Forgemaster Shops) are likely going to fade away as they can't harness the power of Null Rod effectively. Martello is kind of looking like yesterday's deck at this point anyway, lately Hangarback Walker and Arcbound Ravager are all the rage.

Looking at "Smoking Nova", we see that it looks like a sort of hybrid between a Terra Nova deck and an Espresso Stax list. Terra Nova decks and Stax decks are both very controlling, with Stax having a hard lock in the form of Smokestack and Crucible of Worlds. This deck has the eight man-lands, full play-sets of Mishra's Factory and Mutavault. There's also Batterskull, often found in such decks. Batterskull fares better against the likes of Dack Fayden than Wurmcoil Engine, but in there is some amount of tension between equipment and Null Rod. Luckily, the "living weapon" keyword ability mitigates this a little bit.

If you want to be successful in Vintage you need to have a good plan to face all of the different variations on Shops. This is especially true on Magic Online, where Shops is played very heavily. Treating these decks as identical is a recipe for disaster. Each one plays different threats, and some cards, like Pulverize, are not good against other cards, like Hangarback Walker. Some of the basics tenets of facing a Workshop deck are universal, like making sure you have enough basic lands, proper fetching, and so on. Beyond that, the cards you choose to employ make a huge difference.

Let's take a look at how another popular archetype is adapting to the new restricted list:

When I did my article on the "pillars" of Vintage, someone commented on Reddit that U/R Delver doesn't really belong in the grouping of blue-based control decks. I had placed it there, because that's where I found threads on the deck listed on www.themanadrain.com. The comment suggested that the deck was better placed under the Null Rod pillar, and as we can see with this list in particular, that makes a lot of sense.

I used to run a Null Rod or two in my Delver sideboards when space allowed. It was always good against Time Vault, but now that more people are going to be tempted to run a full load of artifact mana, Null Rod and Stony Silence should be even stronger.

Between Null Rod, Dack Fayden, and the Ingot Chewers and Hurkyl's Recall in the sideboard, this deck is prepared to fight multiple sub-types of Workshop decks. Pulverize was my personal go-to sideboard card after Ingot Chewer, but even I admit that it's efficacy has diminished since newer builds of Workshop decks have emerged. Good old-fashioned Hurkyl's has gotten better, and I like the copy in this deck's sideboard.

Yes, yes you did.

The last two decks were examples of what you could do with Null Rod. There are many more decks that could use either Null Rod or Stony Silence, namely the Humans deck from last week, or BUG Fish (Sultai Fish if WotC is listening). I think that playing a deck like BUG Fish might be a good idea going forward, Null Rod has always been a classic Foil to the plethora of big blue Time Vault decks.

The Grixis Thieves deck that took second in this year's Vintage Championship could be seen as kind of a predecessor to the kind of Time Vault decks that were running rampant right up until Thirst for Knowledge was restricted. For illustrative purposes, I'm going to show a typical Grixis Thieves list as well as an example of a "Tezzeret" deck from 2009.

These two decks share a lot in common. At their heart, they are both based on Tinker, Time Vault, restricted cards, and control elements. While that can describe a lot of Vintage decks, I think that these are especially close in their basic game plans. Even some of the cards that aren't directly ported from one deck to the other are just analogs, Darksteel Colossus has obviously been made obsolete by Blightsteel Colossus these days, and Dack Fayden sees a lot of play and Tezzeret the Seeker does not (although I think that should change).

I'm sure that the Grixis lists will only get better by adding more copies of Thirst for Knowledge. It's actually a little unnerving to think that decks like Marc Lanigra's 2009 list were the stated reason for restricting Thirst, considering that Grixis Thieves has been performing better lately. Even so, there is one giant metal difference between now and then ... something printed in Worldwake...

All fear the JuggerSphere!

Lodestone Golem put the "Espresso" in Espresso (mono-brown) Stax. Prior to the existence of JuggerSphere, Smokestack decks generally played colored spells. Some of the early ones played five colors, and there were variations that played less, but Lodestone Golem is just so powerful that running it outweighs playing colored spells. That's an impressive concept too, just consider how powerful a card or card combination would have to be to make cutting Ancestral Recall and Time Walk seem like a good idea.

Juggernaut had always been the go-to colorless beater decks would use, if they were in the market for such a creature. In colorless-only decks, Lodestone Golem is strictly superior. Five power for four mana is perfectly fine rate, and not having to attack each turn is fantastic. The three toughness isn't quite as bad if you're not forced to make the occasional chump-attack. The icing on the proverbial cake is that Lodestone provides another mana-taxing effect to add to the prison element of these decks. When Lodestone Golem entered the pantheon of prison artifacts, the decks had already been given Trinisphere, Chalice of the Void, and Thorn of Amethyst. Good old Lodestone gave Espresso Stax a critical mass of powerful lock-pieces the likes of which had really never been seen. Sure, parts of all the iterations of Workshop decks had existed up to this point, but now Workshop pilots could have it all in one deck. Seems pretty good to me.

Doing some research for this article, I came across the results for the 2009 Vintage Championships, which would have been the last Championships prior to the printing of Lodestone Golem. I was somewhat surprised to find a colorless Mishra's Workshop deck in the top eight, but the Red Uba-Stax list in the top eight was more what I expected to see. Let's take a look at those decks...

[Bonus points for anyone who can explain Gaea's Blessing in the Metalworker deck's sideboard)

I think it's really interesting to witness the evolution of these archetypes. I wasn't even aware that anyone had tried making a colorless Mishra's Workshop deck before the release of Worldwake, but here we are. The higher-placing and poly-chromatic Stax list certainly looks powerful, and I've played a similar five-color version of Stax before and seen it in action. I found that compared to colorless Workshop decks, the colored versions lacked consistency and they felt less controlling, as they ran fewer lock-pieces than my Martello and Espresso Stax lists.

The colorless Metalworker deck looks very interesting. Three copies of Staff of Domination allow for the deck to make infinite mana, which is pretty good (or so I'm told). It's really odd to me to see Tangle Wire in the sideboard, but I assume that the metagame nowadays is just more conducive to main-decking of (Tanglewire)s. I've heard another Magic writer refer to Tangle Wire as the best card in those decks, and I think that's pretty spot on at times. I've loved that card ever since I first played them when they were in standard, and I'd have a hard time cutting those from my main deck these days.

Lodestone Golem would have fit right in to that Metalworker deck, so it's no surprise that Workshop decks began a steady increase in power after the 2009-2010 period.

The poster-child for power-level errata.

The rise, fall, and recent paroling of Thirst for Knowledge is really centered around Time Vault. People took infinite turns with Time Vault back in the early days of Magic, with Animate Artifact and Instill Energy. The DCI thought that the infinite turn trick violated the founding father's idea of what Time Vault was supposed to do, so they added a bunch of extra words about depletion counters and whatnot, making it just another useless relic, discontinued after Unlimited Edition.

Right before Tezzeret the Seeker was printed, Time Vault was switched back to it's original functionality. People knew it was great with Voltaic Key, but when a planeswalker was released that could both find and combo with Time Vault, it was big business. Thirst for Knowledge was blue, it was an instant, and it saw three cards. That made Thirst a perfect fit, and it wasn't long before Tezzeret decks were everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean it. From what I've seen of that metagame, the Magic Online meta of almost half Shops actually looks pretty diverse in comparison.

So, while Thirst for Knowledge is a very powerful card, and brings cards into playable zones (hand and graveyard) aggressively and effectively, it is being unleashed into a very different world. On one hand, the bane of blue decks (Workshop Prison) is both very good and widely played. On the other hand, the brown decks just lost Chalice of the Void, and blue decks have access to three blue card-drawing cards that were once restricted (four if you count Fact or Fiction, but sadly I don't count that as it isn't good enough anymore).

I would be remiss if I failed to mention a few other all-star printings that have occurred since Thirst for Knowledge was restricted. "Grow"-style decks are better now, as they got Young Pyromancer and Monastery Mentor. Mentor slots into a wider variety of decks, but Gush decks are just fine with running the monk token machine gun. These two creatures, and to a lesser extent Delver of Secrets all make it possible for a fair deck to race a deck that's just trying to assemble a two-card combo. These creature-based decks did just lose a couple more copies of their delve spell, but they can just run Jace, Vryn's Prodigy now anyway and play those delve spells twice.

I really love blue, black, and "x" decks. From BUG to Grixis, and even Esper, those are my favorite colors. I'm not sad to see Thirst for Knowledge back, at least not at this point. If it does indeed prove that Thirst makes BigBlueTimeVault.DEC the only deck people play, than it's probably a bad thing. I'm already playing a U/B/x Time Vault deck, so I suppose that I'm already part of the problem, if it turns out that we indeed have one.

Final Thoughts

On Vintage and Magic Online

It's been a while since I added one of these opinion sections to one of my articles, and I almost omitted this one, but ultimately I decided that it was worth my time to do to. I was inspired to write this by a couple of things, namely the open letter written by Steve Menendian and Rich Shay posted on Reddit RE: MTGO/Vintage, but also the beginning section of a recent SMIP podcast where Menendian spoke of the letter.

First of all, I'm one of the people who appreciate the fact that these gentlemen took their time to try and help the situation. However, I think that the concerns expressed by Mr. Menendian are mainly relevant to just his part of the Vintage community. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but I think that in this day and age there is a wider group of Vintage players than just those who play fully-powered, sanctioned Vintage.

I'd love to be one of the people who owns a paper Vintage deck, but realistically it isn't going to happen. I've got one started, but it's rather incomplete to say the least. To me, Magic Online was a way to experience this format in a cost-effective manner. The games are basically sanctioned, as MTGO is the official client, and I have a collection that includes the power nine. To me, that's something wonderful. I get to have the feeling that I own a deck, and that I've bought in to the format.

There are also people who, like me, play a lot of MTGO, or play solely MTGO, but don't own paper or at least paper Vintage cards. How do you convince people like that, the "Magic Online Grinder", that they should pick up Vintage? If they do play paper, then there is an incentive for them to play many MTGO formats including Legacy. Legacy has Grand Prix and Star City Games events. You can qualify for the Pro Tour in a paper Legacy GP, and you can earn a lot of money there or at an SCG event. You can even qualify for the Pro Tour in MTGO PTQ's! All of those things are huge incentives to MTGO Grinders.

The thing is, right now, Vintage isn't really offering that segment of the Magic Online player base a reason to buy in. There isn't a Vintage MOCS season, there aren't PTQ's in that format, and there aren't even the kind of large events that Steve and Rich's letter suggested for Grinders to play in. Standard, Modern, and even Pauper evens fire more frequently due to the monetery EV, as well as the "dream chase" of being the next Reid Duke.

Then there's the issue of promotion. I started my Magic Online account because I read an article that said Vintage Masters was bringing the power nine to Magic Online for the first time. My original Magic collection never had the entire power nine, I had two of them, but I wasn't able to complete my set before I sold my cards at 19 years old. That VMA announcement seemed like my ticket to a world I felt beyond my reach. Then there was the constant promotion by Wizards of both Vintage Masters and the Vintage format on Magic Online. I feel that is what drove the initial hype around the format, and in combination with the Vintage Super League, it served to get a ton of new Vintage players into the mix.

What happened to make all of that stop? I'm not sure. I know that when I first started Vintage, that time period seems to be when things first started to go downhill as far as attendance is concerned, but I'm not entirely sure. I do know that the amount of deck lists I can access dwindled down considerably, which suggests a lot less events have fired since then.

All of the suggestions in the letter were good, and I understand that they can only speak for themselves. So, in that regard, what they wrote was terrific. I do think we need to go a little farther than that. It would help a lot if our format looked more attractive to those not already entrenched in the format. Right now, to want to be a Vintage player, you have to like a very skill intensive game, but not care that you won't "get anywhere" (Pro Status) playing the format. Established Vintage players with paper collections are already ok with this idea, and the open letter addresses them well, but ignoring the potential new generation of players is a mistake. I mean, if you want to boil it down to money, Grinders spend a lot trying to avoid spending any money (going infinite), so they're a great demographic to harness.

I've emailed a lot of my ideas to Wizards, and I know that they're at least reading them and considering them. That gives me hope, and hope is good. If you have any ideas, go ahead and be politely vocal about them. It's your right as a consumer, and as long as you're kind about it, it's a helpful thing.

I do my part, trying to promote this format every week. I do so because I enjoy it, and I think that it's a relevant, skill-testing format. Sure, we don't have all of the awesome things Modern does, like a mile-long banned list, Shock Lands, and games that resolve around Blood Moon and Lava Spike, but trust me if you've never done this, casting an Ancestral Recall is just as fun if not more than casting Ghoulcaller's Bell.

That's all the time I have for this week folks, there's a lot of things I wanted to add to this (namely results from the Vintage MTGO Swiss PRE), but time is always an issue for me. Very quickly I'd like to apologize to the people who played in the Vintage PRE that I managed to screw up. I really shouldn't have offered to try to run it, as I had commitments that day (the kind that you have when you've got a young child to care for). Running that event and coordinating all of the incoming chat messages required my full attention, and I guess I thought I could do other things while it was happening. I will publish results soon, and I thank you for supporting my favorite format. I myself am not able to play in as many events as I'd like to, but I do try to play in these when I can.

As always, stay cool, and be good to each other. Oh, and check us out of Facebook... Missed one of my articles? Shame on you! Click here to read them.