Riding the Hype Train

Since the un-restriction of Thirst for Knowledge, there has been a lot of speculation about what is good, and what isn't good enough to win anymore. Some of this has been just theorizing, and some people have tried to jam as many play-test games as they can. Obviously, running thought experiments might give you good ideas, but nothing does as much as sitting down and working out the fine details of a format with hands-on testing against a competent opponent.

As for myself, I wasn't sure what to do. I had my trusty Oath deck, but it looks pretty much the same as it has been looking. I hadn't played in a tournament in a little while, and though I'd been winning most of the matches I played, I didn't think that I could place much weight on those results. Some of my matches were against really great players, but a lot were against random opponents.

Within a day or two of the DCI announcement, I did some play-testing with The Atog Lord, and he was beating up on my Oath deck pretty hard. I had tuned my deck to beat Force of Will and Young Pyromancer, not Mana Drain and Thirst for Knowledge. Beating a Force from a tapped out opponent is child's play when you play Flusterstorm and your own Force of Wills. I realized that my Oath deck didn't have many instant-speed plays to use as bait, which could have enabled me to land something on my turn. Game after game, I felt like I was just feeding into Mana Drain, and not playing something opens up room for an end step Thirst for Knowledge.

I continued playing my Oath of Druids list, knowing that I had to make some kind of changes. I had a list that seemed decent, and I could beat Grixis enough to be comfortable with the match up, even if it wasn't really in my favor overall. When last weekend rolled around, I thought about trying the list in a Daily Event, even though I wasn't that comfortable with it at the time. The mid-day Daily happened, and I got a few reports from people who played in it, and apparently decks like this next one were everywhere:

This is not the kind of deck that I felt I could consistently beat with Oath. A deck like that has a few things that make life hard for Griselbrand. First of all, they're going to out-draw me in the early game (and the late game, unless I activate Oath). They won't ever have a creature out to trigger Oath unless it's Blightsteel Colossus and at that point I just hope they don't have Time Walk. So, I have to have an early Forbidden Orchard to go with my Oath, or an early Show and Tell/Griselbrand if I want to have any hope of winning the game. I can't afford to wait too long for Big G to show up, otherwise I'm going to be buried in card advantage and lose to Time Vault.

If you can't beat 'em...

I did the only rational thing I could do, and I just built the Tezzeret deck myself. If nothing else, I figured it would be fun to try it out. I lacked a few of the needed cards, so I ended up building a slightly different version of the deck played by fellow Vintage enthusiast Oystein Kalas (TurboK). He had cashed the mid-day event on Saturday so I figured it was good enough to start with.

It wasn't until Sunday night that I had the list together, and I didn't feel like playing with it yet. The 9:30pm Daily ended up needing one more person to fire, so I decided to play and help everyone out. With the events costing more now, I would rather not play unless I'm confident that I have the right deck to play. I see no reason to needlessly waste money.

The tournament didn't go well, my second loss came at the hand of the chess clock. I timed out due to lag and a disconnection in game three of that round, and I wasn't happy about it. I had a Tezzeret the Seeker on the table and a Time Vault, I could have potentially had the match depending on what the last three cards in my opponent's hands were. I decided to play the last round for fun, and was awarded the bye. That just made it worse to be honest. I really wanted to get a few more games in with the deck that night, but I can't blame anyone for dropping after their second loss.

Although I didn't do that well in the event, I came away with some important observations. I'll start with the positive ones first:

Dumping out your hand and drawing cards is fun!

With four Thoughtcast, four Thirst for Knowledge, and one Ancestral Recall, this deck draws a ton of cards in a lot of games. Once you resolve your first draw spell, each subsequent one becomes easier to get to and play. When you're chaining these spells into each other, the deck does amazing things.

There are enough bombs in the list to overpower Force of Will most of the time. Nobody can two-for-one themselves that much before they start to fall behind. This is one of the strengths of decks like this and a core principle of its deck construction philosophy. Many times you can just throw out bombs, and even if everything gets countered you just win with a Yawgmoth's Will.

One of the games that I won ended up differently than I had anticipated. I was able to switch my plan for the turn on the fly and set up a Blightsteel Colossus kill, which wasn't what I'd planned on doing when the turn started. With this much mana, you can often craft intricate plays and steal a win before you'd normally expect to.

Playing in the MUD

Trinisphere is a sweet piece of sideboard tech. I always thought that the old three-ball was a MUD-only kind of artifact, but Mathew Murray explained to me how it's used to wreck a TPS deck in a post on The Mana Drain. I decided to test out what it could do, so I brought it in against other decks with a small mana base and decks that rely on abundant cheap spells. My finding was that it either eats a Force of Will that would have otherwise countered your Time Vault or it slows the opponent down to a crawl. This deck is a big-mana deck, and it isn't really bothered by Trinisphere like you'd think it would be.

Get that Rod out of my face!

Null Rod is a savage beating when you're playing Seat of the Synod. In a normal Grixis "Thieves" kind of build, you're not happy about Null Rod, but it doesn't seem as devastating. You can cast Hurkyl's Recall a lot easier when you don't have to worry about four of your lands malfunctioning.

Null Rod plays out differently in different decks and with different draws by the opponent, but that's nothing out of the ordinary. This just means that sometimes you can beat a Null Rod with no issues, but sometimes it is the nail in the coffin. The main factor is pressure, Null Rod isn't beating your face in, it's the Lodestone Golem, Delver of Secrets, or Dark Confidant that's doing the dirty work.

I think that this type of deck needs more than one answer to Null Rod in the main deck, and I'd even think about making sure you can answer a (Stoney Silence). One of the problems that I've run into is that unlike Grixis Thieves with two Islands and a sideboard Mountain to fetch, you've got one basic Island in Tezzcast with which to dig yourself out. Don't forget that Null Rod often times goes hand-in-hand with Wasteland, which puts even more pressure on your single basic Island.

One main-deck Hurkyl's Recall is all you have against Null Rod or Spheres in game one. While that's often enough if all you have to do is resolve a single Oath of Druids, this deck's cheapest threats of similar power cost three mana (Tinker), or they need more than one card to do anything (Time Vault and Voltaic Key). I've been playing around with running a second anti-Null Rod card because I think it's necessary for continued success with this deck.

Thinking about Thoughtcast

To make room for Thoughtcast, this deck doesn't run cantrips. Not even Brainstorm, which just breaks my heart. You can't really run Brainstorm effectively though, as you're not running many fetches. On one hand, this makes the deck slightly more resistant to Mental Misstep than it otherwise would be. The flip side to that is that there's no guarantee that Thoughtcast will be powered up by turn one or two. You need to be able to play Thoughtcast for one or two mana, otherwise you're playing Divination, and that isn't Vintage material the last time I checked!

Yuck!

In order to power up Thoughtcast this deck plays not only four artifact lands, but also cards like Mana Vault and Mox Opal. Mana rocks are powerful, and offer some explosive starts. They're also really terrible top-decks sometimes. While that can be true of nearly any Magic card, mana in general is something that players never want too much of (unless you're name is Hrishi and you're playing Academy). Sometimes, this deck opens a hand with crazy mana, then casts Thoughtcast and draws two more lands or moxen. That isn't fun.

The worst thing that will sometimes happen involves having to keep a hand with no card-draw, or having your one early draw spell countered. If you don't already have a game winning combination of cards in your hand, you need to start chaining draw spells. If you can't land the first few early on, you could end up stalled and dead before you even had a chance. Things do start to get a lot better once you've resolved a few draw spells, so that's something to keep in mind when making mulligan decisions.

My Final Verdict

Ultimately, I think that the Tezzcast deck is extremely powerful, but it's also feels like a glass cannon at times. It's not quite as all-in as a deck like Blue Belcher or Steel City Vault, but it's pretty close. You get to play less Counterspells but hope that you can either draw a broken opening seven or chain together a few draw spells until you hit a jackpot. I've used a slot-machine metaphor before when describing decks like this, and it certainly feels that way in some of your games.

Compared to Grixis Thieves, this deck has the potential to be faster. If the games go long, you'd probably rather be playing Thieves instead of Thoughtcast. I think that as time goes on, a more traditional Grixis list sans Thoughtcast will prove to be the way to go. The next step is tuning to beat mirror matches, or just moving on to something like BUG Fish.

There's still a lot of excitement and hype surrounding Thirst for Knowledge, and that's going to warp the online meta a little bit for a while. I don't anticipate seeing Tezzcast everywhere much longer, but of course I've been wrong before. I will say this though, in the past when I said that a deck like Grixis Thieves couldn't stand up to Gush decks, they suffered from not being able to play Gush themselves, and they had nothing to keep pace with it. Now Grixis can play the same number of draw spells as Delver, and that is likely to make this family of Time Vault combo decks much better going forward.

Totally Serious - Top 8 questions with Nat Moes

One of my all-time favorite Vintage writers is a man who sometimes goes by the name Grandpa Belcher (as in the Goblin Cannon). He's written many articles I enjoy for LegitMTG.com, and most recently Gathering Magic. Here's my Top 8 questions with Nat Moes:

JF: How long have you been playing Magic/Vintage?

Nat: I've been playing Magic since 1995. My first starter deck was 4th Edition and had Living Lands, Kormus Bell, and Aladdin's Ring. I played with friends mostly through high school then took a break for a couple of years shortly after Odyssey block. I started again around Kamigawa and got into Vintage around then, in 2004 or 2005.

JF: Your nickname is Grandpa Belcher, after Goblin Charbelcher. When did your fondness for the artifact start?

Nat: When I first started playing Vintage, I was playing a combo deck that used Helm of Awakening and the Odyssey block cycle of eggs (Darkwater Egg, Skycloud Egg, and the rest) to draw into and play Tendrils of Agony. The deck was similar to more recent Turn-One Tendrils or SX lists, so I've always liked combo. When I started going to Mox tournaments (back when local stores could afford to give out Moxes), the proxy policies weren't as lenient as they are now, so I was mostly playing aggro-control decks like Fish that let me proxy five cards. That can be a fun and exciting challenge since you have to build and play a deck perfectly, but I'm far from perfect and was getting kind of tired of losing all the time. The proxy rules relaxed a little, and I was soon exploring other options. Eventually I stumbled on Michael Simister's Belcher lists and those played by Justin Droba and others. I never took those lists to a tournament, but my curiosity was piqued. In 2006 and early 2007, Rite of Flame, Empty the Warrens, and Simian Spirit Guide were printed in successive sets, and I was sort of able to make Belcher my own by combining them and simplifying the deck into two colors, red and green, based heavily on the pair of Simian and Elvish Spirit Guide. I started playing that regularly, eventually playing it at every Vintage tournament I attended between 2008 and 2010. I did well locally and made top 16 at a Waterbury in 2009. I guess I made quite a reputation for myself, and I would regularly get questions from people who were interested in playing the deck. That's where the "Grandpa" part came from, since I was raising up all of these kids to be like me. I still love Belcher and usually have a version of it together. I still get questions about it, even though I don't play it as often as I used to—at least in Vintage; it's still my go-to Legacy deck. If anyone's interested, I wrote a pretty decent primer in 2009 that's still mostly relevant.

JF: Before I began playing competitive Vintage, I became interesting in the format from listening to podcasts like "Serious Vintage", and I'd read a bit about Team Serious. When did Team Serious begin and what do you guys do?

Nat: Thanks for listening! The podcast was a lot of fun, and I'd like to get back into it at some point. Team Serious grew out of the Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio Vintage group, mostly Cleveland, and particularly those who weren't associated with Team Meandeck. In the early- to mid-2000s, there was a big "team" aspect to competitive Vintage that developed around Star City's Power 9 tournaments. I'm sure there's a history somewhere, but the basics (I think) were that the Paragons split into Meandeck and Shortbus, which later spawned Reflection. In the upper-Midwest, there was GWS and ICBM (which was rumored to stand for "I Can Beat Meandeck"). For the average Joe like myself, the team structure and subsequent rivalries were mostly confusing and ridiculous. Anyway, Team Serious came after most of that had passed, I think in 2007 or so. We were a group of friends who used the excuse of playing Vintage to prioritize going out after an event to have delicious food. There are lots of what I would consider founding members, but I'd mention particularly Mark Trogdon and Jerry Yang who went to pretty much every tournament within four hours of Cleveland; Vintage hype-man Anthony "Twaun007" Michaels; and Nam Tran, who, outside the Thurman Cafe in Columbus, originated the Team Serious mission statement: "We just need to be the best that we can to get better, dominate Vintage tournaments, and represent the Cleveland area. Yeah, man! Yeah!" Clearly, if you're not having fun playing this game (even if you're winning), you're doing something wrong. Today we have a few dozen members, still mostly based in Ohio, but also including people in Virginia, Michigan, Texas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada, and probably a few other places I'm forgetting.

JF: Recently, the DCI released an update to the B&R list for Vintage. It's still early, but what are your initial impressions on the subject?

Nat: Tough question. Dig Through Time almost certainly deserved restriction, but I will miss building around that card. I think the biggest problem there is just that it will get added to the list of restricted blue and black cards that get played in pretty much every blue-based list. Thirst for Knowledge is a card I didn't play much when it was unrestricted the first time (because I was too busy playing Fish or Belcher). In testing now it's seemed powerful, and resolving one puts a player that much closer to resolving a second and third one, similar to how Dig and Treasure Cruise were. Most players are going to go through a few weeks of excited development with Thirst, looking at ideas old and new to see if they compare to other contenders in the format. The big question is whether Thirst can compete with Gush, and how well, and then how well either of those can compete with Workshop decks. So far Thirst seems very good, and I know some big names in the format are wondering whether its unrestriction—especially combined with the restriction of Chalice of the Void —will prove to be a mistake. Currently it's too early to tell. I still disagree with the restriction of Chalice of the Void. It was one of the less threatening lock pieces in Workshops. Even when I was playing a cantrip-based list like Jeskai Ascendancy, I could safely ignore it played on zero or one because my best cards against Shops cost two, three, five, and eight. More importantly, though, Chalice was part of the non-Powered player's arsenal against Vintage, because it could shut off powered decks' Moxes and make them play fair. So the big losers weren't Shops but things like Fish and Hate-bears. There's a huge difference between doing that on turn one (limiting both sides to lands only) and doing that on turn two with Null Rod or Stony Silence. If something needed to get restricted out of Workshops (and I'm not sure anything did), there would have been more effective options with less collateral damage. All that said, I love Vintage and will play with some combination of whatever cards I'm allowed. One way or another, these changes will fuel plenty of development and counter-development in the next few months, so there's lots to have fun with.

JF: I'm a fan of your articles from LegitMTG and Gathering Magic. How long have you been writing for?

Nat: I recently switched to Gathering Magic and have been there for just a few months. I'm excited to be posting Vintage content there since they have some great writers and community personalities. Before that, I was with LegitMTG since 2013, starting when I wrote an article about the effects in Vintage of the updated legend rule. I have also been a staff editor for ManaDeprived, which has been a lot of fun since it encouraged me to work on things that aren't Vintage. ManaDeprived also hosted a short series on match-ups and one of my favorite articles, the story of how I got my Power . Way, way back I had a blog that I kept up with regularly from 2006 to 2009 or so. Outside of Magic, I'm the editor of an association technical journal and have been working on writing, editing, and publishing for most of my career.

JF: The yearly Vintage Championship at Eternal Weekend has been growing steadily for the last few years, and there is more content being produced for Vintage lately than there was just a few months ago. How does it feel to you to see interest in Vintage growing?

Nat: I love seeing new players get excited about the format! I had several people talk to me at Eternal Weekend this year (the first I could make it in some time) and tell me that they had gotten interested in Vintage because of my articles, which was awesome. Other people have thanked my Serious Vintage co-hosts, Geoff Moes and Josh Chapple, and me for producing that. Now I'm working on streaming Team Serious events live at www.twitch.tv/seriousvintage. I have a lot to learn and some big plans, but there are videos from our October 11 event available that look pretty good!



There seems to be a lot of demand for all kinds of Vintage content, and it's good to see that writers, podcasters, streamers and others are stepping up. I know it takes a lot of time and effort to put material together on a regular basis—especially in Vintage where the players tend to be older and have jobs and families and other obligations—and this work should be appreciated and recognized.



That said, there's always room for more. In a proxy environment or on MTGO where the cost of entry is so much lower, the barrier for entry into Vintage is greatly reduced, so the biggest hurdle is getting new players past the impression that the format is nothing but combo and all games end on turn one and there's no interaction or variety. It's important to show Vintage being played and represent it as a format that's just as vibrant and playable as the others. Every format is different, and Vintage won't be for everyone, but there's no sense in not trying it. Playing outside your comfort zone, in any format, makes you a better, well-rounded Magic player overall.

JF: Do you have any advice for an aspiring Vintage player?

Nat: Going along with my previous answer, just get into the format and start playing. Proxy up an entire deck, have a friend proxy up another, and just smash them together. If you get tired of that, proxy up something else and try again. With a few exceptions, there are few Vintage decks that have true analogues in other formats, so it's hard to come up with a great answer when someone says, "I play X in Legacy, so what should I play in Vintage?" Just try out a few different things and see what happens. To paraphrase Jerry Yang, "Just play with cards that get you excited." Then go to a tournament. All the Vintage tournaments I've ever been to have been completely welcoming and fun events. Yes, you might lose, but that's okay. I lose anytime I draft or play Standard too. Most Vintage players will be thrilled to have new opponents and are willing to give whatever help or advice you need. And if you go to a Team Serious event and stick around until things are finished, you can definitely invite yourself to dinner with us!

JF: If you were stranded on a Tropical Island, what two Vintage decks would you take with you?

Nat: Sorry in advance for not saying Belcher, but I guess for pure goldfishing fun I'd probably take Turn-One Tendrils and maybe the Gush Through Time Combo list I was playing last winter. But, really, couldn't I take a thousand-card five-color Battle of Wits deck plus, like, Bazaar MUD and be able to play most of the decks I'd want to? I could maybe use cards as tinder too, since that seems important for survival on a tropical island.

Thanks again to Nat Moes for answering my questions, you can follow him on Twitter here. Special thanks to my wife and son for being awesome, and thanks to all of you for your support over the past year. It's been great fun, and I love providing content for all of you. Until next time, keep on rockin' in a free world!