Get ready to play Vintage!

by Andreas 'ecobaronen' Petersen

Hello everyone and welcome to this article about my favorite format - Vintage. The main purpose of this article is to get you ready to play the ManaTraders swiss on Saturday. I'm personally thrilled when they decide to support less popular formats, but I also understand that playing a completely new format when you're used to playing Modern, Pioneer and Standard can be a mouthful. Fear not, I'm here to pitch you four relatively simple decks, how to play them and what to look out for in the metagame.

Why Play Vintage?

All flavors of Magic are delicious, but my best sell for Vintage will be the combination of playing with legendary and fabled cards from 30 years ago and combine them with new and powerful cards from recent expansion. It's truly Magical that you can tap your Mox for mana and cast Orcish Bowmasters, or tap your Mishra's Workshop and cast The One Ring.

Oath of Druids

The first archetype that I'll cover is Oath of Druids. The objective is to use Oath of Druids or Show and Tell to get a huge discount on an even more huge creature. Forbidden Orchard in your manabase helps giving your opponent a creature if you play against combo or decks that cleverly decides to not play out any on their own. Historically, this deck has had the same gameplan with practically only the creature suite changing over the years. We used to Oath into Akroma, Angel of Wrath or Spirit of the Night, but these days we have the multi format powerhouse Atraxa, Grand Unifier. Atraxa generates tons of value from its' ETB trigger, but it's also very valuable in your hand because of its colors for Force of Will and Force of Vigor.

I like Oath a lot as a choice if you haven't played much Vintage before. The gameplan is pretty straight forward, and you get to play with some cool and powerful cards to boot. Oath is great vs. creature strategies and taxing elements out of Prison Shops because it's so cheap. It can struggle against fast combo that can win the turn after you deploy your enchantment and the card The One Ring which interacts favorably (from their point of view) with your attempt to trigger Oath of Druids on your following upkeep.

In the sideboard, Oath wants to have relevant interaction against the various pillars of the format and answers to the anti-Oath cards out there which is mainly Grafdigger's Cage and Containment Priest. Leyline of the Void is for Dredge, counterspells are for combo while Null Rod and Force of Vigor help vs. Mishra's Workshop-fueled artifact decks.

Mono White Initiative

Next up is the premier aggressive deck of the format: Mono White Initiative. This deck is a powerful aggro deck which maximizes the impact of the turn one play and mulligans aggressively to make that happen. Ideally you want to disrupt first and beat down hard after. The key card is Archon of Emeria which makes it terribly hard for the average Vintage deck to execute its gameplan. No double spell turns, even fetchlands enter the battlefield tapped. When the game is played at that speed, Mono White Initiative is heavily favored to take down the game.

The deck plays numerous ways to ignore Force of Will. On the play, revealing Chancellor of the Annex will almost always give you a clear runway to resolve your first threat, and Vexing Bauble and Cavern of Souls have similar effects. Cavern is the important one to study as many creaturetypes overlap in the deck. Finding the right name between Human and Cleric will do wonders for your win percentage.

Mono White Initiative is favored against all decks on the play and will have to cross fingers that nothing devastating happens when on the draw. The sideboard addresses creature matchups, graveyard decks and combo decks with large amounts of artifact mana.

Dredge

The third option for you is Dredge. Dredge is a weird one to process if you haven't been playing much Vintage before, but hear me out. The power of Bazaar of Baghdad combined with the dredge mechanic and free creatures entering from your graveyard is incredibly powerful. The deck can even fit ton of free interaction between Grief, Force of Will, Force of Negation and flashbacked Cabal Therapy. It even has built in Wasteland-protection in Noxious Revival which can also serve as a "Time Walk" in the clutch where you can put a blank on top of the opponent's deck or disrupt their graveyard in the mirror or against other graveyard-related decks. Add in the zero mana 4/4 that is Hollow One, and you have a hard hitting aggro deck that asks tough questions of your opponent's draw. Furthermore, with open decklists in the tournament, firing off Cabal Therapy will be a bit easier.

Dredge is natually a very strong game one deck while it will have to beat hate cards in one of the two sideboarded games to take down the match. Keep in mind that managing your hand and keeping relevant interaction is oftentimes worth slowing down your dredging for, but sometimes you need to dredge as aggressively as possible to close out your opponent with Creeping Chill.

The sideboard is relatively simple with Leylines for graveyard, Force of Vigors for hatepieces and against artifacts or enchantments in general, and Sickening Shoal for Containment Priest, Deathrite Shaman and Yixlid Jailer.

Jewel Shops

The fourth and last option on my menu is Jewel Shops. This deck is a blazingly fast combo deck that can support Force of Will for protection which is a very powerful combination. The opponent might lose the game on the first turn or you might try and play consecutive haymakers to break down their defenses. Mishra's Workshop is a key card in the deck because it lets you cast both The One Ring and Coveted Jewel. Phyrexian Metamorph interacts favorably with both, since you both get the trigger from The One Ring while legend ruling out the old one and with Coveted Jewel because you draw three cards "for free". Speaking of Metamorph, that card has huge utility vs. the format copying anything from an initiative creature to an Atraxa, Grand Unifier.

After drawing most of your deck, the goal is to assemble Time Vault and Manifold Key which generates infinite turns. From there, it's easy to win the game with Construct tokens from Urza's Saga. Speaking of Saga, the land will provide you with a solid plan B vs. hate and can even help you set up Time Vault + Manifold Key combo by searching out the latter.

Enemy number one for Jewel Shops will be Null Rod and Null Rodney (Collector Ouphe) which see play out of a couple of decks. Having open decklists is an advantage for a deck like Jewel Shops because you don't have to guess about your opponent's sideboard options.

Jewel Shops' own sideboard plays creatures like Wurmcoil Engine and Argentum Masticore to ignore and deal with hate while the Defense Grids are meant to overload opposing blue and green Forces. There's a tiny Karn, the Great Creator / Urza's Saga toolbox as well with some trinkets vs. graveyard and Pithing Needle as a catch all.

That's gonna do it for my four suggestions of relatively easy plug and play options for this Saturday's ManaTraders Series. Aside from the above options, Vintage has a few more decks on top of the metagame. Dimir Lurrus Saga and Sultai Midrange are the fair blue options which are essentially control decks with proactive elements to close out the game. Prison Shops will try and lock down your plans with Sphere of Resistance, the restricted lock pieces and recursive Wastelands while Doomsday is the big brain combo deck that tries to sculpt their hand, cast Doomsday and draw into a lethal Thassa's Oracle.

If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading along. I can't wait to see you in the trenches for this Saturday's Vintage ManaTraders Series!