Could be a nice include in that kind of deck but IMHO it would be overkill since uba mask + BoB does the same job for lower mana cost. However it might be worth a try.

Btw, in turn 3 (in the video) landing a strip mine and a ancient tomb in the same turn makes it easier to win

I find dredge to be quite a good matchup for that kind of deck (even pre-side) so i would not choose caverns/circles because of it.

IMHO, having in the deck a way to ping creatures and/or player is an absolute requirement. I have been using staff of nim for quite some time and so i could run cavern instead of circles. I was quite happy with it. Because of the rise of null rod after chalice ban, i chose to come back to circles again.
Nowadays, people are running more creatures removal than they used to so make welder non-counterable is less relevant.

My mind is not set on that choice so far and i think it might be a meta choice (use circles as a way to get rid of small creatures) but i would give a slight advantage to circles.

Thanks for this nice little article.

I have been playing a quite similar list at the last LCV tournament and went 14th out of 38 with it. Running Uba Mask has been a quite last time call but i have been very happy with it during the whole tournament. I lost several very close games because of missplays (i was a bit out of training since i had not played vintage for quite a long time) but the deck could have made much better results than i did actually. I agree Uba Mask is a great choice in the current meta.
My 10 cents.

Well, mana base for red shop is always a bit difficult, you need enough red and enough explosive opening hands (lots of mana). I chose to have a very low curve (for a shop deck), that means nearly all my spells are cc3 or less. It really helped reducing mulligan due to low mana opening hands. There may be other solutions but this one seems to be working quite well.

I would keep the 4 welders (2 in opening hands are not that bad since they do not stay on the field very long usually and it allows some nice tricks too and it is one key card of the deck).

If i could i would enter as much revoker as possible but i would remove the lone titan that is a bit random IMHO.

I first added ratched bomb to deal quickly with dark confidant but nowadays they are very useful to deal with tokens and flipped delver and most fish creatures. The only tension is to set it at 1 with welder on the field. By the way, it can be made recursive with welder and i wiped the oponent field clean lots of time but it is a bit overkill most of the time.

Bridge is just amazing, it is nearly autowin against Dredge and MUD and gives the needed time to setup your field in other matchups. It made me win lots of games by its own.

I have been playing red-shop for a long time and when i read your list it reminds me of an old list i used (basically the difference was wurmcoil as huge beater). I had some little success with it but i finally find out it to be too much in the 'middle road' : not really aggro, not really control. I decided to follow the control road and here below is a list i used one year ago so it is not uptodate but you may find some ideas.


Now, i would do +1 cavern / -1 mountain and the 2 slots for staff of Nim are floating i guess.

The expedition map is wonderful in this particular list but maybe i would not use it in a list like yours (it puts you off-tempo, my list is much slower so it is OK in it).

I do not think Mental Misstep is a problem for any shop deck. Most of the time they are sided out for artifact hate and if they keep it, it is even better since it means less artifact hate against me. I agree that mental misstep on welder is no good news but actually they could have done far worse that turn. I am more concerned with bolt, sword or decay on welder.

I chose to run Staff of Nim over Uba Mask for two reasons :
- Staff is useful when gameplan goes wrong
- i felt the ping damage was really necessary to get rid of small nasty creatures (dark conf, ...)
But i may be wrong in this choice.

I felt Null rod is not necessary as welder, bridge and crucible make G1 very positive against MUD. Post side it is even better with cage. More over, IMHO expedition map is a key card of the deck.

I have been testing and playing a list for some time. I ran one very similar to the one below at the last BOM (i was expecting lots of legacy-like decks and especially BUG) and got some success with it in the vintage trials. Masticore in SB were basically for BUG decks running null rod so i would put back Triskel instead for Delver decks.  

4 Mishra's Workshop
3 Cavern of Souls
3 Bazaar of Baghdad
4 Wasteland
1 Strip Mine
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Barbarian Ring
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Ruby
1 Sol Ring
4 Goblin Welder
4 Lodestone Golem
3 Chalice of the Void
3 Crucible of Worlds
4 Tangle Wire
1 Trinisphere
3 Ratchet Bomb
2 Ancient Tomb
3 Mountain
2 Expedition Map
3 Ensnaring Bridge
3 Sphere of Resistance
2 Staff of Nin
SB: 3 Tormod's Crypt (Dredge)
SB: 4 Grafdigger's Cage (Dredge, MUD, Oath)
SB: 1 The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale (Dredge, Agro decks)
SB: 3 Razormane Masticore / to be replaced by Triskel (MUD, Legacy like : RUG, BUG, UR, ...)
SB: 2 Witchbane Orb (Oath)
SB: 2 Phyrexian Revoker (Dack, shaman, etc. but actually floating slots)

Basically it is an old STAX with a few changes. My plan is to be the control deck obviously.
- a very low mana curve for reducing mulligan and get more stability. So welder is less amazing but it easier to cast stuff fairly if he can"t stick to the field.
- ratched bomb instead of smokestack : i want to be able to choose what is destroyed and do it quickly.
- bridge MD are just amazing (in the european meta), near auto-win against MUD and Dredge. a little bit more tricky when oponent plays mana denial.
- staff : shop deck with draw (and filtering with bazaar) is just adictive ! the ping is worth the mana cost (compared to portal). no tension with bridges : if i can play or weld staff i can deal with 2 cards a turn.
- less sphere than usual but there are not that many combo/broken decks in european meta.
- some tension between golem/bridge but not that often if you play smart. A few time you will have an expensive sphere (that will attack when the board is cleared).
- i used to play maze too but i prefer tabernacle because of pyromancer.
- with lots of bolts/decay in oponents decks, barbarian + staff are an alternative kill.

I am not yet satisfied of all slots but in an MUD/Dredge/Legacy-like meta this deck works quite well.

My 10 cents

I 100% agree with that. Because of the difference between paper and virtual, they could have make it different so entry price for vintage MTGO was lower but they chose not to.

Paper Power cards are objectively rare. On the other hand, Wizard has full control on the availability of virtual cards, they could have made them very available, they chose not to. That was my point.


I said "too much popular" not "popular". By this i meant, Wizard does not want lots (let's say the same number as people playing T2) of people to play Vintage. Of course they want it a bit popular (in a reasonable way) or they would have not made Vintage MTGO at all.

Vintage paper cards such as Power are expensive first because of their very low availability. Then, other factors such as "iconic value", hoarders (or whatever) come into play.
OK. Now let's consider virtual cards, namely MTGO.

Development of MTGO (the software) had cost some money. Even if quality and money put inside are not always related, it looks like a fair guess to say they did not put lots of money into it (compared to any other similar product, namely any online software games, they are technically the same kind of product whatever the game they support).
Each virtual card had cost some money to be "made", that's true but a black lotus or a giant growth had cost strictly the same (basically take already existing drawing and text and put them on a frame).
To print more cards ? Very easy it costs a few bytes to store the number and the time needed for someone to change the number somewhere in a database. Compare it to the cost to re-print paper cards ....

My point is first, we should compare what can be compared : economical model for MTG paper card is obviously different than the one for virtual card.

Someone said before, vintage cards could be the lowest of all. Actually i think they should be. With the very low number of vintage players, the ask for vintage-only cards is so low that they should cost less than any other card. Obviously market law does not apply properly which implies it is not a free market. Iconic value or hoarders make the value raise ? Very simple, Wizard re-print more (control of the market). To make it short, if Wizard wanted to have vintage cards very cheap they could do it very easily (and it would cost them nearly nothing). Their economical strategy with vintage MTGO is obviously different.

My guess (and it is only a guess) is twofold :
- it is an easy way for them to make money and since they can't pretend virtual power is rare to justify the price they bet on the iconic value and the fact that if something is expensive people will want it because people just love to have expensive stuff.
- Wizards do not want MTGO vintage to become very popular. They do not want it to die too but let's imagine lots of people playing vintage. Once you got a free turn for U1 , how would you feel if you are told you should pay 5 mana for it ? Got my point ? It tooks years to Wizard to balance card power (cost, creature vs spells, ...). Vintage is a "degenerate" format so from game design point of view so it can"t become too much popular because of that. It should live because it is part of the legend of MTG but legends are always better when they are not too much present. I love vintage and i want it to become more popular but from a game design point of view they are quite right.

From Wizard point of view the strategy looks good. From player point of view, i do not like it and wish it was otherwise since it could have been a nice way to make vintage more popular (we are quite far from the point where there are lots of people playing it). I will put no money into it but it is my personal choice.

My 10 cents

During the last BOM i lost a game that was mine because of exactly the same "trick" on a tangle wire trigger (and it was also a BUG player but not the same one) . After the game i asked the judge about this and i got the same answers as above in the thread. I understand it is in the rule and now i will be very carefull about this but i can"t help thinking a rule that "allow" this kind of "trick" in a strategic game is a bad rule. However, live and learn !

To try to answer your question about staff of nim/portal :
I have been playing a stax deck for some time (different from yours, it is a welder stax so some of my conclusions may not fit to your deck) and i find BUG matchup to be quite a difficult matchup too. From my experience, chalice, tangle wire and revoker are very good against BUG but they are not enough. I play 2 staff of nin MD and i am very happy with them since they can kill dark confident and snapcaster. In case of null rod the drawing effect allow to stay in the game even if you can't kill the dark confident. the casting cost can be a problem if their mana denial plan worked well (but i can weld them in) so maybe in your deck the portal is better actually. Since i run expedition map, i use also a random barbarian ring to kill deathrite shaman. I definitively think that MUD/stax requires a reliable (trad. not affected by null rod) way to ping creatures (i use triskel too in SB but it is not very good because of null rod).

My 10 cents

My three favorite cards in no special order :
- Goblin welder : you should read "T: bring a cup of coffee with sugar". I just can't manage to play shop without this card !
- Chains of pephistopheles : an unique card effect that challenges deck builders. I tried lots of deck with it, none were really competitive but all were very fun to play and so confusing for my opponents. I just love this card.
- Sinkhole : my first competitive deck in 1994 was a land-destroyer deck. cc2 instead of cc3 made so much a difference that i never lost a single game when i had it in my opening hand.

The decklists for the main vintage are here :
http://www.bazaar-of-moxen.com/en/bazaar-of-moxen-coverage-bom9,24/bom9-vintage-main-event,c152.html

The decklists for the vintage trials are here (mixed with other formats so one has to search in the page) :
http://www.bazaar-of-moxen.com/en/bazaar-of-moxen-coverage-bom9,24/bom9-decklists,c143.html

Hi,

I am Laurent from France. I started MTG at the near beginning, played some tournaments and stopped MTG in 1997. I played from time to time until 2007 when i started again to play seriously. Luckily i had not sold all my cards when i stopped ! I play some Legacy and Commander but my favourite format is Vintage. The french vintage communauty is not very active but there are some small tournaments (and we have the BOM !) and i also play in spain at LCV when i can. So far my results are quite average (with some small success) but i keep learning and improving !
I have been reading TMD for some times and there are lots of very interessting threads. IMHO, the vintage format has not been so interesting for quite a long time and i look forward playing at the BOM !