I guess given your views on the fact that Null Rod is "obsolete," a response like that could be a given.

REB>you creatures, F/I>your creatures, STP>your creatures.

I'm also not understanding exactly how Jitte is an autowin against Workshop Aggro, Madness or Threshold.

Madness runs as many/more counters as you do

Nimble Mongoose>Jitte.

A resolved Null Rod essentially nullifies your deck strategy.

I don't understand. Why would you post a deck idea and then when someone has a very valid point you get so offended that you can't even take what they said into consideration. you can't just run 12 creatures with all these creature enhancement spells, it's just WAY off balance.

Here's the list I'm proposing - Feel free to post your modificationss

Viktory by Flight - Can't really be called fish anymore.

4 Flooded Strand
4 Tundra
3 Polluted Delta
2 Island
1 LoA
5 Moxen
1 Black Lotus

1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
4 Curiosity
4 Mask of Memory
2 Standstill/Brainstorm

2 Urijatwe's Jitte
1 Sword of Fire and Ice
1 Enlightened Tutor

2 Misdirection/Mana Drain
3 Daze
4 FoW

4 Meddling Mage
4 Spiketail Hatchling
3 Cloud of Fairies
4 Flying Men

Sideboard
1 Swords to Plowshore
1 Tinker
1 Platinum Angel
1 Disenchant
2 Arcane Laboratory
2 Dust to Dust
3 Swords to Plowshore
4 Seal of Cleansing

Standstill vs. Brainstorm question comes up a decent amount to the people I've had try this list out. Standstill is great against many decks in the current meta. But if you play in a field with even some aggro, you should definately opt for Brainstorm instead.

The mana base depends on your style of play. This deck has an extremely low mana curve. You rarely want more than 2-3 mana sources. Some people are comfortable running an 18 mana source base and throwing back a lot more hands. One of my friends opted to do that with this deck to run Brainstorms. This is actually a fine strategy for aggro control since you run on such a low mana curve anyways so once you have two mana sources, you don't want many more. Just be willing to paris aggressively. You'll make up for lost cards the second you get your draw engine online.

The same person who opted to cut standstill and a land for Brainstorm also opted to cut both MisD and a Jitte for 3 Mana Drains. It's largely personal preference, playstyle dependent and meta dependent which of these cards you use but I can attest that the deck can definately support 3 Mana Drains and they seem to work fairly well most of the time. So if you insist that you want a bigger hard counter base, I definately recommend trying out Mana Drain in the list.

The deck has a bigger counter base than Oath (counting Spiketail) for the first several turns before Dazes and Spiketails lose their efficacy. But thanks to the moxen and the invulnerability to mana screw, these few turns of being able to play threats is all you need. Drop a evasive creature, use it set up a solid recurring draw engine (or use Standstill to find one), and by turn 2-3, you are drawing so many cards that you'll almost always have a solid counter when you need one while you always have something to do with extra dazes whether pitching to the FoW or to Mask of Memory.

Urijatwe's Jitte is an absolute bomb that adds much needed versatility to Fish. It slaughters aggro decks, Welders, Fish mirrors and even Oathed up Akormas and Spirit of the Nights! Makes your deck resilient to annoying Lava Darts Also significantly speeds up your clock to that of Bird [Censored] level (BS has to wait to reach threshold afterall). Found them to be far more useful against far more decks than Swords to Plowshore and Grim Lavamancer combined which is eventually why I ended cutting all the Swords to the sideboard.

After more extensive testing, we've found the alternate build, the one utilizing mana drain and brainstorm, stronger in some of the tougher matchups (Workshop Aggro running Chalices, Spheres, Stax, AND Tangle Wire - The wire can really hurt if you haven't got your draw engine online yet) but slightly weaker against control (which still remains a strong matchup, Standstill was great against control though). So the below build may be even better for this meta.

4 Flooded Strand
4 Tundra
2 Polluted Delta
2 Island
1 LoA
5 Moxen
1 Black Lotus

1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
4 Curiosity
4 Mask of Memory
4 Brainstorm

1 Urijatwe's Jitte
1 Sword of Fire and Ice (Can play a second Jitte here instead)
1 Enlightened Tutor
 
3 Mana Drain
3 Daze
4 FoW

4 Meddling Mage
4 Spiketail Hatchling
4 Cloud of Fairies
3 Flying Men

Sideboard
1 Urejatwe's Jitte
1 Tinker
1 Platinum Angel
1 Disenchant
2 Arcane Laboratory
2 Dust to Dust
3 Swords to Plowshore
4 Seal of Cleansing

I didn't really play post sideboard games as much since I wanted to spend my time on tweaking the main body of the deck before worrying about the sideboard. But the games I did play, the current sideboard seems to work well enough with plenty of tools against some of it's worser match ups. But the sideboard could probably use some work though.

I want to get a good sideboard discussion going...






--------------------------------Pre-edit reply to some of the criticisms below)----------------------------------

To the user who recommended Kowal's Ninja Sword. I proxied it up and tried the deck out a decent bit, and IMO, it seems like the deck has many serious weaknesses. Ninja Sword IMO tries to play far too many colors. It's also very vulnerable to crucible lock since it can only get out one island under it and can't play any of it's threats with it. Sure Vial can help smooth out the multicolored creature base, but I would rather not have to rely on one card to smooth this out. Also the creature base isn't very good either IMO. None of the creatures have evasion. So I don't see why Ninja of Deep Hours is even played since they're no guarnetee you can get a creature to go unblocked. Yes Withered Wretch is a bomb no question, and Shaman is sometimes very useful. But Old Man of the Sea is only worthwhile against a few decks, it's not worth maindecking and should be left in the sideboard. The same can be said for Gilded Drake. It's only reasonably useful against Oath. And even then, it only works some of the time. Say you steal their first Oathed creature, they'll Oath up their second one and the two will probably end up killing each other most of the time. So upon Oath's next activation, both cards get shuffled back into their library via Gaea's Blessing and you're right back where you were, but now you have a 3/3 flyer to worry about too. In addition, the deck's card draw pales in comparison to this. And the countermagic is also 1/3 of what you play. So the deck has card drawing, a worse counterbase, and most of the creatures are pretty situational anyways. It also doesn't kill any faster than this deck. So I can't see one reason why I would want to play Ninja Sword over this. If a normal forum user rather than Kowal posted that list, I would've bet that it would be moved to Vintage Newbie by the end of the day.

To the user who suggested that BBS is similar to this deck but better in every way. I played BBS, and that's simply not true in the least. This deck draws more cards, a heck of a lot more cards than simply any other control deck I've ever played.

More importantly, it starts drawing cards a few turns earlier than all other control decks. That's a huge strength against control. It means you can draw into more countermagic in time to counter their card drawing spells. Mana isn't the most effective resource to attack Control at if you can't kill them by midgame. Stopping control's card drawing has a far more devastating effect.

It's a mistake to think that this deck doesn't attack your opponent's resources. It doesn't attack your opponent's mana base, because that strategy while effective early on is useless by midgame and later. Also that wasteland you used up or that turn you took to play Null Rod could've been used to set up your draw engine to draw into counters. But it attacks each deck at it's achelles heel. It attacks controls card drawing by letting you get your card drawing online fast enough to find more counters to stop their card drawing. It attacks key combo cards with it's counterbase. It attacks aggro decks with counters to stop big threats and Jitte/SoFI to stop their creatures. And if a Workshop player can't stop your draw engine thru your initial counter wall fast enough, your card drawing will allow you to draw land and permanents faster than they can destroy them.

Yes it is dependent on creatures, and that is a weakness. But it's worth what you gain. Besides there are only 6 pure creatures which are insanely cheap/free, the rest function as countermagic themselves (Meddling Mage and Spiketail). U/R Fish rarely had too big of a problem keeping it's curious flyers in play, it just couldn't win fast enough. This deck plays a decent bit more countermagic counting Meddling Mage, 2 more evasive creatures, and a lot more card drawers (that are equipment too). It also plays equipment that protects its creatures. Protecting your creatures isn't too big of a problem.

Add it up, you're playing 19 counterspell, almost double the number of a lot of control decks. But for arguments sake I won't count Spiketail since its a creature and it sometimes must be used in combo with Daze to counter a spell. But to compensate I will count Daze as a hard counter though because it's always useful early on and when used with Spiketail almost never fails. So that's 15 hard counters you're running, 1/4 of your deck. So on average, you have two hard counters in your opening hand (or the turn after) and one more for every 4 cards you draw. Plus you starting drawing cards usually by turn 2 and at worst by turn 3. What control deck can boast that. By turn 5, you're drawing a ridiculous number of cards by the time most control decks are just starting their card drawing (excluding Brainstorm which technically doesn't draw any cards). By that time, you should be in a position to counter most of controls major draw spells. And that's a very good position to be in. As for making sure your draw engine resolves and can is up and running early, you're effectively playing with 19 counters to let you do that since both Daze and Spiketail are very effective early on.

Yes Chalice for 4 kills this deck. But if a chalice for 4 ever resolves against this deck, you almost certainly either kept a hand you shouldn't have or you seriously misplayed the hand.