I thought this was a very good article with many valid points and well worth the read.
I especially liked the fact that, unlike so many North-american articles before it, it didn't bring up the subject of proxies at all, although I realize now that might be because Wizard 'discouraged' any mention of it. I did not like the reference to baseball personalities (was it? I'm not even sure) which means nothing to a European like me, nor did I like the link to paying-members-only articles on SCG.
Still, a very nice article. Thanks.

On this interesting subject, why not let the master say a few words.



If you want to read the whole article, you can find it in The Duelist magazine NO.19 (October 1997).

Your build looks good but lacks persistence. I would personally run more draw and fewer Chalices/Rods. You seem to be assuming that those two hate components will slow your opponent down for long enough, or even win you the game all by themself. But IMO Oath can't play the long control game, not with 4 Orchards and a weak draw engine like yours. That's right, I consider Spirit tokens important. The Chalices and Rods are good for getting you some of the way, but against properly constructed decks they will slow you down just as much, and if you lose the first counter war you will run out of steam and not recover before it's too late.

You also seem to be assuming that Fish will not adapt to Sky Swallowers.

Well to begin with, Abyssal Nocturnus seems rather weak. It reminds me of Megrim, a classic that also says "if you can force your opponent to discard lots of cards (a condition that would often be a sign of the game going your way regardless) he also takes some damage". By itself, Megrim does nothing. Abyssal Nocturnus is by itself a 2/2 creature for 1BB, or close to nothing. For this to have serious impact you need to start it off with a ritual on turn one, otherwise it is likely to arrive too late to make a difference, since the cheap effective discard spells should obviously be played as fast as possible. The anti-synergy with Hypnotic Specter is horrible. I would attribute any limited success this decktype may have had lately to Confidant rather than to the Nocturnus.

I used to play Salvagers a lot and was thinking the same thing (about 10 seconds after I noticed the Tyrant from this thread). I am looking at ways to build a deck with 1 Salvagers and 1 Tyrant. But so far the list has issues and I am not sure a deck with 2 Tyrants wouldn't be better. Tyrant solves a lot of hate problems that the Salvagers decks had, but also introduces new challenges. First of all, Salvagers isn't a stormcombo deck and shouldn't be build like one. You really want to play only 1 Salvagers for the fastest possible clock, which implies that your deck should be build like an Oath deck (finding and protecting Oath is an issue). Time Walk must be included because of the synergy with Oath. On the other hand, random wins with a Tyrant (ie when you Oath up Tyrant first) require your deck to be buildt more like a stormcombo deck with lots of drawing power, Rebuild, Y.Will, etc.

These two directions seem different enough to be problematic.
I am curious to know more about your deck.

Did you try Flash of Insight? It's sort of broken in these types of decks. It also makes a nice drawing engine if you play Merchant Scroll and Cunning Wish anyway, because you can Scroll for Ancestral, rfg Ancestral with Flash and fetch Ancestral back later with Wish. Sound crazy but it works.

Sorry for going off topic with the Tyrant, maybe we could split the treads and make one for Tyrant?

Rootwater Thief/Extract CAN work, especially if u also play StP. But in UR it's not the best strategy. I agree with Gabethebabe that the best strategy for UR fish is A) keep Oath off the board (Annul), and B) if A doesn't work, keep Oath from triggering (Bombardment) and beat down with Mishra's. It's also entirely possible to race the Oath deck to 20 even after Oath triggers, especially if you have burn and/or stalling cards (ie Fire/Ice). If the Oath creatures now become untargetable as standard (SSS) then maybe its time to look at untargeted removal/stalling cards such as [card]Curfew[/card].

Reshape into Engineered Explosives?

On topic: yeah the blue/green monster is made for Oath.
EDIT: But why limit this to a discussion about a single sideboard slot in a deck that has been on the decline for a while? That seems unimaginative. This win condition is blue, untargetable, hardcastable, and non-Legendary.
Why not run 4 of these as the only creature in a more controllish version of Oath?

To be fair, I think your deck looks good.

But it has nothing to do with Fish.

If Fish is an idea then you got the wrong idea somehow. Fish is not equal to aggro-control. Fish does not run small but efficient creatures (in terms of power). Fish runs tiny creatures (ineffective in terms of power) that have either a disruptive function, or a utility function, typically as part of the deck's draw engine. Yes, Fish does have a draw engine, it is one of the defining features of Fish that it is aggro-control with a draw engine, often a strong one even by T1 measures. Fish does not come out strong in the beginning. It comes out weak, stalls the game over many turns, and finishes strong. There is a very good article on Fish here
http://www.themanadrain.com/forums/index.php?topic=25595.0

Please call your deck something else.

There is some truth in what you're saying about chalice, I guess your initial arguments about killing opposing chalices and welders didn't exactly help your case. Remember that in those fish decks chalice has synergy with both vial and standstill and can be cast for more than just 0 to win games. Viewed as a jewelry hate card alone and as 3-of it might still be worth considering, and in the rare event of an endgame you can cast it for X=3, shutting off will+tinker. The big question is, do this deck really need additional jewelry hate now that maze/monkey lock is back in place? The basic idea of removing strip effects for price of progress also is worthy of a second thought and I would say your deck is ready for testing, as soon as you add at least some of the 5 mana back you just removed. 14 permanent mana is not enough if you want my "expert" opinion.

If we can now put the Chalice issue to rest, and before we start discussing Null Rod as an additional weapon against fast mana, allow me to ask: Where is Gorilla Shaman? The fact that you can eat moxen and loti with it before they get a chance to use them (thx to Root Maze) is, like, THE POINT of this deck!?

from MAGIC: THE GATHERING® DCI FLOOR RULES
Effective September 20, 2005

So let's say (for the sake of this argument) that a number of future T1 events were made Team Constructed events with the above mentioned Unified Deck Constructed rules. Let's say 4-player teams. Then this apparently remedies the problem of availability and entry-level cost to Vintage in a very elegant way: Each 4-player team would need no more than 1 playset of the expensive power cards and other costly stables, so for each player the entry-level cost to T1 would be about 1/4 of what it is now. In addition, the ability of pure budget decks to compete on the highest level would be higher because fewer than 1 in 4 opponents would play with say, Ancestral Recall.

The game would still be Vintage in the sense that you (or rather, your team) would be able to play with every Magic card ever printed, but subject to the Unified Deck Construction rules. The question is, would this metagame be very similar to the T1 we know now from certain semi-powered metagames (Europe) or would it be something entirely (too) different from traditional Vintage? Many serious T1 players are already now organized in teams that design decks together, test together, split prizes and so on, and this has helped the development of the T1. But how different would this experience become for them, and for the average individual player?

Moriarty