Wait...so the basis for believing in this "Eternal Masters" set is some statements from the temp account of some guy on reddit who "leaked" that Splinter Twin and Summer Bloom would be banned?

And he claims he has this information because he overheard two vendors talking about it at a GP?

First off, I don't even play modern and I could have told you the Amulet Bloom deck was getting a ban.  You almost couldn't help hearing about how broken it was, how it wins too early, etc. No inside information needed.

Twin I take it was less expected, but again, I don't even play modern and I overhear complaints enough to know that it's good and some people don't like it. Doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable claim to throw out there if you're just looking to stir things up (this is the internet after all).

Then, when it turns out these two things are true (which really came down to a near sure thing and a reasonable guess), all the sudden the rest of this guy's story has some credence?

I mean, if you think some vendors at a GP loudly discussing inside information like that is a high probability event then sure. Otherwise I'm not sure this really sways me much.

Probability anyone on the Internet correctly guesses the next cards to be banned in modern ~= 100%
Probability that someone who makes guesses about the modern banlist has also made other speculative statements that may be in need of some "evidence": roughly 100%

Compared to the probability that wizards leaked the existence of Eternal Masters to vendors, times the probability that those vendors would loudly discuss said information at a GP for this guy to overhear, times the probability that this guy then decides to leak it on reddit: idk but I'll take the other one.

I'm not a store owner, but if I was, I feel like I would have pretty much no choice but to do the same. Losing WPN status would be a death sentence to a lot of stores, and I don't think I'd be willing to risk my livelihood on what may or may not be a "hint, hint, wink, wink" type policy.  Kudos to the store owners out there braver than me, but I feel like for a good number of LGSs this pretty much forces them to comply or risk losing their store.

This is the most frustrating thing about this decision for me personally. I can't speak for everyone but at least in my area the people who own fully powered Vintage decks are few and far between, but there are enough people that can play ~15 proxy or so that events can be organized regularly. If this rule is actually enforced, the number of Vintage events will almost certainly plummet, since most of those 15 proxy players can't/won't shell out the money to "finish" their decks. That means even people that own fully powered decks are going to get to play less and honestly I think a lot of people will think very seriously about selling off some or all of their collections. Many just aren't interested in owning a stack of $1000 pieces of cardboard that you never get to play with.

To me it is also a clear indication of the level of respect/support Wizards has for the eternal formats. I can't really imagine they think this will help the Legacy/Vintage scene in any way. I hate to be "that guy" but this does seem like a pretty clear signal that they want you to play Standard/Modern/Limited and they are willing to actively sabotage attempts to do anything else.

You are correct that Ponder "digs deeper" by ~ one card (slightly less since you could draw one of the cards you shuffled back), but by shuffling those blanks back into your deck you dilute the quality of subsequent draws. If you scry them to the bottom they stay there until you shuffle again so even if you miss on that 3rd card off the cantrips you know your next draw won't be one that you bottomed.

That being said, I haven't actually mathed any of this out to see how relevant it is -- I'm just explaining the reasoning I was given.  Honestly I think it's probably close to irrelevant whether you run 3/1 Preordain/Ponder vs. just 4 Preordain.  Personally I feel like I'd try to find room to run all 5 but I have seen several Fenton Oath style lists with no Ponder so maybe I'm missing something.

My understanding of the reasoning for Preordain over Ponder in Oath was that the nature of the combo made the ability to bottom a blank more valuable than setting up your next few draws. If you already have Oath in play but you really need Orchard for instance, scrying those extra Oaths, Show and Tells, etc. to the bottom is probably better than shuffling them back into your deck and drawing a random card.

This is the deal breaker for me as well. If I could even get it working on OSX that would be enough. I'm not going to go out and get a copy of windows just to run MTGO though...

Seems WOTC dropped the ball on this one a bit. I mean it's 2016 and you only have a (buggy) Windows version? Meanwhile I'm pretty sure I saw Hearthstone running on an iPad the other day..

Sure, they can *ask* and perhaps incentivize people to do what they want. *Forcing* people to do (or not do) something turns out to be quite a bit harder. Hopefully wizards is aware of this and is just trying to bandaid the situation while they figure out a better solution. For instance, they might be trying to figure out how to design a standard format that is "unsolvable" in a practical sense -- which obviously might take some time.

Of course, they might also just think they can tell people to stop and it will work. Who knows? Maybe this time...

I don't mean to be down on Dromoka, but it's a one-of in a deck with no tutors or other way of finding it outside of the usual draw spells. Let's be honest, you could replace it with an uno card and the deck would still work just fine because the shell is solid.  I can see how it could be an integral part of something like the salvagers oath deck (since oath lets you pseudo-tutor for it) but in this case it's just a fun-of finisher as far as I can tell.

Again, I'm not trying to trash the card (windmilling 6 drop dragons in vintage is sweet no matter what anyone says), but I do think it's important to realize the difference between a critical component (say Sylvan Library) and a flex slot / finisher. 

Disclaimer: I didn't build the deck and will defer to Brian, Rich, etc. if they feel I'm way off here. 

Err...so you're main decking 4 Burning Wish and your wish board contains Thoughtseize, Void Snare, Empty, and Tendrils? And you're also running 4 Dark Petition? Don't take this the wrong way but...have you ever played Vintage storm before?

*golf clap*

I mean...you can count Mentor as whatever you want but he did specifically say "Dark Ritual combo" which pretty clearly does not include the Gush-based Mentor lists (seeing as they rarely run black at all much less Dark Ritual).

I hesitate to make statements like "Deck A beats Deck B" but I will say that in my experience both Doomsday and various straight up count-to-9-then-slam-drills decks seem to do pretty well against the Gush-based Mentor deck. 

Doomsday can go toe-to-toe with card draw / disruption and either go off in your face if the coast is clear or just slow roll until you commit to a Mentor and then untap and win before you ever get a chance to attack with your tokens.

The faster storm decks can just overwhelm your counters with bombs / defense grid / discard and as the Mentor player you are pretty much on your heels for the first few turns until they brick or otherwise run out of gas. If you make it this far you can actually start getting your draw engine online but you still have to play pretty tight and hope you have the fluster/misstep/force when you need it since they can always peel a bomb and just kill you if you drop your guard. Honestly, this matchup is kind of hard for me to judge.  There is a lot of variance at work and of course when I get blown out I like to chalk it up to that. But given that rituals have been kind of dormant for a while it wouldn't surprise me if someone was able to brew up a more consistent build that could be a real contender. 

Tl;dr maybe looking at "strategies to answer Mentor" is a better idea than focusing on "cards to answer Mentor".  I know I'm not the first one to say this (OP mentions it as "Option 2") but this thread does seem to have pretty much exhausted the "card" approach and it seems like the "strategy" approach is getting hand-waved away a bit more than it should.

I'm not going to make any absolute statements like "no force in storm ever" but I will say I have tested it quite a bit and my experience has been:

1) It weakens your blue matchup significantly -- to the point that it honestly might not even be a positive matchup anymore. You are not going to Force your threats through against decks packed with pyroblasts, missteps, etc. Hopefully I don't need to explain that any further.

2) It doesn't help the shops matchup as much as you might think. Ok, they had a t1 golem and you forced it pitching one of the other non-mana cards in your hand. Now what? Sure, sometimes you can win with the remaining 5 or draw into a win but I don't think "nut draw my opponent" really counts as a valid anti-shops plan

3) It requires you to run enough blue cards to support force, some of which may not be totally optimal in terms of advancing your primary gameplan. If you're running quad laser preordain, missteps, etc...maybe try cutting the rituals for gushes and the tendrils/bargain/necro for mentors and see if that doesn't work out a bit better.

I could go on but I have to run to work and I think the point should be clear enough. You are playing ritual storm. You WILL get blown out by a good shops draw a lot of the time. There's no real fixing that. Luckily, shops doesn't always draw the nuts and not everyone plays shops. Think about how you're winning *those* games and I think you'll see why Force might not be good here.

Fair point, but most Mentor decks I've seen run 1-2 copies of Stony Silence if they run it at all (due to tension with their own moxen).  If you're planning to point 10+ drills at their face on turn 2-3, the chances that they draw and resolve one of those copies before that is, shall we say, unlikely at best.

Also, this is still a thing:



Full disclosure: I spam cantrips and dudes that spit out dudes just like everyone else.  Not so much because Mentor is insane but because the Tiny Jace + Gush + Dack draw engine is insane.  

The only problem is, that draw engine doesn't really get insane until about turn 3-4 when you can fire off Gush, activate Tiny Jace, etc.  The longer the game goes, the more you can capitalize on the virtual card advantage created by cutting lands/moxen for cantrips, etc.  If you've been playing Gush decks for a while, you know what I'm talking about.

Removal isn't what terrifies me when I'm on Mentor.  Neither is Tinker/BSC/Vault/Key.  What terrifies me is:

a) Decks that are going to force me to empty most of my hand on turns 1-3 just trying to stay alive (Storm, Belcher, etc.).

b) Decks that can go toe-to-toe on countermagic / card draw, but can go over the top and win through a resolved Mentor (ala Doomsday).

c) Brian Kelly jamming highly advanced technology that I cannot reasonably expect to be prepared for (e.g. Dromoka, Oath -> Magus of the Moat, running less than a playset of Force of Will, etc.)

First off I want to say thanks for the article!  Personally I really enjoy "concept" articles like this that go a bit deeper than the usual "here's some winning decklists...seems good" type of deal.

That being said, I'm not quite sure that finding the best Mentor removal spell is the way to beat a Mentor deck.  As you mention in the article, all the answers are situational (Sudden Shock kills Mentor but not the tokens, Supreme Verdict costs 4, etc.).  If your opponent has some threat diversity, that compounds the problem even further (Dismember is not exactly insane against Dromoka for instance).  Of course that's not even getting into the issue of those cards being dead in other matchups, taking up sideboard slots, etc.

I'm not denying the Mentor deck is strong but...have we forgotten the most tried-and-true Vintage removal package of them all?



Win now.  Ignore the dudes.  

They're for the shops matchup.  A lot of older lists had additional basics in the board for the shops matchup.  I think replacing them with Waste/Strip makes sense in this case since most DP lists already have 2-3 basics maindeck and boarding in more probably wouldn't do much.  They might have some utility against dredge but personally I find the best strategy against Dredge is to just race them -- I don't think blowing up their Bazaars/Depths is really want to be when you're playing Storm combo.

 

Does it?  It turns on all their removal and makes their dudes more relevant since they can block your Mentor.  Things like Flusterstorm, Misstep, etc. might be marginally worse but you're still playing Storm -- those are good against your no matter what your win condition is.  The only matchup I can think of that it might improve is Shops, but at least in the testing I did, it seemed to actually make that matchup worse since I was more likely to whiff after bouncing their team.

So I guess my real question is: what matchups does adding Mentor improve?

What I meant to imply was that most decks I see these days don't tend to be going "broken" in the traditional sense -- and that's the sense where a card CDA counterspell makes the most sense (IMO).  If you just want to protect your own win through, I think there are probably better options (Flusterstorm, Defense Grid, Duress, etc.).

Overall I think we agree -- it's a meta call.  I'm just saying I think the meta right now (at least my meta anyway) seems to be in such a position that Force of Will might not need be an automatic 4-of, especially in decks like ritual storm.

Why do you think the best deck should have 4 Force of Wills?  

Seems to me that the most broken thing going on in most Vintage matches is Gush decks spamming cantrips and draw spells until they finally find a dude that spits out enough other dudes to attack for the win on turn 8.  I'm probably not using Force on a Preordain or Gush, and by the time they cast Mentor I'm probably so far down on cards that I'd lose the counter war over Mentor anyway...and they might run Cavern.  

Don't get me wrong, I've been starting every decklist with 4 Force of Will and all the nice blue restricted spells for years now...I guess I'm just wondering if maybe that's no longer a valid strategy.

It seems like the threats are so varied these days (Mentor, Vault+Key, Robots, etc.), maybe it would be better to just win before they matter?

For the record, here's my current "win before it matters" list (a work in progress):

Mana (28):
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
2 Mox Opal
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Black Lotus
1 Lion's Eye Diamond
1 Sol Ring
1 Lotus Petal
4 Dark Ritual

3 Polluted Delta
2 Scalding Tarn
1 Badlands
1 Underground Sea
1 Volcanic Island
1 Island
1 Swamp
1 Tolarian Academy

Bombs (9):
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
1 Necropotence
1 Tinker
1 Memory Jar
1 Mind's Desire
1 Timetwister
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Windfall

Tutors (5):
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Imperial Seal
1 Dark Petition

Draw (10):
4 Gitaxian Probe
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Ponder
1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Sensei's Divining Top

Protection (7):
3 Duress
2 Defense Grid
1 Hurkyl's Recall
1 Chain of Vapor

Win (1):
1 Tendrils of Agony

SB: 1 Defense Grid
SB: 2 Hurkyl's Recall
SB: 2 Island
SB: 2 Rebuild
SB: 1 Swamp
SB: 3 Ingot Chewer
SB: 2 Flusterstorm
SB: 1 Empty the Warrens
SB: 1 Thoughtseize

Double post

I've tried Mentor in storm and found it...kind of pointless to be honest.  Perhaps it depends on your build?  Maybe if you're playing a slower deck that plans to win on turn 3-4 but in that case...why aren't you just playing Doomsday or Gush Storm?

If we're talking about faster decks, for 3cmc I could be casting:

Necropotence
Tinker
Wheel of Fortune
Timetwister
Windfall
Yawgmoth's Will

Those all seem more likely to win the game on the spot than Mentor does, not to mention the red splash for Wheel also gives you access to things like Ingot Chewer which IMO is still very helpful for the shops matchup to prevent getting sphered into oblivion before you can find/cast your bounce spell.

Hey guys,

Long time lurker, short time poster here.  I started playing around Urza's block and quit around the time Mirrodin came out.  I started back about 2 years ago or so with Legacy and have slowly moved into Vintage which I now play pretty much exclusively.  I test mostly on cockatrice and play live events the few times a year I get the chance.  I've been thinking about buying into MTGO but I'm still having trouble justifying dropping $1k on digital cards to myself...

Likes: Tendrils of Agony, Yawgmoth's Will

Dislikes: Dudes that spit out dudes, the combat step