Ouch. I'm often a little surprised at the precise contents of the B/R announcement, but this one actually hurts. I can't even think of what I'm going to play now. Almost every deck I've built for the last few years has had 4 Thirsts. Perhaps that's some evidence that it's a little too good, and it was working out well for me, but I wasn't playing the consensus top decks.

I'm not positive about this, but I think Thirst was the last unrestricted way to reliably draw more cards than you spent, at instant speed, for 3 mana or less (without losing a turn or giving the opponent a card, heh). I guess the next best thing is AK. It seems to me that in a powerful format like Type 1, at least one such unrestricted card should be available to you, if your deck wants it. I find a format more fun when the control decks are not all about nickel-and-diming the opponent until they drop the win.

I think my Welders are crying.

Nice report and nice list. I was just confused a little by this:
Tinker for Tezzeret? Or did you mean you opted not to cast Tezzeret? If he had been printed as an artifact, there would have been many fatally powerful tantric orgasms as Type 1 players released their pent-up expectations for that one card that does everything and works with everything in their decks.

I'm not sure what sounded like an assumption, and no, I don't have a bloody knife or an article dated 1993 for evidence. I only have my own recollection, and was just clarifying why it was logical at the time. I guess to be precise, I started in 1994, so I took a small liberty with the year. I doubt the accepted interpretation of Time Vault changed much in that time (if anything, it probably solidified), as the wording hadn't changed.

Anyway, while it's true that by today's standards there are multiple possible interpretations of Time Vault's original wording, back then, consensus interpretation was often quite important, as the cards didn't give complete answers. I'm sure some players convinced their opponents that they could untap Time Vault whenever they wanted, but that was just the kind of thing that could keep them from getting invited back to the play group. It'd get them the dreaded "rules lawyer" label, which really meant "rules twister," and isn't much of an insult anymore. I expect if you find more people who remember how it was played, they'll support the current wording.

I'd say the unfortunate (though not very important) thing, if you want cards to work like they did in 1993, is that Mana Vault can't be templated like Time Vault without making it messier. As mentioned above, what happened then was that you applied the effect as you were about to untap. At the start of your turn, you could choose to skip the whole turn to untap your Time Vault. You can see why it worked this way: the untap option is worded as a clarification about what you need to do if you want to avoid the "doesn't untap normally." Let's not forget that there was very little rigor in the rules in those days. Hell, for a while we played Wall of Water and Wall of Fire as if the +1/+0 was permanent, because the ones we had (Revised) didn't say whether it went away at the end of the turn. They got huge!

At a glance, it seems like you might get a free untap, but that presumes that somehow you untap everything else before you make the choice about Time Vault, and you'd be regarded as a pretty dubious player if you tried to argue that. What happens when you skip your turn at the exact same time as you're trying to untap? The common sense of the time said you didn't untap. Oddly enough, as far as I know, the opposite was true for Mana Vault, because why wouldn't you be able to tap the lands you're untapping to help untap the Mana Vault? The turn's not over, so they would have untapped.

With the current Oracle wording, Time Vault now works the way it was (sensibly) interpreted when printed - and the original interpretation, while considered ban-worthy, was not considered to be inconsistent with the rules. I think that's as close as you can get to "original intent" without undue speculation and trusting fuzzy memories.