Black/Blue

[wisknudde]

Hello everybody,

This is my first attempt in making a Vintage deck at all, I`m quite fond of the combination of Black and Blue. This deck might seem like a tendrildeck, but unfortunately I lack the funds to get the power. So please if you would post suggestions here do keep that in mind

I have been thinking of adding Tendrils, but I`m afraid that the deck is a tad too slow for tendrils to have even an impact.

Lands:
4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Mire
5x Island
3x Swamp
1x Strip Mine
1x Tolarian Academy
(maybe adding wastelands?)

Spells
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x Counterspell
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Tinker
4x Duress
1x Yawgmoth`s Will
1x Yawgmoth`s Bargain
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Tutor

Creatures
3x Juggernaut
1x Darksteel Colossus
1x Old man of the sea (maybe adding more?)
2x Ambassador Laquatius
2x Masticore

Artifacts
1x Sol Ring
1x Mana Vault
1x Mox Diamond (though, I`m not fond of it)
1x Lion`s eye Diamond
1x Candeladebra of Tawnos
1x Thran Turbine
1x Memory Jar

56 Cards, Slot for 4 more cards

SB:
4x Hydroblast (quite a lot of red decks here)
4x Dodecapod
3x Choke

I hope you guys will be gentle with my first time 

[silvernail]

Well this isnt a bad attempt for a first deck. The most important consideration you have is what are the other people in your area playing. That will let you decide what cards work best for you. Since i dont know that ill work from a general point of view.

4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Mire
5x Island
3x Swamp
1x Strip Mine
1x Tolarian Academy
4x Wasteland

Spells
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x Counterspell(change this to mana leak or mana drain if you can)
2x Misdirection
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Tinker
4x Duress
1x Yawgmoth`s Will
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Tutor

Creatures
4x Phyrexian Negator
1x Darksteel Colossus
3x Old man of the sea

Artifacts
1x Sol Ring
1x Mana Vault
1x Mox Diamond (though, I`m not fond of it)
1x Mana Crypt
3 Sensei's Divining Top

your deck's goal is to cast something and protect it for the win. Misdirections help win counter wars or to deflect some kind of destruction spell(creature damage or artitfact etc). masticore an ambasador are pretty bad in the current metagame because they are too slow, old men will help more.

the subpar thran turbine and the comborific memory jar dont fit in a deck like this and neither does yawgmoths baragin so i changed them for more tinker targets in Sensei's Divining Top. They help find cards and can be tinkered. Also note that you can arrange top 3 cards then draw that card , so you can easliy find counterspells.

On the note of counterspell, with the mana base the deck has, double blue might not happen fast so mana leak would be better for you.

currently type 1 at large relys on artifacts for speed and control. This means you'll want soemthing like Energy Flux in your sideboard.Other good choices might be toromods crypts, Coffin Purge, Echoing Truth, Arcane Labrotory,Skeletal Scrying and a millon other things depending on what you expect to see.

all in all not a bad first deck, but just remeber that type 1 is all about winning and winning fast (ok there are some decks that do other things but mmostly this is true). Your goal is to slow your opponent just a bit using duress and or wasteland effects then play Negator or tinker/collossus and protect it for a win. Good Luck young wizard

[BigMac]

Silvernail has some solid points. For the creaturbase you could consider other creatures as well. Instead of the negators you could consider Juzam Djinn, but as that is not really a budget card grinning demon is a very nice second choice in my oppinion. It puts your opponent on a clock as well as negator but in my oppinion the draw backs are less considering all the red damage spells out there.

As a replacement for your mox diamond you could consider a lotus petal. It is not nearly as powerfull but you can have a counterspell on line turn 1 and with a land drop always have that counterspell mana. I know you can only use is once but it is only to get past the first turn without problems.

Another creature you may want to take into consideration is a triskelion. It is a good creature to tinker in when you have a goblin welder against you. Perhaps as a sideboard slot but definitely a critter to remember.

For your sideboard, considering there are a lot of red decks, consider chill to be a very good way to slow down your opponent.

Another creature for your sideboard is bane of the living. It is a very nice creature to play versus creature decks as it can wipe most little critters at once.

Where to put them all is up to you but look them up and try and figure out how you can use them in your main deck or in your sideboard.

Sideboard cards you can consider are propaganda, back to basics, energy flux, chill, some bounce spells, mutilate, arcane laboratory and perhaps hydroblast. Most importantly try and run something to bounce artifacts.

Perhaps you can consider to run 1 or 2 cunning wish in your main to get a somewhat more flexible deck with sideboard. as targets you can think of diabolic edict, rebuild, hurkyl's recall and chain of vapor. Even capsize could be a nice card for that. Try to find a nice mix of cards usefull to your strategy.

have fun puzzling it all together and good luck.

[jackpot]

This deck has a lot of potential. I'd play more pressure and more disruption making it an aggro control deck. in theory aggro control beats plain old control. Cards like recoil would be a nice trick for this deck. You bounce their fatty and they have to discard a card for instance. Mana leak should be in unless you add some blue sources. I think that a few Skeletal scryings would be great for this deck. The 3 Divining tops suggested are too many in my opinioin. Those could be more card drawing. Thirst for knowledge or you could add intuition/Accumulated knowledge. That's really what the deck needs if you want to beat the other control decks. POwder Keg would be great in here as well. So here's the ammended list:

4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Mire
5x Island
3x Swamp
1x Strip Mine
1x Tolarian Academy
4x Wasteland

Spells
3x Thirst for knowledge
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x mana leak
1x recoil-probably more-these are never a dead card
1 skeletal scrying
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Tinker
4x Duress
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Tutor

Creatures
4x Phyrexian Negator
1x Darksteel Colossus
3x Powder keg
2 Grinning Demon-more pressure
Artifacts
1x Sol Ring
1x Mana Vault
1x Mox Diamond (though, I`m not fond of it)
1x Mana Crypt
 
with all the added pressure a person on a buget may look into Undermine. Attack for 5 and then undermine their spell. That hurts. You should probably add some more blue if you go that way.

[silvernail]

4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Mire
5x Island
3x Swamp
1x Strip Mine
1x Tolarian Academy
4x Wasteland

Spells
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x Counterspell(change this to mana leak or mana drain if you can)
3x Duress
2x Misdirection
2X Cunning Wish
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Tinker
1x Yawgmoth`s Will
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Tutor

Creatures
4x Phyrexian Negator
1x Darksteel Colossus
3x Old man of the sea

Artifacts
1x Sol Ring
1x Mana Vault
1x Mox Diamond
1x Mana Crypt
2x Sensei's Divining Top

Well some of the other posters have made notes about red decks, and quiet frankly that is meta game dependant, in which case Negators are horrible and Serendib Efreet might be a better 3 cost creature choice. Grinning Demon is bad because he costs 2 black mana and your counter magic cost 2 blue mana, you dont want to have mana issues and demon would give you that.

 The same is true of Undermine, it costs 3 colored mana , wait stop never mind that it COSTS 3 MANA!!!  Your counterspells should all cost 0 1 or 2 mana. Jackpot suggests this for a buget player but mana leak is 1000% better in that case because it costs 2 mana and only one is colored.

One thing jackpot suggested was Powder Keg which isnt a bad idea in a non creature based enviroment you could sub them for old men, but a newer card, Engineered Explosives is arguably better and definatly faster than Keg.

about your sideboad, wish targets are always good to have but specialize the board to your metagame, whereas one poster said red decks are everywhere, the only red cards i ever see are goblin welder, red blast and rack and ruin, none of this burn spell stuff he suggests. So his advice may not work for you and mine might not as well. If you want help with a board let us know what kind of decks your opponents often play.

[LordHomerCat]

Just something small, Polluted Mire = Polluted Delta (ONS B/U Fetchland)?  If so, good.  If not... Well, it should be. 

Why so many Basic Swamps anyway?  I can't imagine you ever would need more than 1, maybe 2 at a time, with the 4 underground seas and all.  You don't have any double black (except grinning demon, tho I think you'd be better off with some of the other suggestions), so when would you ever want more than 1 swamp on the board?  Tolarian Academy also seems like it would be quite underwhelming with like 6 artifacts in the whole deck, and no moxen (save diamond), I'm not so sure it belongs in here.  Maybe go up to 6 or so fetches, so you have 4 Delta, 2 Strand, 4 UG Sea, 4 Wasteland, 1 Strip Mine, 1 Swamp, 5-6 Island, (1 LOA/1 Boseiju/1 more Island) to make 22 land as before.  That would make your brainstorms better, and would probably be easier to get up Counterspell (or preferably Mana Leak) mana, and not draw a ton of basic swamps that don't really do much.  In addition, thats 11 sources of black for your duress turn1, same as now. 

As for the artifacts, you probably need at least Sol Ring, Mana Vault, and Mana Crypt to power the tinker plan (I assume you don't have any Moxen or else you would have listed them), and Mox Diamond is kinda so-so, keep it if its played well and otherwise, just drop it, no big loss. 

Skeletal Scrying is less than impressive without any drains, and Thirst is also pretty bad with no moxes or artifact men to toss out.  Intuition-AK seems like a viable draw engine, although also harder to power without Mana Drain, its not nearly as mana-intensive all at once like scrying can be.  AK would also be good with the YawgWill, which currently can just let you play a land, duress, and brainstorm once or twice, and at best cast a tutor.  That would give you some of that explosive power (draw 4, draw 3, etc.) to really abuse it in here.  Maybe dropping the Old Men or Negators (Those guys are bad against burn decks) and those cunning wishes (and maybe the tops) in that last list for 2-3 Intuition and 4 AK would work, although I'm not sure I like going to so few artifacts in a deck built to tinker in the DSC, so I'd be wary of cutting all the tops (anyone have a good estimate of the minimum number of cards required to run tinker, like the 16-17 for FOW range?). 

Those would be my suggestions, if you can give us an idea of what kinda metagame, it would help tweak the deck a lot (like, fully powered Stax, goblin sligh, type 2 Tooth and Nail, etc.).  Good luck.

[wisknudde]

First off, I`d like to thank everybody who posted their thoughts. It is very much appreciated
I`m going tp plunge myself in the world of vintage, and (after reading most topics here) I made that deck up. I have been thinking of adding the negators and misdirections. Also have I read the replies concerning the sideboard. I don`t have a clue yet what kind of metagame we have in holland (as I unfortunately never participated in vintage tournaments, yet )

Here is the current deck (after reading your suggestions)

Lands:
4x Underground Sea
4x Polluted Delta (sorry my bad for the wrong spelling)
2x Flooded strand
5x Island
1x Swamp
1x Strip Mine
1x Tolarian Academy
4x Wasteland

Spells
4x Brainstorm
4x Force of Will
4x mana leak
3x Duress
2x Intuition
4x Accumulated Knowlegde
3x Misdirection
1x Mystical Tutor
1x Tinker
1x Yawgmoth`s Will
1x Vampiric Tutor
1x Demonic Tutor

Creatures
4x Phyrexian Negator/Serendib efreet (dependant
1x Darksteel Colossus

Artifacts
1x Sol Ring
1x Mana Vault
1x Lotus Petal
1x Mana Crypt

Sideboard cards :
(When I am a tad more familiar with my metagame I`ll adjust it to the enviroment. )

Hurkyl`s recall
Dodecapod (superb card against discare decks)
Energy Flux
Hydroblast
diabolic edict
Chill


So far, the decklist suggests (to me) that it`s all about drawing cards, getting a negator out and protect it with Misdirections, The DSC/Tinker combo is still nice, But I`m afraid it`ll be too slow for it, as with the current format I`ll only have 4 artifacts to tinker with even. Aren`t juggernauts a better idea instead of the negaters? seeing that they could be tinkered with and still pack a nice punch.

[jackpot]

If you go with the Juggernauts then you may as well cut out the black altogether and add in more artifact mana. Then you can add some red for Welders, and then its nt the deck you wanted to play in the first place. Besides Negators in a control deck is a very cool idea. It's very suprising to see Negators in the main deck in control. The Juggernauts are one mana more to cast and can be bolted for instance. I'm definately against the DSC/Tinker combo in a deck like this. Those could be two more cheap and aggressive creatures. Benthic Djinn is a 5/3 islandwalker from Mirage. it costs 2BU. That's pretty good for this deck and in T1 almost every deck except goblins has some kind of island. The other cheap and aggressive black creatures basically suck. Phyrexin Scuta is kind of good, but paying 3 life when you kick it may be bad. It's also only B3 to play, which is nice in a deck like this. 

[silvernail]

Negator is generally your best bet becasue his says 5/5 trample, juggernaught doesnt say that. Negator hates triskeilion which is probably going to be your worst fear in current type 1.If some one does trike your negator you sac him as the first permant you have to sac and they cant make you lose more permants.

Juggernaut also is removalble via artifact destruction which is running around alot in type 1 currently( thanks to workshop and stax decks), oh and he costs 4.

Morphling or serendib efreet are your best bets if negator ends up being bad for you.

[silencebringer]

This is looking an awful lot lot a tog deck.... why not make the leap?

[jackpot]

Good point. I think this player is on a buget and Tog is only an uncommon after all...

[silvernail]

well rationally speaking , most tog decks use wish to get berserk, which means budget player that doesnt apepar to have access to proxies cant run this configuration. also tog decks need speed, ala moxes which a budget player doesnt have access to. Also the deck changes to a more combo based deck if you run togs over negator because your trying to combo draw into a big fatal tog instead of just controlling the game and or protecting negator.

they really are two differnt kinds of decks even though the change is approxamatly do able with a 4 card switch.