If I'm known around here for anything, it's intentionally leaving Ancestral Recall out of a blue deck. Or maybe making arguments that tend toward the unpopular and technical that take jabs at the lack of innovation in the format, the hubris of its "top" players, and the general focus on making a shiny (Beta, Foil, Asian) deck over an original or groundbreaking deck. So,
this "interesting" if ill-fated tyrade caught my eye. It's fairly misguided, and the few valid points is makes, it makes "wrong." So, removing expletives and focussing on arguments:
They are slow, they are fragile, they do not utilize the power of the best cards in the game.
Grim Long isn't slow. Nor (arguably) is Fish. Or even Stax. Decks that don't win outright immediately can still have already won. Draining a CC 4+ spell is approximately equivalent to winning, as is turn 1 Trinisphere, Meddling Mage on a win condition (with backup), or Hide/Extract.
I'm unaware of a less "fragile" format. Simply put, of all the formats, Vintage has the best hate. Hands down. We have Leyline, Wasteland, Balance, Moat (broken in half in any other format, sees almost no play here), Mana Drain (yes, it hoses large spells), Meddling Mage, True Believer, Jotun Grunt, Goblin Welder, Balance, Trinisphere... The list goes on. We can hate hands, graveyards, big spells, small spells, cards in play, creatures, artifacts, enchantments, lands. You name it, we have crushing hate against it. The key is the resource being hated. It's easy to refill your graveyard after dealing with hate against it. It's really really hard to recover from the tempo loss caused by Trinisphere, Mana Drain, or Balance. Don't even bother bringing T2 Gruul Aggro up against Moat. Modern Vintage decks often rely on their graveyards because it's the easiest resource to restock. I mean, you restock it by playing spells. Oh darn. How inconvenient. Decks in other formats only *feel* less fragile because the crushing hate isn't available. (His argument here gets picked up later, he really seems to want a single-minded format.)
As far as ignoring the "most powerful cards in the game..." Um...which ones? Balance and Mind Twist? I'll give you those. That said, discard/card advantage doesn't mean as much as it used to. While they're still some of the games best cards, they're not necessarily gamebreaking anymore. Balance is increasingly situational and Mind Twist too late-game. In my opinion, Extract, Hide//Seek, Rootwater Thief, and Jester's Cap are the only *obvious* major exclusions in Vintage today, and only because they can singlehandedly win the game for four mana or less.
First, there's slaver...sucks ass...even though it can do some damage with recurring slaver, it is dependant on welder, which is hated out in every deck.
It doesn't need to recus Slaver. Vintage decks involve choices. Some players make good choices, some make better choices, but one turn of making truly *awful* choices can seal the game. You don't need to feel Slaver lock to lose, you just need to Ancestral your opponent, Waste your own lands, fetch nothing, or Demonic Consultation for Gray Ogre. Also, by investing cards into hating the Slaver player's graveyard, you're opening yourself up to Tinker->DSC...and you won't be Welding out their DSC due to your own strategy.
Next there's gifts, which is graveyard loving and is vulnerable to the best graveyard hate card printed, leyline of the void.
I know that agreeing with this comment will make me even more unpopular, but Gifts is overrated. I can't agree with the *context* of this comment, but I feel safe agreeing with the content. Gifts has been slow to adapt to both increasingly powerful Fish and combo. That said, I would *not* rely on Leyline against Gifts. They're happy to wait 10 turns before bouncing it and comboing out. And that's *if* you survive the early Tinker->DSC option. Don't get me wrong, Gifts isn't *bad* by any stretch, but it's not what it once was. Maybe Tier 1.5-ish. Certainly no better, if not worse, than Fish.
Finally, there is stax....which is slow. It taps shit and makes you sac shit, but can't deal with "blamo, I win" decks.
You mean with Null Rod, Chalice, Trinisphere, In the Eye of Chaos, or Sphere of Resistance? Remember, IT Tendrils was a variation designed to get around the serious constraint that is Stax-based metas.
I would love to see some innovation in todays meta, but that seems to be asking too much. Certain tendrils decks can pack a punch if they can clear the path for a turn 1-2 win, but I don't see many decks posing a resilient threat, as even tendrils can fizzle horribly bad and lose after putzing out. Where and what are the resilient, consistent, powerhouses of T1 anymore?
It kind of sounds like you're asking for "The Deck," Long.dec, 4x Trini Stax, or maybe even the "good ole' days of Channel Ball?" I don't know about the rest of the community, but I like designing decks almost as much as I like playing with them. I don't really enjoy going, "Oh, I won the die roll, now lose to my mad skillz" or "I've only changed two cards in as many years, isn't this deck great!"
