You really seem to hate things that aren't yawgwill, as well as mention a lot of unlikely (though hardly unheard of) situations.
Not quite, but I can understand how you might be arriving that idea.
The fact is that Yawgmoth's Will is undoubtedly the most powerful card in the format (and, by extension, the most powerful card in Magic's history) and no deck better abuses it in my opinion than Pitch Long. The most straightforward and commonplace Turn 1 and Turn 2 Long kills are going to involve some combination of Rituals and/or Black Lotus, maybe a draw spell/Brainstorm, then a Tutor, Yawgmoth's Will, reiteration of those earlier steps, and then a lethal Tendrils. For show you can even Hurkyl's Recall yourself and beef the storm up to 12-15. Will is the strongest, easiest, cheapest, and most low-risk murder weapon available for Pitch Long.
After months of encounters with Pitch Long, if I had to rate that deck's business spells in terms of efficacy and return on investment, I would begin with Yawgmoth's Will, followed by Necropotence, Tinker, Yawgmoth's Bargain, Mind's Desire, Timetwister, hardcast Jar, Rebuild/Hurkyl's/Chain of Vapor, and (if included) Windfall. Because they are all such high-powered cards, their relative power is mercurial, but I've put them in this order for the following reasons: The cards closer to the top of that list either vest more control in the pilot's hands or reliably generate mana->card->mana flow during the turn which they are resolved (notwithstanding Necropotence which earns its place by providing superior card selection). Towards the end of the list, the business spells and their success depend more on random chance/probability (thus depriving the pilot of some control), involve greater overall risks, and have more prohibitive prerequisites to being played, like six mana instead of three, or requiring a certain quantity of artifacts in play. While Pitch Long produces mana at an alarmingly fast rate, there's no denying that it's easier to find 2B than 4BB.
That given, anything other than Tutor->Will is probably going to give a deck like Fish an extra turn to pump that Vial, lay a Crypt, etc. And I think that the most reliable way of comboing out game 1 against one or more nuisance creatures would be with Yawgmoth's Will, because it enables you to easily use Chain of Vapor twice.
Like MoxLotus said, your tutors are also bombs... not because they fetch tendrils, but because they fetch anything.
I think this is a semantic point regarding what constitutes a "bomb." I've characterized tutors as "bomb-fetchers" because it seems to me that is exactly what they are used for. However, I can see how they might be considered bombs themselves because they usher in the business spells that end the game. Bomb or bomb-fetcher? Either way seems plausible to me.
It's not only reasonable, but often a fantastic play, to resolve more than one large business spell in a turn. Finding and playing Mind's Desire costs only 2 more mana (colour issues aside) than finding and resolving Tendrils... do so at 7-8 storm under Yawgwill and suddenly the Children look much easier to blow past. Pop a Jar and lead it into Will (draw 7 cards isn't draw 7 cards then stop forever!). And I can hardly believe you included Bargain there... "draw 15 cards" is as absurd as it sounds.
Yes, it is often a good play to resolve more than one business spell during a Pitch Long turn. I haven't denied that or suggested anything to the contrary. The lone problem I see with Bargain v. a Mage on Tendrils, if you build up storm powering out the Bargain intending to win that turn (say, for instance, Underground Sea, Mox Ruby, Cabal Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Black Lotus for UUU -> Bargain with U or B floating), then with a spent Lotus, you risk running into a mana bind if you don't draw into the right combination of accelerators (Petal, Sapphire, Jet, Cabal Ritual, etc.). While you may have enough cards and mana to tutor up Will or a comparable bomb and Tendrils out for the win, you'll be cutting it close squeezing that extra mana-mileage out to both do that and bounce (and/or tutor for the bounce) on Mage. It's certainly possible that a good player could pull it off, but he/she will be at the mercy of random chance to get the right cards. It wouldn't be the first time I've seen an expert Pitch Long player Bargain him/herself down to 2 or 1 and then concede in frustration. I will acknowledge though that post-sideboard, this is a lot easier with Massacre if the Fish player has exposed a Tundra (I try not to).
An understated point of the long-fish match, which indeed I barely understood myself until I picked up a fish build myself, is although Fish runs as many force of will as CS (which already isn't enough) it does not draw cards in the early stages of the game, or often at all. Which means it has less force of will than CS after turn 1 or 2.
This is an intriguing comparison. I am well aware that Pitch Long generally devours Control Slaver. However, Control Slaver lacks the redundant early game hate that makes Fish, including this Vial build, better equipped to bridle Pitch Long. Excepting Library of Alexandria, its draw spells are (pricy) one-shot deals and it's undeniable that however able Pitch Long may be to bounce critters and go for the kill, a Meddling Mage or True Believer is a lot more of a hassle than a Goblin Welder. You should never have to bounce Welder to win. Even Colossus gives you ample time to combo out. Mana Drain should come online no earlier than Vial @ 1. There's about as much chance of you getting Slavered on turn three as there is for me to have a Mage on Tendrils, Voidmage Prodigy, and Vial @ 2 on the table by the same time.
I share a lot of random singletons with recent Slaver builds like 1 Library of Alexandria, 1 Strip Mine, and 1 maindeck Tormod's Crypt (which after a lot of thought, I upped to 2 in the maindeck at the expense of 1 Voidmage). But where Slaver has four Mana Drains, I run four Vials, four Children, four Meddlings, and two Voidmages. They run Thirst for Knowledge; I run Dark Confidant and Ninja. They have Triskelion; I have Jotun Grunt. They can Echoing Truth/CoV a hardcast "pass the turn" Memory Jar and I can Stern Proctor it. Their non-combo threats (Trisk, etc.) clog up their hand while mine (Gilded Drake, Waterfront Bouncer) can pitch to FoW without regret. Slaver has a few tutors which I lack for reasons explained in the initial post. And for recursion, if Slaver's resolving Will, then either it's an "emergency Will" or it's the seventh turn and you've already been Slaved two times and lost. By contrast, I've had Oath of Ghouls online in the early/mid game in multiple Long match-ups (particularly post-sideboard) bringing back Mages, Believers, Voidmages, Children, etc.
For all those reasons, I would say that, like most other Fish builds, I enjoy a better Pitch-Long match-up than Control Slaver. Now as for the match between Vial Fish and Slaver itself, that's another story. Control Slaver is the most difficult "big Drain" deck to handle because, unlike its more arrogant cousin Gifts, Slaver engages the board and knows how to subjugate it.
I'm perfectly capable of playing Pitch Long like it's Grim Long and just throwing bombs around until one sticks, and that will happen VERY fast against your build.
What can I say but "don't knock it till you've tried it."
It's a lot easier to sneak a tendrils for 12 through a soft lock than it is to power one through for 18.
Good point, the life loss is relevant. But if I'm under 14 life ((give or take a few points based on a revealed FoW) due to a Dark Confidant, we would probably be talking about the fourth or fifth turn here . If I've been drawing a minimum of 2 cards for the last three or four turns and am still alive, I wouldn't be so sure things are going well for the Pitch Long player. At any rate, the risk of life loss is well worth having a personal 2/1 Howling Mine in any match-up.
I'm interested in hearing about how the deck plays against things that aren't long. This thread is unduely tunnel visioned.
Thanks for your interest. I will outline how things stand now and talk about some match-ups that were not listed in the original post because of their lacking prominence in today's metagame.
First, I've been toying around with LotusHead's (and others') suggestion of Bazaar of Baghdad + 4 Oath of Ghouls. I've also gone with dicemanx's suggestion of running full acceleration because its components lack the UU, UW, and WW features of the original build. What I'm trying now is almost mono-white. It's a lot more grave-hate sensitive but there's a 1/1 for
creature in Coldsnap called Martyr of the Sands that, when sacrificed for
, gives you 3 life for each white card you reveal. Gaining 12 or 15 life on the first or second turn is nothing to scoff at (especially when he's recurring) and this build has a lot of peculiar synergy and unorthodox methods of generating tempo and card advantage. An amusing observation that hadn't occurred to me before experimenting with this build is that Jotun Grunt + Weathered Wayfarer functions like a walking tag-team Crucible of Worlds + Strip Mine (Strip at EoT, Grunt it back into library, fetch it up again... until opponent has less land than you of course). I will report on it much later when there's a significant quantity of content to share. And for anyone interested, I will probably put it in the Open Forum because I've been contacted by a lot of users with thoughts/ideas on the list and would like to include as many contributors as possible in the discussion. Thank you to the Full Members whose input has been integral to the birth of the more dynamic spin-off version.
Now, regarding the original build, I want to mention that if the "does not target" errata is removed from Oath of Druids and Oath of Ghouls (like it was this summer for Intuition, but may have been overlooked with respect to Oaths) then True Believer will probably be a maindeck must-include. A lot of decks can remain static throughout the relases of new sets and other shake-ups but as an oppositional deck having no inherent brokenness of its own, Fish must perpetually evolve to stay on the radar. Hence, the Fish lists are always going to be more fliud and less cemented than others.
Before I discuss a few more match-ups, I want to elaborate on what I mean by the "Disposition" section since it seemed to engender some negative attention above. These are not indictments or praises of any particular archetype. They are not excerpts from a dissertation on statistical probability. Rather, these are
subjective conclusions I have reached on the interplay they share with a Vial Fish build, coupled with my own personal play-style, after a marathon of heavy testing. I may be wrong and my judgment is not perfect. But my opinions are an honest account of my experience. They are and have been shared for the purpose of stating firsthand perspective and affirming that I have in fact been thoroughly analyzing this build, pre- and post-Time Spiral, in execution v. the most visible and important archetypes in our metagame. Replication is a rare phenomenon in Magic: The Gathering and results may and will vary. Caveat emptor.
The fact that I find it "slightly favorable" against many decks in the field is probably because it was designed with those decks in mind. The central premise is, in a nutshell, to use the Vial/Oath regime to fortify "silver-bullet" Enigma hosers and afford them a reslience lacking in non-Vial Fish, to take advantage of Vial's mana-cheating ability to augment the build v. mana-denial strategies, to strengthen the pure aggro match (aka Swamp/Mountain/Forest.dec) with life gain and recurring blockers, and to imbalance the aggro-control mirror both with larger creatures (in the sideboard) and a much larger critical mass of creatures maindeck. The fact that Wizards has been gratuitously lavishing Fish with ridiculous and perhaps over-the-top utility creatures in the past year (e.g. Dark Confidant, Jotun Grunt, Childen of Korlis) is probably much more to credit for any success the build sees than my own modest deckbuilding skills.
That said, if we open the field up to the myriad of decks that see no play or only irregular play, then there are many more unfavorable match-ups. Anything along the lines of Keeper-esque 4-Color-Control is a nightmare match-up for me that I basically never win. Never. The more that Gifts (post-sideboard) reflects Slaver (by including "eye-on-the-board" removal), and the more that Slaver reflects 4CC/Keeper (diversity of threats and removal + huge card advantage), the worse the game gets for Oath of Ghouls Fish. Heavy countermagic with Gorilla Shamans feasting on AEther Vials is a cobra in a submarine... you just don't want to be there. Morphling is a real deathblow as well. 4-Color-Control and anything resembling it is a Highly Unfavorable match.
Workshop Aggro is another pretty bad match-up that doesn't see too much regular play. Hurkyl's Recall and Rebuild buy some time post-sb. Magus of the Unseen and Copy Artifact can be heroic. Oath of Ghouls + Children and chump blockers is an answered prayer. Same goes for the Bouncer/Drake trick which I like so much I'm tempted to up the count and/or port it into the Bazaar build. But two Juggernauts on the other side of the table on the second turn is a funeral march.
Gilded Claw is another horrible match-up, similar in many ways to Workshop Aggro. LotusHead can tell you more about my repeated string of failures v. the Claw if he'd be willing to chime in.
5-Color-Stax is actually not that bad. I find that like in Uba Stax, Vial goes a long way and I spend most of the game making sure they don't resolve Balance or Tinker. Sundering Titan can be a threat but he's answered by all of the Colossus hate and it's a lot easier to work around a non-trampling 7/10 (especially with 24 potentially recurring chump blockers) than the Iron Man. With an "alternative" mana base (Vials) and a fair amount of Moxen, Crucible-Strip and the Titan's effect don't always end the game. Other than that, it's difficult to generalize further because 5-Color-Stax is pretty variable in its decklist composition.
Finally, combo decks relying on Brain Freeze are a major problem here. Vial Fish is a totally different beast than Null Rod Fish. Where the latter seeks to stymie mana and position development, lunging at the throat in the meantime, Vial Fish invites over-extension and greets it with a "sudden spoiling," like True Believer, Voidmage, or Gilded Drake popping into play abruptly, with their poor timing and uncounterability giving the opponent little room to respond. It sounds risky and perhaps there will never be a definitive answer for whether the reward justifies the risk. That said, by focusing on the metagame's preferred win conditions (the most salient one of course involving life loss...), there's not much to do against an errant T1 High Tide deck (like kLu's) aside from Meddling Mage (when I often won't even see it coming), True Believer (which is currently sideboard), and Jotun Grunt (put the cards back into library before draw if they can't force one on their own).
I'm testing a few changes to the original deck list and sideboard and will post more on it if I find it warrants discussion.
If anyone has any further input or questions, I'd be glad to discuss them.
Thanks,
-Brian
