Noob question: which two decks for practice

[BennyLava]

Hi! I'm not new to MTG, but I am new to Vintage. I have a question for the more experienced ones: I would like to proxy two T1 decks for me and my friends to play with casually, but would like it to be two actual well performing decks with the following requirements:

1. Those two decks should have even chances when played against each other, so that victory could come because of one player learning more quickly and outperforming his opponent, not because one is tuned specificaly to hose the other one.

2. They should be interesting to play, decks that are difficult to play correctly, but offer chance for learning the format.

3. They should allow diversity, in a sense that it should have more than one path to victory, so that players don't get acquainted with them and bored quickly.

could you recommend the combination of decks with explanation why?

[Le Pougnezu]

Hi Benny,

I would advise you to proxify the Paul Mastriano's "SuperLong" (rather "ponderstorm") as a first deck.
It has many many disruption cards, (6 duress effects, 4 Force of Will and 2 MisD), so interaction with opponent is at maximum for a combo deck. This deck also has a very broad line of play, you always can play around a given problem, plus storm is a very skill intensive mechanic to win with.
This is the deck to learn properly (it will take about 1-2 weeks to play it), with so many exciting plays you can do with only 7 starting cards.
You will discover how to intuit timing for combo-launching, how to mulligan, and the interaction brought to you by brainstorm and the huge disruption the deck packs. Plus, the storm combo is quite fun to set up.

Overall it's a nice deck filled with horrible bombs such as Yawgwin, Necro, Tinker, Power cards, and full ritual acceleration.


The second deck could be Gro-A-Tog, for disruption, but I feel the decks are too close for a beginner (the engine is completely different, of course, but Many cards are present in both decks and could give a restrictive feeling of what T1 is).
I'd choose rather Vroman's Lava Owls for a completely different feel of Magic, putting other colors in it, and have a stronger aggro-disruption package.

Many versions of StaX are interresting, but the deck is not interactive enough to be a good training deck (against Long, play a sphere = end game).

I've been testing a triangle PonderStorm - GroATog - StaX, and overall the StaX isn't interresting to play as the two Blue decks.

My 1.37 eurocents

[meadbert]

Try here.

Review the first, fourth and eighth place decks.  These are the ones mentioned above.

I agree.  You should probably play one Gush Deck and then either Long or Stax.

Beware that preboard Stax should be Gush Control most of the time, but post board the Heretics make a big difference.

URL tags added. - Godder

[BennyLava]

thank you. I have proxied the Gush Control (and prepared some togs and stuff for turning it into GAT) and Superlong from the decklists you gave me.

[rkmancer]

I started to learn this format intensively in last 18 months. .how to build a deck, choose cards for my meta game, and play deck on the list correctly. .
And I could say in a big line, vintage is a compilation of big 3 : prison, combo, and aggro-control. .
So I recommend Stax (1st in the list) as your prison deck, Gush Control or Grim Long (4th n 7th) as your combo, and dawn of the dead (2nd) or another fish deck at last. .hope you enjoy the game. .