Basic Land

No idea if this is the right forum for this, but...

I had a conversation with my friend about magic. He and I both used to play quite a bit but have since stopped due to the fact that college doesn't really provide you with an opportunity to play cards.

Anyway, we like to talk about wacky, imaginary formats. We were talking about vintage today and he mentioned that he always though of it as a stupid format because ever since its inception the best decks have just been blue decks with a splashes of other colors for their best cards. We talked about how this largely was due to the abundance of mana fixing from non-basic lands.

It then sort of struck me "what would vintage look like without non-basic mana fixing lands?"

This naturally kills the 3-4 color blue decks that have existed in the modern age of vintage, as well as non-blue based storm (when that existed...). In this hypothetical format, if you want to play cards of a certain color, you have to set aside a significant portion of your deck space to use it.

We talked about decks that might be good in the format, and we thought mono-blue decks were the decks to beat. High Tide sounded pretty strong. RG Beats with Guttural Response seemed like a decent hate-deck. Surprisingly, so did BW Fish because it has access to multiple duress effects, creatures that generate card advantage + disrupt, and decent permanent removal. Shop decks take a hit because they can't utilize wasteland very well. Dragon actually seems like a top contender. etc etc etc

The point I'm making here is that the smoothness of Vintage manabases have naturally kept us playing blue cards with the most frequency. Why play Tarmogoyf in a green deck when I can just add a Tropical Island or two to my deck that has five to seven blue fetchlands?

This idea of blue dominance is particularly interesting when taken with the Vintage restrictions of Brainstorm, Ponder, Gush, Merchant Scroll and Flash (Brainstorm especially). The restriction of these cards has often been called an attempt to neuter blue cards and to spark innovation in the format. However, neither thing has really occurred in the format because even with these incredible tools gone, there is still little to no incentive to stop playing blue decks. That's because blue is still the most powerful color by a wide margin and blue players are still freely able to run the best cards in each color and still be able to run basics so that they aren't completely hosed by wasteland?

The cards that allow for the current blue manabases are The ABU duals along with Flooded Strand and Polluted Delta. The last two are especially bad here in that often they allow the player to build a deck basic islands in a deck that didn't even have a full set of the duals for the corresponding secondary color, or allow it to pick up tertiary colors with ease without having to rely on jank like City of Brass. Maybe a year or so before Brainstorm was restricted, Smenememnene called Brainstorm the best unrestricted card in some thread on scg and at the time I was like "duh." Now I'm not really sure that was the case. The use of Brainstorm as an auto-4off isn't something that really took off until after Onslaught. Further, if fetchlands didn't exist, would people play Brainstorm as a four-off if it wasn't restricted? The card takes a huge hit in power when you can't shuffle your chaff back into your library.

I see so many forum posts complaining about how all the restriction of brainstorm did was take us back to the blue decks we were playing a couple of years ago. If instead the blue fetchlands had been restricted? I'd imagine that the metagame would be largely different in that blue would become significantly weakened in that it would not be able to rely as easily on cards of other colors, which has been sort of a given since the inception of the format (1996 keeper manabases wouldn't really work now because efficient forms of LD exist).

I'm not really advocating the unrestriction of those five cards and the restriction of strand and delta. I'm just simply curious about how people feel about the ease of mana fixing in this format, and the effect which it has in deck choice and construction.