Vintage 101: From Dark Rituals to Dark Petitions

[Islandswamp]

http://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/vintage-101-from-dark-rituals-to-dark-petitions

"From Burning Wish to Dark Petition, Islandswamp takes a look at the history of Ritual-based combo!" - MTGGoldfish

I hope you enjoy it.

[vaughnbros]

Good article.  Thanks!

[TheBrassMan]

Been looking forward to this one - thanks for writing, as always!

[Islandswamp]

Good article.  Thanks!

Thanks for reading it took me a while, but I really enjoyed this one.

[Islandswamp]

With the influx of new Vintage players on MTGO there are plenty of people who don't know much about the formats history. I'm no exception, I played in 1995 but by the end of Mercadian Masques block I was out of the game, and it wasn't until 2013 that I started playing again. I find the history interesting so I figured that I would write about it.

None of this would be possible without having great writers like Andrew Probasco, Steve Menendian, and others. I had to go digging with google and find all those old articles to get the info. So thank you to all of you that wrote those pieces back in the day. The research didn't feel like work as the articles were very entertaining 

[desolutionist]

There's another form of Long that you may have overlooked. Between Grim/Pitch Long and TPS, there was a deck called 2.5c Long.  I had won some Power tournaments along the East Coast with it.  Basically it was the Grim Long deck with a few notable exceptions:

1. Fetchlands. Huge upgrade to 5c lands for enabling threshold as well as favorable interaction with Brainstorm and defense against Wasteland.

2. 6-7 Duress effects. Thoughtseize wasn't printed yet so all previous lists only played 4 Duress. I was the only one to use 2 Therapies on top of the 4 Duress. It literally hasn't been used again until this recent run with DPS.  Back then, there wasn't even Spell Pierces, so Therapy naming FoW or Drain was just brutal.

3. Empty the Warrens. There used to be a thread on here with everyone telling me how EtW would never be Vintage viable.  Brassman was one of the few guys who also saw potential in Empty, as he won Waterbury that year with Repeal (Empty) Gifts. Empty the Warrens along with Wheel of Fortune were the reasons for the lone half color, red.

Someone in the Midwest won a 4-man tournament with it and decided to over hype it as "GWSx Long".  There was also a "Scroll Long" or "Scroll TPS" which mitigated the fact that previous versions of Long had no relevant 2-mana play.

[Islandswamp]

There's another form of Long that you may have overlooked. Between Grim/Pitch Long and TPS, there was a deck called 2.5c Long.  I had won some Power tournaments along the East Coast with it.  Basically it was the Grim Long deck with a few notable exceptions:

1. Fetchlands. Huge upgrade to 5c lands for enabling threshold as well as favorable interaction with Brainstorm and defense against Wasteland.

2. 6-7 Duress effects. Thoughtseize wasn't printed yet so all previous lists only played 4 Duress. I was the only one to use 2 Therapies on top of the 4 Duress. It literally hasn't been used again until this recent run with DPS.  Back then, there wasn't even Spell Pierces, so Therapy naming FoW or Drain was just brutal.

3. Empty the Warrens. There used to be a thread on here with everyone telling me how EtW would never be Vintage viable.  Brassman was one of the few guys who also saw potential in Empty, as he won Waterbury that year with Repeal (Empty) Gifts. Empty the Warrens along with Wheel of Fortune were the reasons for the lone half color, red.

Someone in the Midwest won a 4-man tournament with it and decided to over hype it as "GWSx Long".  There was also a "Scroll Long" or "Scroll TPS" which mitigated the fact that previous versions of Long had no relevant 2-mana play.

Thanks for pointing that out, I honestly did not know about that. Maybe I can mention it sometime in the future.

[LandDestroyer]

will copy my reddit comment here

Thanks, man, enjoyed the article. As I said on TMD SM's articles needed an updating for a post misstep world if not Dark Storm.
Would love to see a follow-up that talks about Efro's recent build and it's matchups v current mentor, shops, oath, tez, and grixis pyro builds
And/or sideboard v various matchup thoughts