EBA in competitive Vintage: contender or wanna-be?

Hi everyone! This is my first post as a newly-promoted member of TMD, and my goal is to examine why EBA (“Eon Blue Apocalypse” [though I never really understood why the deck was named after a Tool song, but I digress]) has all the tools necessary to be successful in the current wide-open Vintage metagame.

First, here is the decklist I’ve been toying with:

The Creatures:
4 Meddling Mage
3 Ophidian
3 Phyrexian Negator
2 Exalted Angel

Disruption:
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
3 Duress

Removal:
3 Swords to Plowshares

Utility:
4 Brainstorm

Broken:
1 Yawgmoth's Will
1 Time Walk
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Fact of Fiction
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Mind Twist
1 Demonic Tutor

The Mana:
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Sol Ring
2 City of Brass
2 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
3 Island

It is essentially the list that Cody Vinci used at StarCity Richmond, with a few changes. I decided that Impulse, while an excellent card, just wasn’t cutting it in this build, so after discussing it with my friend Elias (SonataoftheCathedral) we decided to put Ophidians into the deck to replace them, with the slot freed up by the 4th Impulse becoming the 4th Tundra (I sometimes found myself having a hard time flipping Exalted Angels).

Some people advocate running Vindicate in this deck, just like its originator deck, Extended “Dump Truck”. Yes it’s versatile, but it’s also a sorcery and requires mana of two different colors. I really don’t like it in the Vintage version of this deck.

Here’s why I think EBA can do very well in the current metagame:

1) It has an incredibly strong disruption package: Duress, Mana Drain and Force of Will, complemented by Meddling Mage and Mind Twist, can make for some very bad times for your opponent, . Add to this the possibility of running a few maindeck Stifles à la Fish or Birdshit and you can really stop your opponent from whatever game he’s trying to play. I’d love to be able to fit some Strip effects in there, but with a 3 color mana base it’s a bit of a squeeze. I can definitely see running a Strip Mine in there, and possibly a Library of Alexandria. Post-SB our disruption gets even better, but I’ll go into that later.

2) It has very fast clocks (for a creature deck): there’s no doubt that EBA’s clocks are faster than Fish’s, since a Negator or Exalted Angel can end the game in just a few attacks, as opposed to the eons Fish/Birdshit can take to win with their Factories, Cloud of Faeries and Nimble Mongeese. Exalted Angel even has the benefit of making us that much harder for TPS and other Tendrils-based decks to beat, with one swing often being enough.

3) It’s good vs. aggro decks: Swords to Plowshares, Exalted Angels and even Ophidians are all good in the aggro matchup, and this deck is capable of running Balance to really ruin their day. Granted, Negators are horrible vs. something like Burninator (and given TheDeadMan’s recent top-16 at Waterbury it’s likely that more budget players will give that deck a try), but that’s why we have Exalted Angels.

4) Excellent and versatile SB options: we can run any number of annoying cards, including Arcane Lab, Null Rod, Tormod’s Crypt, Stifle, Energy Flux, Rushing River, Sacred Ground, Seal of Cleansing, etc. The one problem is that we don’t have access to all of Red’s great SB cards for the Control-Slaver and SSB matchups (Rack and Ruin, Red Elemental Blast, etc.), but are they really necessary? I’ve not been able to test the Control-Slaver matchup as much as I would’ve hoped, but with disruption-heavy draws it’s not a bad matchup at all, especially if we resolve a Meddling Mage on Goblin Welder. I’ve not been able to test the SSB matchup at all, but I imagine it would work similarly to the CS one, except that they are less vulnerable to a quick Meddling Mage.

I also think the deck has some weaknesses that need to be addressed:

1) Lack of a broken draw-engine: this is the deck’s main problem, as I see it. Other decks have great ways of drawing a lot of cards, whether it’s Thirst For Knowledge, Intuition/AK, Deep Analysis or otherwise. We have Ophidians, Ancestral Recall and Fact or Fiction (with the Mystical Tutor to fetch them), but that’s about it. Ophidian can sometimes be excellent, but can be pretty bad other times.

What’s the best draw-engine that could make its way into the deck? AKs are definitely out of the question, since they require Intuitions to be truly good, and that would take up way to many slots. Deep Analysis is an option, since it is reusable and gives us more Drain sinks. The downside is that it’s a sorcery. Thirst For Knowledge really wouldn’t work in this deck, since we have only 4 artifacts, and that would lead to way too many 2-card discards. Do we have any other decent options in this department? Skeletal Scrying is certainly a good card, but it's not particularly good in the early game, which makes me resitant to run it. If I'm way-off in my assessment of Scrying please let me know.

2) Relatively poor Yawgmoth’s Wills: in this deck, perhaps more than any other powered Vintage deck running Black, Yawgmoth’s Will does not usually equal “YawgWin”. Sure, it can, but it’s not that often, just because the deck still relies on creature beatdown to finish an opponent off, and not chaining spells into a Tendrils or getting off a Slaver activation.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of the deck, it’s hard to make our Wills all of a sudden become better, so I’m not quite sure how to address this problem other than simply accepting it and moving on. Cutting Will is an option, but I’m very reluctant to even try this out, since the card is just so damned good, .

3) The mana base: the most notorious problem the deck can have it not having access to double-White mana to flip over Exalted Angels. It’s not like it happens every time, but if earlier in the game I used a fetchland to grab a Tundra and another to grab an Underground Sea, unless I have my Mox Pearl that flipped Angel is just making baby Jesus cry, .

The easiest way to eliminate this last problem is cutting the Angels altogether, and I can see them being replaced with something like Decree of Justice, that is another good Mana Drain sink. What are people’s thoughts on simply replacing Angels with Decrees? Since aggro has really begun to disappear a very strong case can be made, I think.

As a final note I can also imagine a more controlling version of the deck, probably cutting the Negators and adding more Angels and Ophidians, dropping Duress for something like a Cunning Wish or two, and possibly running Decree of Justice as well. While I’m open to suggestions of this kind, I’m more interested in discussing a version like what I posted because of its added aggressiveness and disruption, which makes it better vs. combo and control, though perhaps slightly weaker vs. aggro decks (again, I’m not sure how much of a problem that really is, at the moment).

I’d appreciate any kind of criticism on the maindeck, thought on matchups and such that anyone would like to share, and I look forward to becoming a part of the ongoing discussions in this forum.

Luiggi