Un-powering Fish for an un-powered environment.

When I was looking for a budget deck to build, I scoured starcitygames for anything that seemed like it could be current, easily upgraded as the environment changed and most of all; something that could be run unpowered. Aside from the Type-1 tournies in Toronto, I only have a small shop that holds weekly winner takes all tournies. As you can imagen, there is very little power played, aggro running amuck ( if you can imagen taking a mono green Elf aggro player seriously), followed by U/R burn / countro builds, some Sui - discard decks and a horde of worse than rogue deck ideas.

I was at a point where I wanted to be playing a deck that had forum support as an archtype, yet still no cash for power purchasing. My first concern was shutting off power during the Toronto tournies, as I had none. The overall cost of a Vintage deck was my second concern in relation to how well it could perform in a variety of metas ( if you can seriously concider my local a "meta") with minimal tweaking. I found I was reading an awefull lot of Steven Mendian's articles and anything related to Meandeck's concepts and builds. I caught onto U/W Vial Fish w/ Chalice. I found this deck to be versatile in both powered and un-powered environments.

I have read a forum in concerns with why Fish is very lack-luster in un-powered environments. I was a little confused at this statement, because my environment is almost totally un-powered and I seem to roll over pretty much anything put in front of me. I'd like to touch on the concept of taking power out of Vintage decks first. I have looked at Vintage not just as an environment which has the largest card pool available to it, but also as an environment where the mana acceleration can provide a huge portion of the punch and pressure in a given match. I'm not going to provide deck match-ups, but speak in broader terms on the concept that all vintage decks use at least SOME power. That is a point we can all agree on, and therefore the point of this thread in relation to Fish.

If the use of power is the huge separation factor of this environment, then nullifying it seems to greatly slow these decks down by leaps and bounds. And since Fish is among the slowest decks in our format, the tempo of Fish is relativly un-affected. Yes I aknowledge that Ancestral Recall and Time Walk are HUGE in U/W Fish builds, but not so huge that in an un-powered environment, the deck becomes a sub optimal choice. I belive that the overall redundancy of Fish archtypes is what lends itself as a logical choice for an un-powered environment such as mine. The impact of the absence of M.Saph and B.Lotus is not something that is hard to get by, as you have Aether Vial that steps up your clock on it's own and leaves mana open for the control game. Further the absence of TimeWalk, while providing a game winning swing a turn earlier is, again, not a huge factor in an unpowered environment. Finaly the absence of Ancestral Recall is also not something that cripples this deck in relation to it's overall redundancy and Standstill draw engine.

The Deck List:

Creatures:
x4Meddling Mage
X4RootwaterThief
X2Ninja Of Deep Hours
x2Kira GreatGlass Spinner
x1WaterFront Bouncers
x1DSC

Counter/Utility:
x4FoW
x2E.Truth
x1MerchantScroll
x1CunningWish
x1Tinker

Draw:
x4Standstil

Artifacts:
x4AetherVial
x4CoTV
x3Umezawa's Jitte

Lands:
x5Islands
x3Plains
x4Flooded Strand
x4Mishra's Factory
x1StripMine
x4wasteland

SB:
x1Umezawa's Jitte
x2Waterfront Bouncers
x1Mystical Tutor
x3ManaLeak
x4StP
x3Seal Of Cleansing
x1Tormod's Crypt

Match ups I expect to see:

Pure or hybrid aggro decks(70%)

in this case, Chalice is set to 1, due to the huge amount of Goblin, Elf and White Weenie decks. Also x1 Kira is removed ( if at all needed) for X1 Mystical Tutor. This bolsters the likelyhood of me fetching Tinker for DSC. When playing versus Fatties, the Chalice is taken out all together in favour of x4StP. Yes this will allow thier 1cc mana accelerants, but I'm looking for the removal of the fatties here. The rest = card disadvantage for them and elf type accelerant is eaten up by my creatures. Also in this type of game, my fish with a knife brings the game to the point that the mid / late game DSC only has to hit play and they scoop. Kira can also be sided out in favour of Seal Of Cleansing, if they are playing with a tonne of enchantments/artifacts.

Burn / Control(30%)

This would include the rest of the bad builds as well. In this situation I would again leave Chalice @ 1 for the usual lightning bolt/shock/lavaspike spells. As for the control aspect, in terms of spells (counterspell, manaleak sort of thing), x1 bouncer comes out for x1manaleak x2Echoing Truth comes out for the other Manaleaks. Two things happen here traditionaly A) they run out of targets for thier burn spells and B) they cannot cast countermagic because of Vial. And the viable targets run into my own countermagic, which Standstill can usually replenish.

Conclusion:

In all honesty, this is what I see in my local environment( as talked about above ). As such there is very little difficulty in beating thier decks. As said above, this decks redundancy just runs them down as it has answers to everything they play. It has too many targets for them to shut down, and nothing of terrible importance for them to go after. If they do go after the vial or chalice, then I cast another or keep on playing the control/disruption game while continuing to swing at them. You notice I made no mention of the Meddling Mages here. The reason is because we all know that we set it to whatever the worst threat is, or whatever may give us a tempo advantage or card advantage if applicable. Over all I feel that It's flexability is it's greatest atribute and that put beside the fact that it is easily powered up w/o many slots changed, allows me to retain the feel of the deck when playing in both powered and un-powered environments.

Whats next?(aside from trying out other Fish varients)

I have been reading about True Beliver and Jotun Grunt in U/W Fish decks. They seem to be great additions and I plan on testing these guys in the very near future as well. True Beliver with Kira out seems to be savage to me at first glance and I hope thats the case when testing. I would like now to hear about aspects the community feels could improve this list understanding my situation, both environment wise and money wise. I have a tourny that I will be attending in Toronto this month, that allows 5 proxies. I plan on using proxy power and I will post the results if anyone cares to hear about it at all.

So lets hear it people, is it a pile or is it a versatile deck list. Again the majority of this deck was a list provided by Meandeck ( I belive the list was 2 cards short and hadn't been fine tuned as posted) so I take no credit here.