[Free Article] Vintage Avante Garde- Creatures! And a new Bant List

[Troy_Costisick]

Here's a new DeMars article: http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/vintage/23481_Vintage_AvantGarde_Creatures_Creatures_Everywhere.html

Included is an updated Bant list from his recent top8 that looks really good to me.  It's an interesting article, you should check it out.  The Dredge bitching is kept to a real minimum!   

Peace,

-Troy

[The Atog Lord]

This is a very interesting article. And one of Brian's finest. To summarize Brian's main conjecture (which he borrows in part from Chris Pikula):

Broken blue decks were very flexible when the best counters were general-case counters like Force and Mana Drain. Recently, Wizards has printed counters that are much more situational, but also much more powerful when they work, such as Flusterstorm and Mental Misstep. This has forced Blue decks to make a tradeoff between the versatility of their counters and the efficiency of their counters. And as blue decks have opted for the more narrow but more potent counters, spells such as Tinker have become more vulnerable to those counters, while cards such as Tarmogoyf and Trygon Predator have become more resistant to them.

I think that Brian makes an excellent point. Personally, I much prefer to play a versatile deck with no bad matchups, rather than a deck that has a lot of good matchups and some terrible ones. If a given deck has an awful Blue matchup, an awful Dredge matchup, or an awful Shops matchup, I am probably not going to want t play it.This, in turn, leads me away from playing some of the more powerful but more fragile decks (such as combo doomsday) and toward playing decks that are strong across the field (such as my Champs Gush deck). But playing a deck with no awful matchups has become more of a challenge when there is a tradeoff to be made between those narrow counters and those more flexible solutions. Including a Flusterstorm in your deck means having a completely dead card against Workshop, and Remora is nearly a blank against Dredge decks. On the other hand, omitting those two cards can lead to vulnerabilities against the more focused blue decks that do include them.

In ages past, such as the era of Control Slaver, I would look at metagames and use that to determine how to construct my decks. I'd change slots here and there based on what I expected to see. However, what I would not do is change deck archetype unless something dramatic happened. Other players, such as Matt Elias, take this further and change decks frequently. If Brian's hypothesis is correct, then it may suggest that we will need to become more comfortable with more frequent deck changes going forward.

[Onslaught]

This article implicitly shows why Snapcaster Mage is so good - it allows you to play fewer copies of conditional cards. You get the best of both worlds: general versatility against the field and access to multiple uses of narrow "blowout" cards without sacrificing a large amount of deck space.

Running single copies of Flusterstorm, Spell Snare, or REB keeps you from drawing dead in certain matchups, while Snapcaster allows those effects to be reused when they are really good. If I am playing a Gush Control type deck with 4 FOW, 3 Mana Drain, and 3 Misstep as the counter package, I am at a marked disadvantage against a Snapcaster deck with oh let's say 4 FOW, 2 Misstep, 2 Flusterstorm, 1 Spell Snare, 1 Misdirection. At the same time, we both have a fair amount of counters that are bad in certain matchups. This is a bit of a tangent, but it also hammers home the fact that you CAN still choose between versatility (at the cost of power) in the form of Mana Drain.

Anyway, even with Cage existing, I will continue to assert that Snapcaster is the best creature in Vintage.

[voltron00x]

Steve and Paul were both very successful last year and both changed decks from event to event all year. I think this Vintage format is particularly enjoyable for those who enjoy playing a range of strategies.

[Prospero]

This article, like its many predecessors, was excellent.

[Troy_Costisick]

Steve and Paul were both very successful last year and both changed decks from event to event all year. I think this Vintage format is particularly enjoyable for those who enjoy playing a range of strategies.

Yeah, I agree.  It reminds me of 2007-2008 when you could choose from about five or six decks and have a reasonable chance with each.  Only, this is better.  Or at least, I hope it stays better with the printing of Grafdigger's Cage.

[forests failed you]

Hey, as always thanks for the comments and support; Vintage looks to be taking some interesting twists and turns that could have 2012 being one of the most interesting years ever!

I wanted to make a quick amendment to the article:  I talked to Smennen yesterday, and he pointed out that when he played his Doomsday deck he didn't play it knowingly having a bad Mishra's Workshop match up.  In fact, he actually thought the match up was close to 50%.

He said that when he was playing sideboard-ed games he was alternating between being on the play and the draw and was winning about half of his matches.  However, in reality he was winning most of the games where he was on the play and losing most when he was on the draw.  Which meant, he had a bad game one match up, a great game two match up, and a bad game three match up; so, you do the math it turns out being a situation where despite the fact that he can win half of his post board games, he was unknowingly a pretty steep underdog to actually win the match.

While I still think that Steve has a tendency to go into tournaments with decks that are stilted toward beating other blue decks (vegas odds at 3:2 he maindecks a Red Elemental Blast), the article may have overstated that he plays decks with bad match ups.