Transformational Oath Board

[Onslaught]

More and more, I think the approach of "add more artifact destruction to the board" is a futile way for most blue decks to fight Shops. Especially when you don't have access to Red for Ingot Chewer. For a long time, I was playing Talrand Gush. It was a completely solid deck, with a stable mana base and 8 or more legitimate sideboard cards for Shops. Still, it had an extremely low win percentage against Shops on the draw, and I would often lose games even when starting with a hand of like land, land, mox, Nature's Claim, FOW, etc.

None of this is breaking news, it's well established that a lot of decks have a really hard time winning against shops on the draw (even postboard). It doesn't matter if you have an infinite amount of 1 mana answers in your hand if you don't have the mana to play them (or worse, if Chalice is set at 1). That being said, what was becoming increasingly annoying to me were the situations where I did in fact have the mana to play my removal spells, and still lost. In many situations, you are barely surviving and scraping by to piece together a board that can finally Bolt a Lodestone, or Ancient Grudge a Sphere, or Hurk's to get rid of Chalice on 0 , and so on. But then another threat comes down and you are floundering to survive again, or perhaps finally get locked completely out of the game.

So when you have a small window to actually cast/resolve a spell against Workshops, it seems that a lot of decks would benefit a lot more from playing a card that will simply win the game instead of grind out incremental advantages. Of course, I'm referring to Oath of Druids. The recent success of the Burning Wish decks with Griselbrand attest to this tactic being viable, and it has been shown to work through the sideboard through some recent events. One such example is a Gush deck that won the LCV (incidentally, the second place finisher from this tournament also had an Oath sideboard):

Creatures [1]
1 Talrand, Sky Summoner

Instants [28]
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Misdirection
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Noxious Revival
1 Rebuild
1 Vampiric Tutor
2 Brain Freeze
2 Flusterstorm
2 Remand
3 Mana Drain
3 Repeal
4 Force of Will
4 Gush

Sorceries [7]
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Ponder
1 Regrowth
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Yawgmoth's Will


Enchantments [1]
1 Fastbond

Artifacts [8]
1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Sol Ring

Lands [15]
1 Flooded Strand
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Polluted Delta
2 Misty Rainforest
2 Scalding Tarn
2 Tropical Island
3 Island
3 Underground Sea

Sideboard:
4 Forbidden Orchard
2 Rune-Scarred Demon
1 Tidespout Tyrant
2 Abrupt Decay
1 Hurkyl's Recall
4 Oath of Druids
1 Ravenous Trap

Utilizing this tactic only has a few requirements. Mainly, you should probably have access to Green mana outside of just Forbidden Orchard, and you need to not be reliant on playing creatures of your own. It would obviously be pretty stupid to have a Bob based deck and then bring in Oaths. Also, it would probably be more beneficial anyway for Bob decks (or decks with Wasteland, or Deathrite Shaman, etc) to stick with efficient removal spells since they are more apt at fighting Shops on the board than something like a Gush deck. Aside from those requirements, you also want to utilize this in a deck that already has an overwhelming win percentage against many (most?) of the other archetypes. The Oath plan eats up a ton of sideboard space, so ideally your maindeck would already be very good at beating blue, or have a very fast/consistent combo to outrace Dredge.

One specific application of an Oath board that I would like to bring up is in the Doomsday archetype. Doomsday is notably great against most blue builds, and fast enough to combo out against Dredge without needing to disrupt it. Furthermore, you can save a lot of space in your board by not running any of the Oath creatures, since you already have a two turn win (that can mostly ignore Grafdigger's Cage) with Oath + Laboratory Maniac. Here's what I've been running lately with some promising results:

[The Atog Lord]

Onslaught, first, let me say how much I like your idea of using a Cockatrice screenshot to display a decklist. Mentally parsing a text decklist is always a process, especially in Vintage with so many one-ofs. Looking at the card images in a single glance can really help the reader comprehend the contents of a deck quickly.

As for the idea of Gush boarding into Oath itself. As you know, two Vintage decks near and dear to me are Oath and Gush. They're both decks that I have used extensively and would be happy to play again. Combining the two concepts, then, seemed natural. In fact, in the Olden Days before the 2008 restriction spree, I was a strong advocate of the Gush Oath deck that my teammates and I designed.

Unfortunately, in the just-one-Brainstorm era, getting these two concepts to work together has been very difficult. Your manabase is pulled toward Islands by the Gush plan, and toward Orchards by the Oath plan. If the opponent's plan involves having creatures arrive, then that mitigates much of this concern; unfortunately, many opponents are no so cooperative, especially when they realize your intention to Oath them into oblivion. Also, without Brainstorm, your ability to sift through the situational cards that Oath mandates becomes severely diminished.

But if those two factors alone were the only strikes against Gush Oath as a concept (pre- or post-board), then I would not be as concerned. By concern, rather, is an observation about how Workshop decks have evolved since Gush Oath was, in my opinion, the best deck in the format. No doubt, Workshop decks have gotten better. Lodestone Golem is a game-changer. And people are better at building Workshop decks (or at least, better at copying Nick and the Forino Brothers). No more free wins because your Workshop opponent has been tricked into thinking that a 4/2 haste Cat is a real Magic card. But it is not just the case that Workshop decks have evolved to become stronger. They have evolved to be better suited against Oath as a strategy. I've seen Workshop build that run both Sculpting Steel and Phyrexian Metamorph. Removing a morphed-out Legend is easier than ever. Both Grisselbrand and Rune-Scarred Demon rely on casting one or more spells after their diabolic arrival; Workshop decks have become better than ever at preventing that from happening.

So, in short, I feel that there are two problems with combining Oath and Gush to defeat Workshop decks. First, Oath and Gush are no longer the chocolate-and-peanut-better they were back when Vintage decks could enjoy a full set of Brainstorms. Second, Workshop decks have evolved to be more resilient against Oath as a strategy -- both because Workshop decks have improved in the abstract, and because they now run a larger number of Clone effects that can thwart an Oath-based strategy.

(NB: I initially typed up this response to the post, only to see the original post vanish. I'm re-posting this since it appears that Onslaught re-posted his post.)

[Grand Inquisitor]

just-one-Brainstorm...manabase

Idk, these are the same challenges that traditional Oath builds have and that deck still T8s with some consistency.

Metamorph

...but he's not running those creatures, he's running Maniac.  I think the current workshop lists are actually kind of weak to this plan.

To me the problem is (1) you're really diluted against hard control lists, (2) even casting your one oath spell against shops may be difficult with only 22 sources and only 4 accelerants, (3) people really underestimate dredge's ability to race or outmaneuver them.

Especially for the lists you refer to from LCV, they're super weak to Dredge.  I'm not sure if that was because they expected little or if they got lucky, but that's not a plan I want to rely on.

[gkraigher]

Being a shops player, I have to tip my hat to the oath of druids sideboard in general.  It is the best way to use 8 cards against shops.  The extra lands are also hugely relevant.  
We do still have phyrexian revoker to name griselbrand--which is another reason why some use rune scarred demon.  Most of us also play Grafdigger's Cage, which is also good vs. yawgmoth's will.  

(*props on the Cockatrice shot)

Now with your only creature being lab maniac, that means you have to oath twice.  Or oath and doomsday.  That opens you up to duplicant, triskelion, and even serrated arrows.