http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell?printable=trueThis was in last week's New Yorker (11 May 2009) and was, I thought, an excellent article on the effort and strategy that help an underdog beat a champion. Though you'll have to synthesize this information with the state of Vintage today, I thought it was very relevant and explained a lot of David decks like Fish, Ichorid, and fast combo work against Goliaths like Tezzeret.
Jerry Yang had also read the article before I posted it, and we spent a while yesterday coming up with a "full-court press" deck that tried to neutralize the advantages afforded a Force+Drain deck, namely the ability to counter your spells.
My posit was that Null Rod is a red herring. Yes it stops the win and slows development, but it's weak to removal and counters and does nothing against Tinker. As such the first cards we agreed upon were Chalice of the Void (to stop Tinker and slow development), Aether Vial (to neutralize Force and Drain on our disruption), and Pithing Needle (to cut Time Vault off and a turn sooner than Null Rod). From there we added disruptive creatures and topped everything off with Force of Will (necessary for survival against broken openers) and Tinker-Leviathan to meet the opponent head-on when available.
Full-Court Fish
4x Force of Will
1x Tinker
1x Ponder
1x Brainstorm
1x Ancestral Recall
1x Time Walk
4x Chalice of the Void
4x Aether Vial
3x Pithing Needle
4x Meddling Mage
4x Ethersworn Canonist
4x Cursecatcher
4x Voidmage Prodigy
3x Rootwater Thief
1x Inkwell Leviathan
4x Tundra
4x Flooded Strand
1x Wooded Foothills
1x Strip Mine
4x Wasteland
1x Island
1x Plains
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Pearl
1x Lotus Petal
1x Black Lotus
The last cards we came up with for this deck were Erayo, Voidmage Prodigy, and Rootwater Thief, any or all of which could make the final build. In deciding, Jerry wanted Voidmage and Thief, and I wanted Erayo and Thief. I'm not sure why Thief came away with the bulk of our attention as it hasn't been tested in a long time.
Testing this last evening suggested that the deck had some legs. However, I was playing it against TPS since I haven't gotten Tezzeret put together yet. That changes the value of several cards, most notably Ethersworn Cartoonist.
Of course, Vintage isn't youth basketball, so only time will tell if the "Full-Court" strategy pans out as well in practice as it does on paper. Jerry and I agreed that the deck that most closely fits the strategies recommended in the article is Ichorid, which forces Force+Drain decks to play a completely different game that involves moving massive numbers of cards around and not needing to cast spells to win. The problem with Ichorid is that it loses to a prepared sideboard. Again unlike youth basketball, Magic is a best-of-three series that allows you to change your deck against an opponent after the first game, and this completely neutralizes Ichorid's advantage.
This article will likely not rend the Vintage metagame asunder, but it does have some eye-opening parallels to Magic.
PS: Jerry might not want to take any credit for the deck, since he said it "Looks just like every other Fish deck." My argument was that getting away from Null Rod is a significant change. Whether it ends up being right or wrong is another question entirely.
