The topic of singletons in Vintage is a specific area of interest for me. Luckily there has already been some groundwork done in this area, and as it turns out the "Useful Articles" thread stickied on this website can turn out to be useful from time to time. Here is a piece written by Adrian Sullivan:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/6444.htmlI would recommend reading it, but if you haven't I can try to sum it up briefly. Adrian conducted a test:
Take a deck that runs a high amount of library manipulation (say four Fire/Ice, four Brainstorm, four AK, one Intuition, one Mystical Tutor, three Fact or Fiction, four fetchlands and Moxen, and four Isochron Scepter).
I marked a single card in the deck with a piece of paper and over the course of forty trials (including mulliganing and play/draw) got to that marked card on average before turn 6. I wasn't using the counterspells. I was just searching with a Goldfish as an opponent. In the real world, it certainly would have been slower because I'd have to take the time to stop my opponent from winning. But, what it does show is the incredible selection ability of modern Blue.
In case you missed it, that is his at the time
Standard legal Psychatog deck able to find a singleton in the deck by turn 6 on average. The library manipulation was potent, including Brainstorm/Fetch along with a number of cantrips and several power drawers like FoF.
I conducted this test a few months ago in Oath, in part because I was testing Regrowth and wanted to see how reliable Regrowth + Ancestral is as a draw engine. I was goldfishing and found that I could find Regrowth by turn 4 on average (though not always with Ancestral in the grave).
Just yesterday I conducted a similar test again to help me get my bearings on the new Gush metagame. I goldfished with a Gush-based deck because I wanted to do several things:
-Discover whether or not the Gush engine was stable and consistent
-Test specific cards and how they interact with this engine
-Know what kind of goldfish I can present, and understand the critical turn so as to best prepare future decks
-Realize how often I could find Fastbond
In my tests, I was able to find Fastbond in 91% of my games. The other 9% of my games were such that I did not find Fastbond, but they did involve "winning the game" as an appropriate substitute.
When I found Fastbond it was on average by turn 2.86. In the other 9% of the games, the ones where I didn't find Fastbond, the goldfish had lost the game on average by turn 2.89 (to a storm spell).
It's also worth noting that my deck contained only 1 copy of Brainstorm, Ponder, and Merchant Scroll. I'm fairly certain that if I had access to unrestricted copies of those cards then my ability to find a singleton would be greatly improved. As it stands, I hope the point gets across that finding Fastbond quickly is a common affair now, much less with copious amounts of high quality library manipulation.
