With the release of Vintage Masters on Magic Online, the format that really got me into competitive Magic is now going to be much more widely accessible, and that's enough of an excuse to write about it.

I really started getting into Vintage back in 2004, only slightly before I played in my first Pro Tour, and playing one or more Vintage tournaments a month definitely got me hooked on playing in Magic tournaments. Competing against other people, for prizes nonetheless, while playing an awesome game? It was exactly what I wanted to do, and, it turns out, it's something I was lucky enough to pursue much further.

 

From the look of it, things were going very well for my opponent. I had already mulliganed to five, and offered him very little resistance. This had allowed him to assemble an impressive board of Xenagos, the Reveler; multiple Saytr tokens; Ajani, Mentor of Heroes; Elspeth, Sun's Champion; multiple soldier tokens; and a Sylvan Caryatid, to my board of exactly nothing.

He must have been sitting very comfortably, as no normal U/W Control deck would have any reasonable way out of this situation. There simply wouldn't be enough time to play all of the Detention Spheres and Supreme Verdicts necessary to battle back from this unenviable position.

Lucky for me though, I was not playing a normal U/W Control deck. As I laid my sixth land, I played what would be only my third spell of the game:

As it happens, I’ve been obsessing over a Blue Wizard deck in Modern—the Voidmage Vial deck. The Sky Hussar deck. That’s the deck I’ve been working on for the Modern season. It’s good, but it’s still so unexplored.

The core is there—play embarrassingly bad creatures on which the opponent is reluctant to use removal spells.

When they don’t, start hoarding resources with Sky Hussar.

Try to prevent the opponent from progressing their board with our tiny blue men.

The question then, has been, how to finish? How to use those extra resources to catch up on the battlefield? I’ve tried it all.

I started with Cryptic Command and Biomass Mutation.

That was no good.

So I tried Kira, Great Glass Spinner plus Sower of Temptation.

At this point I was starting to win, but Abrupt Decay made me keep looking.

And this is where I arrived. This combination has seemed like the best, leading to so many wins. Together, these guys can bring us back from the tempo holes we find ourselves in. They give life to Sage of Epityr.

But, just because this wins, doesn’t mean it’s the only way. Perhaps there is something else.

And, as the universe seems to be giving me another chance with Battlefield Thamaturge, I decided I would try it.

If we do our job right, there should be enough different and fun things to do that people can be competitive with whatever strategies they play the best, and their comfort level will be more than enough to keep them from just playing the top deck from the last week. It lets people's originality and deck preferences be more important to their personal success than just what is the most powerful in the abstract, which means the metagame should stay pretty healthy. If we ever have an environment where Guillaume Wafo-Tapa is casting Goblin Guide, then I know there is probably a problem.We spend a lot of time trying to get the power level of the new cards just right for Standard, but that does mean we can miss on the power level of a card in other formats. Delver, as an example, was much stronger in Legacy, with access to Brainstorm, than it was in Standard. A joke we've made around the office is that the top Standard decks often include a card that development made a mistake on, Modern decks are built around development mistakes, and Legacy decks feature development mistakes from across the ages. Of course, Vintage decks are nothing but mistakes. And Slash Panthers.