With the release of Vintage Masters on Magic Online, I thought it would be an excellent time to familiarize myself with Vintage. I generally have not played very much Vintage (outside Bazaar Dredge in the late 2000s), so I wanted to try something different from the old days.

With the mindset of finding the deck with the most broken cards, I ended up working my way to this list (a riff on Reid Duke’s TPS (The Perfect Storm) from Vintage Championships this past year):

The Perfect Storm ? Vintage | Jarvis Yu

• Spells (48)
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 1 Brainstorm
• 1 Cabal Ritual
• 1 Chain of Vapor
• 1 Hurkyl's Recall
• 1 Mystical Tutor
• 1 Vampiric Tutor
• 4 Dark Ritual
• 1 Demonic Tutor
• 1 Grim Tutor
• 1 Imperial Seal
• 1 Mind's Desire
• 1 Ponder
• 1 Preordain
• 1 Tendrils of Agony
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Timetwister
• 1 Tinker
• 1 Wheel of Fortune
• 1 Windfall
• 1 Yawgmoth's Will
• 4 Duress
• 4 Gitaxian Probe
• 1 Necropotence
• 1 Yawgmoth's Bargain
• 1 Black Lotus
• 1 Lion's Eye Diamond
• 1 Lotus Petal
• 1 Mana Crypt
• 1 Mana Vault
• 1 Memory Jar
• 1 Mox Emerald
• 1 Mox Jet
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Ruby
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 1 Sensei's Divining Top
• 1 Sol Ring
• 1 Mox Opal

• Lands (12)
• 1 Island
• 1 Swamp
• 1 Volcanic Island
• 2 Scalding Tarn
• 2 Underground Sea
• 4 Polluted Delta
• 1 Tolarian Academy

• Sideboard (15)
• 1 Nihil Spellbomb
• 3 Tormod's Crypt
• 1 Blightsteel Colossus
• 3 Hurkyl's Recall
• 3 Pyroblast
• 1 Empty the Warrens
• 1 Pyroclasm
• 1 Thoughtseize
• 1 Island

Buy This Deck

Compared to other Storm decks you’ve seen in other formats, this deck is a lot more resilient.

Instead, with so many permanent mana sources, you are able to play bomb after bomb (Wheel of Fortune and other draw-sevens, Yawgmoth's Bargain, etc.) until you run your opponent out of counterspells or disruption.

This also brings up the important point that this deck is much easier to play than different formats’ Storm decks simply because you have a much higher density of broken cards and a very consistent game plan with all of the tutors in the deck (Mystical Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Demonic Tutor, Grim Tutor, Imperial Seal).

On the flipside, in exchange for being an extremely broken deck with a lot of fast kills, Mishra's Workshop decks with Sphere effects (Sphere of Resistance, Trinisphere, Lodestone Golem, Thorn of Amethyst) are quite a challenging matchup if you don’t win the die roll or draw enough lands.

• −1 Hurkyl's Recall in the sideboard for +1 Rebuild

Most of the original lists had that, and I finally figured out the reason for it, which is that a Chalice of the Void on 2 along with Spheres will lock you out of the game. Granted, Rebuild isn’t easy to cast there either.

I am also considering playing another Mox Opal. This card is quite good—reaching metalcraft isn’t difficult given how many artifact mana sources and cantrips and draw-sevens you have.

The Workshops deck is extremely popular on Magic Online right now, and it sports a great matchup against this deck, so perhaps now is not the best time to play this exact list.

I will be investigating other Vintage decks (Fish variants, W/U Control with Mana Drain and/or Fact or Fiction, and Oath of Druids decks).

Thanks for reading, and I welcome any suggestions, other comments, or decks you’d like to see here or on Twitter (@jkyu06).

Jarvis