Hey guys, this is Eric, writer of things in lists. I also go by caliban17 on Magic Online. Recently, Wizards released Vanguard for Magic Online, and held a series of release tournaments in three formats: Standard, Extended, and Kamigawa Block Constructed. I decided to devote myself to breaking the most abusable of these formats - Vanguard Extended (hereafter known as Vext). And not to toot my own horn or anything, but I sort of succeeded. My record with the deck once it was in its final form was 13W-2L-6D, and Wizards had to nerf my Avatar.

Because I can't really communicate with other people in non-list formats, here's an overview of this article. Indulge me. It'll make me feel better.

Part 1 - The Avatars
Part 2 - My Deck
Part 3 - The Other New Decks
Part 4 - The Statistics
Part 5 - The Future?

Part 1 - The Avatars
The Vanguard online formats mirror the old Vanguard paper formats - you play your deck with an "avatar" that's a fairly famous creature from Magic's present or past, usually a Legend (er... Legendary Being. I am seriously never going to get that right). It grants you special powers in exchange for changes in hand size and life total. The more powerful the effect, the less cards and life you have to work with.

When the Vanguard release events happened, there were twenty-four avatars available for use. While eight of them made appearances in Extended top 8s, only four of them had more than three appearances total:

Elvish Champion (94/136) +1 Card +1 Life
This was the avatar to beat. It fueled every possible deck type, with its extra card and free Mox-like elf. It also spawned one essentially new deck-type in Belcher. Affinity, Belcher, and Ponza became the Big Three of Vext, all using this avatar.

Prodigal Sorcerer (16/136) +1 Card +2 Life
This avatar proved most useful with Tog, but also helped Scepter-Chant, TINGS!, Reanimator, Madness, KCI, and even Affinity.

Seshiro the Anointed (13/136) +0 Card +5 Life
Three creatures, when coupled with this avatar, can create infinite loops.

These are the three decks that placed, and what this article is primarily concerned with.

Akroma, Angel of Wrath (6/136) +1 Card +7 Life
This avatar was dominated by Affinity, with 4 showings. One R/G Beats and a TINGS! round this one out.

To save us all the hassle, these four are hereafter known as: Elvish, Prodigal, Seshiro, Akroma.

Part 2 - The Deck
I'm a Johnny. Shamelessly. I build combo, combo, combo. I only use creatures as part of my combos, and only when I need them.

You attack with your creatures? So passé.

My paper Extended deck is Life, my Legacy deck is Solidarity, my Type I deck is pretty much anything without Mana Drains. In Online Extended I generally run Life, Cephalid Breakfast, or Nevermind (one of the Early Harvest-based decks). I almost never play Standard or Block - there are hardly any good, abusive combos to be found there. So it was with zealous glee that I embarked upon my quest to break Vanguard Online Extended.

This format is truly the Type I of Magic Online. Turn 1 kills are barely possible, turn 2 kills are fairly uncommon, and turn 3 is the fundamental turn for most of the competitive decks. The only banned cards are Entomb and Skullclamp. Joy!

I had a long boring section about how I came to realize how awesome Seshiro could be blah blah blah blah. But even I didn't really care, so instead I'll just say that I quickly realized that Wirewood Symbiote, a favorite of mine from Elf and Nail decks, was incredibly abusable in this format.

Because if you play with Seshiro and call "Elf," you can use the Symbiote's ability to return itself to your hand. This isn't terribly broken, except the other part of his ability lets you untap a creature - say, a creature that can tap to produce G. Which allows you to replay the Symbiote. Since the game treats this as a brand new Symbiote, it's not subject to the "play this ability once per turn" clause. Rinse, repeat, annoy your opponent.

Congratulations! You have just used two cards costing G each (and one pays for the other) to play infinite creature spells. There are a lot of cheap ways to turn that into some other infinite effect - most notably Brain Freeze (infinite milling), Glimpse of Nature (infinite cards - with Chrome Mox in deck, leads to infinite milling), and Wirewood Hivemaster (infinite insect tokens).

So here's the final version of the deck that I developed and played all through the Vanguard release week.

NOTE FOR THE FAINT OF HEART: Just like Type I, this is not a cheap deck when fully powered. In fact, it's by far the most expensive online deck I've ever played; right around the $700 range. Although Pithing Needle may replace Orim's Chant when it comes out - which would knock about $300 off the top of the deck price. I'll also talk about a budget version (<$20) later that's still pretty good, so don't fret.

Seshiro Avatar Deck Featured by Eric Engelhard on 2005-06-12 As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/9871.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 4 Chrome Mox Creatures 3 Birchlore Rangers 4 Birds of Paradise 4 Llanowar Elves 3 Wirewood Hivemaster 3 Wirewood Symbiote	Instants 4 Brain Freeze 4 Eladamri's Call 4 Orim's Chant Sorceries 4 Glimpse of Nature 4 Living Wish Basic Lands 6 Forest Lands 4 Brushland 4 City of Brass 4 Forbidden Orchard 1 Yavimaya Coast	Sideboard: 2 Kami of Ancient Law 1 True Believer 2 Viridian Shaman 1 Wirewood Hivemaster 1 Wirewood Symbiote
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

This deck lists only seven sideboard cards, but the rest of the sideboard is largely irrelevant - the combo is so tight that you have almost no room for maindeck changes. You can take out two of the Hivemasters against decks with instant kills or Engineered Plagues, and maybe two of the Orim's Chants if you need too, but that's about it.

So the sideboard needs to be almost completely Living Wish based, and in about thirty-five matches, I never wished for anything else. Some possibilities I tried (this is the part where I make Ferrett go link-crazy) - Eternal Witness, Shared Triumph (to fight Engineered Plague), Bloodline Shaman, Wirewood Herald, Elvish Champion (oh, the irony), Gaea's Herald, Stifle, Genesis Chamber, Naturalize, Aura Shards, and Auriok Champion.

How to Play It (The Abridged Version):
It's the most boring deck you'll ever play.

I had to get that out of the way up front. Does it win? Yes. Can it achieve miracle victories from practically nowhere? Yes. Will you have fun doing it?

...Not unless you're into self-dentistry.

It requires an enormous amount of repetitive perfect clicking. I spent two days practicing in secret before the first Vext tournament, and I still screwed up one game (luckily, it was one that didn't matter). For each cycle, you have to click a minimum of six times, all on different objects, in the right order. Some cycles require eight clicks. You have to do this a minimum of twenty times - with Hivemaster, more like thirty-five. It takes three to six minutes to do the entire cycle each time, if you're fast and have practiced. If they Plague or Pyroclasm and kill your tokens, you have to do it again (after killing the Plague, of course).

This deck gives you a lot of chances to screw it up. But if you have at least one untapped land, it's usually forgiving enough not to blow the entire game. And I never ran into time problems despite this - when you win on turn 2 or turn 3 at the latest, you really don't need all that much time.

Here are some other tips on playing the deck.

1) Never, ever, ever keep a hand without Symbiote or a Wish or Call to get Symbiote. The deck has nineteen draws (out of the fifty-three left) to find a mana producer and nineteen draws to find a win condition, but only eleven to find Symbiote.

2) Mulligan Aggressively. Very aggressively. I mulliganed to four - to four! - and still had a turn 2 win.

Twice.

In the same tournament.

My hands looked like: Land, Symbiote, Bird/Elf, Glimpse/Freeze. If you draw a land and they don't kill your bird/elf, this is a turn 2 win. With Glimpse, you don't even need another card to win.

3) Symbiote can always save himself from burn. He can also save any other creature in your deck that has a Shock or Lava Dart pointed at him, though then he can't save himself later in that turn (the "play this only once per turn" clause kicks in). I can't tell you how many Magma Jets I fizzled with Symbiote.

(Hey! Stop twisting my arm, Randy Buehler! Ow! That really hurts! Okay - I meant to say "countered by the rules of the game due to an illegal target." Jeez!)

4) Birchlore Ranger is your best friend. Behind Symbiote, he's the best card in the deck. He's a Birds of Paradise with haste. Seriously. Turn 1, you cast Symbiote. They can try and kill it, but you can always return it.

Turn 2, play a land and cast Ranger. Tap the Ranger and Symbiote for Green. Return Symbiote and untap Ranger. You're back where you started. Glimpse or Freeze or Hivemaster away! He also works well with Hivemaster if you've lost Symbiote - the insect tokens are elves too and can be tapped for any color mana.

5) Unlike some of the other combo decks, every piece of this one is fairly useful. If you need cards, you can always cast Glimpse and then an Elf, which likely leads to another 1cc creature, etc. Without a mana producer, Hivemaster and Symbiote can produce a mini-army to block with while you search. Even Brain Freeze - I've used it more than once to stop a Goblin Charbelcher activation from being lethal (since he typically needs to play three to four spells that turn).

6) The major threats to you are Engineered Plague and Cabal Therapy. (I would go so far as to say these are the major threats to virtually every Online Extended deck, Vanguard or no.) These two cards (along with their lesser brother Duress) are the Force of Will of the new Extended - they keep combo in check. As much as I despise them, I've come to see them as necessary to balance the format.

Your specific plan against them is just to win first. You can outrun a plague if you go first. If not, you can either go all in and hope they don't have it, or just wait and see if they do, depending on the depth of your hand. Also, remember that a plague on Elf will kill their Elf token as well (assuming that's what they play). Therapy (my most hated card, ever) can always get lucky, but you have so much redundancy, it can be hard for them to hit the first time - it's slightly less of a threat here.

I prefer to call the deck "Symbiosis." It's a very synergistic deck, and contains lots of little combos that can lead to victory, so I think the name fits. A couple of other names I've heard bandied about are "Inf-Elf," "Wirewood Freeze," and "I-can't-believe-my-Belcher-deck-lost-to-that-pile-of-garbage.dec." But as deck designer, I get to put my foot down and name it, so it's Symbiosis.

The budget version of less than $20 looks something like this:

Seshiro Avatar Deck Featured by Eric Engelhard on 2005-06-12 As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/9871.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Creatures 4 Birchlore Rangers 4 Bloodline Shaman 4 Llanowar Elves 2 Wirewood Herald 4 Wirewood Hivemaster 4 Wirewood Symbiote Instants 3 Annul 4 Brain Freeze	Sorceries 4 Commune with Nature 4 Glimpse of Nature Basic Lands 13 Forest 4 Island Lands 4 Forbidden Orchard 2 Tarnished Citadel	Sideboard: 2 Elvish Champion 2 Kami of Ancient Law 2 Viridian Shaman 2 Wirewood Herald 1 Annul 4 Naturalize
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

Annul is an incredible card in this format. It stops all the major threats except Therapy, including Belcher and Affinity, and even has game against Ponza. It's the best cheap Chant replacement.

Herald is great against almost everything except Belcher, since it can get any creature in your deck when it dies. Bloodline Shaman coupled with Symbiote can draw you an awful lot of cards, though its no good if you need a Freeze in hand to win. The deck is less consistent at fast wins, but in some ways has a better long game. It's still very possible to get turn 2 kills with this, and turn 3 is still fairly likely. However, one Cranial Extraction can ruin this deck's day without Living Wish to get Symbiote back.

If you have the money, the order to add cards to the deck is this:

• Chrome Mox (allows Glimpse to be a same-turn kill)
• Birds of Paradise (Mana producers nine through twelve)
• Living Wish
• City of Brass

Part 3 - The Other New Decks

1) Rotlung Combo
Seshiro can make a lot of other creatures unfair, but only two others turn into easy infinite loops. One is Rotlung Reanimator, calling Cleric. When any creature you control dies, it gets replaced by a 2/2 zombie.... including 2/2 Zombie tokens. You can abuse this with Blasting Station, Carrion Feeder, Nantuko Husk, Spawning Pit, Phyrexian Altar, etc.

It's somewhat slow in this format, since you must have a Rotlung on the board for the deck to do anything, but was fast enough to place two people in top 8s. I don't have a great decklist for it, but I'm sure you can figure it out from there. In my opinion, it's the weakest of the Seshiro combos - but it has the advantage of being fairly immune to Pithing Needle, which almost no other combo in Vext is.

2) Demon Combo
The other creature that can go infinite is Blood Speaker. With a Zombie Infestation on the table, discarding two Blood Speakers will put a Zombie Demon token into play, which bounces the Blood Speakers back to hand, so you can do it again. Though it sounds difficult to get two of them, one advantage here is that you only need to cast one spell to win the game (a la Dragon in Type I). Buried Alive helps to get two in your graveyard - then you can discard any two cards to go infinite. The rest is filled with tutors and discard.

In terms of clicking, it can get ten or twelve zombies on the board a lot faster than Symbiosis can win - but actual turn 2 kills require a lot more luck in the draw. Of course, you have access to great disruption, to make up for it. It looks something like this:

Seshiro Avatar Deck Featured by Eric Engelhard on 2005-06-12 As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/9871.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 4 Chrome Mox 3 Damping Matrix Creatures 4 Blood Speaker Enchantments 4 Zombie Infestation Instants 2 Lose Hope 4 Plunge Into Darkness 2 Spoils of the Vault 3 Tainted Pact	Sorceries 4 Buried Alive 4 Cabal Therapy 3 Duress 3 Night's Whisper Artifact Lands 4 Vault of Whispers Basic Lands 9 Swamp Lands 3 Barren Moor 2 Cabal Pit Legendary Lands 1 Shizo, Death's Storehouse	Sideboard: 1 Damping Matrix 4 Engineered Plague 2 Devour In Shadow 2 Lose Hope 1 Tainted Pact 4 Cranial Extraction 1 Duress
Download this deck in Apprentice format!		Download this deck in Magic Online Text format!

Deck plays pretty obviously. Get a Zombie Infestation on the table, get two Blood Speakers in hand or graveyard, win. It can win at instant speed in response to a Disenchant effect, which is pretty nifty. Even if your opponent is smart and saves Disenchant until you start the loop at end of their turn, you can discard another cards to get the Blood Speakers to trigger again. Same thing if they try and Coffin Purge a Blood Speaker. A single Engineered Plague can't stop it, either.

So it has an incredible amount of resilience - once Zombie Infestation resolves and two Speakers are in hand or yard, its very, very hard to stop. However, Pithing Needle is going to be the bane of this deck - it can't do anything at all against Turn 1 Pithing for Zombie Infestation. And monoblack is not known for its artifact kill.

3) Belcher
The other "new" deck in Vext is Belcher. The idea is same as it ever was - activate Goblin Charbelcher with no lands in your deck. This is made much easier with Elvish Champion providing a free green mana to start. There was a lot more variety in these decklists than in the ones I shared above. Belcher always used the Elvish Champion Avatar, and typical builds had four lands - two Forests, a Mountain, and a Swamp, as well as four Mox. Most builds had Birds and Elves, all the Rampant Growth effects plus Kodama's Reach, eschewed Talismans, and prominently used Cabal Ritual and Seething Song. They also used black for Plunge into Darkness and Spoils of the Vault. (Two cards whose stock go way up in Vext.)

4) Ponza
Ponza decks did second-best in Vext, though I wouldn't count them as a "new" deck. It's the same Big Red with Land Destruction decks that dominated Vanguard Standard (or Vast, as I like to call it). The typical win was still turn 1 or turn 2 Seething Song into Arc-Slogger or Kumano. Extended brings the deck Pillage and nothing else vital.

Part 4 - The Statistics
So this is the Top 8 statistics for all seventeen Vext Tournaments (136 spots total), sorted by deck type, then with breakdowns for different avatars played with that deck:

The top decks:

29 Affinity

• 21 Elvish
• 4 Akroma
• 3 Prodigal
• 1 Two-Headed Giant

26 Ponza

• 26 Elvish

20 Belcher

• 20 Elvish

8 Rock (2 Control, 1 Aggro, 5 Red Rock)

• 8 Elvish

8 Tog

• 6 Prodigal
• 2 Elvish

7 Symbiosis

• 7 Seshiro

7 KCI

• 6 Elvish
• 1 Prodigal

5 U/G Madness

• 4 Elvish
• 1 Prodigal

4 Demon Infestation

• 4 Seshiro

The lesser decks (in this format):

2 Cephalid Breakfast

• 2 Elvish

2 Rotlung Combo

• 2 Seshiro

2 Goblins

• 1 Raksha
• 1 Serra

2 Reanimator

• 2 Prodigal

2 RG Beats

• 1 Elvish
• 1 Akroma

2 Scepter-Chant

• 2 Prodigal

2 TINGS!

• 1 Prodigal
• 1 Akroma(? - Lord knows why)

2 UW Control

• 2 Serra

1 Opposition

• 1 Elvish

1 Five-Color control

• 1 Birds of Paradise

4 Unknown

• 3 Elvish
• 1 Serra

These numbers are not perfect - Birds of Paradise wasn't available for the first few, Rock steadily declined until it disappeared as the week went on and Ponza and Belcher grew, and of course, Symbiosis wasn't known until I started making top 8 with it. (I personally accounted for 4 of the 7 top 8s with the deck).

More interesting statistics - I was able to get complete lists of players and decks for 11 of the 17 Vext events. (Sleep is for the weak! Or next week, anyway.) This is the avatar breakdown (out of 919 players I got data for):

313 Elvish (34.0 %)
140 Prodigal (15.2 %)
133 Akroma (14.5 %)
77 Seshiro (8.4 %)
69 Serra (7.5 %)

35 Higure
27 Birds of Paradise
21 Erhnam Djinn
17 Raksha
13 Two-Headed Giant
12 Goblin
12 Phage
9 Viridian Zealot
8 Fallen Angel
8 Grinning Demon
5 8.5 Tails
5 Karona
4 Royal Assassin
3 Etched Oracle
3 Flametongue Kavu
2 Platinum Angel
2 Ink-Eyes
1 Bosh
0 Arcbound Overseer

The top five most-played Avatars shouldn't surprise you. The only one so bad no one played it was Arcbound Overseer - though that one did make a top 8 in Vanguard Kamigawa block. I would say everything below Raksha (except Etched Oracle) may be eligible for adjustment up in the future (see part 5 for what they adjusted this go around) - particularly Bosh, whose ability may not be worth it at any price. Also, note that FTK is not nearly as popular as Wizards seemed to think it would be, though Belcher and Ponza having no great targets hurt its appearances, I'm sure.

More interesting stats:

• 34.0 % of decks used Elvish - 69.1 % of people making top 8 were with Elvish
• 15.2 % of decks used Prodigal - 11.7 % of people making top 8 were with Prodigal
• 14.5 % of decks used Akroma - 4.4 % of people making top 8 were with Akroma
• 8.4 % of decks used Seshiro - 9.6 % of people making top 8 were with Seshiro

It's somewhat comforting to note that the only two Avatars that increased their percentages between Swiss and top 8 are the only two that Wizards nerfed. Which brings me to the next section....

Part 5 - The Future
Three important things are happening in the month of June with relation to Online Vanguard.

1) Paul Sottosanti posted the following on Friday, June 3^rd in Aaron Forsythe's weekly column. I'll comment on each change afterwards.

"Elvish Champion - 7 cards, 15 life (from 8, 21)
"During playtesting, we thought that the early game power of the Elvish Champion would be offset by the long term power of the other avatars. Unfortunately, the Vanguard format turned out to be fast enough that this wasn't the case, and Elvish Champion ended up dominating many tournaments. The new stats should bring it into line with the other avatars and give aggressive decks a place in the format."

"Dominating many tournaments" is a bit of an understatement - Skullclamp was pulling in similar 70% saturation of top 8s when it was banned. While I personally think that having a Mox that can attack and block (though also be killed) should cost you a card and it should start with six cards, at least having seven cards is more reasonable and in line with the power of the other avatars.

How relevant the low life total is remains to be seen. It brings it within easy range of Cranial Plating and Arc-Slogger - but both of those decks preferred using the Elvish Avatar.

My prediction is that Elvish will continue to pull in 30%+ of top 8s, mainly on the back of Arc-Slogger. Belcher will be harder hit, where the loss of a card really can affect it, but it's still viable. KCI may rise a bit to take its place, as it does just fine with seven cards. Affinity should experiment with this avatar, but I suspect it may find Akroma more to it's liking now.

"Seshiro the Anointed - 7 cards, 19 life (from 7, 25)
"There are a number of combo decks involving Seshiro that can kill quickly and consistently. With Elvish Champion's reign coming to an end, there was a risk that Seshiro would simply rise up and take its place. A lower life total will make games more interesting by giving these decks less time to assemble their pieces."

I'd like to thank the Academy for recognizing all my hard work. It's been a long struggle, but I finally have achieved the recognition I craved. I'd like to thank all the little people who made this possible. It was always my dream to join Stephen Menendian in almost single-handedly getting something on a Banned / Restricted Announcement.

Okay - there were other Seshiro combo decks, but if you look at the numbers, Symbiosis is clearly the most troublesome, followed by Demon Infestation. So I feel sort of proud that they recognized its power right away and acted to nerf it.

If you're curious, the "number of combo decks" he mentions = three, the same ones I've discussed. I'd also take issue with the statement "Elvish Champion's reign coming to an end," though we'll have to wait and see on that one.

What does all this mean for Symbiosis? There were a handful of games that I did indeed end up at less than six life. But on the whole, if your deck can kill on turn 2 (and on turn 3 about 90% of the time if not disrupted and you have mulliganed correctly), I don't think the life loss will be significant. Probably fewer painlands will be used - I honestly needed them less than I thought I would. It affects Demon Infestation more, as they spend their life freely on Plunge Into Darkness, Spoils of the Vault, and Night's Whisper, so they will probably require some more tuning.

"Goblin Warchief - 7 cards, 22 life (from 7, 17)
"Goblin Warchief suffered from the dilemma of a low life total combined with an ability that makes you want to neglect defense and simply attack. The extra staying power should make it better able to compete."

Only Grinning Demon among the free Avatars put up worse numbers, and I agree this could use a boost.

"Ink-Eyes, Servant of Oni - 6 cards, 17 life (from 6, 13)
"Ink-Eyes, despite being a foil to all of the combo decks, hasn't been seeing any play due to its rather low stats. The change will give it a couple more activations of the secondary ability and should breathe some life into the avatar."

This may be quite significant, as its ability to Distress you coupled with the near-certainty of them running four Cabal Therapy would indeed make this a very good foil for combo decks. I'm not sure what deck would run with this Avatar, though; it doesn't seem a good fit for any established Extended deck off the top of my head. And even at seventeen life, I have the feeling Ponza can still beat it. We'll see - it's certainly more interesting.

I'll admit I was a bit surprised at this one when there are many other cruddy Avatars that could be cool. This change may have something to do with the fact that Bennie Smith, author of the Into The Aether column about Magic Online, was the only person to try running Ink-Eyes in a Vext tournament.

"Arcbound Overseer - 7 cards, 23 life (from 6, 23)
"This is an interesting avatar that hasn't seen much play due to the low hand size. An extra card should allow it to compete on more even footing."

It actually did manage to make a handful of top 8 appearances in other formats, though no one even tried playing it in Vext. It's a powerful ability that can be abused, particularly with Umezawa's Jitte. (Jitte can be abused? Stop the presses!) I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot more of this in Vast, and some people finally trying it in Vext.

I'm a little worried that they upgraded two of the premium (rare) avatars - if these become dominant (very unlikely but possible), they'll have a lot of complaints to deal with (not complaints I necessarily agree with) as to their availability, as Arcbound in particular is fairly rare. They did leave Royal Assassin and Platinum Angel (the two most expensive avatars) alone, although I don't think anyone would mind a modest boost for them - they're completely uncompetitive and not a whole lot of fun at present, even in casual. They're not going to be winning any tournaments, regardless.

Scott Larabee, MTGO tournament co-ordinator, made this announcement on Saturday, June 4^th.

"Vanguard Premier Events have been added to the Premier Event Schedule starting the week of June 6. They will be run on Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday in the Standard and Extended formats. See the Premier Event Schedule for exact times."

So all of this analysis of the Vanguard Extended format would have been rather academic, if it was going to be a strictly casual format from now on. However, as many predicted - and I for one am overjoyed with - Vext and Vast are returning. This means the Type I of Magic Online lives!

I know some people will hate this announcement, but I don't think there's a really a problem. No one brings Symbiosis or Ponza to casual Vext games - I've played hundreds of casual Two-Headed Giant Vext games, and the most 'broken' decks I've seen anyone bring are actually Birds of Paradise control decks. There's an obvious divide between casual decks and tournament decks, and I have yet to see someone truly mix them up. It's a fun and popular format for casual, and I expect it will be a popular tournament format as well.

"The Saviors of Kamigawa release for Magic Online is scheduled for June 27."

If they follow the pattern of previous releases, the cards will be legal in every format the day the cards are released. This means, that starting June 27^th, Pithing Needle will be legal in Vext.

Pithing Needle is going to change this infant format in a way no format has been changed since Tendrils of Agony met Type I.

Pithing Needle Stops:

• Symbiosis
• Belcher
• KCI
• Demon Infestation

Pithing Needle Severely Hampers:

• Affinity
• Tog
• Rock (naming Pernicious Deed)

Of the top nine decks in Vext (that had three or more top 8 appearances), the only ones it doesn't affect dramatically are Ponza and UG Madness. They both have prime targets (Arc-Slogger, Wild Mongrel) but they have other cards that do the same thing (Kumano, Aquamoeba) and don't rely so exclusively on a single card for victory.

I feel Rock and Tog can adapt to deal with it, but their decklists will look different. Affinity will have a harder time adapting - they need Arcbound Ravager to win a great portion of the time, and Cranial Plating can be stopped too.

Symbiosis is better equipped than some of the other combos to deal with this - Belcher, KCI, Affinity, and Demon Infestation have no maindeck way to remove Pithing Needle. But I'm telling you right now, it's going to cause profound changes in the format. And not just this format, regular Online Extended (which is going to be paper Extended in six months) is going to undergo a tectonic shift as a result of Pithing Needle. After June 27^th, the Vext and Ext formats are going to be wide open in a way they haven't ever been since I've been online - but whatever you do, don't forget to bring your Pithing Needles.

Hope you've enjoyed this look at Magic's newest fast tournament format. While it's no Type I, for those of us Type I enthusiasts, there's now an online format that's comparable in tournaments and also fun in casual. I plan to keep you all updated when I can on how the format is going, now that tournaments are beginning again.

See ya again when Saviors Legends start hitting the scene and we see which ones of them flame out and die spectacularly - spectacular enough to make my "BAD LEGENDS 2: ELECTRIC BOOGOOALOO" list of the worst of Kamigawa block!