In Vintage the natural decks have two points of commonality. The first is the abuse of the Moxen and their allies Mana Crypt, Sol Ring, and Black Lotus to cause a preponderance of mana. This is a fundamental commonality to all of the natural archetypes in the format, and is a key to understanding the construction of the most powerful decks. The second point of commonality is that all of the natural decks seek to abuse one or more of the most degenerate unrestricted cards in the format: Mana Drain, Mishra's Workshop, Dark Ritual, Oath of Druids, and Bazaar of Baghdad. In order to create a functional anti-deck for Vintage, you have to be able to attack both levels of the construction of natural decks: their mana and their reliance on ridiculously powerful cards.

Fortunately, there are cards that exist to redress the balance between natural deck and anti-deck. In order to attack the mana of these enormously powerful pillars of the Vintage metagame, cards like Null Rod, Chalice of the Void, and Wasteland combine to successfully disrupt the finely tuned mana bases in these decks. To engage the actual strategies themselves, a variety of approaches can be made.

Building an anti-deck for Mana Drain decks is actually more a matter of actual deck construction than specific cards. Due to Drain's presence as an accelerant, you need to keep the overall casting cost of your deck to two or lower. Force of Will is the lone exception, and the number of times it runs into a Mana Drain is small in this deck. This means that the Drain deck cannot do more than leverage mana from one turn to the next by successfully resolving Mana Drain; therefore they cannot cast their Gifts Ungiven or Thirst for Knowledge without having a significant amount of mana on the table. Your job is to win the game through mana deprivation, and the best way to do that is to not play into their Mana Drain. Both Control Slaver and non-hybrid Gifts Ungiven decks fall under this category and attacking them involves cutting their mana to pieces then winning before they recover.

For the anti-deck to Mishra's Workshop, you also need to deny them the mana. However, for most aggro-control decks there is a relatively recent development in the fight against the brown legions: Kataki, War's Wage. This legendary Energy Flux on a stick both enhances the mana denial of the traditional anti-deck plan and breaks up the powerful artifacts that come from the Mishra's Workshop decks lately - the Chalices of the Void, Spheres of Resistance, and Smokestacks all now have an upkeep cost that is difficult to impossible to pay with Kataki in play and the opposition gunning for the non-Workshop mana sources.

Dark Ritual decks are themselves a rarity in this format. However, since they are either marginally playable or completely degenerate, having a plan against them is probably not the worst of ideas. The traditional mana denial aspects outlined above are quite useful, but the Ritual decks have countermeasures for the artifacts that would otherwise spell their doom. Fortunately, there is another wave of denial for them. Enter True Believer. This Ivory Mask bear will force the Ritual deck to deal with it as well as the Chalices and Null Rods that normally keep them pinned. Very few decks will run enough bounce to take care of the Chalices, Rods, and the Believer.

Oath of Druids is currently the chief foil to aggro-control strategies and Mishra's Workshop decks in the format. At 1G, it is cheap enough to be cast through mana denial and the ridiculously sized monster that it puts into play means that a traditional aggro-control strategy has a very difficult time with the Oath of Druids archetype. Recent developments, as well as retooling the traditional builds, have swayed the balance back to a neutral state. Stormscape Apprentice fulfills a very necessary role here - it taps the dreadnought-sized monstrosity that showed up, allowing the smaller creatures from the Fish deck to try to come online and race. Failing that, Swords to Plowshares, Meddling Mage, and Seal of Cleansing all provide to trip up the natural predator.

Bazaar of Baghdad's niche is a solid one. It either exists as a main card in the Worldgorger Dragon combo deck or as a support card in a Mishra's Workshop deck (Robert Vroman's Uba Stax). Fighting this card depends on which deck it is in. The Worldgorger Dragon combo can be fought by Wasteland on the Bazaar of Baghdad itself, or you can defeat the combo by casting Swords to Plowshares on the Dragon during the first iteration of the loop. In addition, you bring into the deck Pithing Needle and Seal of Cleansing after boarding to further inhibit the generation of infinite mana. In Uba Stax, you still have to worry about it. but if you have Kataki then you've already gone most of the way towards a victory. In that deck, while it's utterly ridiculous (now they just Weld things around), it's not what you should probably attack first.

With these principles in mind, I set out with my Team Meandeck partner in crime Jacob Orlove to update U/W Fish for the current metagame. Here's what we came up with:

Meandeck Deck Wins - Rian Litchard and Jacob Orlove

U/W Fish Featured by Rian Litchard on 2005-12-25 (Vintage) As written about in http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/11029.html Print this deck!
Maindeck: Artifacts 1 Black Lotus 4 Chalice of the Void 1 Mox Pearl 1 Mox Sapphire 3 Null Rod Creatures 4 Meddling Mage 4 Savannah Lions 3 Stormscape Apprentice Instants 1 Ancestral Recall 4 Brainstorm 4 Force of Will 3 Swords to Plowshares	Legendary Creatures 3 Isamaru, Hound of Konda 4 Kataki, War's Wage Sorceries 1 Time Walk Basic Lands 2 Island 2 Plains Lands 4 Flooded Strand 1 Strip Mine 4 Tundra 4 Wasteland 2 Windswept Heath	Sideboard: 3 Pithing Needle 4 True Believer 4 Seal of Cleansing 3 Last Breath 1 Swords to Plowshares
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The True Believer/Kataki slot is strictly a metagame call, even in a metagame deck such as this one. If you think there will be more Workshops than Mana Drains, play Kataki maindeck and board True Believer.

This deck is a significant upgrade over traditional U/W Fish lists that are prevalent (see Paul Nicolo's deck from SCG: Chicago in October). Meandeck Deck Wins has increases in all categories of performance including offensive firepower, proactive disruption, and mana stability. Now you have the ability to finish the kill before the opponent breaks out of the mana denial that was stunting his development. You have both Chalices and Rods to make it far more likely to see one every game in a relevant amount of time. And you don't clutter up a mana base that reliably has to hit W (W/U) on turn 2 a vast majority of the time with 9 colorless lands just so that you can have Mishra's Factories.

On December 10, StarCityGames hosted the final Power 9 event in wonderfully sunny Rochester, New York. At the last minute a large number of my teammates decided to not brave the winter weather to come visit me and battle the Canadian legions, leaving the task of defending my home city to myself and Paul Mastriano.

After no actually exciting matches (honestly, this deck's game-plan is to just knock out some mana and then beat people up before they recover), I ended up 5-1-1, missing tiebreakers at 10^th place. Opponents included one U/G Threshold, BrassMan Gifts, 2 Control Slaver, Gifts Oath, B/u aggro-control (included Confidants, Jittes, Wretches, Forces, and Brainstorms as the cards I saw), and the Canadian Old Faerie Men U/W Fish build maindecking Old Man of the Sea and other goodies. The single loss was to Ryan Trepanier with Control Slaver. The first game involved me putting him on zero mana but I had none as well until a lonely Mox Pearl showed up. He failed to Force of Will that card and it powered out eventual pride of angry lions. In the second and third games, he boarded out his Mana Drains for board control elements and a Gorilla Shaman. Between that Shaman and the one Darkblast he saw, he proceeded to make a mockery out of my deck in the latter two games. Monkey hungry.

All day long people were complaining that they lost to Savannah Lions or Isamaru or something else ridiculous.

Having such success, we then presented this deck to a couple of our friends: the Research and Development luminaries Mike Turian and Randy Buehler. They are not allowed to play in sanctioned events due to their status as Wizards employees, but they are fully allowed to game in the unsanctioned world of Vintage Magic since the DCI has no control over these events. Randy was using it as a gauntlet deck against which he was to smash his formidable head, while Mike was brawling with the legendary monsters and Invitational winners.

Mike won. And kept winning. And won some more. Stax? No problem, Kataki your board. Gifts? Nice True Believer, good man. Gifts Oath? You sir, have no mana and then you do nothing relevant before your life total is erased. Grim Long? Chalice, Rod, Believer, Mage. Smash you? Heh. And so on. The one matchup that was less than stellar was the more traditional Oath match with the twin giant Angels. You can get that result to slightly less than even, but if they're bright enough to be able to use mass removal, then you simply don't win anything ever. Randy said: "Forsythe's reaction to Kird Ape's (my online handle in Magic circles has been kirdape3 since the Beyond Dominia days circa 2000) deck was awesome: "It's like you went up to some little kid and tried to explain Type 1 by saying 'You can play with all the best cards in the history of the game.' And the kid gets all wide-eyed and awed and says 'Really? Even ... Isamaru?!'

Unfortunately, Mike did not do terribly well at the tournament, going 2-2. Round 1 he lost to BrassMan Gifts that resolved Thirst for Knowledges (that card cannot be shut off by the mighty True Believer, so it ends up being really good), and Round 4 he lost to Angel Oath.

In his commentary, he advocated removing Stormscape Apprentices for the original Char, Psionic Blast. He stated that the Apprentices did too little in their intended matchup (Oath of Druids primarily), while the Blast would succeed in finishing off opponents at low life. Another item of importance is the above Thirst for Knowledge dilemma; you can't shut it off with True Believer and that means they can get ahead of you or Weld in something indomitable. I'm not sure exactly how to address that charge, except that your goal is to try to keep them kicked down if possible such that Thirst is essentially defensive in nature and not offensive - he's scrambling for answers rather than advancing his own game-plan. The last point was the Oath match; it's sufficiently bad in his terms to advocate some one-mana enchantment removal (Erase probably) in addition to the Seals and other hate.

As always, creating an anti-deck is a response to a calculated metagame. In Vintage, however, you have to always remember to attack the mana before you consider attacking the rest of the metagame. If you do not, the natural decks will probably have you destroyed before even your proactive measures come online. This deck is just a mostly successful example of that premise in action.

Rian Litchard
Tassilo27 on AIM
Tassilo27 AT yahoo DOT com
Kirdape3 on www.themanadrain.com, mtgthesource.com
Team Meandeck - Crushing our enemies, seeing them driven before us, and hearing the lamentation of the women since 2002.

"I GOT ME... A MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEANDECK."