So you're curious about Vintage, are you? Sure you are – otherwise, you wouldn't be reading this. Maybe you're bored and looking for anything at all to read, like I was when I started dabbling in Vintage. But maybe other factors are at work too - perhaps you're scared off by the lingo, or you're unsure where to begin trying to digest all of the information on the format. Maybe you're scared off by the price of the cards. Heck, maybe you've just been locked into Extended/Standard/Block for so long that you don't know where to look for help when it comes to Eternal formats.

Well, worry no more – that's what I'm here to fix.

This series of articles is supposed to be a Vintage primer for non-Vintage players, to hopefully get them to understand the format even if they never choose to play it (though honestly, I hope that you guys will at least give it a shot – it really is a lot of fun). I believe that Vintage is a really interesting format, and you can learn a lot that can be easily applied to your Extended and Standard matches. The sheer amount of decisions that go into each turn of a Vintage game is educational on its own merits, especially with combo decks where you really have to think out everything you want to do before you even take that first step. In fact, was primarily a Standard aficionado until I read a series of Stephen Menendian's articles about DeathLong (a Dark Ritual-based combo deck), and the sheer depth of analysis that his article showed got me interested in the format. The rest (as they say) is history.

First and foremost, I'll assume that you've read this excellent beginners article by Stephen Menendian. It explains a lot of the jargon and basics of Vintage Magic – as with all formats, Vintage has its own slang and its own pet names for decks. If you haven't read it, I suggest that you read it now – it sets a very good foundation for the topics I intend to discuss in this series of articles.

Read it yet?

Great!

There's a lot of different stuff I want to cover in this series, but I think the most important thing is for people to have an understanding of the decks in the format; a lot of the other topics fall into place much more easily with a good background and a decent understanding of the format. And yes, we'll eventually get into the myths and misconceptions that plague Vintage. But in the meantime, let's proceed with the first topic: deck archetypes.

There are generally three recognized forms of Vintage decks – control, combo, prison – along with a general assortment of metagame decks, which generally use aggro-control strategies. These strategies tend to coincide with what I call the “big three” cards of Vintage in Mana Drain, Dark Ritual, and Mishra's Workshop – the reasoning for this will be clear as we trek through the deck archetypes. For now, just realize that Mana Drain, Dark Ritual, and Mishra's Workshop are three of the most powerful unrestricted cards available to Vintage deckbuilders today.

Before we dive into that, let's take a look at the decks I plan to cover in this series:

Mana Drain Decks (today!)
Control Slaver
Meandeck Gifts
Brassman Gifts
Burning Slaver
Oath of Druids
Salvager Oath
Bomberman

Dark Ritual Decks
Grim Long
Pitch Long
Intuition Tendrils
2-Land Belcher
Meandeck Tendrils

Other Combo Decks
Worldgorger Dragon Combo

Mishra's Workshop Decks
UbaStax
5-Color Stax
Staxless Stax
Workshop Aggro

Aggro-Control Decks
U/W Fish
Other Fish Variants (U/R, U/G, eBA)
Sullivan Solution
The Mountains Win Again (TMWA)
Worse Than Gro

Of course, there will always be innovations and new archetypes, but the above decks should provide a solid starting point for any beginning Vintage player. If you notice that I've left out a major archetype, though, please let me know so I can fix that.

And now, the main attraction and our first topic of discussion – those ever-lovable Blue control decks! Yes, don't think I don't see you Green mages giving me dirty looks…

Introduction to Mana Drain Decks
Today, we're going to be talking about decks that generally revolve around abusing a certain Legends instant called (surprise, surprise!) Mana Drain. These decks are Blue-based control decks, using Mana Drains and Force of Wills as their reactive control elements. Generally, their game plan is to stall the game using countermagic until they can find, play, and successfully protect their win condition. Mana Drain helps the game plan along immensely by basically allowing the control player to cast free spells, whether it be a hardcast bomb or “just” a draw spell.

Why Mana Drain is so good
Mana Drain is, in my opinion, the best counterspell ever printed (though Force of Will is by far the most important, for reasons we'll get to in a bit). Generally, Blue control decks just want to survive to the late game (which, in Vintage, can be as early as turn 4 or 5) and make sure its game-breaker resolves with some sort of protection. If you think about any Blue-based control deck in the past five or so years, though, you're going to find that the game plan is pretty much purely reactive until that late game hits. For example, Upheaval Psychatog back in Odyssey had to hit nine mana – 4UU for Upheaval, floating 1UB more for Psychatog, and more if you expected your opponent to counter. Jushi Blue in CBS/R Standard had to hit at least five (for the Clouded Mirror of Victory), and preferred to have eight for Hinder backup. Usually in Blue control decks, having that amount of mana means many turns of land drops and praying for enough control elements or draw spells to survive the early game, until the deck reaches the mana threshold where it takes over the game. Blue control tends to have lots of reactive defense in the early game, switching to offense only when it's safe – especially in recent years, it has never been able to immediately leverage good defense into good offense.

Leveraging defense into offense is exactly why Mana Drain shines. Not only does it counter your opponent's spell for the low cost of UU (which R&D has since found to be too cheap for a hard counter), it gives you that mana to use as you please during your next main phase. If you think about that for a while… that's insane. In a Standard environment, you could Drain your opponent's turn 2 play, untap, drop a land, and play a turn 3 Meloku. That's pretty good, right? Well, in Vintage, it's even more busted. Fact or Fiction is a great spell, but can you imagine paying just U for it? What about casting Gifts Ungiven or Tinker for that same one Blue mana? What about a two-mana Memory Jar, or a one-mana Thirst for Knowledge? I'm sure you get the picture. If you Drain even a small spell (two or three mana), it can fuel all sorts of ridiculous plays on your turn, and if you drain something bigger like Smokestack or Memory Jar with a hand that isn't utter garbage, you've essentially just won the game. Mana Drain turns defense into instant offense, without sacrificing the Blue deck's ability to still play defense. It means that you can afford to be proactive and reactive at the same time… and that's awesome. The rare instances where you'll burn on Drain mana are far outweighed by the times that the Drain mana wins you the game on the spot – and even when you burn, at least you know that you've prevented one of your opponent's quality spells from resolving. Just make sure you actually remember to use that Drain mana… people forget more often than you'd think.

A good way to think of Mana Drain in Standard terms is as an insanely broken Rewind. The two spells are similar only in that they generate some mana, but the concept is there. Rewind untaps four lands when it resolves, meaning that you essentially get a “free” counter. Basically, the ideal Rewind play is to counter a spell, untap four lands, and cast an end-of-turn spell with the mana you've “generated” – it “discounts” that spell by two or so mana (using UU Counterspell as a baseline). Once you untap, you're back to the mana you originally had – if it's the early game, the best play is probably to play a land and pass the turn to represent more countermagic. Mana Drain costs UU, but given enough mana it allows you to cast your end-of-turn spell, untap with all of your mana available, cast a significantly-cheaper bomb with the mana you've generated, and leave UU up to represent another Drain. You get the full discount of however much you Drained for, and you get it during your main phase, where it can be used to play sorceries as well as instants. The best analogy I can come up with is if Rewind allowed you to play its “untap 4 lands” clause at any point during your next main phase.

Supporting cast – the usual suspects
Mana Drain decks include 4 Force of Will without fail, because FoW is the single most important counterspell in the history of Magic. If Force of Will did not exist, Vintage (and Legacy) would not be stable formats – there are so many degenerate plays to be made in the early turns that it would be impossible for control decks to keep up. Force of Will breaks another rule of Blue control – namely, that you have to have mana to counter a spell. That brings balance to the environment – combo decks can no longer simply go for a turn 1 kill every game, because if a key spell if Forced they're more than likely out of gas. Some decks (such as MDG) even include Misdirection as a Force of Will proxy – it counters any counterspell by changing its target to the Misdirection, and as a bonus it also destroys any player that runs out an unprotected Ancestral Recall.

Drain decks generally run eight pieces of power (excluding Timetwister); fetchlands to create a stable manabase; plenty of artifact mana like Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Lotus Petal, and Sol Ring; and assorted in-color restricted bombs such as Yawgmoth's Will, Tinker, Demonic and Vampiric Tutor, and Memory Jar. They also tend to have a few slots dedicated to metagame considerations – common cards to see in those slots include spells like Tormod's Crypt, Rack and Ruin, Hurkyl's Recall, Lava Dart, and even Pyroclasm.

Yawgmoth's Will is an auto-include for Drain decks. As Menendian notes in his article (you did read it, right?), it's pretty much too silly to be a real card, but somehow it was printed in Urza's Saga anyway. It's easy to see its utility in combo, but why is it in Drain control decks? Well, resolving Will allows you to replay the entire game up to the point where Will is cast; for Drain decks, that means replaying any broken Lotuses, using that Ancestral a second time, breaking a fetch again, using that Demonic Tutor again, and sometimes casting Burning Wish for Tendrils of Agony to win on the spot. Even when a deck doesn't utilize the Tendrils kill to win on the spot, a decent Will puts the control player so far ahead that 99% of the time there's no way for the opponent to come back. There are rare instances where the first player to resolve Yawgmoth's Will doesn't win the game, but most of the time it just doesn't happen. While Drain decks certainly don't rely on Yawgmoth's Will to win the game, it's certainly good enough to warrant a slot.

A lot of people have argued that modern Drain decks would be more correctly categorized as control-combo decks instead of pure control decks, and I think there's a lot of merit in that. As you'll see in a moment, a lot of the best Drain decks run combo-like win conditions, and that makes sense – after all, in a format like Vintage, you really just want to win the game as quickly as possible after you've executed your game plan, so your opponent can't topdeck into a broken card and wreck all of the work you've done. Nevertheless, Drain decks are the closest to pure Blue control that the format has, so I label them as such.

With all that said, let's take a brief look at the more popular Mana Drain archetypes in Vintage:

Control Slaver
Name and Background - This deck gets its name from its signature play – using one of Goblin Welder, Tinker, or Mana Drain to cheat a Mindslaver into play, and then activate it. As most Vintage decks are quite powerful, a Slaver player can often do irreparable damage to his opponent's board and hand on his Slaver turn – for example, a fetchland can fail to find a land, a Necropotence can be used to set aside 20 cards (oops), a Demonic Consultation can be set to find Chimney (p)Imp, Tormod's Crypt can remove your opponent's graveyard from the game after you crack his Lion's Eye Diamond for him, and so on and so forth. If the Slaver player can do this multiple times in a row (i.e. he has multiple artifacts to Weld), then this is known as “Slaver lock”. Even one turn of this can be devastating - if multiple turns in a row are taken in this fashion, it becomes nearly impossible for the Slaver-locked player to come back to win the game.

The Strategy – Control Slaver (CS) is a deck that thrives in the late game. Its primary goal for the first few turns is simply to survive and to get its draw engine online. Thirst for Knowledge draws three cards and allows the CS player to put his big artifacts in the graveyard, where they can be Welded into play. Alternately, if the CS player is able to Mana Drain a big spell, he can hardcast his artifact bombs instead. The bombs in question are usually some combination of Darksteel Colossus, Triskelion, Memory Jar, and Mindslaver, though Platinum Angel, Pentavus, Duplicant, and Sundering Titan are also not unheard of, and quite good in their own right.

The Win Condition – Essentially, it doesn't matter to this deck. If CS executes its gameplan and survives into the late game, he can literally beat with Goblin Welder for 20 turns against a helpless opponent – it's not unheard of, and has happened more often than you would think. Traditional CS builds win the game with creatures – Darksteel Colossus is easily Tinkered up and ends the game quickly, and Triskelion is no slouch either – it beats for four, shoots for two, shoots itself, and then is Welded back into play for another go the next turn.

BrassMan Gifts
Name and Background – This deck is named for its creator Andy Probasco, better known to the Vintage community as the ever-lovable “BrassMan”. Between jokes about being crying tears of emo and having to pay mana to untap himself, Andy found the time to make the first attempt at breaking Gifts Ungiven, and the deck has evolved since then through numerous iterations.

The Strategy – BrassMan Gifts (BMG) is a very similar control deck to CS, except that it eschews the big robots for a combo finish. The deck is so similar to CS precisely because Brassy worked off of the CS shell when trying out Gifts. Like CS, it uses Thirst for Knowledge as its draw engine; however, it doesn't use Goblin Welders, because as explained by Brassy in an excellent article here, Thirst for Knowledge is still pretty good without that pesky Goblin around. This version of Gifts uses Gifts Ungiven as a pseudo-tutor and a game-ending bomb more so than as a simple card-selection/draw engine.

The Win Condition – The first iteration of this archetype used the Mana Severance-Goblin Charbelcher combination to kill its opponent – this version of the deck was dubbed Shortbus Severance Belcher, or SSB, because Probasco was on Team Shortbus at the time. The combination was simple – a Gifts pile of Charbelcher, Yawgmoth's Will, Recoup, and Mana Severance guaranteed the Gifts player the combo, given enough mana. When Meandeck Gifts was introduced, the Darksteel Colossus kill (explained in further detail below) was utilized. Later, when Flame Fusillade was printed, the deck switched over to the Time Vault-Flame Fusillade kill, dubbed FlameVault, with Fusillade, Vault, Will, Recoup as the combo-guarantor here. (Note: In both the FlameVault and the Severance Belcher combos, there were often other ways to assemble the combo that required less mana, usually involving some combination of tutors and Tinker, but those piles all depend on game state, so we'll stick to the generic piles for now). When the Powers That Be errataed that combo out of existence, the deck went back to the DSC kill, though the Charbelcher kill is still fine. The deck also has a sideboarded Tendrils of Agony that it can fetch with Burning Wish, similar to the next deck on this list...

Meandeck Gifts
Name and Background – Stephen Menendian of Team Meandeck built this deck to abuse Gifts Ungiven; the name pretty much explains itself. The deck uses Gifts Ungiven and Merchant Scroll as its draw engine and runs the full complement of each.

The Strategy – Meandeck Gifts (MDG) is a very aggressive variant on the Mana Drain archetype. It wants to be the control deck in the early game with Drains, Forces, and Misdirections. When able, it resolves a Gifts Ungiven for four bombs that will likely end the game on the spot. The card is also used as a setup spell – for example, if you're holding two Gifts, you could use the first one for some combination of mana cards (for instance - Black Lotus, Tolarian Academy, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault) to set up your mana for the second, game-ending Gifts. Extras can also be pitched to Force of Will or Misdirection. This deck ditches Thirst for Knowledge; its draw engine is Merchant Scroll for Ancestral Recall, a single Fact or Fiction, and aggressive use of Gifts Ungiven to find the cards the pilot needs. Think card-selection, like Standard Heartbeat but a lot stronger, instead of raw topdecking power.

The Win Condition – The game-ending play that MDG is known for is casting Gifts Ungiven for Time Walk, Yawgmoth's Will, Recoup, and Tinker, a win that BMG later adopted as well. No matter which two cards the Gifts player is given, he will be able to (given sufficient mana) Tinker for a Darksteel Colossus, cast Time Walk twice (from its hand, off Will, or off Recoup), and attack twice with the big guy. I refer to this as the “DSC” kill, for obvious reasons. MDG lists will also usually have a Tendrils of Agony in the sideboard as an alternate win condition, to be fetched with Burning Wish.

Burning Slaver
Name and Background – Burning Slaver is Brian Demars's attempt to combine the best elements of CS and the various Gifts builds into one deck, after he realized that Gifts and Slaver are essentially the same Mana Drain/Yawgmoth's Will deck at their core (and indeed, CS and Gifts lists usually have 50+ identical maindeck cards). He took the deck in a more combo-oriented direction, due to the power of Tinkering for a Memory Jar. The deck is named for its inclusion of Burning Wish to the Slaver core.

The Strategy – Very similar to Gifts and Slaver; after all, it is a hybrid of the two. Control the game for long enough with reactive Blue spells and win with the big bomb of your choice. The deck is not as aggressive as Gifts variants, but it can't really hold the late game like Slaver can either, especially not against a deck like Stax. The tradeoff is giving Slaver access to a very focused win condition in Tendrils of Agony.

The Win Condition – Burning Slaver combines the win conditions of CS and Gifts – it is capable of Slaver-locking an opponent and beating with Welders, casting Gifts Ungiven for the DSC kill, or casting Burning Wish for Tendrils of Agony on a Yawgmoth's Will turn.

Oath of Druids
Name and Background – These decks are named for their signature card. There are two major variants of this deck – GWS and ICBM, named for the teams that pioneered them. It should be noted that the GWS variant has dropped Mana Drain in favor of Mana Leak, but most Oath of Druids decks (including the first one to abuse Forbidden Orchard, Meandeck Oath) have used Drains as part of their control suite, so I've included them here.

The Strategy – The deck revolves around the synergy between Forbidden Orchard and Oath of Druids. The GWS variant wants to aggressively dig for and cast Oath as soon as possible, holding off the opponent with countermagic in the meantime – Drains are cut in favor of Mana Leaks, which are easier on the manabase. It should be noted that the GWS variant of Oath is more akin to aggro-control strategies than the pure control strategies that the image of Mana Drains usually evoke. The ICBM variant seeks to disrupt the opponent with cards like Chalice of the Void and Duress, dropping Oath when it has established control of the game. Gaea's Blessing prevents the Oath player from decking himself while Oathing, and also to shuffle binned Angels back into the deck to be Oathed up again. The Oath player also has to be careful not to use Forbidden Orchard too many times, as overuse can quickly lead to death by an angry swarm of 1/1 spirits (and burning on Drain mana doesn't really help matters, either).

The Win Condition – Akroma, Angel of Wrath and Razia, Boros Archangel are the two most commonly-used creatures; sideboarded Simic Sky Swallowers are also a common sight nowadays, as people seek to protect themselves from both Jester's Cap and Swords to Plowshares. Spirit of the Night is also a serviceable six-power haster, if for some reason you can't get your hands on one or the other of the angels. The major problem with the Angel plan is that it requires that the Oath player pass the turn after having executed his “combo” – he can only Oath up one Angel at a time, and the extra turn can make all the difference. Drawing either of the Angels, of course, is terrible no matter what the circumstances.

Salvager Oath
Name and Background – The deck is named for its signature cards – Oath of Druids flipping up Auriok Salvagers for a combo kill.

The Strategy – Very similar to traditional Oath decks – find Oath, play Oath, flip up the win condition. The difference here is that the win condition does not require that the Oath of Druids player pass the turn – he can often win on the spot, not giving his opponent the extra turn to win the game or find an answer. The tradeoff here is that the win condition itself is fairly fragile, as we'll see in a moment.

The Win Condition – Auriok Salvagers will recur either Lion's Eye Diamond or Black Lotus to make infinite mana of any color – sacrifice either one for 3 mana, bring it back for 1W, rinse and repeat. Once infinite mana is made, a Spellbomb is used to draw the deck until a Pyrite Spellbomb is found. Then, the Pyrite Spellbomb is recurred ten times for the win. As noted above, this combo is very fragile – any Chalices of the Void must be removed (as you may have noticed, the deck cannot win at all through Chalice for 0 or 1, and Chalice for 2 hinders the ability to find and cast the Salvagers significantly); as well, any creature removal must be played around.

A caveat here is to make sure that you actually generate mana of the colors you need. On IRC a while back, Rich Shay (The Atog Lord) related a story where he was playing against a Salvagers player, and his opponent tapped out, fired up the combo, made 100 White mana…and then proceeded to use it all to generate 50 Red mana. Then, he tried to restart the loop. Oops.

Bomberman
Name and Background - It seems that Auriok Salvagers really likes to kill players with little spellbomby trinkets, so it seems only natural to call him Bomberman. As you might have guessed, this is another deck based around Auriok Salvagers.

The Strategy – I almost put Bomberman into the aggro-control department, but it's not really disruption-based, so after a little discussion with Jesus Roxas of Team Reflection, I decided to put it here. Bomberman is an aggro-control strategy wrapped up in a control-like shell. It runs the full complement of Mana Drain, Force of Will, and Mana Leak to survive the early game and set up its win condition. Trinket Mages find the requisite Spellbombs, the two silly artifacts that generate three mana for nothing, or other useful artifacts like Pithing Needle, Tormod's Crypt, and Engineered Explosives (particularly good for taking care of pesky Chalices off of Drain mana). Once all the pieces are assembled, Bomberman wins.

The Win Condition – There are two ways that this deck goes about winning. The first is the same Pyrite Spellbomb/Black Lotus combo that the Salvager Oath deck uses; nothing new here, other than the fact that the deck doesn't use Oath to find the Salvagers. The second is a little more mundane – it draws the deck with Aether Spellbomb recursion, gets all of its Salvagers and Trinket Mages into play, and then passes the turn with a full grip of countermagic. One or two turns later, it's over. This eliminates the need for Bomberman to run Pyrite Spellbomb at all, and also eliminates the essential problem with Oath's traditional win condition because unlike Oath, Bomberman guarantees that when it's done going off, its opponent will never be able to resolve another spell before the game is over - having seven counters in hand tends to do that pretty well.

Hopefully, I've given you guys a good overview of what Drain decks are all about and how they can exist in a format as brutal as Vintage. Next time, we'll talk about those dirty combo decks that you always hear about, the decks that are the reason that Vintage has an unfair reputation for being a format of coin flipping. If you have any concerns, suggestions, or criticism in the meantime, please feel free to let me know – after all, it's the only way I'll ever become a better writer.

Until then,

Jonathan Wang
wraith985 on SCG, TMD
mkv_wraithstyle on MTGO
jrwang AT (nospam)gmail DOT com

Many thanks to Kevin Binswanger, Jesus Roxas, Josh Silvestri, Andy Probasco, and Peter Olszewski for helping me proofread this article and making sure I didn't say anything stupid.