Ahoy, mateys! Welcome to the second installment of this series; glad to see you made it back (i.e. my first article didn't bore you to death). Again, a brief overview of what I'm going to do over the next few articles and links to previous articles:

Introduction and those Silly Drains
The Long and Short of Long-style Combo
Blitzkrieg – The “Other” Combo Decks
I've Been Working in the Workshop…
Annoying Critters with Rods

Today, we're going to go over those silly combination decks that make people want to hurl themselves off of cliffs…okay, so they're not that bad. Still, Vintage has an undeserved reputation for being a format determined by the coin flip, and while that is true to an extent (as going first is a very big advantage in this format, probably more so than in any other), it is by no means completely accurate. As we trek through the different deck archetypes, you'll hopefully begin to understand why this is the case.

Combo decks are generally split into two categories – “Long”-style decks and “Other.” Okay fine, that's really one category and one grab bag, but bear with me here. Combo decks are typically associated with the card Dark Ritual, because it's the best unrestricted mana accelerant that Vintage has to offer. I can actually only think of one tournament-tested combo deck that doesn't use that card, so the association is generally well-warranted. Let's look at the archetypes we'll be tackling today:

Grim Long
Pitch Long
Intuition Tendrils

As you may have noticed, this is not the same list of combo decks as was outlined in my previous article; it's also a pretty short list. I've decided to break combo into two parts, because the different flavors of combo are so vastly different that they deserve more time than I would give them if I just crammed everything into one article. Today, we'll be covering Long-style combo; next time, we'll talk about the other combo decks.

In my opinion, Long-style combo is the most interesting of the commonly-seen archetypes in Vintage, and there's a lot of developmental history here – so this article will be fairly long, despite my only covering three archetypes (well, five if you count the history). Bear with me though – the history I'm going to share with you is actually pretty cool, and I'll do my best to keep it interesting and relevant.

Before we dive into the archetypes, though, we should examine the card that makes the large majority of combo decks tick – that innocuous looking one-mana instant named Dark Ritual.

“If there is such a thing as too much power, I have not yet discovered it”
Ah yes, Dark Ritual - the scourge of the early days of Magic. People who have been around for a while should have no problems remembering why Dark Ritual is busted; Ritual into Hypnotic Specter doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the possibilities of this card. It found a home in many Black decks – it powered out turn 1 Necropotence (and later, Phyrexian Negator), it was the card that allowed Hatred to be cast on turn 2, it powered up early Mind Twists, and the list goes on. However, the most important thing to know about Dark Ritual as it pertains to Vintage is that it is totally, completely, 100% unrestricted. You can run four copies of Dark Ritual goodness in any deck you create, which is nothing short of amazing.

To see why being unrestricted is so important, let's take a look at the restricted list. All of the best mana accelerants in Magic are restricted in Vintage; some (such as myself) would go as far as to say that there are accelerants on the restricted list that don't belong there, hamstrung by the simple fact that they produce more mana than they cost to cast. A quick look down the restricted list provides ample evidence for this claim: Black Lotus, Mox Emerald, Mox Jet, Mox Sapphire, Mox Ruby, Mox Pearl, Sol Ring, Mana Vault, Mana Crypt, Lotus Petal… all restricted. Even stuff like Grim Monolith, Mox Diamond, and Chrome Mox are there because they make more mana than they cost; they might not be as broken as the above, but would likely be broken as four-ofs in decks designed to abuse them, so out they went along with the rest of the accelerants. I believe it was Randy Buehler who commented that R&D would continue to make fast mana cards and would also continue to immediately restrict them in Vintage, because they would be broken no matter what the drawback was (at the time, he was talking about Lion's Eye Diamond, which has probably the worst drawback you'll ever see on a Magic card aside from “you lose the game” and yet was still broken as a four-of; you'll see how in a moment). I'm skeptical about the truth of that claim when it comes to Lotus Bloom, but the point remains – mana accelerants are very, very powerful in Vintage, and all of the best ones are restricted… except for Dark Ritual.

Dark Ritual's effect is simple enough – it gives you a one-time +2 mana shot in the arm. It costs B to play and produces BBB, meaning that any deck that utilizes it will have a heavy reliance on Black mana. This is different from a card like Mana Vault because it requires a very specific mana cost – you need to have a Black source already in play to cast Dark Ritual at all. A small distinction, to be sure, but as any Vintage player will tell you when he's struggling to find mana of a certain color, not an irrelevant one by any stretch.

Recently, R&D has moved fast mana to Red's slice of the color pie, and the closest Red analogue to Dark Ritual would have to be Seething Song. Dark Ritual is far superior to Seething Song because mana is a scarce resource in the early game; the boost from three mana to five mana, when you have presumably developed your board for a few turns and allowed your opponent to do the same, is much less significant than the boost from one mana to three mana, when neither of those conditions necessarily applies. The early game is extremely important in Vintage, and combo decks are in a race against time – they're designed to win as quickly as possible. If the combo player allows his opponent to develop and execute his game plan in any meaningful way, it becomes much harder for the combo player to win the game. Granted, it's not impossible, but it speaks to the necessity of combo having explosive starts. Black Lotus is the best accelerant in the game not because it gives you three mana of any color, but because it does so without requiring any resources at all. Ritual comes close – it requires you to have a resource already on the board, but it's not a difficult one to find, especially not in a deck designed to abuse the power of Black mana.

So what is “Long”-style Combo?
Before you ask – no, the other style of combo is not “short” combo. Har har har! Okay, bad joke. Anyway, this style of combo deck is named after that guy that everyone loves to hate and to keep out of the Hall of fame, one Michael Long. To understand why, we need to take a short detour back to the beginning of modern combo.

“Long”-style combo is named as such because the original concept for the combo deck that Roland Bode (and subsequently Stephen Menendian) tweaked was created by Mike Krzywicki and Mike Long. What resulted from those tweaks was the most disgustingly powerful combo deck ever conceived in Vintage, at least up to that point. He wrote an excellent series of articles about the deck, archived right here on SCG – go have a look if you want the long (ha ha, I made a pun!) version of what I'm going to outline here.

The Original Long.dec
The original Long.dec focused on abusing the power of Yawgmoth's Will in a somewhat unorthodox way – it put Will in the sideboard! Instead of using tutors to fetch a maindeck Will (remember that Grim Tutor and Imperial Seal were not legal at the time), the Long.dec player would instead use Burning Wish to fetch it from his sideboard whenever he needed it. With a full complement of maindeck Burning Wish, it was as if the pilot was running four maindeck Yawgmoth's Wills. It's also relevant to note that since Yawgmoth's Will removes itself from the game when resolved, the pilot could use another Burning Wish to fetch it again if something went wrong the first time he tried to go off. Yeah, seems good.

By itself, that interaction was ridiculously good, but the interaction with Lion's Eye Diamond really broke the format in half. Can you see the synergy between Lion's Eye Diamond and Burning Wish/Yawgmoth's Will? Basically, the play was to cast Will or Wish and crack Lion's Eye Diamond in response, netting you three free mana, your entire hand in the graveyard where it could be played with that mana post-Will, and that same LED back for a second boost of free mana. The goal of this deck was to play an early (and usually game-ending) Yawgmoth's Will as early and as consistently as possible. Unrestricted LED made this deck incredibly efficient on mana and cards, and it didn't need a whole lot of either resource to end the game. Take a look at what you can do as early as Turn 1 with Long.dec:

Play Gemstone Mine.
Play Mox Anything (or Lotus Petal, which is actually better in this case). Storm 1.
Cast Lion's Eye Diamond. Storm 2.
Tap Gemstone Mine and the Mox to cast Burning Wish. Break Lion's Eye Diamond in response for BBB, discarding your hand. Fetch Yawgmoth's Will. BBB floating, Storm 3.
Cast Yawgmoth's Will using the LED mana. Storm 4.
Replay Lion's Eye Diamond. Storm 5.

Look what we just did - we just generated five storm with an LED in play and a graveyard full of spells waiting to be abused – and we did it all with just two usable mana and two business cards from our hand. Assuming your hand has some good spells in it (which it would have to, in order for you to consider going off), you're in the driver's seat of this game and will likely win in short order. Consider also that Burning Wish and LED were (at the time) unrestricted, meaning that these openings were certainly not uncommon because you could expect to see at least one of those cards in your hand a good deal of the time, and you begin to understand the sheer power of the deck. Again, I strongly urge you to take some time to read the original articles about the deck – you'll come away with a far greater appreciation and understanding of the deck than I could possibly convey here.

The Restriction-Hammer and the Evolution of Long.dec
Well, Wizards R&D saw that Long.dec was ridiculously broken, so they restricted the two cards that really gave it oomph – Burning Wish and Lion's Eye Diamond. The deck was too good to give up on, though, so Team Meandeck took another shot at it and came up with Death Long (also known as “MeanDeath”). As you may have guessed, this new deck used Death Wish to replace Burning Wish's functionality in the original Long.dec shell. This deck holds a place near and dear to my heart, as it was reading Stephen Menendian's articles about it that originally piqued my interest in Vintage. If you want further information about this deck, I'd recommend reading the articles that were written about the archetype – the articles are really very interesting, and (as with the articles about Long.dec) will help your understanding and appreciation of this evolution far more than what I can say in such limited space.

The important thing to know about Death Long was that because of the loss of unrestricted Burning Wishes and Lion's Eye Diamonds, the combo became far more difficult to execute. In the original Long.dec, you could count on replaying Lion's Eye Diamond to immediately recoup some of the mana you had spent on Wishing for Yawgmoth's Will; in Death Long, this was no longer the case. The combo ended up costing seven mana without Lotus or LED – 1BB for Death Wish, 2B for Yawgmoth's Will, and B floating to cast any Dark Rituals in the graveyard to get the ball rolling again. The fact that Death Wish could find any card in your sideboard made it more flexible than Long.dec in terms of answering hate, though it was overall far less resilient simply because of the mana requirements. While the deck certainly had its high points, it was a far cry from original Long. Still, it was definitely nothing to sneeze at.

That brings us to the most important event for combo decks in recent memory – the legalization of the three Portal sets in Vintage. Two very important cards arose from these sets – Grim Tutor and Imperial Seal – and Grim Tutor was (and still is) not restricted. No longer would combo players have to mess with paying half their life and having to find a second Wish to go off - suddenly, combo decks had the critical mass of tutors that it needed to move Yawgmoth's Will to the maindeck, and modern combo as we know it arose directly from the impact of these tutors on Vintage.

Whew! That was a pretty long (ha ha…okay, okay, I'm sorry, no more) detour! Point is, Long-style combo refers to decks that abuse Yawgmoth's Will and win the game quickly on its very capable back. A small bit of terminology before we continue - generally, the spells cast before a Yawgmoth's Will are referred to as played “on the way in”, and the spells cast after Will resolves are referred to as played “on the way out”. For example, if I were to refer to casting a thresholded Cabal Ritual “on the way out,” it would mean that I cast Cabal Ritual with threshold after resolving Yawgmoth's Will. The usage will become clearer as you see it.

Without further ado, let's take a closer look at the components of Long-style combo.

The Supporting Cast
The best reason to play combo is that you can play with almost all of the most broken cards in Magic…at the same time. Long-style combo has a lot of cards that are essentially auto-includes:

Black Lotus, Mox Sapphire, Mox Jet, Mox Pearl, Mox Ruby, Mox Emerald, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt
These are the best mana accelerators the game has to offer, and all of them are restricted. You will commonly see the entry “8 SoLoMoxCrypt” on a posted Internet decklist as shorthand for these cards; everyone knows what you're talking about, and it just makes things easier. Note that Lion's Eye Diamond is not on this list – while it is still generally used, some combo players have begun to see that slot as flexible and it is no longer the auto-include it once was. Notably, Lotus and LED are doubly awesome because you can use them twice with Will – once on the way in, and again on the way out.

Necropotence, Yawgmoth's Bargain
These are bonafide bombs in every sense of the word. Stephen Menendian (gee, his name pops up a lot in discussion of Long-style combo decks) once said that if you resolve a Necropotence or Bargain and don't win the next turn, something had to have gone horribly wrong, and I tend to agree with his assessment. The plan is not just to refill your hand to seven cards – the plan is to gorge on cards, as many as possible without destroying your chances to win, keeping only the best seven. The best seven cards out of your hand and the top ten or so cards in your library will almost always be enough for you to win when you're playing a deck with the raw power of combo. Bargain is harder to resolve than Necropotence, but it's devastating when it hits the table; unlike the Skull, you can stop when you find the card you need, and you can activate it any time you want to dig for any answer you want. It's also much better with the card disadvantage tutors (Vampiric Tutor, Mystical Tutor, and Imperial Seal) than Necropotence is, because you can cast the tutor and get the card right away. Necropotence makes up for its shortcomings simply by being ridiculously cheap – it can be played from any Ritual, Black Lotus, or even just a very fortunate mana draw (Swamp/Mox Jet/Lotus Petal, for instance). Hooray for Dark Ritual and Cabal Ritual!

A side note – it is very, very bad to be Duressed with Tendrils of Agony in your hand if you have Necropotence in play – if you don't see why, check the text on Duress, and then check Necropotence for its clause that mentions discarding. Yeah…you'd better hope you have a second one somewhere, or you just lost the game…assuming your opponent takes the correct card, which is actually never a guarantee. Watch out for that play!

Ancestral Recall, Timetwister, Time Walk
The “Big Blue” make their appearance here as well. See, I wasn't kidding when I said you could play with the best cards in the game all at once – notice that every card I've listed so far is restricted. Recall is a no-brainer. Timetwister has negative interaction with Yawgmoth's Will, but it's a necessary evil as a reset button in case your Yawgmoth's Will or Tendrils of Agony (or both) somehow end up in the graveyard, and you can't win any other way. It's also a draw-7, which is awesome too. Time Walk has the negative effect of resetting your storm count, but you can easily set up situations where you resolve a bomb (say, Necropotence) and cast Time Walk for the win. It's also fun with a sideboarded Darksteel Colossus.

Tinker, Memory Jar, Mind's Desire
More restricted bombs. Tinker fetches Black Lotus (for free storm and/or mana fixing) or Memory Jar (for drawing 7 new cards), and sometimes even Darksteel Colossus post-board. Memory Jar is probably the best draw-7 in Magic, because you get to use all of your cards and your opponent can't use anything that's not an instant; it basically doesn't have a drawback. Mind's Desire is just a bomb, plain and simple; if you can find the UU necessary to resolve it with a decent storm count, you're in very good shape, because nearly every card in your deck is awesome even when it costs mana; playing multiples spells for free, therefore, is absolutely insane.

Demonic Tutor, Grim Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Mystical Tutor, Imperial Seal
The standard tutor suite of the deck, each one of these has its place. This category also marks the appearance of the first unrestricted card on this list in Grim Tutor, which is very good. The BB requirement can be a problem at times, and the life loss means you need to have at least seven life if it's your only tutor on a Yawgmoth's Will turn (three for Grim Tutor pre-Will, three for Grim Tutor post-Will, and one left so you're alive), but it's still the best unrestricted tutor out there. Diabolic Tutor is not close – the difference between 1BB and 2BB is humongous – and Rhystic Tutor is pretty worthless as well. The card disadvantage tutors (Vampiric, Mystical, Imperial Seal) are the most questionable of the tutors, which should tell you something about the quality of cards that Long-style combo decks employ.

Tolarian Academy, Lotus Petal, Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual
Ah, the “other” mana producers. Lotus Petal is no Black Lotus, but it's still awesome – it fixes your colors, adds to your storm count on both sides of Will, and is another zero-cost accelerant you can play on turn 1. Tolarian Academy needs no introduction; it's about as busted as a land can get. Cabal Ritual requires a little more explanation. It is excellent for several reasons – first, it enables more ways to get a turn 1 Necropotence, and second, its Threshold ability is super awesome. Even if you don't have threshold on the way in (making it a very average +1 accelerator, from 2 to 3), many times you'll find that you'll have threshold on the way out, due to the nature of the deck and its ability to chain a lot of spells in a very short time frame before casting Will and getting to do it all again. It goes without saying that a +3 mana boost is ridiculous.

Brainstorm
Some say it is the best unrestricted card in Magic, and I tend to agree. It smoothes your draws, digs for lands and threats, and combined with a fetchland is essentially Ancestral Recall numbers 2-5, in that it gives you three new cards at the low cost of U (ditching what you don't want doesn't really count as a cost). The only thing this sucker doesn't do is get you lunch. Essential stuff.

Chain of Vapor
Simply put, Chain of Vapor is the best bounce spell around. It's the cheapest, hits any permanent that's relevant to you, and rarely (if ever) gets bounced back to your side of the table. It is necessary in the maindeck to get rid of problem permanents such as Arcane Laboratory, Meddling Mage chanting Tendrils of Agony, various lock pieces in Workshop decks that are giving you headaches, etc. A popular card to supplement Chain is Hurkyl's Recall, both to clear the board of lock pieces from Workshop decks and to provide an alternate win condition should the Yawgmoth's Will plan not pan out (you can play various artifact accelerants, Hurkyl's Recall yourself floating the mana, play those same accelerants again, and cast Tendrils for the win). Most lists have Hurkyl's in the sideboard, though, so I'll leave it at just Chain of Vapor.

Tendrils of Agony
Well, yeah. You need a way to win, and this spell is the best storm finisher of them all.

So putting all of that stuff together, we have:

Long-Style Combo Shell

Artifacts (10)
8 SoLoMoxCrypt
1 Lotus Petal
1 Memory Jar

Instants (14+)
4 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
4 Dark Ritual
2 (or more) Cabal Ritual
1 Chain of Vapor

Sorceries (8)
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Grim Tutor
1 Tinker
1 Time Walk
1 Mind's Desire
1 Timetwister

Enchantments (2)
1 Necropotence
1 Yawgmoth's Bargain

Win Condition (1+)
1 (or more) Tendrils of Agony

Land (1)
1 Tolarian Academy

That's at least 36 slots devoted to the shell of the Long deck, plus another 10-12 more slots devoted to land. Four of those free slots (at least) are dedicated to disruption, leaving just a handful of slots to mess around with. As you'll see, there are several different ways to assign those slots, all of which have an impact on the way the manabase is built.

Cards that are not generally played
Well, there's a lot of really good stuff that could be played, but generally isn't. Let's have a look-see:

Demonic Consultation
This card is awesome, and was restricted for good reason – it's cheap, an instant, and puts the card you want directly into your hand. So what's the problem? The problem with Demonic Consultation is that it removes cards from the game, where you can't reach them anymore (remember, modern Long decks have switched over to Grim Tutors over Death Wish). As most decks only run one copy of Tendrils of Agony, the risk of removing your only win condition from the game is simply unacceptable. In a deck with two copies of Tendrils, Consultation becomes much better.

Personal Tutor
A lot of hullabaloo was made about more good tutors entering the format, centering mostly around Imperial Seal and Personal Tutor. Well, we know from the above that Imperial Seal made it, but what about its Blue cousin? Unfortunately, Personal Tutor has pretty much been determined to be trash. Why? It all hinges on one word, right around the middle of the card – the one that's pronounced SORE-suh-ree. Mystical Tutor's slot is tenuous to begin with; the flexibility of instant-speed tutoring and being able to cast it during upkeep is what gives the card much of its allure, making up for its inability to grab cards like Black Lotus or Necropotence, and the fact that those cards don't actually go in your hand. Take that away, and you're left with, well…a bad card, at least in Vintage terms. Imperial Seal has found a place because it fetches any card in the deck, which makes up somewhat for its incredibly debilitating drawback of being a sorcery. Personal Tutor has no such luck – combine Mystical Tutor's restriction to instants and sorceries with Imperial Seal's sorcery speed, and what you're left with is not pretty. It's simply not good enough to make the cut.

Cruel Tutor
Remember what I just said about more good tutors entering the format with the legalization of Portal? Well, ignore that for this section, because Cruel Tutor is absolutely terrible. The first problem is that it's a sorcery-speed Vampiric Tutor, and (as any combo player will tell you) Imperial Seal being a sorcery is a royal pain in the behind as is. The second problem is that not only is it strictly worse than Imperial Seal, it's not even close – it's three times more expensive! As it is, combo players hate using Imperial Seal, a spell that costs a solitary B, because the game state can change a lot in the turn that elapses between Sealing and drawing (assuming you don't have Brainstorm, Bargain, or Recall to go get it immediately). Costing three times as much as Seal for a card that doesn't even go to your hand, then, is sufficient grounds to immediately discount the card without any more thought. There's a reason that Imperial Seal still pushes $150 and this thing isn't even close.

Burning Wish, Death Wish
The card that defined the original Long.dec archetype and the card that defined its immediate successor are now both forgotten in their descendants – sad, but true. The fact is that with Yawgmoth's Will in the maindeck and unrestricted Grim Tutor, there's really just no reason to be fiddling about with your sideboard anymore. The best targets not already in the maindeck would probably be Diminishing Returns or Time Spiral, and that's pretty terrible when you consider that it's far easier (and less painful) to just Grim Tutor for Wheel of Fortune or Timetwister (i.e., the better versions of those cards), or even Windfall. These cards have their place in the annals of Long.dec history, but are now no longer necessary for the archetype to succeed.

Now (finally!) for those archetypes. Keep in mind that more in-depth primers are archived here on SCG for your reading pleasure – use the article finder if you're curious. With that said, let's jump right in, shall we?

Grim Long (sample decklist)
Name and Background – “Grim” comes from Grim Tutor, and “Long” should be self-explanatory at this point of the article. The deck was pioneered by Stephen Menendian and Team Meandeck as the evolution of Long-style combo post-Portal (with Will in the maindeck instead of the sideboard).

The Strategy – Grim Long has been described as a jackhammer, in contrast to the deck that I will cover next. Its game plan revolves entirely around trying to resolve as many bombs in as short a time as possible, eventually overwhelming its opponent's countermagic wall and winning the game on the back of whatever gamebreaker it finally resolved. It is the fastest Long-style combo deck because it plays pretty much all-out, all the time – if you can deal with all of its threats, then you deserve to win.

The disruption suite in this Long variant is 4 Duress; some versions sideboard 4 Force of Will as well. The remaining slots are filled with more bombs, including Regrowth, Windfall, and Wheel of Fortune. This obviously necessitates the use of a five-color manabase with Cities of Brass and Gemstone Mines. The five-color manabase allows the deck to run a maindeck Xantid Swarm to combat reactive Blue strategies, and also a couple of Elvish Spirit Guides to help break out of any lock pieces a Workshop deck might try and put down. For example, Elvish Spirit Guide allows the Grim Long player to get around a turn 1 Sphere of Resistance by allowing him to chain Moxes – removing ESG to pay for the first, and then paying for each subsequent accelerator with the mana generated from the one played previously.

The Win Condition – Um, yeah... play lots of spells and play Tendrils of Agony. Sometimes there's a Darksteel Colossus in the sideboard, so in post-board games the second option of smashing with DSC is also there.

Pitch Long (sample decklist)
Name and Background – “Pitch” refers to Eric Becker's idea of using 6-7 pitch counterspells (4 Force of Will and 2-3 Misdirection) to protect the combo instead of the Duresses that Grim Long utilizes. Team GWS promoted this deck extensively, and it has put up several very good finishes as of late, including second place at Vintage Worlds this past year.

The Strategy – Pitch Long sacrifices pure speed and a couple of bombs so that it can play a two-color (some would describe it at 2.5-color) manabase with fetchlands and basics. A two-color manabase helps with mana consistency, because Wasteland can only hit a couple of the lands in the deck. As an added bonus, your lands don't hurt you or go away after a few turns, as City of Brass and Gemstone Mine do. The tradeoff is losing some bombs like Wheel of Fortune and Regrowth, as well as having to move a couple of the maindeck answers (Xantid Swarm, Elvish Spirit Guide) to the sideboard. It also cuts you off from running Orim's Chant in your sideboard to combat other combo decks. I describe the manabase as 2.5 colors because against Mana Drain decks, the Pitch Long player can bring in a Tropical Island and a Bayou, along with Xantid Swarms, and be reasonably assured of finding the requisite Green mana thanks to his fetchlands.

The biggest advantage of Force of Will and Misdirection over Grim Long's Duresses is that they cost no mana to play. Sometimes, you'll be stuck in a situation like this – one Black source on the table, Duress and Dark Ritual in hand. Do you Dark Ritual and take the chance that it gets countered, or do you Duress to protect your combo but force yourself to pass the turn? Not the most ideal of situations, that's for sure. Force of Will allows you to protect your combo for no mana investment, at the cost of a card in your hand and a point of life (which can become relevant, given the way that modern Long-style combo decks use life as a resource to fuel broken cards). Misdirection is similar, except that it only protects against counterspells and not against any proactive disruption that you don't want to see hit the table (for example, turn 1 Trinisphere). As with Drain decks, though, Misdirection has the bonus of wrecking any player who runs out a naked or insufficiently-protected Ancestral Recall.

This deck plays in a slightly more defensive fashion than Grim Long; it seeks to protect its bomb of choice, meaning that it's a little heavier on the setup side than Grim Long is. It plays out quite similarly to an older, outmoded combo deck called TPS, or “The Perfect Storm” (also derisively nicknamed “That Play Stalled”, for reasons I'm sure you can figure out), in that it invests a little more time in the setup in exchange for more stability when its pilot decides to try to go off.

The Win Condition – Yeah, still Tendrils or DSC.

Intuition Tendrils (sample decklist)
Name and Background – Intuition Tendrils (IT) is another one of Eric Becker's creations, this one sitting squarely between Grim Long and Pitch Long on the timeline. The idea is that Intuition in a Long-style combo deck helps make Cabal Ritual a lot better and allows its player to run a two-color manabase, the stability of which was the bane of Workshop prison decks (this idea later carried over to Pitch Long). Workshop prison decks were extremely popular at the time that Intuition Tendrils was created, and the deck was designed to beat Workshop prison decks without sacrificing too much in the other matchups.

The Strategy – Very similar to Pitch Long, in that IT invests some time in setting up the combo for better stability when it goes off. Intuition is not necessarily a key card in the deck, but it is nevertheless very strong, enabling threshold for Cabal Ritual and getting a key card in hand; a topdecked Intuition (assuming it resolves) can turn an average hand into a very good one. The deck runs 7-8 disruption cards, split between Force of Will and Duress (I've seen configurations that split 4-3, 3-4, and 4-4), as well as two maindeck artifact bounce spells in Hurkyl's Recall and Rebuild. This gives the deck a lot of resilience against decks reliant on artifact lock pieces. In addition, it runs more land and (just as importantly) more basic land than is normal for a Long-style deck, making it far less susceptible to Wasteland than other combo decks of its ilk. To achieve its goal of beating Workshop decks, it sacrifices percentage against Mana Drain decks, though the matchup is far from impossible to win. Team GWS still recommends this deck over Pitch Long in Workshop-heavy metagames.

The Win Condition – Blah blah Tendrils blah blah DSC blah blah…

So…why doesn't a Long variant win every tournament?
The short answer is that there is hate everywhere. The long answer is a little more involved, but it looks something like this:

The main thing about Long-style combo is that it takes a good amount of time to get used to. It is often overwhelming for a beginner to even begin to see the sheer number of lines of play that Long-style combo decks provide while goldfishing, let alone finding ways to get themselves out of a jam on the fly when their opponents are doing their best to disrupt them. Each tutor can fetch any of a number of restricted (or unrestricted) cards in your deck, and you run a lot of restricted cards, meaning that the number of potential plays is pretty much limitless. You need to know when to Brainstorm, when to tutor for cards that you won't even need for another few turns, when it's correct to go all-in on a play and when that would be suicidal, and so on and so forth. Take heart – it's a learning process. For a long time, I didn't understand how to goldfish Long decks at all; I was throwing back what I now know are very good hands because I didn't understand the workings of the deck, and even when I started to understand the deck I was still playing in a manner where I would just die to any random hate card (Force of Will, Null Rod, and Chalice of the Void set on zero readily spring to mind). With more experience came better understanding; while I am still far from an elite combo player, I can at least say that I'm much better at the archetype than I was just a few months ago, though I still have plenty of learning to do. Given the constraints of tournament Magic, I feel completely safe in saying that you will never play a perfect game with combo – but if you practice enough, you should be able to do very well.

A common mistake that new players make is assuming that they must resolve Yawgmoth's Will to win, which is simply not true. Sure, it's much easier if you have the luxury of winning by replaying your entire graveyard, but it's not necessary, and the mark of a good player is his reaction to having Will be shut off, perhaps by an early Tormod's Crypt or Meddling Mage. There are a variety of ways to win without Will, all of which will take an understanding of the entire contents of your deck and the ability to think far in advance. As you get more experienced with the deck, you'll start being capable of winning through lock pieces and countermagic, and you'll also start thinking of innovative ways to get around hate. For example, in one game I cast Yawgmoth's Will when my opponent had Tormod's Crypt on the table. Naturally, he burned my graveyard in response. With Will still on the stack, I proceeded to cast two Dark Rituals, resolve Will, play them again, and win with the cards I had carefully built up in my hand. That thought would literally have never crossed my mind when I was just starting to learn Long-style combo; I've since added it to my repertoire of ways to beat Tormod's Crypt, keeping it in the back of my mind for the day that a similar situation pops up.

Basically, you have to be very good at Magic and very familiar with your deck to pilot a combo deck through a number of grueling rounds of Swiss and through any Top 8. Running a high amount of broken cards means next to nothing if you cannot utilize them effectively, and the amount of hate in any given Vintage deck is very high because of the essential nature of being able to survive against combo. Long story short, it's hard to play combo. There are no hard and fast rules – you must adapt to each situation. Tutoring for Yawgmoth's Will may be a game-winning play at one juncture and completely terrible at another, and only experience can tell you which is which. Preparation is key – you must be experienced with the deck to play it well. The reward for your efforts is being able to play combo at all, and playing combo will always guarantee that you have the highest concentration of broken cards in the room. Combo decks reward foresight, mental flexibility, pattern recognition, anticipation, ingenuity, and intellectual stamina (more important than you might think) with game wins. Of course, sometimes the deck will just barf up an auto-win hand, but that's just the reality of the game – and really, isn't that the case with certain decks in every format?

Wrapping Up
Even if you never plan to play in a Vintage tournament, I would suggest that you pick up a Vintage storm combo deck and goldfish it. To pilot a combo deck through the hate available to Vintage players takes a lot of skill, and even as a theoretical exercise it is a great deal of fun to think about the ways that you can get out of any given situation. For example, try to execute your game plan with a Tormod's Crypt (or Trinisphere, or Sphere of Resistance, or a Null Rod, or…) on the board, and think about how you would adapt to that situation. If you really think about the potential plays that you can make and how to truly maximize every card you draw instead of just playing broken cards blindly, your ability to think ahead in every format will improve greatly, and your game will be better for it.

I hope you've enjoyed reading about the evolution of Long-style combo and the variants that currently exist. Next time we'll be talking about the other combo decks that don't really fit into the Long.dec framework, so keep your eyes open for that – a couple of these decks are even faster than the above three decks, if you believe such a monstrosity can exist. Again, please direct any questions or concerns to me, to help me become a better writer.

Thanks for reading,

Jonathan Wang
wraith985 on SCG, TMD
mkv_wraithstyle on MODO
jrwang@ NOSPAM gmail DOT com

PS: On an unrelated note, I forgot to include Meandeck Dredge (Ichorid) on my original master list of archetypes; I'll likely lump that together with the aggro-control strategies, though it is somewhat lighter on control and heavier on aggro than most of the decks I'll be talking about in that article. If you have a better suggestion, please let me know!

Many thanks to Stephen Menendian and Josh Silvestri for helping me proofread this monster; thirteen pages, phew!