[Editors Note: The first two articles in this series are Premium articles that are available to premium members. Part 1 can be found here, and Part 2 can be found here. For those of you who do not have Premium, I have included the decklist at the beginning of this article for reference.]

Meandeck Tendrils
Win Condition:
4 Tendrils of Agony

Land:
4 Land Grant
1 Bayou
1 Tropical Island
1 Polluted Delta

Rituals:
4 Dark Ritual
4 Cabal Ritual

Artifact Acceleration:
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Black Lotus
1 Lotus Petal
1 Lion's Eye Diamond

Artifact Mana Fixing Cantrips:
4 Chromatic Sphere
4 Darkwater Egg

Tutors:
4 Spoils of the Vault
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Demonic Consultation

Blue Cantrips:
4 Brainstorms
4 Sleight of Hand
1 Ancestral Recall

Misc:
1 Chain of Vapor
1 Hurkyl's Recall
1 Yawgmoth's Will
4 Night's Whisper

First, The Bad News
Let's start by getting something out of the way: this is not an easy deck to play. With each new spell you play, you'll have another decision to make. Every decision is an opportunity to make a mistake, and you're going to make at least ten decisions on your winning turn-frequently quite a few more. That leaves you with plenty of chances to make a mistake. What's more, the power level of the cards involved is low for a Vintage deck, and the effect of most of the cards on the game state is relatively minor. This makes choosing between alternate lines of play much more difficult, because the differences between them are often slight (ahem). It also makes each individual mistake more damaging to your chances of success.

Play errors with Meandeck Tendrils are both difficult to recover from and often quite subtle. It's to this that I attribute the deck's relatively high learning curve. In particular, the subtlety of many of your early mistakes with the deck will make them harder to identify, and will make it appear as if the deck simply "fizzled" when in reality you made a minor mistake or two-playing Sleight of Hand instead of Brainstorm (or vice versa), using that precious Black mana for Night's Whisper without calculating the odds that you'll see another Ritual in the two cards you draw, etc-that put a lethal Tendrils just out of reach.

So that's the bad news. The good news is that the same uniformity of effect and design that makes weighing potential lines of play so difficult also makes this deck fairly easy to schematize, which in turn makes it easier to understand (on a theoretical level) than a deck composed of the entire restricted list and numerous other one-ofs, each having different effects.

I. Poisson d'Or a la Meandeck: The Basics
We'll start at the end. This deck, like every combo deck, simply wants to achieve a specific condition at the end of its series of actions for the turn. As with any Tendrils of Agony-based deck, that condition is: two Black mana and two colorless mana floating in your mana pool, nine storm, and Tendrils of Agony in hand. This is incredibly obvious to all of us, I know, but you absolutely have to keep it in mind at all times.

I find that the easiest way for me to approach playing the deck is to ask myself "given my goal with the deck-lethal storm, Tendrils in hand and the mana to play it-what are the primary obstacles keeping me from that goal? What am I lacking?" With every hand, we're lacking two things. First, we start with seven cards, eight if we lost the coin flip and are on the draw, but we need to play ten spells. Second, we start with no mana in our mana pool. So we know that we're going to have to draw and play more cards, and that some of those cards are going to have to generate mana. All that's fine, of course, but how does that help you when you fan open a hand of seven and see a lot of dinky little cantrips, a Mox, and a Ritual or two?

Well, given that we have two resources we need to manage, mana and cards, the easiest way to classify our starting hands is to determine which of those two resources is scarcer, and what that usually does to how we play the deck.

A. Draw-scarce Hands
These are the hands like: Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Land Grant, Mana Crypt, Brainstorm, Darkwater Egg, Mox Pearl. We're only going to end up with two new cards (one from the Egg, and one from the Brainstorm, though we'll see three from it). Our mana, on the other hand, is fantastic. Depending on what we draw and whether that enables threshold, we can generate as much as 11 mana on the first turn, 8 of it strictly profit. Remember that we need to leave 4 of that alone to cast Tendrils. That leaves us 4 extra mana to do with as we please. It also leads me to an important shortcut to remember when playing the deck:

One to One to One
The golden ratio of this deck is that one mana will get us one card and generate one storm. Sleight of Hand, Brainstorm, Night's Whisper, Chromatic Sphere, Darkwater Egg, Spoils of the Vault: all of them give us one card per mana we spend on them. This fundamental formula drives the entire deck. In the above case this is important, because even before we consider what we might see off that Egg, or which cards we might have to put back off of Brainstorm, or whether to Brainstorm before we Land Grant to take advantage of the shuffle effect, or wait until afterward, or.... Before all of that begins to overwhelm us, we can say, "My hand already begins with seven spells. I need to cast two more and a Tendrils to win, and I already know that I have as much as four extra mana to work with. Since, generally speaking, one mana will get me one card and one storm, not only should I be able to generate lethal storm with a little bit of luck, but I even have a couple of "extra" mana in case I draw badly or need to cast extra spells to get the card I need." Coincidentally, that "extra" two mana is the difference between a Cabal Ritual with threshold and one without, which further indicates that even if we can't generate threshold off of our draws, we'll still often be able to win with this hand.

What Do I Need to Win?
So the hand looks potentially promising, and we decide to keep it (in fact, it's going to be a turn 1 win the majority of times we play it). Next, we're going to have to ask ourselves how well it really needs to draw. Remember that right now we know we can probably generate the mana for Tendrils, plus extra, and 7 storm. So what are we lacking? We need to play two more spells, after which we need a Tendrils in hand. This kind of exercise will be one of the keys to simplifying your options, enabling you to devote more brainpower to following a potentially winning line of play, and less to following lines of play that never really had a shot to begin with.

Always keep in mind your final goal of BB2, 9 storm, and Tendrils, and ask yourself exactly what you're lacking right now. Then ask yourself what cards give you the best chance to reach that state, given what you have in hand now. It's all too easy to simply chug along on autopilot, drawing, casting Ritual, playing a Sphere, drawing another card, playing a Sleight, and suddenly you have 12 storm but no mana to cast your Tendrils. You should know, before you cast Sleight of Hand or Brainstorm, before you crack an Egg or a Chromatic Sphere, exactly what cards you need to see, and what you plan on doing if you don't see them. This will also enable you to decide when a hand just isn't panning out, so that you can stop midway through a spell chain with enough cards and acceleration still in hand to realistically combo out next turn instead.

With the hand above, we are going to see four cards, two of which we get to keep. Since we get to keep two cards, but we know we're going to have to play three (including the Tendrils), we know that we have to see at least one cantrip or tutor. What we're really looking for is a Spoils of the Vault, Demonic Consultation, or Demonic Tutor for Tendrils of Agony to finish the game immediately. But remember that we have extra mana to spare, so even if we don't find a Tendrils or a tutor for Tendrils immediately, we can keep two cards like Night's Whisper and Mox Emerald and just continue to chain into more spells.

The George Michael Principle
This brings me to my next point: you gotta have faith (faith, faith) in the deck. I used to play it too timidly, and rarely pushed the deck to its limits in situations like the one above. Hands like these seemed to indicate turn 2 wins, since I could drop Mox and Egg and wait until next turn to try to combo out, giving myself an extra draw and an extra mana to hedge my bets a little. I was wrong. This deck rewards aggressive play. Think about it: what we want off of that Egg and Brainstorm are two spells that add to storm, one of which (at least) we want to draw us some cards. Well, everything in this deck besides the three lands increases our storm count, so that's almost never going to be an issue. And of the 53 cards remaining in the deck, fully 26 (counting Yawgmoth's Will because, well, you know why) will draw us at least one more card. We get four chances to see one of those 26 cards. The Egg alone will give us an almost even chance to see a cantrip or tutor of some sort. Add the three additional chances that Brainstorm gives us, and remember that if we only see one cantrip in those three and have to put two mana generators on top of the library, we have Land Grant to shuffle before we play the cantrip we drew. Suddenly the hand starts to look much better than it might have at first.

So go for it. What you'll find is that, as you might assume, draw-scarce hands like these usually win on turn one, but are much more prone to fizzling than a hand with even one more draw spell. Make that Land Grant or that Mox a Night's Whisper, or even better, a Spoils of the Vault, and suddenly it's very difficult to lose (unless you get unlucky with Spoils).

In the case above, I dealt myself that seven-card hand (Dark Ritual, Cabal Ritual, Land Grant, Mana Crypt, Brainstorm, Darkwater Egg, Mox Pearl) and then shuffled the deck thoroughly. Here's how I played it: Mox Pearl, Darkwater Egg, Mana Crypt, use the Crypt mana to crack Egg. UB floating, 3 storm. I draw Sleight of Hand off of the Egg. There's that cantrip I was talking about earlier. If I didn't have Land Grant to shuffle but had some other way to generate Blue mana, I'd Sleight first and then Brainstorm, but since I can shuffle after the Brainstorm anyway and then play Sleight, I go for Brainstorm immediately. This way I have more cards to choose from before making any further decisions, and can stop after the Brainstorm in the event that everything is going to be riding on Sleight of Hand (for example, if I drew three mana producers off the Brainstorm).

I Brainstorm into Land Grant #2, Chromatic Sphere, and Spoils of the Vault. This is pretty amazing, actually, and now I don't even need to shuffle. Right now I have B floating and 4 storm. I put the second Land Grant back, with the Spoils of the Vault on top. I play Ritual (BBB, 5 storm, 3 cards in the graveyard), I play Chromatic Sphere, I crack it for Blue mana and draw Spoils of the Vault (BU, 6 storm, 4 cards in the graveyard). Since my storm count isn't going to be a problem, I don't particularly want to see that second Land Grant and its free storm, so I play Land Grant #1 right now for the shuffle effect and get Bayou (BU, 7 storm, 5 cards in the graveyard). I play Sleight of Hand (B, 8 storm, and threshold once the Sleight resolves), and unless I draw a Tendrils right now it doesn't matter what I see. I see two cards that are (for goldfishing purposes) meaningless, take one of them, tap Bayou, and cast Cabal Ritual with threshold for 5 black mana (BBBBB, 9 storm). I Spoils for Tendrils, find it 12 cards down, and cast Tendrils for 22 damage on turn 1.

B. Mana-scarce Hands
If the draw-scarce hands reward moxie and aggressive play, mana-scarce hands will tax our prudence and judgment. Not only do we have to know what we want to draw, but we'll sometimes have to do a lot of technical work to figure out how best to cast the draw spells we have without fizzling out entirely. These are hands like this: Darkwater Egg, Chromatic Sphere, Night's Whisper, Brainstorm, Land Grant, Mox Emerald, Dark Ritual. We have a little acceleration, and once again every spell in our hand contributes to the storm count. But with what we've got, we can only make four mana at most on our first turn, enabling us to reach about 6 storm or so before we simply run out of mana. That leaves us short on storm and well short of the mana needed to cast Tendrils. The hand is resilient, and has a lot of chances to draw out of its mana issues, but we may need to untap that Mox and the Bayou we're going to have to grab with Land Grant before we can utilize any mana-generating spells we draw, and that means giving our opponent a turn. Given this deck's weakness against a number of the format's most commonly played cards, that's something we want to avoid whenever possible.

One Mulligan, One Turn
However, whenever deciding whether to mulligan a hand, you need to remember another one-to-one ratio that defines the deck: one mulligan will typically set back our goldfish by one turn. A second mulligan will typically set back our goldfish by another turn, and if we have to go to four, we'd better have Yawgmoth's Will or Ancestral Recall-or better yet, both. This is so true, in fact, that it led my teammates and I to discuss whether there are, in fact, matchups where, after winning the die roll, we might actually choose to draw a card instead of play. This was a short-lived thought, since even the slowest decks in the format have cards that might hurt us tremendously on the first turn, but it illustrates just how badly this deck needs each and every card in its hand. The only exception to this mulligan rule is when we're on the draw, which (due to that extra card) frees us up a bit. You can, and usually should, mulligan hands that look like turn 2 wins on the draw, simply because we're still going to start our first turn with seven cards even if we mulligan. On the other hand, that extra draw also allows us to keep hands that really need a specific type of card to go off on turn one (a cantrip or a mana producer, for example).

So let's revisit the hand above. It needs a lot of mana, and while it has a decent amount of draw to find it, we may have to give our opponent a turn before we can utilize all that draw and optimize our grip. On the other hand, if we mulligan, we're probably looking at a turn two kill anyway, with the added risk of drawing a hand that's completely unworkable and needs to be mulliganed further. So we'll decide to keep.

Discretion and Valor
The first decision you need to make with a hand like this is whether or not to push it for the first-turn kill. With draw-scarce hands, the explosive potential of the hand and The George Michael Principle will invariably lead us to go for the throat and give your opponent no quarter. That's because with each turn our opponent gets, the danger to us increases. Our deck is founded on unfettered aggression, and is almost psychotically fixated on taking our opponent to the ground before he's even begun to think about mounting a defense. We are blitzing the quarterback every time. The more time he gets in the pocket, the longer he stays on his feet, the greater the chances that he'll find a way to make the play, and the more the weaknesses in our plan begin to show. Every turn we give our opponent to solidify his position and pursue his game plan makes us less likely to succeed with this deck.

On the other hand, sometimes the deck simply will not win on the first turn. It does so significantly more often than not, but about one of every three hands just won't do it no matter what tricks we pull. To keep from outright losing those games entirely, you need to learn to recognize when not to push it. Sometimes you need to play conservatively, usually by casting an Egg or a Sphere-or sometimes both-then passing the turn, waiting to untap next turn with no loss of mana or cards (since the Eggs and Spheres replace themselves). I'd like to teach you some trick that would enable you to know when a hand is a turn 2 hand and when it's worth it to push it for turn 1, but I'm afraid all that I can say is this: mana-scarce hands are more likely to be turn 2 hands, and the only reliable way to know which ones are turn 2 and which are worth pushing is to get very, very familiar with the deck and trust your intuition. This doesn't mean you shouldn't be calculating probabilities and thinking critically about the hand, but in a real tournament setting you probably don't have the time to do nearly the type of complicated odds calculations you need to if you're also going to consider the four or five major branches of the decision tree your hand presents to you.

The best way to get this sense for the deck, at least for me, is to start off by keeping every hand that's not obviously unworkable (no way to generate colored mana, no draw whatsoever, etc), and then push it as far as you can. You'll stall out a lot, but you'll eventually find that many of the hands that you were stalling out with originally are now becoming wins. Eventually, you'll get to the point where you have a good feeling for what just won't win on the first turn no matter what you do to it, what will probably not win on turn 1-but might-and what's worth betting on.

Getting back to the mana-scarce example hand (Darkwater Egg, Chromatic Sphere, Night's Whisper, Brainstorm, Land Grant, Mox Emerald, Dark Ritual), my intuition is that this is probably a turn 2 hand. If we go for the kill, our Mox will be used to cast the Egg, then we'll cast a Ritual off the Bayou we find with Land Grant. Already we've lost the shuffle effect for Brainstorm, meaning that if we cast Brainstorm, we're all in with our next three cards. That would be fine, except that after casting Brainstorm, we're going to have BB floating, Night's Whisper, Chromatic Sphere, and two mystery cards in hand, with five storm. If we had another shuffle effect then this might be enough, depending on what we drew from the Egg and the Brainstorm, but in this case we've got to cast four more spells and Tendrils, and Night's Whisper costs us two mana but is entirely dead because we've already seen-and rejected-the two cards it will draw us. One of those mystery cards absolutely has to be a mana producer, since we can't even cast Tendrils yet with the mana we have, much less cast other spells first to increase our storm count. At this point we start realizing that for the two mystery cards to win us the game, they're going to have to be something like Black Lotus and Yawgmoth's Will, or include Demonic Tutor or Demonic Consultation. The odds of drawing not just one, but two, of the high-effect restricted cards in the deck are vanishingly small.

So that pretty much rules out Brainstorm; what if we cast Night's Whisper first? This will leave us with five storm (Mox, Egg, Land Grant, Ritual, Whisper), one colored mana floating-we'll have to decide which color in a second-and three mystery cards (two from the Whisper, one from the Egg). This is a better situation than with the Brainstorm, but there are two very important points to consider. One is that, while you'll have more cards in hand, you'll actually see fewer cards with the Whisper than with the Brainstorm, which diminishes our chances somewhat. The other is that last mana we have floating.

Think about that situation for a moment: we have Brainstorm, Chromatic Sphere, and three mystery cards, with one mana floating, and we need to cast four more spells and a Tendrils. We obviously need more mana, and if we want to maximize our chance to generate it, we need to leave a Black mana floating in our pool in order to help cast a ritual of some sort. Further, we know that we're going to need to see at least two cards that generate mana, because we need to have four mana left over in our pool even after we've played four more spells. That means that we are probably going to need two of those three mystery cards to be mana generators, and the third should ideally be some sort of draw spell or tutor. The thing is, most of our draw spells, including the one in our hand that we're hoping will find us a way to get Tendrils (Brainstorm), require Blue mana to cast. If we leave a Black mana floating, which by now we realize we have to do, the only way we have to generate Blue mana is that Chromatic Sphere, but we're going to have to sacrifice a mana to cast it. That means that even if one of those mana generating cards is a Dark Ritual-the best of the likely options-it will only generate a profit of one mana for us. If it's Cabal Ritual, it won't generate any profit. If it's a Mox, it's a wash. Lotus would be lovely, but once again we're relying on a restricted card, which we should only do in a last resort.

Already, then, the hand is starting to look less and less likely to win on the first turn. The Night's Whisper scenario isn't as bad as it could be, but if it fails we're going to have to pass the turn with a land on the board (vulnerable to Wastelands), we'll have used up our Dark Ritual for nothing, and we'll have to spend a mana all over again in the coming turn just to cast Chromatic Sphere to get access to the blue mana we're going to need for Brainstorm.

On the other hand, how do we set up a turn 2 win with this hand? Well remember that one of the problems with the hand was that the most mana-efficient option, and the one that sees the most cards even if it doesn't draw us the most, was to play Brainstorm, but that the lack of a shuffle effect made that problematic. If we hold the Land Grant back, though, we can simply play Mox Emerald, Sphere on the first turn and then use the second turn to untap the Mox and filter that useless Green mana into Blue mana, draw a card, cast Brainstorm, see three cards that we can use to fix our hand as necessary, then shuffle with Land Grant to get Bayou, and cast Dark Ritual. Now look at our situation: not only have we drawn an extra card on our second turn, but we see four more just from the Sphere and Brainstorm. The Brainstorm is a mini-Ancestral with the shuffle effect, and now we can cast Dark Ritual having seen a total of five more cards in the deck before deciding whether to play the Night's Whisper or one of the three mystery cards we'll have drawn. The difference is tremendous, as if we'd added a free Ancestral Recall to our opening hand.

To make sure that my reasoning and intuition were accurate, I goldfished the hand ten times in each of the scenarios above (the two different first-turn win scenarios and the second-turn win scenario). I never got the first turn kill if I cast the Brainstorm first; the odds just weighed too heavily against me. In a couple of those goldfish games I still had enough gas left over to go for the win on turn 2, but that was rare. In the Night's Whisper scenario, I had two first-turn kills, but both of them involved either Black Lotus or Lion's Eye Diamond, which is obviously not something you can count on with any frequency. However, when I went for the second turn kill, I succeeded nine times out of ten. The tenth hand, that didn't succeed, involved dying to my own Spoils of the Vault (for Cabal Ritual, with four left in the deck).

So what did I actually do with the hand? I played Mox, Sphere, go. Then I drew Land Grant #2 on my draw, and filtered the mana from my Emerald into through the Sphere, drawing Mox Jet and leaving me with a Blue mana floating. I played Brainstorm with the floating Blue mana (1 storm) and saw Spoils of the Vault, Cabal Ritual, and Demonic Tutor. At this point my hand had both Demonic Tutor and both types of Rituals, with which I've never failed to goldfish that turn, so I know I'm set. But what to put back with the Brainstorm?

My first impression-the most straightforward play, as I see it-is to put back the second Land Grant and Night's Whisper (with that much tutoring power, the Whisper is pretty much pointless here), shuffle with Land Grant, play Jet, then Ritual (BBB floating, four storm, Bayou in play, three cards in the graveyard). From there I can cast Demonic Tutor with B floating, fetch Black Lotus, sacrifice it for BBB, play Egg and sacrifice it, giving me BBU floating, with threshold (and seven storm). Then I can play Cabal Ritual for BBBBB, Spoils for Tendrils, and cast it for exactly 20 damage with mana to spare. The problem with this is that it opens me up to dying to my own Spoils of the Vault, which obviously I'd like to avoid. So what else can I do?

Demonic Tutor, when it doesn't lead to Black Lotus (its most frequent target in this deck), usually leads to Yawgmoth's Will. The problem with that will be in generating five mana to pay Demonic and Will, with any mana floating to replay the Ritual and somehow get to 4 mana left over for Tendrils. Obviously in order to get that kind of mana, I'm going to have to cast that Cabal Ritual with threshold, preferably once on either side of the Will. If I put back the Darkwater Egg and the Night's Whisper from the Brainstorm, I can generate an extra storm and put a card in the graveyard at no cost whatsoever by playing that second Land Grant and simply failing to find a land (which will enable me to replay them from the graveyard if I want). If I keep the Egg instead, that extra card in the graveyard will cost me a mana I can't afford.

Which is exactly what I did. I put back Darkwater Egg and Night's Whisper, and played my first Land Grant, fetching and playing Bayou. I then played the second Land Grant, failing to find a land in my library (though Tropical Island was there to be found if I'd wanted it). That left me with four cards in the graveyard, Bayou in play, and three storm. I played Mox Jet and Dark Ritual, then cast Demonic Tutor to fetch Yawgmoth's Will. With the Dark Ritual and Demonic Tutor in the yard, I now had threshold, and with the remaining two mana I cast Cabal Ritual for BBBBB, cast Yawgmoth's Will, recast the Cabal Ritual (again for BBBBB), and from here it's obviously academic, as I can simply replay my entire graveyard until I end it by casting Demonic Tutor for Tendrils of Agony, with storm well above the nine necessary. That leaves the lonely little Spoils of the Vault all alone in my hand, unused.

Mutation
So we've covered (at last) the two major types of hands that this deck will give you. You'll really start to understand the deck, however, when you can see one type of hand becoming another in mid-combo and adjust your play accordingly. Mana-scarce hands, in particular, can become draw-scarce fairly quickly-see above-and that should cause you to rethink your plan for the hand. Every so often a hand that began with minimal draw will end up chaining draw spells into other draw spells, or tutors into tutors, and then you're going to have to start seriously thinking about managing your mana resources in the same way that you do with mana-scarce hands. That includes making decisions about when discretion is the better part of valor-sometimes the correct play will be to stop the combo while you have enough cards to make a go at it next turn or the turn thereafter.

II. Time to Go to The Mattresses
So, a minor eternity later, we've covered... How to Beat Your Goldfish at Magic, Except When You Don't, Because You Kill Yourself First. If you're not impressed, I don't blame you. The thing is, there are whole swaths of the field at any given Vintage tournament that will put up no more resistance than your goldfish. And I'm not just talking about that kid with his Mirari's Wake deck, either, bless his "rouge" little soul. Frankly, this deck doesn't so much have matchups against certain decks as it does against certain cards. You are so much faster than they are that their deck's strategy, its game plan, all that careful agonizing over what to cut from the maindeck to reach 60 cards, all of it is as irrelevant to you as your opponent's age, name, weight, and hair color. If everything goes correctly, you'll never know any of it. It'll be over too fast.

The Extra Gonad
So let's start with the monster in the corner, the one we've been ignoring: Trinisphere. Obviously, if Trinisphere hits the board and sticks around, we cannot win. And unless this is game two, we cannot stop them, either. This leaves us only one viable option, but it's a surprisingly good one: race. Kill them before they can play it, because they can't do anything to stop you, either. This works much better than you might think. I've been on both sides of the matchup quite a bit, and I'd rather have Meandeck Tendrils any day of the week. A turn 2 Trinisphere is almost always too slow, and if they mulligan aggressively for the first-turn Trinisphere, they will frequently mull into oblivion or be forced to keep a four-card, second-turn Trinisphere hand. And then they'll get blown out of the water.

The 65/40 Rule
Please note that I'm not trying to suggest that Trinisphere isn't problematic. Hell, Force of Will is in the side to board in on the draw almost solely for the sake of combating the three-balled monster. When it hits, we have very few outs, even with Chain of Vapor and Hurkyl's Recall (since we only run two real lands, in order to cast either of those spells under a Trinisphere, we'll need to have already had a turn to play some mana acceleration). We can, and will, lose matches to turn 1, or even sometimes turn 2, Trinispheres. But remember that this deck is all about playing the percentages, and in this case what I call The 65/40 Rule applies: our approximately 65% first-turn goldfish rate is significantly better than their approximately 40% chance to nail down a first-turn Trinisphere. So stop worrying about Trinisphere. That's a pony we can race.

The Riefenstahl Effect
The single most common misunderstanding of the deck that I hear bandied about is this: "Meandeck Tendrils is incredibly fast, but it just loses to Force of Will." The deck does NOT lose to Force of Will. At the latest Waterbury, I punched through each of the following hands: Duress plus Force of Will, playing second; Force of Will plus Mana Drain (playing first); two Force of Will in one turn (playing second); and two Force of Will plus Mana Drain (playing first).

That said, obviously the deck didn't fare well among the rest of my teammates, many of whom are more skilled than I am, in a field full to the brim with control decks. So what was the problem? The real problem was the time that Force of Will bought our opponents to play something relevant to the matchup, like Sphere of Resistance, Arcane Laboratory, or most commonly at Waterbury, Tinker for Platinum Angel. If your opponent isn't running the combo hate cards they should be (depending on the metagame), then all but the most spectacularly counter-heavy draws on their part will be useless against you. Waterbury wasn't the Triumph of the Will, it was the City of Angels (and Laboratories, and Spheres of Resistance, but, uhm, that doesn't make for a very snappy sound bite, does it?).

So how do we win through Force of Will? Well, sometimes we go straight for the jugular and hope that they don't have it-remember, the 65/40 rule applies here as well. There's an important difference here, however, in that, unlike with Trinisphere, it's still possible to play in a way that minimizes the potential effects of a well-timed Force of Will on our ability to just go off next turn instead.

Your Opponents (you knew you'd have to worry about them eventually, right?)
The first thing we have to ask ourselves when trying to play around Force-and this is a very real question-is just how skilled do we think our opponent is? If this is game one, we would probably be best served by expecting our opponent to play optimally, or at least well, and adjust our strategy accordingly (I'll discuss how later). However, by game two or three (depending largely on how quickly we put down our opponent in game one), we'll have a much better gauge of our opponent's skills, and of just what kinds of plays s/he might be capable.

An opponent who's familiar with our deck, or just exceptionally sharp, will probably figure out that the best way to stop it is not to simply counter the early acceleration, as some do, or to hold that Force of Will for a bomb spell like Will or a Draw-7. Instead, the best way to stop the deck is to wait until it builds about five or six storm, then counter the scarce resource. If we're low on cards, that indicates that we will probably need to resolve a draw spell. Countering spells like Brainstorm, Night's Whisper, or even Spoils of the Vault is key (despite the chance that we'll kill ourselves with it, it's often more advantageous for our opponent to counter the Spoils than it is for her to counter the Spoiled-for card, which can sometimes turn a hand vulnerable to Force into a hand that ignores it-most obviously, if it looks like we might Spoils for Tendrils of Agony, she'll be dead if Spoils resolves).

On the other hand, if we have 5 storm, four cards in hand, and just one Black mana floating, he should counter the Ritual. The chances that we'll need it to cast anything further this turn are very good, and she's made us waste every card we've played so far this turn. All five.

In other words, a good opponent will be paying just as much attention to which resources we're lacking as we ourselves are (which, incidentally, is why it's a good idea even for people who never plan on playing this deck to get familiar with it and goldfish it for a while).

Disinformation
This entails something very important, however: if we're playing against a good player with Force of Will, the game has now become a war of information. We're automatically at a disadvantage here simply because, as the aggressor in the matchup, we're going to be acting first. That means that they're going to have access to significantly more information about our hand than we will about theirs, which will be exacerbated by the fact that we'll frequently be playing every single card in our hand. This makes it imperative for us to disguise our hand, but they're going to see most of it anyway. So how do we do that?

The single most common way to do it is spell order. Let's say we're on a mana-scarce hand. If that Ritual doesn't resolve, we're sunk. A lot of people's initial impulse is to hold back on the Ritual until it's absolutely necessary. If you're playing a skilled opponent, don't do it. Play it immediately. If we know we have to resolve two Rituals this turn in order to win, and we're going for the kill, play both Rituals immediately. Why? Because it gives our opponent less information, and less information means a greater chance to make a mistake. He may let the Rituals resolve, believing that he can hold off and counter that key draw spell that he thinks we're slowplaying, causing us to fizzle and take mana burn. After all, he let the first Ritual resolve, what's the point in countering the second? Of course, the entire rest of our hand is draw, so if he counters the Brainstorm, we can just play Night's Whisper and keep going-so long, and thanks for all the storm. Take every chance you can to give your opponent the opportunity to misplay.

Of course, now some of our opponents have read this. But even that is beneficial, because fundamentally we're trying to instill uncertainty in our opponent. Uncertainty and a lack of self-confidence are where most of our opponent's errors are going to come from. Once we've settled on a few possible plans of action with a hand, we need to think about how many different ways we can play the spells involved and what, to our opponent, the hand may appear to be if we'd seen only those spells.

The other major way to disguise your hand is simply to employ as many psychological tools as possible to try to intimidate our opponent, or indicate weakness when we are strong, or vice versa. Personally, I am not particularly good at this; every so often, I'll try to hint at a little bit of trepidation when trying to resolve a spell I really don't need to resolve, for example, or even double-fake and do so when I'm trying to resolve a spell I really do need, if I think my opponent is hip to psychological manipulation. But generally speaking, I am fairly poor at this. So I simply try to maintain a somewhat friendly tone with my opponent while giving away as little information about my hand as I can manage. You may get better results by playing the psychological game very flamboyantly (Stephen Menendian comes to mind here...), or by remaining mostly silent and imposing if you have the physical presence and reputation to carry this off (Marc Perez is good at this). This is something that I don't think I can teach, but most good players are aware of their strengths and limitations in this area. However, I believe that Magic players in general, and Vintage players in particular, usually overlook the potential strength of this aspect of their play. Despite its importance, psychological play is made even more difficult with this deck, because you will have to spend so much brainpower simply on the technical, "how do I make this hand work?" aspects of the deck that sometimes very little is left over for actually playing your opponent.

Counter my Ritual? Yes, Please
The other way to beat Force of Will (and Mana Drain, etc) is simply to power through it. This almost always involves a draw-heavy (and hence usually mana-scarce) hand. My reasoning for this, besides being based on personal experience, goes like this: unless a hand is completely unworkable, the uniformity of the various elements of this deck mean that hand size is the single most important factor in winning that turn. Draw-heavy hands have spells that mostly replace themselves, so when (eventually) one of the hand's spells is countered, we will still have plenty of gas to try again next turn. The problem our opponents are faced with is this: they need to hit our scarce resource (mana) to keep us from rolling them this turn. However, as long as we have one or two permanent sources of mana on the board, eventually we will draw into a mana glut and we'll have already seen so many cards that stopping the win at that point will be nearly impossible.

In other words: if you can manage it, get your opponent to commit to countering your mana, not your draw. This will slow you down, but it will also break down their counter wall. This, incidentally, is how I broke through that two-Force-of-Will-plus-a-Mana-Drain hand from above. It's not even that my opponent played incorrectly. I believe he played correctly, but my hand was too quick at replenishing itself, and it allowed me to place continual pressure on him until I finally found Yawgmoth's Will and smashed his head with the bricks I'd torn out of his counter-wall.

The last key point to remember about the control matchups is that we don't have to rush. If you can race Mana Drain and still play around Force of Will effectively, by all means do so, but even Mana Drain isn't the end of the world. As long as they're focused on countering our spells, and we keep so much pressure on them that they don't get the opportunity to pursue their gameplan, then we're still in the game.

Duress ("Oh, uhm, yeah, sure, take that. Heh.")
Duress has the potential to be one of the single most damaging cards that can be realistically cast against us. If our opponent is skilled and understands our deck, she can thoroughly cripple us, as Duress should reveal to her our entire game plan and exactly where the chink in our armor lies. If you find yourself on the receiving end of such a Duress, I can't teach you anything that's going to help you.

The good news, though is that most of your opponents are actually going to have no clue what they should take. In that case, feel free to ham it up when they take that Night's Whisper, but leave that Land Grant intact, or when they take the Dark Ritual when your only source of mana was a Mana Crypt that you needed to filter through a Chromatic Sphere to even cast the Ritual in the first place. Personally, I like to purse my lips, shake my head slightly, and ruefully congratulate my opponents on their poor plays.

The "Other" Hate
There are plenty of other cards that concern us in the format, of course. Most of the permanents that hurt us are dealt with using the 65/40 rule. Race them. This is true for Arcane Lab, Tinker for Platinum Angel, and just about anything that an opposing combo deck can throw at us.

But-and this is a "but" with big implications-the "other" hate is often what will actually kill us. If it does, it may be due to our having to keep a turn 2 hand while our opponents luck into something like a first turn Tinker or Lab (harsh, but that's life in Vintage Magic); more likely, however, these spells are going to come down on turn 2 or 3 after our attempt at a first turn kill is interrupted by Force (or sometimes Drain, if you had to keep a slow hand or lost the die roll).

IV. And Finally, The Problem
Personally, I view the above as the fundamental problem with the deck, even more so than the difficulty of playing it correctly in a tournament setting. More often than not, our opponents won't have Force followed by Lab, or Force and Drain and Tinker, etc. But I would guess that about once in every three rounds, they will, and we have absolutely no answer for that other than the makeshift solutions of Chain of Vapor and Hurkyl's Recall. If they can pull it off, you will almost always lose on the spot, whereas something like TPS or Doomsday can frequently find an out before the axe falls.

That might not sound like such a big deal-one game every three matches or so? No problem!-but think about that for a second. First, we probably have about a 10% chance of either killing ourselves with Spoils or fizzling massively when we're pushing for the first turn kill. Second, our opponents can sometimes win games with random broken draws like Workshop into Trinisphere or land, Mox, Mox, Tinker, and there's nothing we can do to stop them unless we're in games two or three and brought in Force of Will. Third, a number of our opponents' hands that start with Force and Drain will also end up drawing into something like the above Arcane Laboratory or Tinker for Platinum Angel. Add all that up, and while I'm still convinced that Meandeck Tendrils will take more than 50% from almost every deck in the format in the hands of a skilled player, there are a whole slew of decks from which it won't take very much more than 50% of the games. What that adds up to in the end is an edge in individual games, but a very serious disadvantage over the course of a tournament.

To a certain degree this is true of every deck, but many of them make up for that fundamental problem by giving their pilots the opportunity to outplay their opponents. I don't think that Meandeck Tendrils gives you many such opportunities. This is different from saying that the deck doesn't take much skill to pilot, or that its wins aren't skill-based. They most certainly are. However, the vast majority of the skill involved simply lies in playing the deck correctly and getting it to work in the first place. Because the entire deck is proactive and non-disruptive, once we've mastered the technical play and learn how to play against disruption, we are leaving the results of our matches entirely in the grip of the mathematics of the two opposing decks. As far as Meandeck Tendrils is concerned, its pilot is usually little more than a very hard-working human machine, whose job is simply to keep all the wheels greased.

Most decks would simply solve this by adding Duress. In theory it seems perfect; we attempt to win on the first turn, we're halted by Force of Will, we begin to rebuild, and before they can cast the game ender, we Duress it out of their hands. Meandeck had Duress in the board to bring in against decks who could threaten us like this in game two or three when on the play, but even after Waterbury (in a field full of precisely the decks we wanted Duress against in the first place) almost all of us reported being surprisingly disappointed with it. Nevertheless, Steve O'Connell, a.k.a. Zherbus, tried a build that included four maindeck Duress, because in theory it seemed right. We found that the card's violation of the "One mana, one card, one storm" rule and its interference with the goldfish (the 65/40 rule) were so problematic that every attempt to fit the card into the deck just made the deck worse than before, without significantly impacting the matchups we wanted to fix.

The Wrap Up
So there you have it. My attempt to meander through some of the basics of my team's most brilliantly failed creation. I think the deck itself is a work of art, and I respect anyone who can play it anything like optimally in a tournament setting and retain their sanity. Personally, I didn't play it optimally, but got lucky enough with the deck that it didn't matter. And, obviously, I never had any sanity to retain in the first place.

I would also like to say that there's even more to the deck than these fifteen or so pages describe. I didn't even touch on calculating the odds of various lines of play in order to compare them, for example, largely because I think that, in a tournament setting, the mental gymnastics involved are unreasonable, and likely to get a judge called on you for slow play. Beyond that, I'm a big believer in understanding the concepts and theory that drives the deck first, and letting that guide you as you play it. Eventually, that leads to a much more intuitive "feel for the deck" that will be a very potent weapon in a tournament. So enjoy the deck, and if you've got the moxie to actually bust it out on an unsuspecting tournament, my hat's off to you. Make sure you learn it inside and out, though, because it's a vicious little monster, and it'll bite anyone. Including you.

Justin Walters
Saucemaster