If it's happening in Magic: the Gathering, it's being talked about in our forums! Join, and share your thoughts with the rest of the Magic: the Gathering community!
About JP Meyer: JP is a member of Team Mean Deck and was amongst the first to develop competitive Psychatog and U/G Madness for the Vintage format. He is also one of the foremost pundits on Magic's oldest format.
Note: This was originally published as StarCityGames.com Premium content - but like all StarCityGames.com Premium articles, it has been made freely available for the entire community after ninety days have passed. Join StarCityGames.com Premium today and gain exclusive access to the most informative Magic: the Gathering content available!
Become a StarCityGames.com Premium Member and receive exclusive access to top-level strategies, new decklists and entertaining reports from many of the best players and writers that the game has to offer!
PLUS! StarCityGames.com Premium members now have unprecedented access into America's largest Magic: the Gathering sales database, and can view lists of StarCityGames.com's top-selling items - broken down by category, format legality, and rarity - in real time! When it comes to trading, increased knowledge equals increased profits - and increased knowledge is just one click away for our Premium members!
If you are a valid StarCityGames.com Premium member and still cannot view the article, please consult this FAQ.
After a year-long wait, Aether Vial has started to show up en masse in Type One. Here in Rochester, Vial is all over the place. The most common buids featuring Aether Vial are U/G Fish decks like the one which Jacob Orlove recently submitted an article on. The next most common decks running Vial are U/W ones. The big difference here is that while almost every single U/G Fish deck ran Aether Vial, most of the U/W Fish decks did not, since they usually were running Null Rod.
Those are the two most common Vial decks. After those, there are also random spatterings of other aggro or aggro-control decks that Vial has been added to. A few Goblin decks, for instance choose to run Aether Vial instead of Food Chain. There's also Ken Krouner's four-color Fish variant which runs a suite of Invitational creatures.
All of these decks play Aether Vial differently. Typically, the U/G and U/W Fish decks run mostly two-mana creatures like Meddling Mage, Cloud of Faeries, or Wild Mongrel and thus will usually play an Aether Vial and then park it at two counters. Subsequent Vials are totally dependent on deck construction, since the mana curves can vary heavily. A U/G player who is supplementing his Basking Rootwallas with Nimble Mongeese will thus play a second Vial at one counter. Vial at three counters shows up fairly commonly, especially following sideboarding. This is done less to smooth draws like Vial at two, but rather is because the three-mana creature of choice is Old Man of the Sea. Old Man's casting cost of 1UU can be annoying to come up with because of all of Wastelands and Mishra's Factories showing up in the miror match, so Vial is great for alleviating that. The uncounterability is also a huge bonus here because he want to be absolutely sure that your Old Man will resolve since it will dominate any board where Umezawa's Jitte is not in play.
The other Vial decks need to increment Aether Vial more frequently. Goblins have a pretty top-heavy curve, so the first Vial will often times go all the way up to five mana in order to cast Kiki-Jiki or Siege-Gang Commander. Goblins has such a variety of casting costs that it's quite common for them to be able to play a different creature each turn as the number of counters increase, especially because of cards like Goblin Matron or Goblin Recruiter, which can set up your draws to maximize Vial. KK's Fish isn't as extreme as this, but also has varied casting costs (and all sorts of different colors!) that work quite nicely with an incremented Vial.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what caused Aether Vial usage to pick up. I figure that there are a combination of factors. The most prominent is probably the changed perspective regarding how counters are used in Type One. Counters are used much more offensively now, with Mana Drain practically leaping out of its caster's hand in order to generate its mana boost and Force of Will being used more and more to force through win conditions or to stop someone else's Force. Aether Vial allows aggro players to keep Mana Drain from being used offensively. A control player would love to Drain a turn two Cloud of Faeries, because it not only would it take the wind out of the Fish player's sails, but it was also a relatively risk-free play since it was very unlikely that the Fish player would be able to follow up that turn with anything else.
Furthermore, if you look at Fish decks, there are very few cards in the deck that aren't counters, creatures, or mana. It's mostly just Null Rod/Chalice of the Void and Standstill. With Aether Vial making your creatures uncounterable, this allows the Fish player to reserve all of their counters towards stopping the opponent's spells, rather than occasionally needing to use them in order to force through their own spells. This is actually somewhat risky since Fish decks don't pack a large number of counters and thus can sometimes leave them unprepared for a timely Tinker or similar spell.
I'd say that the other big reason for the increase in Aether Vial is the increase of Chalice of the Void, both in Fish and in other decks. Chalice of the Void can serve a similar function to Null Rod in Fish decks, because both can counter Moxes and slow down artifact decks. Like I said above though, Chalice use is up across the board, and Fish decks were particularly vulnerable to Chalice. Chalice at X=2 stops nearly all of the creatures in Fish, along with Standstill, Null Rod, and Daze. Vial sneaks nicely around this problem.
