The 2025 Year-In Review for the Agents

2025 was the biggest year ever for Value Vintage. With the format exploding in popularity, new decks emerged and others got more optimized. The massive influx of new members from Tolarian Community College provided a ton of new players and perspectives, and from all that comes learning. Lets find out what the Agents did and learned this year, and what they plan to take into 2026.

Doot

Primary Decks This Year: Boros Energy, Rakdos Reanimator, Fluctuator Combo

2025 was a big year for me. Taking second in the Indianapolis March 1k was equal measure heartbreaking and amazing, and despite my middling performances in other 1ks and events throughout the rest of the year, I can see myself improving by the month. My biggest goal for next year is to take down a major event, as well as continue to create and refine cool decks and start to ramp up my content flow both here and on Youtube.

The biggest thing I’ve learned is that I LOVE Aggro-Combo decks. If I’ve got multiple proactive angles to progress a gameplan across multiple axes, that’s kickass to me. If they’ve got tempo-esque play patterns, all the better.

My new favorite card I’ve started playing this year is Troll of Khazad-Dum. I always knew it was a good card, but this year really drove home how insanely strong it is. Between fixing your land drops and giving you a baseline mulligan of land+troll+Life/Death, Troll is a wildly flexible card I’ve fallen in love with since I started playing Reanimator nonstop for the past two months.

Some things on my to-do list for next year:

Fix Boros Energy. The deck has felt very feast-or-famine, and that’s a problem I feel like I can fix.
Continue to refine Fluctuator and Reanimator. Those decks have really become my babies this year, and I think I’ve proven they can break through into at least a top 8, but I would love to take one or both of them to that point.
Investigate Infect. It seems like a deck I’d really enjoy given my newfound propensity for aggro-combo.
Play more Prowess. I love that deck to death and haven’t played it nearly as much as I should have.

Santi

Primary decks this year: Miracles, Monogreen Cloudpost, Monoblue Spirits, Gruul Initiative, Prowess

This was my first year taking VV seriously. As I don’t live in America, participating in offline tournaments is off my reach (for now), so I mostly participated in the online Cockatrice league. I recently got a couple decks on MTGO so I will be participating in more events in 2026.

One of the most important things I learned when it comes to VV is that there are three approaches that seem to work. The first one is having a fast, linear approach that kills your opponent quickly. This is both the hyper-combo strategies of the format, but also Prowess, Infect and even Crashcade. The second idea is to interact in the most efficient way possible, generate card advantage for cheap and turn the corner as early as possible. Really passive Control decks do not perform well, as much as I have tried to make them work, and once you turn the corner, the quicker your clock is, the better. The third approach is to just jam must answer threat after must answer threat (especially if they generate a ton of value by themselves or are hard to answer, things like Amped Raptor, Peema Trailblazer, Minsc & Boo, Timeless Heroes, White Plume Adventurer, Caves of Chaos Adventurer and Undermountain Adventurer are prime examples of this) backed up by very powerful interaction, which the Energy package of Static Prison and Galvanic Discharge offers in spades.

What I’m hinting at is that I underestimated the Naya Boom deck, and I believe it can be built to be even more brutal than it currently is. I haven’t seen a lot of Peema Trailblazer in the format yet, but that’s definitely a card to keep an eye on, as it has the potential to end the game against a fair deck in a single activation.

Of course, I’ve been jamming Miracles the absolute most, and it’s the deck I’ve found the most success with. I recently let Teferi, Hero of Dominaria go, and while I’m sad about one of my pet cards not pulling in the weight I wanted it to, I’m really excited to try out Secure the Wastes as a card that plays to the board better, can trade for multiple attacking creatures and contest the initiative in a more proactive way.

As for the things I’m looking forward to in 2026, here’s a couple:

Get a Value Vintage community started and running here in Spain. If you’re in Spain and you want to jam some games and maybe get a Spanish league going, make sure to @ me in the Discord server!
Continue to work on Miracles to shore up the matchups that feel the worst (the infinite value midrange piles, mostly focused around Energy) while maintaining positive winrates into Aggro and Combo.
Keep brewing in the Cloudpost space. I feel like if I can solve the macro archetypal softness to fast combo decks, Oblivion Stone is one of the most messed up cards that exist in the format, and I want to take advantage of that.

Dan

Primary decks this year: Hypergenesis, Infect, Bant Nadu, Restore Balance, Midrange Crashcade

2025 is dead. Long live 2025.

The first order of business is thanking my teammates on the Shardless Agents - Santi, Doot, and Trials. When I think back on 2025 I keep thinking about Cockatrice league lobbies, late night Discord testing and brewing sessions, and the laughs. That’s what Value Vintage 2025 really means to me, just a great way to spend the time.

Beyond that I have made a slew of online friendships thanks to the Value Vintage discord, and isn’t that really what it is all about? The friends we made along the way?

No? Alright then it is probably the competition.

This is the format I bother to remain competitive in because I like the scope and scale the best out of all of Magic: The Gathering. I’ve been lucky enough to be a top 8 finalist for the 2025 Invitational, and that’s a real ass achievement. That’s not possible without the Value Vintage Discord and the Community Core, the admins, mods, and the community writ large. Big thank you there, y’all rock.

Then there’s the decks I brought to the format this year. Singularly, I like to think I’ve given everyone the gift of a tiny little elf boy and his bird-mask loving friend.

A lot of what I do is iterate and work in tandem. So by myself, I’m not much of a “brewer” I guess. That said, you ever die to Drannith Stinger? What about Runescale Stormbrood? You ever had your Lose Focus replicated copy your original because of a Ricochet Trap? You ever have your one drop Minor Misstep’d? How’s ‘bout your Ego, you ever had that Drained? You are welcome.

My to do list for 2026:

This format is devoid of annoying color hosers as marquee sideboard fixtures. This allows perverts and deviants like Grist and Minsc run around acting like they own the joint. I intended to perform well enough to get those hosers popularized.
I’d like to see the boys hit the Invitational next year so I plan to focus on coaching/enabling success for the group. I wouldn’t mind adding to my top 8 record though.
I need a new combo deck to focus on, or to take one of my existing combos and refine it further. I’ll be spending Q1 figuring that out and Q2/Q3 complaining about how bad it is. The cycle must continue!

Trials

Primary decks this year: Temur Energy, Delver, Eldrazi, Abzan Superfriends

Being my first year actually playing Magic (instead of just watching it), I sure had a lot to learn this year. Initially starting out in pauper and standard, everything changed when I saw an Oath of Druids in my store’s sell case. Not wanting to build a commander deck, I started searching for a format where I could play my newly acquired Oath, and lo and behold, I found VV. From there I built my first (of many) terrible deck, and never looked back.

The first thing I learned when entering the format was that the aggressive decks were fast. The second was that the combo decks were even faster. And yet, despite this, midrange and control lists could still exist, without being run over by these strategies. This quickly peaked my interest, as I have neither the patience to play control, nor wanted to feel like the game is often out of my hands like playing hyper-aggro or combo can often. I’ve recently set my sights on decks like delver, energy, and any deck aiming to do something with a card that is just a waste of budget (dream halls my beloved) but is, at the same time, very funny.

My goals for 2026:

Find more underrated gems for the format
Build more decks hinging on one overly expensive card and talk about them endlessly to anyone who will listen
Branch out into learning literally any combo deck