SHORT STORY TIME!

I came into this format in 2023 during a Star City Games event in Pittsburgh, PA. There, while doing Legacy and Modern side events - piloting High Tide and Scam respectively - my buddy comes up to me and says 'Dude you gotta try this, Value Vintage.' We back and forth and he's super excited to not only play High Tide but also Dredge and 'a ton of other s*@t.' Needless to say I do a few rounds and I'm hooked enough to be writing this before Christmas Eve two years later.

[Pictured: The super fair ways I intended to spend that weekend.]

That was then, this is now

So here we are now and I have a few top 8 finishes under my belt. So what have I learned about this format that might benefit you? Well you didn't ask but I'm a font of information so let's get to it!

Five Pillars

A while back I heard The Eternal Durdles' Phil talking about Pillars of Legacy. These are things that bans are designed to protect and keep in the format, at the cost of the new. These are also things that form the core backbone of almost every viable competitive strategy.

[Pictured: Completely reasonable and fair Magic: The Gathering cards.]

I like this construction. I like it so much when I talk to people about the most powerful things to do in Value Vintage - things that win - I use a similar construction.

Pillar #1 - Reactive Blue Decks

Value Vintage is at no shortage of powerful blue reactive magic, some of which sees play in other formats including Vintage proper. Strategies like Spirits, Merfolk, and Blue-White Control are incredibly popular and with good reason.

Spell Pierce helps regulate on hyper-fast combo while Lose Focus keeps the game's pace at what blue decks prefer - that is to say, whatever pace they enjoy. Spirits and Merfolk present a critical mass of bodies backed up by reactive magic to take down opposing blue mages, counterswarm aggro decks, bully midrange, and present the pressure side of the reactivity + pressure equation to beating combo. They perform well in our highest levels of competition and again, for very good reason.

Pillar #2 - Demonic Tutor + Free Cast

If we consider Control the slowest version of Magic: The Gathering viable in value vintage, the opposite exists, that is, the fastest.

Enter the Demonic Tutor impersonators that also happen to cast a bevy of high value or game ending spells.

These are split strategies. Amped Raptor decks seek to use Turn two to present a high value 2/1 first striker and gain an absurd amount of card advantage extremely early in the game. This is not unlike the Shardless BUG decks of eras past or the original Bloodbraid Elf Jund lists in Standard/Modern of yesteryear.

Violent Outburst, Shardless Agent, and in other formats [ideally soon this one!] Ardent Plea present a Demonic Tutor Impersonator that finds anything from Crashing Footfalls to Channel to either present overwhelming advantage - Crashing Footfalls - to on the spot game enders - Hypergenesis, Channel, etc.

[Pictured: Bantcade's future?]

Creative Technique has had minimal success in the past, but is worth talking about here as it is a known quantity. Creative Technique is also a series of Demonic Tutors, but Technique demands an interesting all in kind of deck building in the opposite direction. If everything about Amped Raptor and Crashing Footfalls is designed to generate a 2 for 1 scenario, and Hypergenesis' goal is to minimize the combo to amplify the impact, Creative Technique seeks to maximize the combo to temper the impact. Technique seeks a deck that will always loop back in upon itself until it fizzles out and has produced a board state bigger than what Hypergenesis could hope to achieve. And higher power help me, it is entertaining to execute and miserable to witness.

All of these decks have one plan against each other pillar - overwhelm them on board. Go up and over everyone, every single time.

Pillar #3 - That's an awful nice hand you have.

The third pillar is the non-blue answer to reactivity, the Hand Attack Mafia as I have pejoratively called it in the past. This pillar eschews stack fighting and it eschews the aggressive combo strategy in favor of a direct resource attack on the hand to raise the overall value of your own hand and diminish their card quality.

These cards enable midrange and ramp strategies that would otherwise be outpaced or out maneuvered by the faster strategies - aggro and combo - and deny critical resources to reactive blue to keep midrange alive. We're currently seeing people experiment with Green Black Dark Depths strategies and there is a rather infamous green-black midrange deck already in the format.

Of note here, I include balance as the Restore Balance combo acts a lot like Boom//Bust, but also like Mind Twist and Wrath of God. That combo feels best when you are "behind" on all three resources, such that the catch up moment spends two cards to cast three broken spells, and the heavy denial strategy feels very much in line with the Green-Black midrange and Depths decks.

Pillar #4 - What if I punched him really hard though?

Aggro decks are a fixture of this format. Initiative decks are fairly consistently at the top of the format when played, and it is easy to see why. That axis of deck oozes value per card and presents game winning bodies, 4/4's and better, effortlessly.

Likewise burn decks and other sleigh decks consistently pop up and perform as a barrier to entry - if you can't compete against burn or sleigh, you aren't piloting a competitive deck. Nothing against you, this is just what you must be able to do at least 50% of the time, because just like the hyper combo decks, a high rolling burn deck with a competent pilot is neigh unstoppable.

Burn and the Initiative set the tone of the format as a Turn 4 format, that is, if your plan is to "set up" or "win" after Turn 4, not only are you not competitive but you also won't be doing very much in a game.

The Eldrazi have yet to fully define themselves in this format, but it is only a matter of time as these decks are seeing fringe play and even fringier success, but that would appear to be a tuning problem and not a conceptual problem. I for one welcome our Devoid Overlords.

Pillar #5 - Every girl's crazy for a high value marquee permanent

What if I just had 30 mana? What if I could draw my library and Underworld Dreams couldn't punish me?

That's the final category of pillars we have access to, the insane permanent family. While there is a disparateness to each of these - Cloudpost represents the totality of competitive Ramp Decks, Nadu impersonates Cascade Decks while moonlighting as bad Delver piles, and Wilderness Reclamation is the key reason to play UGx Rec Decks - they all present a permanent that once in play warps the game around it.

Cloudpost, of course, dominates mana and enables haymaker-based strategies with Breaker of Creation, mill with Trenchpost, and plays to the board extremely well.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom has stolen tournaments by playing a bad Delver game, a slow Cascade combo with its myriad interactions and resource flood and is known to be a bad but victories beatdown deck when required. It even gets to impersonate the Hand Attack Mafia by being able to sideboard into Cabal Therapy or Duress, as each pilot sees fit. Nadu keeps resources flowing and can end a game on the spot if the build has either the Lush Oasis or Laboratory Maniac combos, and why would they deny themselves access to these game enders?

Wilderness Rec grants a mana doubling and an always-up effect making the pilot able to constantly have instant speed interaction available while allowing land-based physical threats and card advantage engines to flourish. It also enables a combo game plan in the form of Nexus of Fate, allowing the pilot to simply take all of the turns if the game is permitted to go on that long.

It isn't any big secret I'm no fan of Wilderness Reclamation personally - I haven't ever gotten to play it when it felt "good" despite seeing a lot of other players enjoy it - but I would be a stone-cold liar to say this isn't a popular or powerful game piece. Much like smoking, I get why this is fun, but it isn't for me. When a meta presents itself as slower and not focused on Hypercombo and Hyperaggro decks, Reclamation tends to shine.

That's all he wrote

Well, since this is being deployed before I go touch snow for the day and do all the holiday stuff, those are my thoughts, but what are yours? Feel free to hit me up on any of the following, and Happy Holidays!

@KetzerN on X, the Worst At Everything App @sonsoftrier.bsky.social on Bluesky, aka 'What if X but nobody cared' The Value Vintage Discord: DerKezter69