The Finest Vintage: Witches and New Toys on the Horizon

When Strixhaven released, there were a few cards that piqued the interest of Vintage players. The one most talked about was . The second coming of ? Play it while it's unrestricted! I jumped on the bandwagon to check out the new kid in Vintage Wonderland. The natural home for the Witch is a Grixis shell alongside , overloading on . Initially I was pretty happy with the results too. However, I'm not sure whether the metagame moved on by itself or if Witch was perceived as a threat and people reacted to the card, but results dropped off steeply after a while.

I haven't played my usual 100 matches with the deck. I decided not to complete the set as near the end, lacking results, it mostly felt like a chore. I know this reads like a non-starter, but I find the deck worth talking about. It is quite elegant in some ways, but it also has parts that don't go well together. I first want to detail what works and what doesn't work here and then take a look at the newest goodies. The most recent set might be named Modern Horizons 2 for some reason, but the reason definitely isn't that it doesn't have new toys for Vintage.

Sedgemoor Starting Point

Looking for a list I liked I eventually settled on the following, originally constructed by Magic Online user kaiesu.

The main appeal of playing such a deck is that you get to use . Arcanist wants a lot of cantrips and Witch wants the same. The red Wizard is the truly great card here; it's cheap and it creates a big advantage quickly. The only problem with it is that it doesn't have a meaningful board impact. You still need to defend against Ravager Shops and you still need to attack the combo decks, which is where the Witch enters the picture. The card is appealing in that it can play both roles extremely well while having overlapping deck design constraints with the Arcanist.

Before the Witch came along, similar decks usually ran green for . This is a perfectly fine choice, you even get to play with, but the problem is that your sideboard will be lacking against Bazaar decks. If you want to play fair games, Grixis is a very appealing color combination in Vintage because you get to play the blue power main, the most punishing red cards to bring in against Shops decks, and the most punishing black cards against Bazaar decks. Sedgemoor Witch finally allows us to do what we really wanted to do with Dreadhorde Arcanist all along.

Just as was the case with , a big part of the resulting deck follows logically from deck-building constraints. You want three Dreadhorde Arcanist and two to three Sedgemoor Witch. For both cards to work properly, you definitely want everything that loosely fits the definition of a Vintage-playable cantrip. Our five trusty Forces go into every blue deck anyway. There is also an temptation to jam all the . In what is somewhat unusual for a non-combo deck, you also want the full set of moxen to get that Witch into play quickly. With seven to eight artifact mana pieces is just too ridiculous of a Magic card to ignore. goes in any blue deck outside of combo, and is usually on board in the fair blue-red decks as well. You can read this generic sentence as: "These are great cards, but they are not absolutely critical to the deck." Finally there is room for a few more pieces of interaction and voilà, you have your deck.

Analysis

This results in a list that looks coherent and also performed quite decently initially. What follows are a few observations on what works, what doesn't, and what could be changed about it.

When you compare to in your mind and then actually play the deck, you quickly realize that the biggest difference is not that your tokens are smaller. It's that you produce them much less reliably as all your artifacts and planeswalkers don't trigger the Witch. In my experience that makes Sedgemoor Witch only slightly better than . In fact I wouldn't play Witch over Pyromancer if we didn't want black for the sideboard cards anyway. If you aren't into the package, you could even go for Grixis with Pyromancer and no Witches because you get access to Lurrus then. This in turn lets you drop at least one off-color mox and the . Damn, so many options already …

Another problem here is that the number of cantrips is on the lower end. You really only have and the four restriced cards to flash back with . Eight cards is not horrible but frankly not optimal either. A big contributor to this problem is that you have a very high number of counters in your deck, which don't do anything with Arcanist. Overloading on is also problematic in that it makes you extremely soft to Shops decks preboard. And even in many blue matchups Flusterstorms have diminishing returns. If you have too many, you will often lose to their key cards, permanents like , , , or . You can mitigate both of these problems if you replace two Flusterstorm with two . Maybe the card is just too bad for Vintage though. I must admit I am not sure about that, but if you want to play this deck, I'd definitely advise replacing two Flusterstorm with interactive one-mana spells that you can flash back.

Another thing I don't like about the number of Flusterstorm is that you are often forced to decide whether you want to cantrip or interact early on. If you choose to cantrip, you'll often get punished. If you choose to keep the shields up, you will often not get the opportunity to do anything with the Flusterstorm and have wasted one mana. This might not sound so bad, but blue mana is typically a critical resource early on. Again a card like Thoughtseize would work better here.

A thing that I don't understand is why everybody is running and then uses it to tutor up . This deck is inherently weak to Shops and Bazaar decks preboard while it should be strong against combo decks. (Otherwise why play it at all?) With these specifications why not run or main? Sure, it sucks to draw the fat kids, but it at least gives you some kind of plan for your bad matchups.

Aside from preboard Shops/Bazaar, Sultai is a matchup that exposes this deck's weaknesses unsparingly. You have borderline too few cantrips for Dreadhorde Arcanist and eats the ones you have. Flusterstorm is abominable in this matchup as it counters neither their creatures nor their planeswalkers nor their interaction because they usually play these days. This means you cannot protect your Witch and you cannot expect to win against Tarmogoyf and Oko without it. Having a total of four between main deck and sideboard is a bit of a lost opportunity in this regard I think. At least two of these should probably be cards that kill Tarmogoyf with being the obvious choice here. is another card that could be considered. It is super-painful that you cannot flash it back, but it kills Oko, and the mox count of this deck makes the extra colorless mana more acceptable. Either way you will not have an answer that takes care of , which is so annoying to this deck that you should bring against the Bazaar decks.

To sum it up, this is a deck with a lot of potential, mainly due to Dreadhorde Arcanist and the color combination, which gives you potent sideboard options. But the parts of the deck don't work as well together as you would like them to. Specifically at the moment there is also the problem that everybody is on Bazaar decks. If you are hellbent on playing a fair deck just now, then this is probably not the worst choice, but if you are not, then you are better off choosing a deck that is actually good against graveyard decks.

Modern Horizons 2

The set brought several new toys for Vintage players to enjoy. Unfortunately they are not evenly distributed among the big Vintage archetypes. In fact decks got plenty and everybody else has to fight for scraps.

The card that everybody was talking about right away is . If you recall my article about the Hogaak deck, then you might also remember that I critisized it for its lack of interaction and that it has not enough ways to get onto the battlefield quickly. Grief helps solving both of these problems neatly. Another card that is very helpful for getting Vengevine into play is . It is also nice that the deck gets a bit more resilient to this way as it did not beat the card as often as it pretended to do.

I am certain there is a better list out there now than what was previously possible, but what seems to have happened is that Gaak decks have been mostly abandoned and Vengevine along with the new toys has been moved into the Squee Bazaar deck, forming the new de-facto best Bazaar build. This type of deck got another great card in . Previously you would complement with , which was semi-reliably and suffered from a Magic Online bug for the last few months. With Master of Death you get something that returns from your graveyard like clockwork and is blue, which is amazing for your Forces.

Considering that the Squee-based Bazaar decks have a lot of disruption and few black cards, there is little reason to play Grief. But don't fret, there is yet another card that they have picked up instead. kills , exiles your opponent's , and cleans up all those little critters from Ravager Shops. Against other Bazaar decks you also get as an additional sideboard card. As an example of what you can do with this embarrassment of riches, take a look at this:

This deck is quite disgusting. It's fast, disruptive, reliable, and resilient to hate. Actually, as long as is sacrosanct, the deck might even survive unscathed a restriction or two …

In the opposition got a pretty decent new hate piece too. Unfortunately it usually dies in a Fury. is great against this kind of deck, but you need to resolve it before they go wild and you need to get it through their seven Forces. There is also the issue that the decks best at casting an early Void Mirror are the Shops decks and they cannot conceivably play the card. Void Mirror actually turns off so much stuff from almost all decks that virtually nobody can use it.

The card currently talked about the most is I believe. In Vintage this card gives a lot to decks. Suddenly you have a significant alternate win condition at an extremely low cost. Getting to fetch a , or (in case you have ) should also be quite powerful. Michael Bonde piloted this deck to a first place at a recent Vintage Challenge:

Should the world of Vintage return to sanity at some point, there might also be some room for in the format. Maybe there are too many creatures in Vintage these days and Ragavan turns out to be too unreliable, but the combination of extra mana and extra cards for a single mana sure is appealing.

As a final card to keep an eye on, there is . People will probably use this as an excuse to make Blue Stax—the world's most expensive Magic deck—happen, and who knows, maybe it even becomes a thing. Alternatively you can also try out Justin Gennari's new favorite, best worst deck: Vintage Ironworks.

Enjoy!

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