Vintage 101: Phyrexia Marches On
Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're going to be wrapping up with our set reviews of March of the Machine and March of the Machine Commander! In addition to that we've got two Challenges to discuss from this past weekend.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
The Phyrexians Marching Down Main Street
The full spoiler is out for both March of the Machine and March of the Machine Commander, so let's dive right into whatever cards could be playable in Vintage. There actually weren't a lot of additional cards after the end of the spoiler season, so let's take a look.
Dance with Calamity
This card is definitely something interesting, especially in a format with a lot of things like Moxen and the like, however, I think it has a lot more potential to be underplayed actually. One of the bigger issues with the card is that there are a lot of cards that cost a lot of mana in this format but they are often cheated into play or cheating on mana in some fashion (example: Bolas's Citadel or any Oath target, Treasure Cruise) and if you go over 13 you are just exiling a bunch of cards for 8 mana and doing nothing.
There really isn't a dedicated Storm deck in the current format right now, and I don't think this will create one. However, I'm sure Justin Gennari will release a video on it.
Urabrask
This is sort of like Birgi, God of Storytelling, which did see some Vintage play, but mainly because that card triggered off any spell cast (and could also be cast on the back half with Mishra's Workshop. This only being relegated to Instants and Sorceries makes it a bit worse in that regards given that there's a solid amount of other noncreature spells in Vintage.
Vintage Challenge 4/8
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the mid-afternoon Saturday event. This event had 65 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Vintage Streamer's Discord.
You can find all of the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.
Initiative was quite popular and it did well, but had a lower than 50% win rate because of the popularity aspect. Doomsday also did very well, so did Dredge and AggroVine strategies. Jeskai did very poorly, as did PO.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Mono White | 1st | Dreddybajs |
| Grixis Tinker | 2nd | ReneRandrup |
| Combo Shops | 3rd | teichou_aisu |
| Dredge | 4th | ecobaronen |
| Doomsday | 5th | Diem4x |
| Doomsday | 6th | Maxmagicer |
| AggroVine | 7th | gr33nashe |
| Breach | 8th | Gaiametris |
Very interesting Top 8. Good amount of Bazaar, Combo, Shops, and Tinker variants here in the Top 8. At the end of the event though it was Mono White that won.
Very solid stock list at this point for Mono White. It feels like Chancellor of the Annex has definitely become stock at this point as it's just a really powerful opening game effect plus the pitch to both Chrome Mox and Solitude is powerful.
In Second Place we have Grixis Tinker.
Solid list here. All the big hits you would normally be expecting to see here. No frills, but you don't need to have a bunch of frills to have a powerful strategy.
As noted, Doomsday did quite well in this event, so let's look at the highest placing list in the event.
Very straightforward list here with some great sideboard action. As expected, cards like Cut Down and Sheoldred, the Apocalypse are very powerful here.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we have AggroVine.
This is a very strong deck. I think Hexdrinker is a great card in the current format for sure.
Vintage Challenge 4/9
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the early morning Sunday event. This event had 50 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Vintage Streamer's Discord.
You can find all of the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.
Combo Shops was the most popular deck here and had a solid win rate of around 55%. PO did quite well in this event, as did CounterVine based decks. Tinker decks also did well here too.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Combo Shops | 1st | Talking1804 |
| Mono White | 2nd | Danielpena397 |
| Dredge | 3rd | thepowernine |
| 4C DRS | 4th | yoshiwata |
| Paradoxical Outcome | 5th | Hampuse1 |
| Paradoxical Outcome | 6th | shir kahn |
| Doomsday | 7th | Tsubasa_Cat |
| Prison Shops | 8th | mogged |
Interesting Top 8 here. Some PO, some Doomsday, some Bazaar, and some Workshops. At the end of the event it was Combo Shops that won the event.
I think this is just one of those decks that is always going to have to have some strong game in the current format. It does a lot of really powerful things overall.
In Second Place we've got Mono White.
Very similar-looking list to the one from the Saturday event. Very much a stock build at this point, but it works quite well and the deck is fitting nicely into the metagame.
Also in this Top 8 we had a 4C DRS variant.
I like this deck a lot. I've played variants of it in the past and it's super fun to play around with. Getting to play a plethora of Planeswalkers is super duper fun.
At the bottom of the Top 8 we have Prison Shops.
It's nice still seeing Golos around the format for sure. This deck is always a bundle of fun (for the Prison player of course!)
Around the Web
- Justin Gennari has some great content for us this week.
- Revenantkioku has a fun video on Vintage Restrictions. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 lists here.
Soul of Windgrace and Titania, Protector of Argoth? Yeah, buddy!
Wrapping Up
That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for your continued support of the column and join me next week as we continue our journey into Vintage!
As always you can reach me at my Link Tree! In addition you can always reach me on the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the Vintage Streamers Discord.
Until next time!
