Last month, a local Indian school held a Vintage tournament with an interesting twist. They decided to take advantage of their status on the reservation and allow Ante cards, since gambling is perfectly legal there. I brewed up the following list:
[deck title=Gamblin Drains]
[Spells]
3 Timmerian Fiends
4 Bronze Tablet
2 March of the Machines
4 Dance of Many
2 Rite of Replication
2 Pernicious Deed
4 Boomerang
4 Mana Drain
4 Contract From Below
4 Dark Ritual
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Timetwister
1 Time Spiral
1 Tinker
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Gifts Ungiven
1 Brainstorm
1 Mycosynth Lattice
[/Spells]
[Mana]
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
4 Underground Sea
1 Tropical Island
4 Flooded Strand
4 Polluted Delta
4 Island
3 Swamp
[/Mana]
[Sideboard]
4 Smallpox
4 Blanket Of Night
4 Massacre
3 Bottle Gnomes
[/Sideboard]
[/deck]
It’s a typical Mana Drain control shell, but with an Ante package added in. The suite of Fiends and [card]Bronze Tablet[/card] combine with [card]Dance of Many[/card] (animating Tablet via [card]March of the Machines[/card]) to break the symmetry, allowing you to exchange a token copy instead of the original. [card]Timetwister[/card] effects allow you to reuse the combo, eventually exchanging tokens for every card in their deck, assuming they don’t scoop before then. I used glass beads for tokens, but really, you can use anything.
Round 1
Facing a total scrub playing affinity. I get Dance of Many going on Timmerian Fiends, and I can basically take his deck at will. Amazingly he plays it out, and finishes game 2 with 14 cards left in his library. Good luck next round, champ.
Round 2
Dude playing a Parfait variant. [card]Land Tax[/card] presented a bit of a problem, until I could steal it with Tablet and Tax the living shit out of him. Notable sideboard included [card]Peace Talks[/card], which held off some activations of Tablet. It wasn’t hard to wait out the Peace Talks, and then ambush him for everything. So long, chief.
Round 3
Zoo. Dropped game 1 to a fast start, but I brought in [card]Massacre[/card], and really, what can you do when your whole race gets Massacred? Nothing, that’s what!
Round 4
Mana Drain mirror. I came prepared with Smallpox+Blankets out of the sideboard, and he can never build up his manabase enough to gain control. Nice try, kemosabe. Have a handful of glass beads, and I’ll enjoy keeping your lands.
Round 5
Dredge. I’ve never seen anyone splashing red for [card]Gamble[/card] before. He must reeeeeaaaallly like Gambling. Anyway, Dredge doesn’t have much in the way of permanents anyway, and I make short work of him.
5-0, and in the top 8!
Round 6
Oath. I don’t play a creature until I can simply steal his Oath, and that is. Nice Oath, dude. Here’s a hint: any deck based on keeping a promise probably isn’t going to get you far.
Round 7
I don’t even know what he was playing, because he scooped as soon as he saw me. Funny, cause he had a date with some Bottle Gnomes.
Finals
It’s the Zoo guy from round 3! His deck is pretty sparse at this point, and he doesn’t put up much of a struggle. Matter of fact I think he will fight no more forever.
So that’s that, and I take home a couple boxes for my trouble. More importantly, I stuff my trade binder with a couple hundred Vintage cards that I scalped from my opponents along the way. (The one scrub from round 1 asked if I’d do trade-backs. I said yes, but as if!)
In the unlikely event that you find yourself with the opportunity to play in this sort of tournament, I highly recommend the deck. It’s good enough that I found myself banned from the tourney venue. I can only assume it was due to the overwhelming performance of the deck.