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:
Gamblin Drains
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It’s a typical Mana Drain control shell, but with an Ante package added in. The suite of Fiends and Bronze Tablet combine with Dance of Many (animating Tablet via March of the Machines) to break the symmetry, allowing you to exchange a token copy instead of the original. Timetwister 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. Land Tax presented a bit of a problem, until I could steal it with Tablet and Tax the living shit out of him. Notable sideboard included Peace Talks, 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 Massacre, 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 Gamble 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.