Value Vintage is a 60-card constructed format. It follows the exact same banned and restricted list as Vintage. One difference:

Your entire deck must cost $30 or less.

Speaking to Everett, who was there at the inception of Value Vintage, I asked, why? Why $30? What’s the goal here?

The format has humble beginnings. A box of Eternal Masters up for grabs. But what format?

The host wanted a format anyone could play. Value Vintage was born. Players used the store’s bulk boxes to build decks. A bulk box could have anything, so the Vintage ban list made sense. In its original form, the budget was $25. This was an arbitrary number. It just felt right. 2019 saw the budget limit increase to $30, inflation is tough everywhere.

Since its inception, Value Vintage has grown. The format is most popular in the USA. Back in March, there was a 1K at SCG CON Charlotte with over 50 players.

When I first saw this ruleset, I was skeptical.

How close is this to Vintage?

What can I actually do with $30 in this setting?

What do I do without Force of Will?

All these questions lead me to the Value Vintage Discord. I had one week to figure out the format and answer these questions.

The server maintains a tournament report and deck list results section. These were my first target. I wanted to get a grip on the format. Deck list were an eclectic mix. Broadly speaking, there were three kinds:

• Porting a deck from another format
• Back in my day, I was a meta deck
• Built for Value Vintage

Within these, the first camp Pauper decks were well represented. Many Pauper archetypes are close to a $30 budget in the first place. Renditions of Kor Skyfisher bounce decks, or High Tide can be found here. Powerful, but given extra oomph by an expanded card pool. I was particularly impressed with how well Boros Energy from Modern paired with the Pauper Skyfisher decks.

In the ‘back in my day’ camp I could see Infect, Hogaak, 8 Rack. All bolstered by nostalgic players with access to new cards. This format lets us live the dream of casting Hymn to Tourach alongside The Rack!

Then we had decks built for Value Vintage. This is where some beautiful ideas came to fruition. Taking full advantage of the card pool, and the meta. Among these decks I found Channel Mirror. This deck uses Channel and Lich’s Mirror for a combo kill.

The deck is built with exactly one card with mana value two or less: Channel.

It then uses Cascade spells, similar to Living End decks, to ‘tutor’ for Channel.

With mana from Channel, we cast Lich’s Mirror. We pay our entire life total to generate tons of mana. Lich’s Mirror resets our life total and draws us a fresh hand. We generate even more mana and loop through our deck with various tutors. Eventually, a ‘mana sink’ will get us a kill. Boommobile is particularly powerful as it can be tutored with Tinker!

All this set me up with the daunting task of building a deck to take on this format. The decks are powerful, and all over the place. It was a Wild West format.

Moving into the deck building, I initially had my eyes on Death’s Shadow. I could borrow the blue-black tempo shell from Modern/Legacy, and replace the expensive creatures with a more affordable, efficient beater. Unfortunately, my budget began to get squeezed between the Dismembers, Shock Lands, and Cantrips.

I liked the blue tempo side of things. Dropping black I ended up building Delver. In the interest of avoiding the classic ‘look guys my spice new deck is just Delver’ I pivoted again. I wanted to do something “unfair” that could interact with other unfair strategies. This brought me to AFFINITY.

The creatures ran the full gamut of mana value. Patchwork Automaton is hard to answer thanks to ward. Going up the curve Emry, Lurker of the Loch is our source of card advantage. She is available early as turn one thanks to Baubles and artifact lands!

Memory Guardian, Kappa Cannoneer, and Thought Monitor round out the high mana value spells. They dodge Fatal Push thanks to their high mana value, and can come down early on an aggressive hand.

Hangarback Walker rounds out the creature suite. This felt like a nice inclusion for long games and plays nice with Emry if it dies.

Sphinx of the Steel Wind is one of two silver bullets in the 75. Sphinx is a Tinker target that can singlehandedly stabilize against aggressive decks. Several games in the tournament were stolen by a last-chance Tinker!

Magister Sphinx was in the sideboard to combat the Martyr of Sands Proc life gain decks. There were several top 8 decks before this tournament. In the end, I did not get paired against the deck. Sorry Magister, maybe next time.

Instants and sorceries are SLM. Four Metallic Rebuke and Thoughtcast. Interaction, and card draw. I found Rebuke a bit slow in some matches. I valued that it could counter any spell. However, Spell Pierce might have been better, especially against the various combo decks. Tinker is our last sorcery. Tinker can tutor the aforementioned Sphinxes, beyond that we have some great cheap spells we can tutor too. We’ll get to these in the artifact section.

All our artifacts are one mana or less. This gets affinity off the ground quickly. Sol Ring comes from Vintage to accelerate our game plan. A glorified budget Mox.

Chromatic Star, Aether Spellbomb, and Mishra’s Bauble offer card draw and can be re-cast with Emry. On one occasion, amassing Chromatic Stars with Emry allowed me to hard cast a Sphinx of the Steel Wind, and a Leyline of Sanctity post sideboard.

Lavaspur Boots and Soul-Guide Lantern round out the deck. While not as exciting as Sphinx of the Steel Wind, the Boots, and Lantern were frequent Tinker targets.

The lands are fairly unremarkable.

Seat of the Synod x 4 and Basic Island x 13

In earlier drafts, I considered Darksteel Citadel and Mistvault Bridge to bolster affinity. Additionally, these pair great with Kenku Artificer. In the end, it felt too cute for the current direction of the deck.

I felt mostly content for “fair” matchups. I had a fair game plan with my creatures to stave off aggro, and haymakers via Sol Ring and Tinker if I needed to speed up. My main fear was combo.

The combo decks leveraged mana outlets that target the opponent. Leyline of Sanctity was a great answer, especially for those all-in strategies. This was a mixed bag, as the established combo decks were very aware of Leyline and had contingency plans.

Negate and Test of Talents offered some additional counterplay. Test of Talents in particular was useful versus High Tide as I could snipe the High Tide out of their deck. Similar to Surgical Extraction in some respects.

With that said, I feel Negate was a mistake. I would have rather had another good Tinker target/Stax piece. I struggled to tread water against High Tide. A couple Damping Spheres could have saved me, and they can be fetched off of Tinker too!

Rounding things out we have two Soul-Guide Lanterns and one Magister Sphinx. Reanimator exists in every format in one way or another. Value Vintage has an incredibly potent Living End deck borrowed straight from Modern. Soul-Guide Lantern in the main board and side was a blessing.

Value Vintage is distinct from Vintage. The name sells what it is trying to do very well. It is a one-to-one Vintage ban list, with the $30 value restriction. With that said, the gameplay feels incredibly different.

My time with the format felt closer to Legacy or Modern pace. True Vintage has turn one winning potential thanks to the Power Nine. This slowness acts as a balancing factor. Value Vintage does not have turn-one win potential, therefore free interaction is less important. My initial fear of missing Force of Will were quelled. The pace made Spell Pierce and Daze sufficient.

To give a better understanding of the format, let’s follow my matches. 38 participants set me up for six rounds of Swiss, then a cut to top 8.

We started with a familiar face. My first opponent, Andrea Rose, brought a Pauper classic.

Her goal was to cast a Skirk Prospector and First Day of Class.

Then, cast Putrid Goblin, and sacrifice it to Prospector. Putrid Goblin returns to play with a -1/-1 counter due to persist. First Day of Class puts a +1/+1 counter on it, negating the -1/-1. This nets one mana. Sacrifice the Putrid Goblin again and again for infinite mana.

After that, a mana outlet such as Makeshift Munitions or Flamewave Invoker can secure the kill.

This match is about patience. Rose‘s deck has some great redundancy. Goblin Matron can tutor for Invoker, Putrid Goblin, and Skirk Prospector.

In a similar vein, Unearth can reanimate any three-cost creature. In this case, every single creature is a valid target. Interaction requires caution. We needed to counter the right spells at the right time. Countering First Day of Class felt most effective as they lacked meaningful ways to recur a spell.

This match went 2-1 in my favor. Rose piloted the deck excellently, however, the deck did not have any differences from the Pauper version. It could have been greatly improved thanks to the expanded card pool.

The second round against restokiki piqued my interest. Lurrus of the Dream-Den was revealed. My Vintage brain jumped to control. Thankfully, open deck list revealed this was a different beast. The opponent brought a beautiful marriage of Boros Synthesizer from Pauper, and Modern’s Boros Energy.

The deck was a wonderful mix of both. Amped Raptor could cast every single spell in the deck. Glint Hawk could make a game go long by leveraging powerful enter-the-battlefield effects again and again.

Will Pendlay brought a Modern classic. Given the budget restriction, Pendlay‘s version was more glass cannon due to Force of Negation and Subltety‘s absence.

The goal was similar to the Channel Mirror deck previously. Cast a cascade spell to unlock a key card. The caveat with Living End is it relies on the graveyard. This made the Soul-Guide Lanterns an easy option to aggressively mulligan for.

While powerful, I felt this deck lost much of what made the Modern deck so powerful. It is an all-in combo with little to no interaction. I felt content with sitting opposite with a Soul-Guide Lantern Emry looping it practically sealed the deal.

One interaction that may have cost my opponent the game was stacking their evoke triggers.

At one point they cast Ingot Chewer targeting a Soul-Guide Lantern. They resolved their triggers such that the Chewer went to the graveyard first. This means I could crack Lantern, exiling the Chewer.

Later in the game, they successfully resolved a Living End. It would have been larger if they had stacked the trigger correctly. I am unsure if it cost them the game entirely, but these little things come up, especially on MTGO.

Sullivan Brophy brought Rakdos Lurrus. This felt like a midrange monster. The deck Inquisition of Kozilek and Hymn to Tourach for early disruption.

Amped Raptor, Bloodtithe Harvester, and Marionette Apprentice made for a tricky set of creatures to play around. Brophy decided to forgo Sheoldred, the Apocalypse for this low to the ground deck with amazing interaction.

My record scared me into the top 8. I found myself against earterms123 on High Tide. This was a blast from the past, and a sign of things to come. High Tide was banned from Pauper years ago. Little did we all know High Tide was about to be unbanned three days later.

High Tide aims to cast its namesake. Cast something that untaps lands, such as Frantic Search or Turnabout, and dig for a win. It plays similar to storm decks. Win conditions include Mind’s Desire, and Drown in Dreams. Regardless, it is a big mana deck with plenty of powerful interaction.

My opponent played the deck incredibly well. Surgical precision in every phase. In sideboard games I tried to dodge their targeted effects with Leylines and counterspells, however, their own interaction was enough to break through.  A 0 – 2 defeat to cap off my tournament.

The top eight from first to eighth place included:

• Skrocious – Mono Blue Spirits
• DredgeLord – Orzhov Initiative
• earterms123 – High Tide
• Brian Haidle – Channel Mirror
• napalm588 – Azorius Bane
• alexanderclamilton – High Tide
• DerKetzer59 – Hypergenesis
• Bengee – Affinity

The top 8 features a variety of decks. Some we discussed before include the various combos, and Azorius Bane control deck.

Hypergenesis is a riff on the Living End deck we discussed previously, but opting for Hypergenesis as the win condition.

Orzhov Initiative intrigues me. We have seen the power of Initiative in Legacy/Vintage. In this environment, it is just as backbreaking. The various discard effects such as Hymn to Tourach and Elite Spellbinder also make the deck a difficult match.

Finally, Skrocious’ Spirits deck borrows heavily from the Pioneer deck. Plenty of efficient interaction, card advantage, and good spells. The relatively low cost of the deck also allowed them to play some amazing Vintage staples such as Daze, Mental Misstep, and Gitaxian Probe.

These potent pieces would make the cut in most decks, if not for the price tag. Congratulations on the win! The grand final made for some amazing games.