Ah yes, Avatar Week. Over the course of this week you will have read about almost every avatar ever printed. Onslaught’s cycle of “ones” (Heedless One and the rest), Prophecy’s Avatars of Woe, Might, and all the rest, and the shiny new avatar, Scion of the Ur-Dragon. So to break up the norm a little, I’m going to be talking about a different type of avatar. Today’s variant is one that I’m sure many of you are at least fairly familiar with: Vanguard.

Vanguard is an interesting format with a fairly interesting history. It was released, died, then resurrected. Today we talk about learning from the past, and using these avatars in the future.

The History

In 1997, Wizards of the Coast started awarding Vanguard avatars as Arena League prizes. For those of you who don’t know what arena league is, think FNM, but poorly organized. The initial run had eight cards. Through ’98, two more sets were released. Because these were only given as prizes and promotional cards, the widespread appeal of Vanguard was quite limited. Without decent access to the cards, most players simply ignored the format. Paper Vanguard quickly died.

But then Magic Online appeared. With it came the return of Vanguard. Vanguard is now the most commonly played variant of Magic on MTGO. Why the success? One word: Availability. Before, cards were only given to Arena League winners. Today, you get five avatars just for signing up to Magic Online. There are currently 38 Vanguard avatars online. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to all of them, but they are there.

The online system for earning avatars is based on participation and winning. When a new set gets released on MTGO (usually about 3 weeks to a month after the paper release), two brand new avatars are released with it. One of those avatars is given to everyone who plays in the “release events” that take place the week the set goes on sale. These events are both leagues and tournaments. No matter how good or bad you do, you get the participation avatar. The other avatar gets awarded to the most successful players. Going 5-0 in a release league or making top 8 of a premier event tournament will get you the second avatar.

Bringing it back to life

So the format is popular online, big deal. What if I don’t play online? Bringing Vanguard to the online world did more than just give digital players something to ogle over. It also made Vanguard a visible format to all other casual players as well. Now, all the avatar abilities are listed online, making it easier for players at home to proxy up the avatars and play. Also, online players are bringing the format with them when they got together with live friends, resurrecting Vanguard as a casual format.

The Basics

In a game of Vanguard Magic, each player is represented by the avatar of the character of their choice. These characters are usually the main characters from a set’s story line. When Vanguard was first introduced, the avatars were characters like Squee, Karn, and Sisay. Most recently, Dissension gave us a Momir Vig avatar and Lyzolda, the Blood Witch.

Vanguard avatars have three special qualities. First, they have an effect on your hand size. Second, they have an effect on your starting life total. Third, they have an effect on the game. Some effects are activated abilites. Hell’s Caretaker, for example, lets you pay three colorless mana and sacrifice a creature to return a creature from your graveyard to play (at instant speed). This is a pretty insane effect. Unfortunately you start at 5 cards in hand and 18 life.

Other avatars have triggered abilities. The Flametounge Kavu avatar says “Whenever a non-token creature comes into play under your control, it deals a random amount of damage between 0 and 4 to target creature.” You get seven cards, but you have to start at 14 life. Still others have static, enchantment-like effects. The Etched Oracle avatar is a Fist of Suns that you start with in play and it can’t be killed. Note that although it is impossible to kill an avatar, activated or triggered abilities can still be targeted by Reroute, Voidslime, etc.

Other than effects generated by the avatar, normal Magic rules apply.

Playing Vanguard at Home

Like I said above, this is primarily an online format. Whoopde do. But as I also said above, the visibility factor that the online game has given to vanguard has made it possible to be played at home. You don’t need the fancy vanguard cards to play the game. All you need is a few index cards and a pen. It may not be as pretty without the art, but it still works well.

While you can just pick up the deck that you take to your group every week and randomly throw in an avatar, making a deck around your avatar is much more fun. For the most part, the abilities on the avatars allow this. For example, take this deck that uses the Nekrataal avatar (creature spells cost less to play.)

First, yes, you are reading that right, 16 lands. This is for two reasons. First, you don’t want to draw any more than four lands. Every creature in this deck can be played without a land on the board thanks to the avatar. Also, the low land count is to ensure that you don’t stall out when you get your combo going. For those of you that missed it, the combo revolves around Glimpse of Nature. When you play a creature spell (for free), you get to draw a card. This lets you cycle through your deck, meaning you can just keep playing creatures. Early in the game, this nets you an army of guys. Late in the game, it can set up a lethal Tendrils.

The only weakness for this deck is the potential to stall out if Glimpse doesn’t show up. Even if it doesn’t, however, dropping your hand on turn one still means potentially seven guys for an opponent to deal with before he even has a chance to play a spell. Thanks to Affinity decks, we all know how good dropping your hand on turn one is.

Part of the fun of Vanguard is using the abilities in different and sometimes unusual ways. I mean, most of you come to MDV to see decks that do stuff in different and unusual ways. When the Seshiro avatar came out from Champions of Kamigawa (At the beginning of the game, choose a creature type. Creatures you control, creature spells you control on the stack, and creature cards you own that aren't in play or on the stack have the chosen type in addition to their other types.), everyone and their brother played it with Coat of Arms. I saw so many decks that turned everything into a goblin, played Coat of Arms and stuff like Goblin Matron to get very large red guys into their hand.

But the other day I saw a really cool new spin on Seshiro. Unfortunately I was involved in the game where I saw it. The game lasted about six turns. He chose Spirit to be his creature type. So I was expecting Soul of Magmas and Earthshakers or Thief of Hopes. But I didn’t get those. He led off with a Nezumi Bone-Reader. I really think that which creature it was is irrelevant. It was a blank 1/1 for :1:. Because next turn saw Fists of Ironwood on the 1/1, giving him three spirits. Over the next few turns he played another Fists on a Bramble Elemental. Eventually, he played Devouring Greed for about 30.

The deck was cool because A. it didn’t run Coat of Arms, and B. it was an interesting spin on the idea. Think about how many cards care about creature type. Now remove Legions and Scourge from the list, and see how it narrows. The great part of Vanguard is the ability to take an avatar and figure out how to abuse its ability. It may be fairly obvious (like playing Krark’s Thumb with the Effret, which has you flip a coin every turn), or it may be more creative, like using Glimpse of Nature in a deck with nothing but black creatures.

Branching Out

Because all other normal Magic rules apply, Vanguard can be added to just about every format. At this year’s invitational, avatar was added as a twist to the auction format. Normally, the players bid on normal constructed decks, with bids starting at 8 cards/25 life. With Vanguard cards, however, the base of 8/25 was modified by the Vanguard cards. Some decks were built with the abilities specifically in mind. Take Mike Flores’s Hell’s Caretaker Avatar deck, which he both designed and played:

Flores’s deck revolves around Cathodion and its leaving play ability. Notice that it generates three mana when it leaves play. He uses this in combination with Genesis Chamber. Cathodion gives him a free three mana, Chamber gives him extra guys to discard, meaning he can get any creature in his graveyard back. If there are no other creatures in his graveyard, Cathodion just has a bad regeneration ability. But when there is a Hierarch in your graveyard, that interaction gets a lot better.

On the other hand, that format also featured a deck that pretty much ignored its avatar ability. This one is with Eight-and-a-half Tails (1: Target permanent you control gains protection from a random color it doesn’t have protection from until end of turn). It was designed by Stephen Menendian, and played by Oliver Ruel.

The basics of this deck are actually fairly simple. It explodes out of the gate with Chrome Moxes into Rituals and Inner Fires and just about every other non-green mana generating card you can think of. With a huge amount of mana floating, Ruel could cast one of his Wishes for Mind's Desire for about 10 or 11, which more often than not flip up the lethal Tendrils of Agony. Ruel never activated his avatar’s ability during any of the three matches he played with this deck.

For the record, Ruel went 2-1, Flores went 0-3.

The other way the invitational has used Vanguard is with sealed deck. The players were given a standard sealed set-up, one Champions of Kamigawa tournament pack and two Betrayers boosters (Saviors wasn’t out yet). After the players built their decks, they chose a Vanguard avatar to play with. Most (well, half, 8 of the 16) went with the Birds of Paradise avatar (your lands can tap for any color) and slapped all the good cards from their pool together. But BoP proved that it wasn’t the correct choice to play, as no one with that avatar managed a winning record over the three rounds of sealed Vanguard play. The correct avatars to play seemed to be either Akroma (whenever a creature comes into play, it randomly gets two of Akroma’s abilities) or Flametongue Kavu (whenever a creature comes into play, it randomly deals 0 to 4 damage to target creature). Because Limited formats are so creature heavy, those abilities were relevant just about every turn.

While the avatars spawn decks built specifically for them, only one has spawned its own format. Momir Vig has been turned into Momir Basic. Unfortunately, this is pretty much an online-only format. I had planned on showing you how to play it with paper cards, but them something unfortunate happened: Wizard’s changed Gatherer. So now I don’t know how to play it with paper anymore. I’m going to reserve talking about it here, however, because if I ever do find a way to play it with paper, you’ll see a TGPP article about it.

Well, that’s about it for what I can tell you. I’ve told you about most of the ways that vanguard and the avatars have already been used. Now it’s up to you. As I’ve said before, Magic is a game of creativity. So, use that creativity. I want you guys to come up with some new ideas for vanguard. Let me know in the forums if you come up with some really cool ideas.

Join me next time, as we figure out what to do when you are all alone. Until then, have fun with avvies. And be sure to join the Avatar week tournament going on this Saturday. There is still time to enter.

~Nate Lisko (aka lionden_56)~

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

Articles Spotlights from 2006
The Games People Play - Tactical Magic.
If I worked at R&D
The Beginner’s Guide to Rogue
Druid Week Primer
Opting In: Ravnica
MDV Idol: Finale!
Avatar Week Primer
Delusions of Mediocrity: Getting Stuffy in Here.
Raiding Ravnica: Guildmages and You!
Lands-More than Mana: Part One