Whenever a new card gets spoiled, if it’s powerful enough, it tends to generate some hype. The hype then divides people into two camps: those who buy into the hype and those who try and downplay it. Typically I’m so firmly in the “downplay” camp that I sometimes miss cards that end up being format defining (i.e. calling Treasure Cruise “unplayable” in Vintage when I first saw it. Definitely missed the boat on that one). This was absolutely not the case when I saw Monastery Mentor. Young Pyromancer was already the win condition of choice in Vintage’s best deck, UR Delver, and this was a Young Pyromancer that triggered off Moxen AND got bigger. Not only that, the tokens it made got bigger too! Can we talk about how stupid that is for a second? That means that even if your opponent had a sweeper like Electrickery you could just cast an instant to save everything. It didn’t even matter if whatever you cast resolved or not, your team still survived to smash their face in. My jaw dropped. I instantly started working on decklists, being absolutely convinced that whatever deck Mentor settled in to would be the new best deck in Vintage.
All aboard!
At first things seemed to go well. Kevin Cron, a prolific Vintage player with multiple high level finishes to his name, put up several solid finishes with a UW version featuring Mystic Remora that became the starting point for a lot of the initial lists that popped up. My spin on it was to take his deck and add red for things like Dack Fayden and sideboard Ingot Chewers to help combat decks based around Mishra’s Workshop. I took it to a local event in Los Angeles, and although I did not prize I still felt confident in the deck. Then I started playing various Mentor decks against Vintage Master Rich Shay to help him test for the Vintage Super League, or VSL for short, and kept losing. It didn’t matter what I tried: UW, UWR, Esper, Bant, even Four-Color without Red, Rich kept destroying me with his trusty Delver deck. Despite around a month of working on lists, Rich and I couldn’t find a Mentor list that actually won enough games for him to feel comfortable playing it in the second leg of the VSL. The results in the League confirmed our testing, as Mentor based decks went 1-8 in matches over a three week span in the hands of three very competent pilots. Its only win came against a Gifts Ungiven control deck, something Rich and I found to be even worse than Mentor decks in our practice games. At this point the confidence I had in the deck was completely gone. I started to think that maybe I was wrong about Monastery Mentor. Maybe, just maybe, Mentor was akin to a certain Rebel spaceship heading towards Sector 47.
It was time to take a step back and evaluate everything I had learned. Monastery Mentor was clearly a powerful card, that much was certain. The speed at which it closed out games was absurd, and even if it died the tokens it made often were enough to get their controller a win. In order to maximize its effectiveness, I found that any deck based around Monastery Mentor had to have three specific points. All three points are equally important, so for a long time their order was arbitrary when I was talking about them with my friends and teammates. I’m cleaning them up now though and ordering them in a way such that they flow into one another. They are as follows:
1) Be Able to Find/Cast Monastery Mentor Relatively Early in the Game
Historically, there have been decks whose dynamic changes by having a particular card in play. Think Faeries in Standard circa 2008 with Bitterblossom or Miracles with Sensei’s Divining Top. The thing about those decks is that they were/are good even without their signature card in play. That absolutely isn’t the case with the Mentor decks as they stand now. Without Mentor, the decks are basically just Big Blue decks but with white for Monastery Mentor instead of black for Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Yawgmoth’s Will. Considering that Big Blue decks have realistically been unplayable since 2011, so much so that my team, Team Degen, has taken to calling them “Blue BS”, it’s no surprise that the rest of the deck doesn’t hold up to the Vintage Landscape of 2015. With Mentor in play, though, it’s an entirely different ballgame, so we need to make sure that we have one early and often. I would honestly play six if I could.
2) Card Advantage, Not Just Cantrips
This was something I had come to terms with very early on, but until recently something I had trouble articulating. This changed when my teammate Kevin Long and I were talking about our issues we had while playing the deck. Paraphrasing what he said, the reason you need actual card advantage spells is that because of Point #1 you burn all of your cantrips trying to find your Mentor, and by the time you do find it you’re out of gas. This isn’t always the case, mind you, but it is enough of the time that you actually need a good number of spells that put more than one card in your hand.
3) Fast Mana
Every Mentor deck I’ve personally played is extremely mana hungry. In fact, I would say these are the most mana hungry decks I’ve ever played. That says a lot considering some of the decks I’ve innovated and/or invented over the years (Angel City Vault being a prime example). This comes from wanting to be able to both chain draw spells together and cast Mentor relatively early. Thankfully the fast mana spells you play trigger Mentor, so even if you draw them late, it isn’t the end of the world.
So now that we have those three points, let’s examine each possible build by color:
UW: This was the starting point for the archetype, but the problem with it is that there aren’t really any tutors in this color pair that can find Mentor. This means the deck fails Point #1. You could mitigate this by maxing out on Preordain and Dig Through Time, but by then you’re just playing a worse Delver deck. It also fails somewhat on Point #2 since the deck can’t max out on Gush due to the strain placed on how much mana you have access to (aka Point #3) or Dig Through Time because you can’t fill the graveyard that quickly.
UWR: Basically faces the same issues as UW, but Dack Fayden makes it easier to cast your Delve spells. There have been builds with this color pairing that actually do resemble more of a Delver deck as compared to a Big Blue deck, but my playtesting with Rich has shown that those builds don’t really maximize Mentor’s raw power and end up just being worse than Delver.
Bant: For a while I actually thought this may have been the best home for Mentor. Green gave you access to Fastbond which allowed you to play the maximum number of Gushes to address Point #2. It also addressed Point #1 by going a little deep and playing Eladamri’s Call. Ultimately, though, the shortcoming of the deck was its inability to reliably find Fastbond to get the Gush engine online. Enlightened Tutor is terrible, so the only real way to solve this would be to max out on Dig Through Time. This leads to having to play a ton of cantrips which then brings us back to “you’re playing a worse Delver deck.” This was promising enough that I don’t want to completely discard it, but for now I’m setting it aside.
Four Colors without Red: On paper this had everything I wanted: blue as the core, white for Mentor, green for Fastbond, and black for Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, and Yawgmoth’s Will. In practice, the mana was terrible and the deck functioned as basically a worse version of Tropical Storm. The only good thing about this deck was that it reminded me how fun Tropical Storm was, and I ended up playing that for a little while to some success on Magic Online. If you’re interested in that list please let me know in the comments so I can talk about it in a future post.
Esper: The idea here was that adding black would solve Point #1 by allowing you to play tutors, and in practice it ended up helping out a lot in that regard. The issue was that there still was not a good answer to Point #2. Even with the tutors it still faced the same issues as the UW and UWR versions when it came to effectively generating card advantage. So why did I put this last if it still has these issues, you may ask? The reason is because I believe I may have found the answer. While testing for Pro Tour Fate Reforged with Team TCGPlayer, I came up with a Mardu Mentor deck by porting the three points from Vintage to Modern. In order to fill Point #2, I used Night’s Whisper as a cheap card advantage engine. Although the deck ended up on the cutting room floor, it occurred to me relatively recently that there’s no reason why I couldn’t port Night’s Whisper from Modern back to Vintage. The list is still very rough and needs more testing, but here is an initial draft:
Whispering Mentor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Demonic Tutor
3 Dig Through Time
2 Flusterstorm
4 Force of Will
1 Hurkyl’s Recall
3 Mental Misstep
4 Night’s Whisper
1 Ponder
4 Preordain
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Flooded Strand
1 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
3 Polluted Delta
3 Tundra
3 Underground Sea
-Side-
3 Containment Priest
1 Notion Thief
1 Disenchant
1 Flusterstorm
1 Mindbreak Trap
1 Supreme Verdict
1 Swords to Plowshares
3 Engineered Explosives
2 Grafdigger’s Cage
1 Plains
In addition to Night’s Whisper, this list features a new card from Dragons of Tarkir. Back when I was talking about Point #1 I mentioned how I would play six Monastery Mentors in this style of deck. Well, Myth Realized is playing the role of Mentors number five and six. While it can’t go as wide as Mentor can, it can still become an extremely large threat in short order. Not only that, it’s extremely effective against both Oath of Druids decks and Mishra’s Workshop decks if you can drop it early. I would not be surprised to see the number on this card increase from two to three as I test this deck more.
I don’t know what exactly the best shell for Monastery Mentor is. I do know that a shell is out there, and I’m going to do my best to find it. I hope you are all with me when I do. Until next time!
Danny Batterman
Batterskull's Brews 
I like this article. It kind of addresses some of the issues I’ve had with my Mentor deck.
I’ve been playing a Jeskai Mentor list on Magic Online, and I’ve had a little success with it, but not as much as I’d like.
I ran four mentors, because I had flat-out lost matches due to not seeing a Mentor when I needed one.
I also played a draw-spell package that was very close to what UR Delver plays. My counterspell suite was maximized. I even followed some of the deck building ideas I got from listening to the SMIP podcast about Gitaxian Probe.
Still, there was a major consistency issue at times. So much so, that I’m shelving the deck for a little while and learning to play Martello Shops.
One card that I ran in my deck, that worked well for me, is Mana Drain. I know it seems odd perhaps, but it allowed me to cast a Mentor earlier, or Dig/Cruise faster, with the added bonus of keeping my density of counter-magic very high.
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Mana Drain doesn’t seem that odd for a lot of the Mentor shells that exist right now because most of them are Big Blue decks, That’s part of while I really dislike a lot of the builds out there right now, because I REALLY dislike Big Blue.
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