Contract from Below might be a better comp than Wheel of Fortune, since the effect is one-sided.

@fsecco I think you mean, “if you are on the play and you fetch, your opponent can guarantee you will lose the bid”.

Opponent might not want to exercise that guarantee because he does not want to forfeit the ability to activate fetchlands or to cast FoW/Misstep/etc. after the wheel.

Some scattered thoughts...

Maybe both Golos and a companion can be used, in order to have multiple mana sink options? Golos might want to pull in black mana sources (black lands, Deathrite Shaman), which then opens the door to tutors, which in turn could bring more consistency to a highlander deck. Not to mention the Coalition Victory dream...

Alternatively, if going down the Yorian route, perhaps the Risen Reef/Young Pyromancer/Chandra, Acolyte of Flame package could make sense. After all, both Omnath and Yorian’s ETB have some synergy with Risen Reef. Your RUG Elementals deck thread noted that the inability to run Force of Vigor due to lack of green cards hurt the deck; maybe the addition of Omnath and Sylvan Library can help reach the required critical mass of green cards. Also, I think the cost of having a card like Blightsteel in your deck diminishes the larger your deck size, as the probability of drawing it decreases, so Yorian might justify bringing in a Tinker package...which might warrant bringing in Golos as a potential Tinker target.

Volrathxp appears to have tried a Yorian Elementals deck, using an inferior Omnath.

Another option is a cheaper version that is symmetric. You name a card and exile from opponent’s deck/hand/etc. Then opponent names a card and exiles from your deck/hand/etc.

I think another way to frame @chubbyrain1 's point of view is as this:

The publishing of this card is approximately equivalent to adding the following card errata on Alhammaret's Archive:

• This card's mana cost is reduced by (3) and increased by (UU).
• This card can now be Pyroblast'ed.

How many cards in Magic, if given the above errata modification, would move the card from vintage-unplayable territory to vintage-playable territory? Is there reason to believe that Alhammaret's Archive is one of those cards?

There is another consideration worth bringing up.

In the past, players have complained that vintage had become a format where there are no meaningful decisions to be made after the sideboarding and mulligan phases of the game.

From what I've seen, it appears that Lurrus leads to increased interactivity, and leads to the better player winning more often.

For instance, in this video, Andrea Mengucci says that he achieved an overall record of 33-3 with a Lurrus deck, facing a lot of other Lurrus, and that the games are very "grindy", with many games finishing due to a player running out of time due to the sheer weight of so many difficult decision points. Lsv tweets here that he went 8-1 in a challenge with the same deck, mostly facing Lurrus.

One could reasonably hold the opinion that the pro of increased interactivity/gameplay-skill outweighs the con of decreased deck diversity. Perhaps future companion printings can increase diversity and we can get the best of both worlds.

@ten-ten I don’t think this is necessarily so. Imagine hatebears that strongly counter Lurrus are printed, but come with deck building restrictions like no blue cards, or no artifacts, or no spells with odd CMC, or color with maximum devotion is red. You could have a wide palette of available hatebears, perhaps one against every major archetype of the format in your sideboard, but doing so might require thinking outside the box of existing archetypes. This could lead to format diversity.

New companions can be printed to mitigate Lurrus domination without introducing power creep. To see this, imagine they print a companion that is a Relic of Progenitus or Nihil Spellbomb on a beating stick. Now running Lurrus and all those baubles (instead of Mentor or Tinker) might become a bit of a glass cannon gambit.

Or the companion could be a bear with an ETB “gain control of target legendary permanent” effect, or a “moon” bear with a static effect like “all legendary permanents are Mountains”.

With enough hatebear companions, I could envision an interesting meta where a highly defensive deck with multiple companions in the sideboard (anti-blue companion, anti-graveyard companion, anti-workshops companion) becomes viable. This could open up the deck building design space, and increase the pool of vintage viable cards (just like Lurrus brought back previously unused cards like baubles and Dead Weight).

It sounds like in your simulation you changed the card Force of Vigor to only have 1 target instead of 2. It is no wonder then that it performed worse than alternatives.

What if two people sit down to play Vintage, and rather than bringing an already constructed set of 60+15, they take turns constructing their decks on the spot, one card at a time? This would look like, for example:

Alice: "I pick Mishra's Workshop"
Bob: "I pick Black Lotus"
Alice: "I pick Black Lotus"
Bob: "I pick Ancestral Recall"
Alice: "I pick a second Mishra's Workshop"
...

After this construction they would engage in a standard best-of-3 match. Would this make for an interesting format?

In the above example, Bob gets to optimize for his opponent by for example not including Mental Misstep.

This can be extended to, say, 4 players, followed by a round-robin set of matches between them, although you'd probably want simultaneous card selections rather than round-robin to save time. Maybe card selections can be made in groups of 4 cards at a time or something.

What would the "meta" be in this format?