FOW is stricly superior to any counterspell, both early, mid and late game.
Do you even know what "stricly [sic]" means?

FOW is just the best counterspell ever printed, period. Don't argue that
Mana Drain is better than Force of Will, if it resolves the game is usually over in Vintage (or in Legacy because of teh match loss illegal decklist).




But anyway, nobody cares that FoW is good or how good it is. Everyone's willing to accept the card disadvantage.



I hate how people are sticking to retarded arguments like, "That assumes that he or she even would have DRAWN the Swords in the first place!"

That's a dumb argument on like 30 levels. For one, it's unknowable and irrelevant. All we know is that it decreases the average value of cards in their deck. Over enough draws, that makes up for the card disadvantage by itself, because they no longer have a 1:1 with tempo removal. They might not even have instant speed removal at all for your man lands.

For two, knowing that they don't have creature removal changes how you play and allows you to play more aggressively, even using creatures as counterbait (because they know they can't answer your goyf later, they have to counterspell it). This goes hand in hand with the average card value thing. You can probably force them into committing to 2:1 trades and that gets you card advantage.

Lastly that I'll get into, they have a huge chance of having another copy of the card in their hand, giving you right away card advantage. Against a lot of decks, that's far more probable than them "never drawing into a swords" as though that matters.


Please stick to arguments that have a legitimate basis. Also, if you care, here are the actual probabilities of drawing one and only one swords to plowshares for x draws:
10: 40%
15: 44%
20: 41%

Probabilities of drawing more than one swords:
10: 13%
15: 26%
20: 41%

Probability that they see another Swords given the hypothetical situation that one Sword had already been drawn:
10: 43%
15: 59%
20: 71%

So yeah, if they like Brainstorm twice and Ponder once, they've already seen 16-20 cards and have like a 60% chance of having another one in hand, ready to get raped by your Extirpate.