@botvinik

Thanks again for your thoughts. 4 decay is a bit much, I agree. I would prefer running a second force of vigor over the fourth copy. Its just that this deck struggles with overcoming Oko, and I expect to see 2-3 oko-decks in my small meta. I don't really see trophy as an alternative. Decay hits almost all the same targets and is, in my opinion, a far stronger maindeck card: Game one, control opponents can easily be holding dead flusterstorms or forces of negation.

When thinking about it, this is a reason to reconsider gsz. The inclusion of the card is most strongly motivated by the possibility of finding hate turn one: Reclaimer against HollowVine (to find tabernacle) and Dryad militant against Breach. But HollowVine runs forces of negation and Breach runs flusterstorms, and it could be a bad idea to make those cards useful against me.

Dryad militant is untested, but it is 1cmc and green, to make gsz with x=1 turn one a strong play against Breach. I need to play enough games against Breach to find out if I can rely on it. If dryad militant does not prove to be good enough, I will consider cutting the whole gsz plan. Canonist is a phenomenal card, but I doubt I will make room for it this time. I much prefer Tabernacle against HollowVine and Dredge and have sufficient incidental hate, plus a Karakas, against oath. How is canonist relevant versus Doomsday?

Yes, Knight is an allstar against Eldrazi, while questing beast is probably just trading in that matchup. I also don't fear Eldrazi much. (I hope to not have to eat my words later, but this deck should run circles around eldrazi. I'll side out a bunch of cards against it, so having cards to bring in is nice.) Questing beast could be good against various control decks with planeswalkers. I hope I get to test it enough to know if it's good.

Once upon a time is fantastic in this deck 🙂 It's utility grows with every narrow or situational creature and land in a deck, and this has very many of those. I play only 3 to avoid drawing more than one at a time.

@nofuture I guess in my deck the value of pyroblast is a bit greater since it's a way to remove enchantments (like turn 2 oath) or nuke basics so I get max value out of Magus.

I see 1 bolt, 1 fire in your list as the only removal for Ouphe. If your other outs are in the SB, you are likely looking at tutor chain into a possible answer (which means you're not tutoring into a combo). I agree that pyro vs an ancestral or time walk or FoW or something may not be the best (though it is strong), stopping something like turn 1/2 tinker when you just have 1 land IS huge.

On your list specifically, my only recommendation is swapping a bolt and grudge for 2 abrade. You are never whittling the opponent to 3 life with your build, so the burn to the face is irrelevant. When you face an ouphe and draw a grudge, you'll be glad it's abrade instead. The flexibility is big. You lose the ability to bolt a PW, but there are no PWs you really need to try to bolt anyway, as far as I can tell. Oko is immediately a 5 loyalty, and you don't really care about anything else as far as PWs. Maybe Karn, but he's 6 loyalty immediately as well.

You note doomsday and PO are bad matches. Pyro goes a long way in those matches too. Stopping a hand refill (PO), tinker->citadel, or Doomsday when they cast thassa's oracle when they've blown their counters stopping your combo, are really great uses for pyro.

Makes sense.

I am interested in this but I also don't understand the question.

@LieNielsen I'm certain you are an OS/MS player busting out the land tax/scroll rack/armageddon combo, lol. For Vintage...maybe. While that list doesn't seem particularly bad as a white hatebears deck, the vortex seem like the weakest card of the list.

I don't typically see bazaar in a whitebears list, and I think the combo angle of it is a bit slow for what most vintage decks do. I don't think the card is completely useless, but I do think its applications in the majority of the vintage meta is limited at best. Requiring multiple lock pieces to make this playable seems suspect.

Splashing green for something like collector ouphe/FoV just seems better to me. If it has to be monowhite, I'm thinking containment priests or null rods serve that slot better. THAT list looks like it wants to be playing turn 1 land tax/scroll rack (which is iffy in Vintage anyway), so a second land drop could be your singleton bazaar (with only land tax as combo?) or any 2nd mana to cast a real threat or heavy lock piece like null rod. You might snipe a mox and then go on a land-kill plan, but it seems unlikely to be a consistent field-wrecker to me.

I don't mind that detention vortex can fragmentize or plow and MORE...it's the many times where this will do either effect poorly or LESS than other options.

I may be wrong and this might be a 1-mana banishing light...I just don't see it in any reliable form without a total build-around. And I think there are far more busted cards to build around if you're jumping through hoops.

If PWK were one mana cheaper I think it would be a big win for doomsday but I think I will keep playing eliminates for narset, oko, and dack.

@fsecco the question was if you could find zuran orb off this and sacrifice it to the zuran orb, not if you could sacrifice this with the trigger on the stack in general.

@moorebrother1 said in MTGO Leagues and MTGO Challenges are not enough to keep Vintage alive:

I see Vintage living on with very hard work in organizing. I look at Jaco in Chicago and he is an awesome TO, and his efforts with the Lords of the Pit grew Old School. I'd like to figure out some way to do that for Vintage.

Shout outs to Jaco - he is an awesome guy all around, and honestly the Lords are a great group all around.

As a member of the Chicago vintage and OS scene, and a big pusher for paper vintage (I have my deck on MTGO, but hardly use it... it was simply something to put credit into after winning a double up at EW a few years back), let me talk about what I view as the state of paper vintage, and possible solutions.

First off, you are 100% correct about the need for Vintage to move to proxy... as far as I know though, minus EW, and the EW trials, basically every paper vintage tournament has moved to allowing proxies. This really has to be the norm, as not only do 99% of players not have access to $25,000 in cardboard, but as someone who does own all their cards... I don't feel comfortable playing with my real cards most of the time anymore. There is just to much risk playing with them. So all together, this is a given - if you are not going to support proxy use for vintage (and honestly, for OS as well) than the community will not grow.

The next is exposure, lack of experience, and people not having a desire/want to pick it up (often times because of misconceptions).

Many non-Vintage players do not understand that 99% of paper Vintage is proxy friendly, therefore right off the bat they never even consider trying the format, because it is only for "rich people" or those who have been playing since the 90s. This is compounded by the misconception that we all play Turn 0 kill decks, and that the games are therefore short and boring.

The biggest solution to these two things, is communication, pushing the format, and exposure. When I would go to my LGS for commander night, my buddies and I would often get a few vintage games in. I would regularly encourage younger players to "take a seat" and try it out... this is the same method that got ME into OS - just trying it out. More often than not, the player will try out the deck, and realize "wow... this is nothing like I thought it was going to be, and is a lot of fun". Encouraging them to proxy up a deck is the next step, as it gets them wanting to play.

The next, is the number of events. Pre-COVID, every week I could drive less than 20 minutes and have EVERY major format fire off. Commander, Standard, Modern, Legacy... but never Vintage, and other than LOTP meetups or events, rarely OS. Trust me, we tried - we had a monthly Chicago vintage event that was going rather healthy, and then just died after one bad month (when 1/2 of our normal group had to miss, because of another event). Our monthly OS event out in the burbs died for a similar reason. I would regularly talk to LGSs about hosting a Vintage event, and even the few that we got to agree... we rarely would fire off (and this is including me, my wife, and our two friends, all of whom play vintage as well). So stores have little incentive to host events when they have zero demand from most of their community.

Finally... and honestly, one of the biggest reasons IMO... most of us who play the format are just lazy when it comes to pushing the format. Let me give a perfect example.

There is a weekly Sunday vintage webcam event. This thing has been going on for almost a year now. It is plugged weekly on Facebook. It has even been dropped on a few vintage articles. Often times, we don't even have 8 people. We allow for 100% proxy. So... why? The FB group has 3,500 members, all of which who get alerted each week... and we can't even break 8 most weeks. This is pitiful, and makes posts like this honestly feel like a joke when we talk about the community as a whole.

We have nearly 20 players here in Chicago who likely could play paper vintage, 0% proxy. Most events they wouldn't show up. The same thing happened with our old IL/WI tournament - it went on for years, and died because the WI guys generally wouldn't want to drive out.

So why expect the format to grow, when we actively act against it growing?

As a friend of mine once said "there are no wrong threats, only wrong answers." Control needs to be so dense with answers (counter/removal) and have the right piece at the right time that it runs so few threats itself. They are also usually "hard to answer" threats, but those also need to be played in the exact window where you've controlled enough and still have enough control to stop a recovery AND protect your win long enough to close the game. Control has a smaller margin for error because of this. Aggro is redundant enough to try to just overrun you. Aggro/lock is the same as every lock piece is basically a tempo-time-walk for them. Combo can be dogged all game and just "oops I win" once you draw the wrong control piece or open a window when you cast your threat. Control is probably the hardest archetype to play - though it can be smotheringly dominant when played well. But as new sets come out and cheaper/stronger/tougher-to-remove options get printed, aggro is gaining an edge I feel.

You could just post that question here too. I am interested in that discussion. I use discord for old school, but Vintage is lucky enough to have its own dedicated website so might as well use it.

edit

Did I mention how lucky we are to have themanadrain? It takes a lot of resources to have something like this up and running. Thanks to Andy for catering to the nostalgia of a message board — and it’s only going to be as lively as the users that post here.

@lienielsen
I'm aware of chain of smog. I just like the idea of building a deck with a bunch of cards that are good on their own. Chain of Smog doesn't really fit that niche.

@thewhitedragon69 said in [STX] Crackle with Power:

if they have any X/2+ blocker

the BSC will be a 23/23, so blockers typically won't matter

@botvinik You mean the Brassman quote in my signature? It's from the Team Serious Deathstar chat. I thought it was hilarious.

I could see this in some kind of turbo-tinker-time vault deck. 4x transmute, 4x this, mystical, power blue, 8x FoW/FoN (maybe daze) 8x(ish) keys, tinker, time vault. You can run BSC as a plan B and Tezzeret 1.0 as a plan C - and a couple hurkyll's main to hedge vs shops as well as tutor for with StE and remove null rods. You just assemble TV/key as close to turn 1 as possible and pitch-counter to prevent game losses or crippling plays. Once you get Vault/key going, your plan B or C become the win.

I tried a turbo tinker deck some time ago, but it was before FoN/Manifold Key printings. There might be enough redundancy with "mystical 2-5" now to make a go of it.

Channel/Mirror seems fun (noted not meant as competitive), but more mana constraining and less likely to just turn 1 "oops, I miser drew my combo that needs no color requirement." Lots of games have ended with "mox, crypt, land...thanks for playing". This seems to just give that same scenario a lot more probability of happening turn 2.

So it’s not a 2/2 because morph hasn’t been established. And based on the card text, simply targeting the card isn’t enough to reveal the creature. I think 0/1 makes the most logical sense, but that is making assumptions.

Maybe go with “undefined”, and once it’s exiled by plow you can gain life equal to the exiled creatures power?

@lienielsen said in [STX] Harness Infinity:

I believe there has been a green card printed in the last few years that has a similar effect - for the point of comparison if someone can recall the name of that card, I’d love to take a look at it.

Praetor's Council regrowths your whole graveyard and gives you no maximum hand size for the rest of the game for 5GGG. doesn't cost you your current hand in the process, and lets you keep everything you get if you somehow have to pass the turn

That was an incredible read, @Brass-Man. Top notch stuff.

When it comes down to it, a lot of us mid-30s forum members have solidified our approach to message boards based on how we did it in our mid-20s. Setting aside that message boards are either disappearing or being conglomerated into Reddit subreddits, we act as though the past ten years have been the past ten years for everyone that lays eyes on TheManaDrain. It's not, and it alienates new members.

I have an anecdote from just yesterday to illustrate this. I'm keeping it generalized to prevent shaming and witch hunts.

I decided to start a new hobby over the weekend. I read articles about the hobby and visited a hobby shop to begin purchasing the hobby components. Come Monday, I find out that not only is there a Discord for my hobby, but there's a Discord for my hobby in my area! Score, this'll be great. I introduce myself, everyone is excited that I'm there. I talk about how I visited the hobby shop to get started. What transpired next was two members of the Discord recounting a time that they harassed the store's staff and how it was the funniest thing. They claimed the staff simply didn't understand that hobbyists have that sense of humor, which is a really short-sighted thing to say about someone that works at a dedicated hobby shop. Two additional members that weren't there agreed that it was the funniest thing. So funny, being a jerk to staff! Saying absolutely nothing, I left that Discord and was content that I hadn't paid too much for my former new hobby.

I'm no saint, but when you're a jerk to people you'll never know your body count. You'll also realize that people are usually very quiet about their distaste for you. You won't feel it when they quietly leave, but you'll feel it when you ask for help and are met with crickets. The bridge can't be unburned, and rebuilding it will take a long time and not resemble the original.

@blindtherapy I like the combo with this witch (also witherbloom apprentice) and chain of smog. Trying to get it to be consistent...kind of charbelcher-ish. Pulls off a lot of turn 1-2 wins with unmask leads though.

One of the successful Magic Online players is younger than my Vintage career. They’re 15 and I’ve been at this since the StarCity days. Like baseball, the old men need to mentor the new guard rather than be bitter that we can’t play at their level anymore.

@wubbtub said in So Many Insane Plays - 100:

They burned quite a bit of relevancy to put out an exceptionally long podcast that really doesn’t offer much for the people that have been playing Vintage for the past year. It was self-congratulatory at best and too far of a departure from previous episodes.

April 27th is the one year anniversary of their last contemporary podcast episode. Hopefully they’ll release the Core Set 2021, Jumpstart, Zendikar Rising, Commander Legends, Kaldheim, and Strixhaven set reviews sooner rather than later. Maybe an Eternal Weekend prediction and review episode too.

This might be a bit too harsh, but otherwise I agree. Kevin Cron excitedly talking about how often a card got reprinted gets boring after even an hour.