Hi and welcome to the Daily with Josh Silvestri *waves*. It’s great to see you all here today. For Monday, I’d like to speak on one of my favorite Constructed formats, Vintage. The simple fact is I love Vintage because of the community surrounding it. This is despite the fact that I live on the West Coast and am unable to attend any of the premier events of the format. It still is a real joy to interact with most of the Vintage players online. Not only are many of them nice guys in general, they tend to be pretty intelligent in many fields of discussion. Judging what skills we have to help each other with by the posts on The Mana Drain, it’s quite a varied bunch with far more varied college degrees than I’m used to seeing.
There are a lot of good people around in the Vintage community (when they aren’t busy playing WoW anyway), to interact with and that’s my favorite part of Vintage. Lots of love guys.
As for the Vintage environment itself: I love how sometimes you don’t need to be more broken than the next guy to win. I really like how if you attack the broken cards in Vintage – Moxen, Lotus and Blue draw – with cheap answers like Null Rod, Red Elemental Blast and Tormod’s Crypt, you can win. It’s great that combo, despite having amazing power in this format, is kept in line by Chalice of the Void, inconsistency, and Force of Will. My favorite part has to be the long battles you see between Vintage decks sometimes. Before I started seriously playing the format, I thought it was a joke that any format with this many broken cards would take more than ten minutes per game.
What I hate about Vintage has been said more times than I can remember, but it doesn’t make it any less true. I absolutely hate the fact that you can be blown out two straight games and you can’t do a damned thing about it. If you can see the Chicago coverage of Roland Chang vs. Brad Granberry in the quarterfinals, you’ll see exactly what I mean. Regardless of however favored you are or what solid hand you drew, you can get wrecked by virtue of just accepting the game to begin with. People sometimes give the cop-out excuse of other formats being like that too sometimes. When you have a solid 50/50 or 60/40 match and a good hand, but you die because your opponent went first, it still sucks. The same thing happens occasionally when you have a good hand without Force of Will. First turn Land, Mox, Mox -> Tinker? Wow, sucks to be you.
I play every Constructed format and I can safely say that Vintage suffers from this the most. Now, don;t get me wrong – other formats may share the same type of “God-hand syndrome” where you can win a game without any realistic chance of losing. The key difference between everywhere else and Vintage, is that it’s likely to see that same type of great opening hand twice in a row. You end up getting blown out and the feeling you gain from it is one of the most unsatisfying you can have at the end of a match.
Now, I’m not advocating restricting anything, but sometimes I wish there was a better way to curb these starts. People complain about Chalice of the Void and how it’s “random” in how it gives one player a huge edge if they win the die roll and can play it. I agree in a sense, but I accept it because Chalice gives decks like Fish the ability to succeed. By giving some deck strategies like Fish and Mishra’s Workshop decks a restriction worthy card, it helps to offset these broken types of starts. Hosers need to be increasingly stronger to keep up with decks power creep and Chalice is a good example of that.
Vintage is just one of those formats where you can get constantly get on streaks of getting good hands and blowing out opponents. I love playing in a format where I can do broken things. I just hate it when it’s more like goldfishing than an actual game. It’s a fact of life here, but that doesn’t mean I have to always like it. On that note, you now have my reason for not being pissed off when Trinisphere left us. In fact out of my Top 10 cards for causing one-sided routs, only 2 of the cards aren’t currently restricted. Try to guess which ones they are.
-Joshua Silvestri
Team Reflection
Email me at: joshDOTsilvestriATgmailDOTcom