Some shooting stars did rather well. One made Top 8, and at least one (I believe two) others conceded drawn games in the last round when they were in a worse position with time running out.
Others, like myself, did not do so well. Nor can it be said that I was expecting to do well – when the head judge announced the tee-shirt giveaway, I yelled out, “Tee-shirts! Get your tee-shirts here!” I managed to win round one with some timely Blasts but when round four came around my two tee-shirts were already gone. I won that round, but then lost two more before dropping to do what I was made to do: draft.
Fortunately I brought some copies of Succession and Space Station Assault to give away to opponents so no one who played me left empty-handed.
Good times.
As to Vintage itself, my overall reaction was positive. It is, of course, a fundamentally broken format full of fundamentally broken spells – but in many ways it seemed more balanced and interactive to me than Extended or Standard. There are insane spells like Tinker and Gifts that can blow up a game, but there are also eight Red Blasts. Yawgmoth’s Will is insane, but Tormod’s Crypt and Phyrexian Furnace are cheap answers. This tends to keep things in check – Rich Shay won a lot of stuff with Welder/Slaver until people responded with innovations such as Lava Dart to keep Welders off the board. There are powerful threats but there are also powerful answers – and Dave Price’s maxim applies less when you have so much card-drawing and tutoring power available.
Another thing is that there seems to be a surprising amount of fundamental balance in this most broken of formats. Rich Shay put it very well. Good Vintage decks exist on a power continuum. You can push your deck’s power to the utmost, at which point you will generate a significant number of turn one and turn two kills, like Meandeck Tendrils. But when you do so your deck becomes brittle – vulnerable both to self-implosion and to disruption.
Stack Tendrils up against my Goblin deck and what happens? I probably lose, but I might very well win. If I’m on the play, there’s a decent chance I’ll drop a turn 1 Sphere of Resistance, at which point the Tendrils player can almost go home – remember, more than half of Tendrils opening hands won’t have a single land so it’s not “just” that he can’t go off until he manages an EOT Hurkyl’s Recall. If I’m on the draw and they don’t kill me, a turn 1 Sphere is still pretty painful, and then there are those Blasts, which add to storm count but hopefully prevent some important card-drawing.
Putting Sphere aside, Tendrils is also vulnerable to Chalice, Stifle, permission, Duress, Trinisphere and other stuff that can hit play on turn one.
At the other end of the world are the various fish decks that seem almost like they are in the wrong format. Ninjas aren’t even having much impact on Standard – how can they be good in Vintage? Well, when you’ve got Mishra’s Factory and Cloud of Faeries to swing with and want to push your opponent around with Standstill, suddenly Ninjaphidian is a pretty serious threat.
So will I be playing more Vintage? It depends. The cost to enter is still a big barrier. SCG improved things greatly by increasing the number of allowable proxies from 5 to 10 – apparently some people thought this would hurt card sales but the result has clearly been to increase overall demand by bringing lots of new people in to play. Given the prices on things like Mishra’s Workshop and Mana Drain I wouldn’t be surprised if the optimal number of proxies (from a card sales/pricing perspective) is higher than 10 (perhaps even higher than 15) and I look forward to seeing how Pete & Co. handle future events.
In any case, a 10-proxy tournament means one of several things for me. I could invest $500 to $1,000 in the cards I’m missing so as to be able to play with the big boys. I could specialize in the relatively inexpensive decks. I could borrow cards aggressively.
I still have hangups about spending tons of cash on singles (oh, if only I’d gotten over that years ago!), but given the size of SCG’s prizes, reasonable confidence that I could become a strong Vintage player and the extra income from having new articles to write, that wouldn’t be too bad. I might be able to convince Rob to sort out his Vintage cards and “sponsor” me with loaners. It’s quite tempting.
Ultimately, however, my main constraint isn’t money – it’s time. Having a wife, a baby and a startup company doesn’t leave much time for anything else. I skipped a Limited Pro Tour – that tells you how little free time I have.
What about the players?
All of the shooting stars were asked what we thought of the play skill of the Vintage world. But the players themselves tended to ask a slightly different question – they wanted to know what I thought of them in terms of maturity and sportsmanship, rather than merely play skill. In this regard I must say that Vintage defeats non-Vintage. One tournament’s worth of experience is certainly a small data set, but I was very impressed at how few (if any) jerks seemed to be around and how much I enjoyed everyone I met. No one gave me a hard time for sucking and everyone seemed to be there for a good game of Magic.
In terms of play skill, it’s somewhat hard to judge, but I would say that the SCG Tour® nament field was about as good as a Boston PTQ. There were certainly some awful plays, but not an insane number when you consider the number of choices that are available. Moreover, as the field narrowed at the top the level of play seemed quite high to me.
Could the Pros dominate Vintage? I think so… if and only if they put real work into it. Vintage has a rich and rapidly-evolving metagame and a body of players who understand it and work hard at it. It’s probably the case that none of them are as good in the abstract as any of the top 20 Magic players in the world… but as my readers know, “in the abstract” doesn’t mean much.
What was that pile you played?
As I said, I didn’t have much time to test. Throw in some random events and I ended up with absolutely no time to test other than goldfishing. Finally, add a shortage of cards and my options were limited.
I looked at Food Chain Goblins and saw some changes I wanted to make to it. First, Extended had shown me that the disruption of Wasteland was often less valuable than the power of City of Traitors. This seemed particularly true for a deck whose one really good trick is Goblin Lackey – with City of Traitors you had a much higher chance of following up a Lackey with Goblin Matron, fetching you Kiki-Jiki or Siege-Gang Commander as needed.
The next step was deciding what to replace Food Chain with. More Goblins is certainly possible, but how sexy is that really? I wanted something disruptive – in particular, something that would give me a chance to push the good decks back on their heels if I won the die roll. Chalice is the obvious choice here, but Sphere of Resistance seemed potentially crushing and quite fun.
The most obvious point to Sphere of Resistance is that it forces people to pay for their Moxen, gaining you a full turn against most decks, but it goes beyond that. Yawgmoth’s Will is obviously substantially depowered under a Sphere, permission is much harder to use, etc. Vintage players are prone to casting lots of spells during their turns.
Sphere also has a lot of synergy with Goblin Lackey. If you lead with Mox/City or Mountain/Crypt or Black Lotus you can put out a turn 1 Lackey and a Sphere. Unless your opponent is running Ornithopter or has Black Lotus in hand, it’s virtually impossible for them to stop the Lackey from hitting.
Such was the theory, and goldfish draws seemed to back it up. Between two Moxen, Cities, Sol Ring and Mana Crypt I played a turn 1 Sphere quite often and then was still able to play my game.
In practice, the results were mixed. Against Rich Shay I led with Sphere and had some pressure to go with it. Rich led with Library of Alexandria and started drawing cards. When my pressure started to look interesting, he cleared the board with Pyroclasm and then tossed out The Abyss. Tough times. Other times they worked better, but overall I don’t think this “tech” is going to take Vintage by storm.
If you insist on running the deck, one thing I would definitely change is adding more Gempalm Incinerators. I won far more than my share of Extended mirrors simply because I maindecked four, but coming to Rochester I assumed they would be pretty awful in most matchups. Given the number of Fish decks in the current field (and the obvious insanity of instant-speed non-spell removal against them), mirrors or semi-mirrors and the fact that Incinerators can also take out Metalworkers and 5/3s with relative ease, it’s hard to imagine not running three or even four.
Or you could just play a better deck.
Special Amazing Bonus Round: Thoughts on the Hall of Fame ballot!
Five people. That’s hard. Zvi said he didn’t think it should be hard at all, but that’s just Zvi being Zvi.
The first problem is that you have to weigh the criteria. If it was just PT performance, it would be pretty simple. Best of all, team YMG would probably all make it in! But there are lots of criteria, specifically: performances, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship and contributions to the game in general. Not only is there no clear statement on how these criteria should be weighted, the criteria themselves are loosely defined at best.
Don’t believe me? Well, let’s take on that should be clear cut – performances. How do you rate that? PT points is an obvious answer, but what about the Invitationals? Chris Pikula will certainly argue that the Invitational counts – in fact, he has been arguing that on the forums over on magicthegathering.com. Nor is it clear that PT points is the best measure for performance. Should a PT win count for something beyond the points? Perhaps it’s really the total number of Top 8s a player has made? And should you look at lifetime performance or performance during a period?
Playing ability – does this mean talent or current play strength? Quite a few names on the list have drifted away from the game in recent years and are presumably not as strong as they once were (at the very least they aren’t up to speed on the cards and metagame).
Integrity – count me among those who believe that Mike Long should not be voted for. I understand the argument, but he is a well-documented cheater of massive proportions. But then Gary Wise says that he knows 13 people on the list who have deliberately violated the rules. Do you apply a knockout blow to anyone you think has cheated? What about integrity outside of the game – should someone be penalized because of something in their personal life? What about someone who lied to a teammate but didn’t cheat inside the game?
Sportsmanship – don’t get me started. It’s a totally subjective measure. I hate things some people do but know others that love them. Similarly, I’ve been known to engage in antics and banter that I think most people enjoy… but I found to my shock that one opponent of mine thought I was being highly unsportsmanlike during our match. (This is particularly amusing given who the opponent was!)
Contributions to the game in general. This is another highly-subjective criterion. Rob Dougherty sponsored Your Move Games and created one of the best-known brands in Magic. He’s also organized most of the PTQs in the region and created some dominant decks, like Benzo or the YMG Tinker/Welder deck that put me into Day 2 of my first PT and put Rob and Dave into the Top 8. Which category of achievement matters more? Guys like Dave Price and Chris Pikula have done a lot to elevate the spirit of the game; how does that weigh in to contributions? Ironically, Mike Long scores will with some people in this category because of his infamy!
I’m not faulting the criteria by any means – I’m just trying to illustrate how open-ended they are and thus how two different people who agree 100% on how they describe a given player might still disagree on whether that player deserves a vote for the HOF.
As it happens, I’m not eligible to vote (I always think I have higher standing as a writer than I apparently do!), but if I was voting, this is how I would think about it.
I would weigh performance more heavily than any other criterion. This is the Pro Tour Hall of Fame, not the Magic Hall of Fame – if it was for all of Magic we’d have folks like EDT, Frank Kusumoto and (gasp!) Flores as nominees. For the same reason, I don’t put much weight into the Invitational. It’s a cool event and a lot of fun, but it’s the PT equivalent of a prerelease. Darwin doesn’t need the help, but Olle Rade and Chris Pikula come out lower on my scale than they will if people treat the Invitational like a PT.
I’m also willing to eliminate people based on abject failure on one or more criteria. The most obvious one is cheating – I know others (including Knut) will vote for Mike Long and consider other “integrity-challenged” folks, but I won’t. If someone has been busted cheating on a regular basis* they are off my list. The same thing would keep chair-throwing types off the list; if you’re a total jerk in the Magic world**, you don’t get my vote. That said, here are the two folks that would definitely get my vote as well as those that might:
Jon Finkel. Zvi and I talked about “gaming” the vote during a break at Rochester. Zvi was hoping to determine whether someone he thinks deserves to get in is clearly going to get passed over; if so, Zvi won’t vote for him this year but might push next. I pointed out that if you want to avoid wasting a vote you shouldn’t vote for Jon but that’s just theory. The reality is that Jon deserves every single person’s first vote and not voting for him isn’t merely gaming the system – it’s insulting it.
Darwin Kastle. What, me biased? A lot of people don’t like Darwin, but his achievements at the game make him an auto-vote in my opinion. Other commitments, including spending more time on Vs., have taken him off the top of his game, but I have no doubt he’d be back there if he was awarded permanent level 3 status.
After that it gets tough. Among the worthies who should be considered for the remaining three slots:
Rob Dougherty. What, me biased? Okay, so he’s my business partner and good friend but do you know he skipped my wedding just so he could play some card game? I hate him almost as much as Humpherys, who also skipped my wedding and (unlike Rob, Darwin and Justin) didn’t come in first, second or third. I already went through some of Rob’s contributions to the game earlier, so I’ll keep it simple: lots of PT points, lots of contributions to the game, lots of important deck designs. If nothing else, putting Rob on the permanent gravy train would cause him to come up with more revolutionary decks.
Tommi Hovi. He won two Pro Tours. He’s also been strong over a long period of time; if you look at people with over 200 PT points, Hovi is second only to Kastle for points earned during the first two years of the PT. (He’s fifth overall during that period.)
Dave Humpherys. Do you know that every time Your Move Games publishes a new game we sneak an insult to Dave into the credits page? We hate Humpherys that much. Hate the Hump. Hate the Hump in the Hall of Fame is beautiful alliteration. I think it’s sad that each member of YMG may be hurt by a reluctance of voters to elect three people from one team, but in my opinion all three are fully deserving.
Scott Johns. Scott’s overall PT points aren’t quite up with the big boys, but they’re close and he’s a PT champion. Moreover, Scott has made massive contributions to the game at Mindripper, Brainburst and now magicthegathering.com.
Alan Comer. He’s a genius, he’s a sweetheart, and no one comes up with wackier decks than he does. Okay, let me amend that – no one comes up with wackier format-dominating decks than he does. Like Scott, Alan suffers from the “can’t receive the benefits” issue since as a Wizards employee he’s not allowed to compete, but he’s certainly deserving.
Honorary “Guy I’d really like to vote for based on personal reasons” award: Dave Price.
Dave has a PT win but his overall results aren’t at the level of his competitors. Despite that, I think Dave scores maximum points in other areas like impact on the game, sportsmanship and integrity. Dave poured his heart into Magic as the King of the Qualifiers. He earned his title, “King of Beatdown” not merely by winning PTLA or constantly innovating Deadguy Red but by contributing important theoretical lessons that other players can (and do) use.
Dave and I faced each other in the Top 8 of a PTQ – ironically after having spent much of the previous day playing our decks against each other. Dave won game one and as game two began I went to draw a card for the turn. I was full of adrenaline from the previous game (and the realization that 80% of our games had gone to whoever won the toss so that even if I won this game I would be on the ropes) and just forgot that it was turn 1 and I was on the play. Dave could have advanced right there, but he quickly stopped me.
Finally, as much as I’d like to see Chris Pikula and Hammer in the Hall of Fame, I don’t think I could vote for them. Each of them has earned their fame but I just don’t see it as being at the level of the people listed above (as well as some not listed, e.g. Steve OMS who is certainly worth a look). In short, the criterion that eliminates them from contention (on my imaginary ballot at least) is not one of the five voting criteria but rather that only five people will be inducted this year.
As a final thought, I urge all of the people who have the chance to vote to do some homework before making their final decisions. I’m sure I would add some names to the “contenders” list if I learned more about what each candidate has done, and I’d hate to see the vote turn into a popularity contest.
As a final final thought, I hope Wizards will revise the voting committee each year so that new judges, writers and other contributors to the game have the chance to vote for Hall of Fame honors.
Hugs ’til next time,
Chad
* For me, “busted” has to mean actually caught by the judges – or by me personally. Hearsay is too easy to come by.
** While I might like to penalize someone for being a jerk outside the Magic world, I wouldn’t.