TagVintage

The Doomsday deck recorded several first- and second-turn kills on the back of Doomsday, Ancestral Recall, and Beacon of Destruction… Or did it? You see, Stemnemdemianan and I had a conversation about the viability of the deck at the tournament. Steve claimed that the deck was nigh-unbeatable. I told him that if that was the case, then something needed to be done to keep the power level of the deck in check. I suggested that Dark Ritual needed to be restricted in Type One.

But that’s not all! I threw in Mishra’s Workshop for good measure.

Cunning Wish. Mana Drain. Force of Will. The Fetchlands. Now, I’m not going to tell you that these cards are bad – they’re not – but I am going to say that you may be relying on these cards too much – or worse, not supporting them properly.

The DCI has done a great job of cleaning the detritus from the restricted list that had accumulated over the years. In the past two years, Berserk, Fork, Braingeyser, Hurkyl’s Recall, and many other cards were unrestricted, reflecting the fact that they are no longer the power cards they were eight years before. But the Restricted List has taken years to accumulate, and there is still stuff on the list that arguably shouldn’t be. In this article, I’m going to look at the six most questionable cards on the list and examine the pros and cons of unrestriction.

This fall/winter season is a time that’s typically more laid back. There is no Gencon or Origins on the horizon, Waterbury may happen all of once, and there’s no telling what StarCityGames.com will decide to do. While there will be far fewer large scale tournaments, there will be plenty of mid-sized tournaments, which is where I get to stick my tongue out at Philip Stanton and thump my own chest… that is, of course, assuming that you creeps give me Top 8 lists!

Here we go again with part two, otherwise known as the part where I really start smashing! This includes matches against the World Champion, the Hump, and random Europeans even the Europeans haven’t heard of, and details of dancing away Halloween night with Kanoot, Osyp, and more hotties than you can shake a stick at.

There were good arguments for unrestricting Doomsday. Doomsday combo would seem to be no faster than Worldgorger Dragon, which everyone agrees is “fair combo.” I figured, however, that with the Type One card pool, it only takes one truly inspired set of five cards to break the living hell out of it… And so we looked through the Dojo archives to find inspiration. Barely a week had passed when JP showed probably the most elegant win condition ever conceived: Doomsday for Ancestral Recall, Black Lotus, Dark Ritual, Mind’s Desire, and Beacon of Destruction.

Here’s the plan. Let’s jump right into the middle of things, giving the appropriate props out to http://mtgthesource.com/, and look at the archetypes of Type 1.5. This article is designed to give players new to the Type 1.5 format a jumping off point, to introduce the basic decks and archetypes, give an idea of what the metagame looks like, and make it easy for you to dive into the murky waters. To wrap things up, I’ll even take a look at one of my favorite decks for the new environment.

This past Saturday, 142 players made their way to the Windy City to compete in the third Star City “Power Nine” Tournament! If you’re wondering who made the top eight and what decks they were playing, wonder no more. StarCityGames.com proudly presents the top eight decklists from the Star City “Power Nine” Tournament – Chicago!

For this installment, I have updated the largest table I maintain: the monthly occurrence stats for every card, in terms of how many copies showed up in an average Top 8 for each month. So if you see something like “7.0 Black Lotus” it means that in a typical Top 8 from that month, seven of the decks would include a Black Lotus. Something like “3.0 Great Wall” would indicate that I made an error in the table, which is possible – it’s a big table. Regardless, this article will give you a full analysis of all the card trends for the important cards played at big Vintage tournaments for the past year!

So when does a card meet the distortion criteria? That’s one of the primary questions I want to address in this article. It requires a close analysis and a careful look. The critical inquiry is whether a card is “excessively” distorting. This is the problem with Crucible of Worlds. Crucible of the Worlds is not an inherently powerful card, but its presence in Type One is disturbing to many players. Crucible presents an important test case for my proposed framework and to that end I’m going to parse out these arguments for and against restriction in detail.

For me, the most exciting of the recent unrestrictions was Doomsday. Doomsday was long regarded as a weak card that was placed on the restricted list to neuter a combo deck that really wasn’t even that good in the first place. Thus Wizards, in their infinite wizdom, finally unrestricted the card. Even today, most people think it is harmless. I’m here to not only tell you “it’s not that simple,” but to demonstrate a few Doomsday decks that definitely don’t suck.

As the “spark-plug” who got proxy tournaments started, let me provide some history. Most of you probably won’t remember this period in Vintage history, so let me set the stage. It was late 2000. The global metagame was very loosely defined. Europe had far fewer tournaments than it does today, and there was absolutely nothing in New England, save some sanctioned thing in the bowels of Massachusetts. The biggest Type One spots in the U.S. were the Richmond Comix and the Neutral Ground New York. The format has come a long way since then, and it’s important to understand why.

Mean Deck Oath placed an astounding four players in the Top 8 of the most recent StarCityGames.com Power 9 tournament, and we know that you’re all dying to find out how the deck came about, what the strengths and weaknesses are, and how you can either win with it or beat it. Steve has included all this information in his complete primer on the hottest new deck in Type One, so what are you waiting for?

This article presents a new variation on the Mindslaver theme. The deck I’m introducing here can be considered as an hybrid between the standard Drain Slaver deck Kim Kluck created about a year ago and “Turbo Titan”, the Sundering Titan based control deck designed by my MeanDeck teammate Doug Linn. It tries to abuse one of the best artifacts from Fifth Dawn, Crucible of Worlds, in a way no one did before: setting up Mindslaver nastiness.

Richmond marked the debut of a new Vintage archetype… “Mean Deck Oath”. A majority of the field seemed unprepared to face the Oath of Druids/Forbidden Orchard “combo” and four members of Team Mean Deck piloted “Mean Deck Oath” straight to the top eight. What sort of impact will this have on Chicago? Will Team Mean Deck dominate again? There’s only one way to find out! Join us on Saturday, November 6th when the Star City “Power Nine” Tournament Series comes to Chicago!