TagVintage

The problem here is that the deck is woefully underpowered. Think of some the most explosive opening draws that you can think of for decks like Tog, Keeper, Slaver, or combo. They’ve got lots of different hand combinations that win the game that turn, either literally or figuratively. Landstill really can’t hope for much outside of turn 1 Ancestral Recall or Balance, which would generate probably only around four-for-two card advantage.

What I’m going to do in this article is canvass the rules for running a Type One tournament: what you should do, what you must do, and what you should avoid. In the process, I’m going to argue for what may seem to be a pretty radical position in terms of how to run one. I haven’t spent time on these subjects before because they are bristling with controversy…

Congratulations to Marc Perez for winning the East Coast Vintage Championship! Here is Marc’s winning decklist, along with the decklists for the rest of the top eight! Enjoy!

Today Oscar revisits the Keeper mirror match with legendary German deckbuilder Roland Bode.

I noticed your plea for short Constructed questions, and I just wanted to ask you: If you had to update a Three Deuce decklist for Type 1.5, what would it look like?

What’s the second-most played Scourge card in Type I? What’s the average casting cost breakdown for all Type I Top 8 decks in 2004? What does a 36-24-36 woman really look like? The answers to all this and more are just a click away!

More from the wild and wacky world of Keeper vs. Landstill!

“The Deck” is possibly compared to Baldur’s Gate 2. It’s the legendary control deck against which newcomers are judged, but it’s undeniably showing its age. Control decks have streamlined a lot since the days they could just lean on Mana Draining into Braingeyser, but today’s most modern ones have cheaper, more specialized engines. Today’s Head to Head will look at one of the more popular and original control creations to come along: Landstill.

I suppose that the title requires a bit of explanation. A week before the usual unlimited-proxy tournament, I was heavily testing combo GAT (Gro-A-Tog), complete with Fastbond and Future Sight. Somewhere during this time, JP started talking about a U/G deck full of Type Two jank and posting ridiculous win records against Slaver. It was just stupid enough to test, and in the interest of writing a great article for you, the reader, I took what was essentially Odyssey Block Madness to a fully powered Type One event.

Flores’ article from two weeks ago on strategy superiority and rogue deck design really caught me with respect to Type 1. In Type 1, there are so many powerful cards available that failing to build your deck in a way to try to grant yourself strategy superiority against a large number of opponents seems unacceptable.

Not since Fact or Fiction was unrestricted have we seen the hypothetical question”can control be too good?” But recently, Hulk has made us all think about it again. It’s certainly not to the point of”restrict something” yet, but many of the big names in the format agree that not only is Hulk the best deck, but it has no truly bad matchups. In fact, even its number of appearances underestimates it, since the majority of the nine showings were in the finals, with no other deck having more than two finals placements.

Aggro waxes and wanes a lot in Type 1. It just came off one of its worst protracted periods yet, having to contend first with GroAtog and then with Long.dec. Right now, aggro is on the upswing, but there’s a big difference between the aggro decks now and the aggro decks that used to be prevalent. Part of this is that the new decks are leaner and meaner, but there are other, more subtle elements as well.

I haven’t done a tournament report for a while. It’s time. I also haven’t written about T1 for a while. It’s time. I also haven’t won a big tournament for a while. It was about time. March 20, 2004. The big 5-Proxy T1 tourney. It was time.

My constant requests for article ideas finally yielded the suggestion from Oscar”Cinnamon Buns” Tan that, in lieu of a substantial issue to discuss, I develop a new deck, like in the days of olde tyme Tog-Growing. So I skimmed over a list of set mechanics, figuring it shouldn’t be too hard to find one that hadn’t been broken yet. Kicker was wicked bad, so I finally settled on Threshold.

A while ago I said that countermagic is a key component of Type I. Since that time, Wizards has seen fit to add more and more spells that counters things. As always, the Type I environment is changing, and it is obvious that the need for counters changes with it. One of Stephen Menendian’s recent StarCity forum discussion pieces has been on the utility of Stifle. That’s a valid recognition of one facet of the Counterspell problem that I want to examine today.