TagVintage

Nick Eisel says:”Even if you don’t play Vintage, reading Stephen’s articles will arouse your brain and get you involved instead of the usual zombie-like state that is achieved after reading another mundane Magic article. The format he uses to get this information into that mode of thinking is superb and I’d personally like to compliment him.” And given that Nick’s such a fan, shouldn’t you take a look at the third installment of how to play a deck that’s so fast that games only go to turn 4 once in every twenty games?

Well, my last column opened a can of worms about Chalice of the Void and the future of Vintage – and letters are still coming in! Let me answer your questions and concerns.

Dear Oscar:

Suppose R&D wanted to make a card that”forces decks to change their spell mix,” or their designers to think outside the box and not necessarily opt for all the broken cards on the restricted list simply by virtue of their brokenness. R&D wanted this card to essentially”fix” all their old blunders to some extent by making the very thing that is desirable about those spells (their inexpensive costs, out of proportion with their over-powered effects) less desirable. So what’s wrong with that?

Chalice of the Void. Possibly the best card introduced to the Vintage fold out of Mirrodin (though there are those who will argue for Chrome Mox, but they’re probably wrong). Some see a powerful lock card. Some see a powerful hoser. But what does the reigning Vintage World Champion when he looks at Chalice?

Chalice represents a fundamental change in Type One that few cards have ever made. No single card that I have seen since I started playing again, not even Fact or Fiction, have had this sort of impact. This card is going to enter the format in way that will shape deck building for years to come, much like the cycle of Onslaught fetchlands. But unlike the fetchlands, Chalice forces decks that don’t use it to adapt. Moreover, this card affects Type One at every level and in every archetype. Combo, Aggro, Prison, all forms of Control and everything in between will undergo a huge transformation as a result of Chalice. But what will that transformation look like?

Last week, I said three artifacts stand out in Mirrodin: Chrome Mox should be restricted on principle because of the inherent danger of free artifact mana that evades the land drop restrictions. Chalice of the Void deserves to be banned (note, not necessarily”should be”) because of how it cuts off entire decktypes or forces them to radically change their spell mix all by itself, irrespective of the deck that slips it in-or the intelligence of the player who does. Isochron Scepter? Well, that’s a tougher nut to crack.

There are those who say that Burning Academy (also known as Long.dec) is completely stopped by a timely Duress or Force of Will. But Stephen goes to the wire against the best pre-Mirrodin control deck – Hulk Smash – to show you how to fight the first-turn disruption with the fastest deck in Magic!

The reason this deck performs so well versus control – and the reason it is relatively immune to hate – is because it can blitz past both hate and control answers, winning before the blue mage gets UU up. Playing Long is unlike anything before. In the ADD format that characterizes Vintage, like the events in Dragonball Z, you play a massively decompressed game where so much happens in the space of one turn. For Long.dec, turn 3 is not only a long game, it is the late game.

Putting all this together, Chalice of the Void:

• Hoses entire archetypes


• Can be played in any deck to shut down at least combo and weenie aggro


• Hoses budget archetypes worst and some powered archetypes least, by nature

These are three very weighty bullet points, and when you say”entire archetypes,” you’re talking about radical changes to the entire Type One metagame.

You might have drooled the first time you saw Platinum Angel. After all,”don’t lose” was the cornerstone of the original”The Deck” philosophy. That is, by focusing on simply not losing, you can wear your opponent down and later outpace him in resources, and overwhelm him. That philosophy, however, isn’t absolute gospel in today’s far, far faster Type I. In many cases, the best way not to lose is to simply win first, especially when any single deck is hard-pressed to deal with all the many possible ways of losing. That leads us to the Angel’s fundamental problem: It stops you from losing, but it doesn’t help you win.

With all the excitement about artifacts this week, I decided to move up a feature of an artifact-based deck. Since fellow Paragon Steve Menendian already drew the Growing ‘Tog feature and I couldn’t find other notable Stax players like Matthieu Durand, I pulled a couple of very exciting games against someone you probably don’t know. Today, we welcome Guillaume Cardin, a student from Montreal. While he enjoys Type I, his higher-profile achievements include piloting U/G Madness to the quarterfinals of the last Canadian Nationals….

In between the 2003 Bluegrass Battle and the Origins tourneys exists the unrestriction of Berserk, the explosion of Gro-A-Tog onto the Type One metagame, and the subsequent announcement restricting Gush. This article is going to look at the archetype as it evolved and existed in its variant forms interwoven through three Origins tournament reports. Additionally, for those who aren’t into tournament reports, in the concluding sections of this article, I have some important meanderings on the decision to restrict Gush.

Hey – what’s Oscar doing in the fun section? Well, after all the serious debate on the strategy behind the Vintage Championships, Oscar decides to show three improbable routes to victory… Including the famed Invincible Counter-Troll face-off!

In Sweden, Type I is very popular (as is Magic overall). We have two sanctioned Type I events each week in the city I live in; last year’s biggest event had an attendance of about a hundred and thirty, and the largest this year was about a hundred players. Those were both our unofficial Nationals for Type I. So I was well-prepared for GenCon, even though it presented a whole new metagame…

You might remember passing notes from the coverage about how Randy Buehler and some other people passed by the Type I Championships and watched a few matches. Players reported, however, that they weren’t just watching idly. Rumor is some serious talking was done. Something about… Updating the Restricted list?