@mike-noble I was disappointed to see Weissman act this way. I wonder why he bothered to put that second COP:Red in play; if I were him, I would've been less obvious about how the deck I was playing was different from the submitted decklist.

@desolutionist said in SMIP: My Suggested B&R List (2019):

I don’t think Crop Rotation was ever a legal 4-of before New Phyrexia. Card was pretty broken as a 1-of in shops and Storm before Misstep came around.

I played 5C Stax at 2009 Champs with 3 Crop Rotation. It was strong but not broken, finding the one-of utility lands that the deck ran without relying on the stronger tutors such as Demonic Tutor. I remember people being worried about it in 5C Stax specifically since that was the only deck running restricted Crop Rotation prior to the June 2009 unrestriction.

Some relevant tweets:

https://www.twitter.com/brian_weissman/status/1165425450090283008

https://www.twitter.com/brian_weissman/status/1165425713102520320

https://www.twitter.com/ChannelFireball/status/1165430936701460480

The situation in a nutshell: Athena posts a picture of Brian’s board position after losing to him with her red-based strategy. He notably has two Circle of Protection: Red in play. People realize that his submitted “decklist”/picture of what he was playing only contains one Circle of Protection: Red. Brian won the event, but as the tweet above details, he returned the trophy after this information came to light.

This is arguably a watershed moment for the Old School community and format.

@desolutionist
Crop Rotation was unrestricted in June 2009 and New Phyrexia released in May 2011. But there is no deck with more than 1 crop rotation in the mtgtop8.com base during that period.

Obviously the metagame is completely different now, it is difficult to make prediction from this.