@moorebrother1 This is a little off topic, but I just want to say that I think all of these threads you're posting are awesome raising some really important fundamental questions and starting some super interesting discussions. Keep it up

@moorebrother1 said in [Free Article] The Evolving 2018 vintage metagame:

makes local events even smaller since it is so hard to get notice for any innovation there.

I'm responding to moorebrother but there's a LOT of people this response is directed at.

Nobody ever notices innovation. This is true universally, about plenty of non-magic things, but I'll limit the scope to vintage.

Decks don't just get discovered because they're good. People have been making super interesting decks forever, before or after MTGO. I know they don't reach a large audience because tournament results are readily available and people constantly ask "where are the innovated decks?"

You don't hear about players (or their decks) when they win a lot of vintage matches.

You hear about them when they talk a lot.

I know this, because people know who I am.

The barrier is so low for vintage content, write a decent primer and people will ask you questions about the deck for years, whether or not you've ever won a match with the deck, or even played a game with it. People care about MTGO results because people like Stephen analyze it and people like Rich and Matt stream it. If someone wrote an compelling writeup of their small weekly event, people would care about that, too. The writing/content quality is more important than the strategy quality.

I may be biased.

It's just too good. Nobody can stop it. Is this something you really want there to be two of?

I think it's pretty hard to reconcile the idea that vintage is dying with the huge tournament attendance at eternal weekend each year. Surely local metagames die off, mine did a few years back, but are we losing players overall? Saying that SCGCon had 120 players doesn't really mean much ... the last SCGCon ... didn't exist. There's nothing to compare it to. Last year there was no large sanctioned vintage SCG event, and this year they had one with 120 players, that sounds like growth to me? The overall size of the online vintage community feels massive to me now compared to even a few years ago, but I really don't know how to objectively measure this sort of thing.

It really looks to me like objectively, vintage is growing, while at the same time I'll admit that I'm personally very impacted by the aging playerbase, like nedleeds referenced.

For what it's worth, if Old School nabs some vintage players, I'm totally cool with that. I don't want more people to play vintage ... I want more people to have a good time playing magic in a community that enriches their life. If Old School does that better for some people, that benefits everyone involved. I've tried both and I'm still a Vintage player at heart.

Pure prison may be hard to do, but I think that tempo/locky elements still have potential. Thalia is just on the edge of vintage quality, whether that's through an Eldrazi deck or something else.

BUG/leovold decks have always had a minor mana denial element to them, I wonder if Assassin's Trophy will have any impact on that plan.

I'm confused about Transmute Artifact. The current oracle text feels like a reasonable interpretation of "Transmute Artifact fails and the card is discarded" to me. What are people proposing the errata look like, and what could you do with it that would make it relevant?

Interestingly, maindeck graveyard hate used to be quite common, usually in the form of Tormod's Crypt. This would have been before Dredge was as threatening as it is today, it was used to combat Welders and YawgWills and Gifts, which were not more prolific than Delve and Snapcaster today. I don't recall exactly when it started to go out of style.

Here's a cute data point, for what it's worth. I spent most of the day today testing some Battlebond tech @Aelien . We weren't explicitly trying to react to this thread, but our results are probably relevant to the discussion

I was playing a controlly Grixis deck with 4 Mental Misstep and a Mind Twist

Aelien was playing a stormy deck with 7 Duress/Thoughtseize effects.

The Mind Twist was very good for me, and the Duress effects were very good for Aelien. At no point were either of us sad to be running those cards. I think these cards are still quite good against Combo, reasonably good against Slow Control, fine against Tempo Control, and bad against Workshops and Dredge. I think what one does with a Duress is so different than what one does with a Mind Twist that you have very different requirements for wanting them, and I think what one does with Hymn to Tourach is just something no Vintage deck wants.

Ultimately I think if you're just looking at playing one of Ravager Shops/Jeskai Mentor/Esper Outcome/Inferno Oath/Dredge, in a field that consists mostly of Ravager Shops/Jeskai Mentor/Esper Outcome/Inferno Oath/Dredge, discard effects just aren't the best option over alternatives (with the exception of Cabal Therapy, possibly Unmask out of Dredge decks). That's going to include most players in most metagames ... but I do think there are reasonable decks outside that list, and reasonable metagames that diverge from that list, in which Duress/Thoughtseize/Mind Twist are good choices. Hymn to Tourach, I think, won't make the cut in anything reasonable, and I can't think of any other discard effects that are particularly notable.

I don't hate the idea of Mind Twist, but I wonder if you're too optimistic what the card can do without support. This deck looks very capable of winning a fight on the stack, but it might have some trouble dealing with cards that make it to the board.

3 Fatal Push being your only way to interact with the board feels very risky. For instance, if your opponent plays a turn one or two Young Pyromancer, before you have a Mana Drain wall up, even with a Fatal Push in hand you could be in real trouble. If they get even a small number of Elemental tokens in play, your deck can't really kill them, and Jace, the Mind Sculptor becomes quite bad. A single Monastery Mentor would be a real problem, or any Workshop hand where they play 2 or 3 creatures in the beginning of the game (and that's an extremely common opening for Workshops)

This doesn't mean that the deck is a dead end, but I do think you'd be rewarded for running either more removal, or more threats that match up better against the cards which are already good against your discard ... maybe Tinker+Blightsteel Colossus, maybe Tasigur, the Golden Fang, or even just planeswalkers that have more of an impact on the board ... maybe a Karn, Scion of Urza or Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas, but both of those are better with more artifacts. If you're up for splashing a color, red and white planeswalkers are particularly good at closing out the game even if your opponent has threats in play, and of course Monastery Mentor fills this role admirably.

As an aside I'll say that it's very non-traditional for a Vintage deck this controlling to run Necropotence, but the same could be said for Timetwister which is a pet card of mine in Vintage control, so I don't know that I think Necro is necessarily wrong. If you want to keep it, it may be worth running more cards to be sure you don't get locked out with no draw step ... whether that's Tendrils of Agony or more planeswalkers or Paradoxical Outcome or something else entirely, I'm not sure.

There was a similar conversation in the Thought Erasure thread. There I argued that I didn't think there was much of relationship between the playability of Duress and Mental Misstep. I stand by that, but I think this thread raises some other interesting topics.

I think I tend to take the opposite approach to running cards/building decks and I wonder if there wouldn't be some benefit to trying that here.

Basically, a question is posed in the form "Discard effects are bad. [conjecture as to why]. How can we make them good?" While I think we'll find that discard effects are still pretty reasonable, it's a problematic question to ask, because there might not be an answer. If you had asked "Vizzerdrix is bad because it's strictly worse than many other creatures. How can we make it good?" ... you sort of can't, short of changing the rules of the format so much to be unrecognizable. I think there are a few questions you could be asking instead, which may lead to more actionable answers.

What do I want [discard] to accomplish, and what is the best card or strategy for accomplishing that?

While Duress was classically a storm-deck staple for punching through combo-control decks, if you're specifically trying to beat a slower deck with Pyroblasts and Flusterstorms then Defense Grid just does that better. On the other hand if you're looking for action on turn one, in a deck that primarily cares about the stack, maybe the first Duress does that better than the 6th cantrip ... or maybe it doesn't, but at least you know what to measure now.

In what situations is [discard] already good, and what sorts of things make those situations more likely to happen?

There's a reason you're asking about discard in the first place, right? There must be some game state where you really like it ... a Thoughtseize can punish greedy keeps, or provide information on a critical turn, and it's a cheaper way to help your cards resolve than playing multiple threats ... so making Thoughtseize better could involve playing cards that make those things more common, or more important ... Decks with Wasteland are more likely to be able to capitalize on punishing a one Mox//one Land keep. A control deck with a weak combo matchup may benefit more than usual from the information advantage. Considering the broader metagame, if the decks that discard is good against just aren't being played, it's possible the only thing you can do is wait until they are.

What's the best possible deck I could run, if I accept running/building around [discard] as a handicap?

Recognize that when you see a card you like from a spoiler, or you have a pet card you've been shoving into every deck for years, this is the question you're really asking while deckbuilding. There's nothing wrong with doing this, I've done this many times myself, and sometimes it's the best way to discover something truly broken before anyone else ... but if you don't recognize this is what you're doing, you're sure to get a lot of "why haven't you cut Kess, Dissident Mage?" sort of advice from everyone you talk to your deck about. Many people don't want to believe they're running a particular card just because they enjoy it, but if they don't have a good answer to one of the other two questions, that's what's happening.

So ... why do you want to run more discard in vintage right now? Do you think it fills some useful role in an existing deck? Do you think it's undervalued in a particular matchup? Do you miss playing with discard spells and you want to maximize your chance of winning while getting to cast them?