I know it's been said over and over again, but if your goal is JUST that you want a format like Vintage but cheap, proxies are the answer. Yes, there are people who really just don't like proxies (maybe you're one of them, in which case, fair enough). But if you just want to get 8 people together to play a tournament, it's going to be a lot easier to find 8 people who don't mind proxies than it will be to find 8 people who are willing to dedicate however many hours of playtesting for a completely untested/unbalanced format. If you're looking for a competitive environment you're asking people to dedicate months before a format settles. And make no mistake, the format you've described is still expensive. Modern decks look like they're around $500-$1000 right now, which is pocket change next to a Vintage deck, but still a lot to ask for a format that may disappear after the first tournament.

But I don't want to be discouraging. I LOVE player-invented formats. If you think there's some strategic/gameplay difference that's unique about the format you've described, and that difference appeals to you, then I think that's great and I wish you luck! But if you just feel like you're missing out on Vintage without owning power, don't worry! You're already part of the Vintage community! I haven't used my "real" power in a long time and I don't think that's made the game any less fun for me.

Not to downplay the legitimate concerns and melencholy in this thread, but I don't think things are completely hopeless. Just like Prospero I bought my power in another era (just a few years later than him, I think), when I was in my early 20s. My collection in today's prices probably exceeds my entire net worth until I was at least 30. The idea of getting into collecting at these prices isn't just unlikely to me, I literally can't even conceive of how I could have done it. So I know that there are 19 year old planeswalkers out there who are watching IamActuallyLvL1 and ChubbyRain (or whoever the modern equivalent of Oscar Tan is), just as excited as I was, but they'll never be able to own a Lotus. And that makes me sad.

But it's also not exactly new.

Everyone has a budget. Some money they're willing to set aside on their hobby, with maybe a little breathing room if they save up for a while. While card prices consistently rise faster than inflation or salaries, the amount of people with hobby budgets bigger than a vintage collection shrinks and shrinks, but there's never been a time where everyone could play. People have loans, families to take care of. A few summers ago I played FNM in Mexico City, and when I told some of them that I mostly liked to play Vintage, they literally didn't believe there was a format where people actually played with Moxes.

Collecting is fun, it's an important part of the hobby for a lot of people, I'm a (recovering) collector myself ... but the hobby and the community is so much bigger than the cardboard. This is where the hope comes in: Most of the world was already priced out of Vintage in 2002 before I started playing, and as I was road-tripping from tournament to tournament in my early 20s, every month another friend of mine would sell off their power to pay rent and never get it back. But they didn't all stop playing, or being part of the community. This problem that some people are experiencing for the first time now? There's people all over the world who have been working at, and enjoying Vintage, despite their inability to afford a Lotus.

In the past two decades there's been an explosion of wotc-liberated magic communities, with Commander likely more popular than all sanctioned magic combined. But (at least on a large scale) Vintage was the first community that realized (amicably) that WotC couldn't give the format the attention it needed. Where sanctioned tournaments, mothership articles and WPN stores fell short, players stepped up.

You don't need to abolish the reserved list to be a part of Vintage, you don't need to legalize CE or print snow duals.

You just need each other.

Good morning Travis, how are you doing

For what it's worth, while some of the cards restricted back then were pretty silly (Fork??) I do prefer the idea of starting with the original list and seeing how things play out.

The MtgOldFrame folks caught two things I didn't - Flash and Time Vault worked completely different in 2003, and if you're using up-to-date oracle text then it seems appropriate to treat those cards as a special case. (and either errata or restrict/ban them)

Burning Wish/Cunning Wish also worked differently in 2003, in a way that was very relevant to the format. I can't believe I forgot to mention "Combo Keeper"/"The Shining"/"Your Mother" (regional decks had regional names), a Burning Wish based control list that I ADORED, but was rendered non-functional after the errata on Wishes. The modern rules-text makes those cards weaker, however, so there's no reason to consider bespoke-restricting them.

This era is exactly when I started playing competitive vintage so there's a lot of nostalgia here for me. Back then metagames were a lot more regional, and the best decks in Ritual-heavy Italy might not have fared well in Workshop-heavy Virginia. I bet @Smmenen 's History of Vintage has all the details you could imagine. I'll try and give my own perspective, as a newbie player in New England.

@thecravenone said in Premodern Vintage:

@aelien said in Premodern Vintage:

-Do you think it is a good idea to start with the historic B&R List?

What was the list back then?

I walked through the B&R timeline to put together the list as it was on the day before 8th edition came out:

Obviously a lot of these cards would be safe to remove, and players at the time knew it. As little attention as the format gets now, Vintage players were used to WotC making B&R decisions based on games they had played five years earlier. Black Vise was restricted until 2007 despite never having been part of a relevant Vintage deck for over a decade.

Just before 8th edition was an interesting crossroads in the format. Less than a month before 8th edition was the first restriction of Gush. I see Gro-a-Tog as the first modern Vintage deck ... or the first deck of its era, until a decade later, a third-time-unrestricted Gush created the first deck of our current era, Delver. I suspect GAT was far better against the field than its results showed. Back then the metagame didn't move as quickly. This was before the rise of proxy-tournaments and many metagames were defined by the preferences of a few skilled powered players. The gulf between GAT and the next-best deck is probably the largest of the entire time I've played Vintage, but it wasn't even a particularly popular deck.

This moment in time also marks the printing of the Storm mechanic, and the deck Burning Long. In December, Lion's Eye Diamond and Burning Wish were restricted (along with Chrome Mox. While this technically happened after 8th Edition and Mirrodin were released, Long is fully-functional without those sets, and I think it would be reasonable to keep those cards out of the format. Don't worry, you can still Tendrils without it.

The peak-fun in this era for me was probably a few months later, after Mirrodin, before Darksteel. The addition of Mirrodin gives you the epoch-defining Control Slaver, the first Goblin Charbelcher decks, and some very cool now-forgotten archetypes like Meandeck/Workshop Slaver, Scepter Control, Broodstar Runner, and Chalice Keeper

Keeping in mind how regional metagames were very different, here's the metagame pre-Mirrodin, in New England, as I remember it:

Workshops

TNT Listed first because it was my first ever Vintage deck. Workshop to power out "big threats" like Juggernaut and Su-Chi (boy times have changed), with a Survival of the Fittest+Goblin Welder value engine

Stax The "good" Shop deck. Lock pieces, five colors, tons of restricted cards. Would cast Meditate to skip turns with Smokestack and Tangle Wire in play. Card draw, tutors, very few threats, often won with 20 swings of a Goblin Welder

MUD Colorless cards weren't nearly as deep as they are now. The main reason you'd give up on colored mana was to make Metalworker better. Grafted Skullcap was a card people actually played in a metagame where Hurkyl's Recall was even more popular than it is now. Better stick that Null Brooch early.

Combo

Burning Long/TPS, the two Dark Ritual/Tendrils of Agony decks. Long was more popular in America and five colors, cramming maximum brokenness. The Perfect Storm was more popular in Europe and stuck to blue/black, running more disruption (like Force of Will) to try and defend one big spell.

Dragon, there really isn't another deck like Dragon. A Bazaar of Baghdad deck, but nothing like the Bazaar decks you see today - it was pretty common to win without drawing it. The combo, while fairly straightforward to execute, involves one of the most convoluted chain of rules interactions in competitive deck history. It's a graveyard-based deck, but it's important to remember that before Dredge came along, people weren't running 7 graveyard-hate spells, so these matchups were very different. Dragon would try to outdraw control decks and race combo decks.

Aggro

Null Rod Aggro In the time-before-proxies, budget aggro strategies were fairly common, players would specialize in Suicide Black decks (with Phyrexian Negator!) or Sligh. Slightly better were the R/G Beats decks or the R/W The Mountain Wins Again. Goblins decks would appear as well. None of these archetypes had a particularly big market share of players or tournament wins, but a few specialists would put up consistent finishes with them.

Oshowa Stompy Basically just a green Null-Rod Aggro deck, but a little stronger thanks to the addition of Bazaar of Bagdad. This is the great-grandfather of today's Survival decks

RUG Madness This was maybe the great-grandfather of today's Vengevine decks. Traded some of the disruption for splashier cards like Wheel of Fortune. Anger was what made the deck maybe two turns faster than all other aggro. It didn't have a huge following (though I played it and enjoyed it). This was probably the fastest aggro deck, but aggro decks were all really slow then.

UR Fish Except we didn't call it UR Fish, we called it something else that we really shouldn't have. This is the great-grandfather of Delver, but in a time where your best threats were two mana 1/1s instead of one mana 3/2s. You'd follow a Cloud of Fairies with a Standstill and sit on tempo-disrupting cards in a hodgepodge that was tough to pay around. I didn't respect the deck much in 2003, but in a lot of ways it was ahead of its time. Perhaps a bit too far ahead. Still, there was something beautiful about a fully-powered player being brought to their knees by a Spiketail Hatchling

Control

Keeper/Four-Color-ControlAn elegant weapon for a more civilized age. Keeper has maybe always been more popular than powerful, but there's something special about it. Oskar Tan's epic multi-part love-letter to Keeper ("The Control Player's Bible") got more than a few people into Vintage, myself among them. Basically Vintage Good Stuff+Mana Drain, the Keeper mantra was that it had an answer to everything, you just had to play perfectly to find it. A Keeper deck was highly personalized, and players could have 6-page threads debating a single card slot. Steve O'Connell, the original founder of TheManaDrain, was a Keeper pilot, and it's almost certainly where the site got its name from. I don't have to sell you on Keeper: if you're a Keeper player, you already know it.

Landstill. It's been around forever. It's basically always been exactly the same.

Hulk Smash/Psychatog In the wake of Gush's restriction, The combo-control Gro-A-Tog deck gave way to the more purely control Hulk Smash. Basically just a pile of draw spells and counters, Tog wasn't as powerful as Long or flexible as Keeper, but it could outdraw anything. Tog wasn't the first deck I played, but it was the first deck I played well. Tog won the very first Vintage Champs, and there's no question if I were trying to win a tournament in this era, this is what I'd play.

There's a lot of fun options in this era, certainly more than I mentioned. My personal picks to play would be Psychatog ... Dragon ... Madness ... TPS ... Stax ... okay I guess I like a lot of these decks.

I wonder if the premise should be questioned. I think if you take it as a given that you're definitely playing Preordain and Duress this turn, most of the time leading with Duress makes sense. This is probably true for ordering Duress and any card. The key factor is that opening with Duress reduces your opponent's ability to make the right choice. If they have a response like a Mental Misstep or a Brainstorm, Duress forces them to use it when you choose, where Preordain gives them the option of using it when they think is best.

This is probably more important than the information advantage. To evaluate the information advantage, you'd ask:

• what kind of information might Duress reveal that would change how I resolve Preordain?
• what kind of information might Preordain reveal that would change how I resolve Duress?

After asking those questions you should see the trap in the original question. The most likely way for Preordain to change how you would play Duress isn't that you might have them discard a different card, it's that's drawing a particular card might make you not want to play Duress at all. If this is turn one or two and you haven't seen your opponents hand yet, Duress is high value and it's PROBABLY being cast right away. But in many mid-game or later situations, you want to be careful you don't Duress away some medium-quality draw spell and pass the turn, just to have them draw a counterspell later. You want to cast your Duress as close as possible to the turn you try to win (which is probably not this turn if you're worried about a Preordain getting Misstep'd). So I think another question to ask is:

• If I led with Preordain, what could I find that would make me not want to play Duress this turn at all?

If there's a pretty reasonable chance you'll find one of those cards, leading with Preordain is probably best. The other scenario I haven't heard mentioned in the thread is if you want your Preordain countered. If your hand isn't particularly reliant on Preordain then you may not care if it gets Misstep'd. An obvious example is if you have an Ancestral Recall as well, but it could just be the relatively common case of "your hand is totally fine, you're not missing anything critical, Preordain would just make it better". If you lead with Preordain and they Misstep it, then follow with Duress, you may be able to answer two key cards instead of one, which could be significantly better than whatever Preordain would have gotten you.

In some hands that line is particularly strong. If this is turn one and I'm talking about this line with a hand of Preordain, Duress, Underground Sea, Mox Sapphire - I'll hem and haw over my hand for a while, sigh and reluctantly keep, drop the artifact mana without playing the land, and sheepishly run out the cantrip. A lot of players will be extremely tempted to "get you" from this game state. If you can sink your turn one Preordain into their Force of Will and follow THAT with a Duress? The game is usually over.

Ultimately I think my heuristic is:

• Do I want my opponent to interact with the Preordain? (probably fairly common, easy to notice)
• Will the results of this Preordain make me choose not to Duress? (rare, but easy to notice if you're looking)
• If no to both, just Duress first

Those aren't the only factors to consider, but for me those are things that I can reasonably figure out in the middle of a tournament game

@blindtherapy yeah I think that's probably the best approach. So far I haven't felt like spambots show up frequently enough to justify figuring out how to implement that on the site, but if the volume keeps rising then it'll become worth it

@thecravenone maybe not BETTER things, but yeah. It's a manual process and I don't always catch the bots right away. Honestly people have been so well-behaved from a moderation standpoint lately that I've been comfortable going longer and longer between checking in.

There are steps I can take to reduce bot signups (like adding extra friction to registration), but so far I've felt like it's been infrequent enough for me not to worry about it. If the general TMD community thinks it's getting out of hand, I can try and take some action toward preventing it.

If it looks like I haven't noticed a spam post for a while, or something needs to go down RIGHT NOW, I might be more likely to notice a Tweet @tmdBrassMan , unfortunately the site's emailer has been broken for a while so I only see reported posts when I actually log in, I won't get an email or notification on my phone or anything.

@lienielsen I'd say it's not good to treat "must answer a creature" as a hard rule, but it is true that most good planeswalkers have the ability to do that.

A more nuanced way of thinking might be ... if the metagame has a reasonable amount of creatures, a planeswalker without the ability to defend itself isn't likely to last very long. That means if the rest of your deck is very good at stopping things from attacking, you have a lot more room to play with. As a counterexample, one of the most successful planeswalkers in Vintage history was Tezzeret, the Seeker, which was used with Time Vault to take infinite turns. Tezzeret can't defend itself, but A) in many cases you didn't NEED it to survive more than a turn, and B) it was successful in a time when there were fewer creatures in the metagame.

I wouldn't say self-defense is a hard-and-fast rule, but I think what your friend was getting at makes sense in this case. If your opponent has a 2/2 in play, this card when un-kicked is probably going to draw 1 card before dying, and with kicker it'll probably draw 3. Considering it ONLY draws cards, it's fair to compare it to other draw spells, and in most situations you can do better for 1UU or 3UU mana. If your opponent doesn't have any creatures then you might draw 4 or 5 cards off of this, but a Jace, the Mind Sculptor or Dack Fayden would get you much much further in that situation.

This is one of those questions where the answer is going to end up being dependent on your deck and on the metagame. Because those things shift around over time, it might be helpful to try and think in terms of heuristics, e.g. not "which is better" but "what might make one better." I'm not up to date on the metagame enough to give a great answer, but here are maybe some factors you can think about:

Does your deck have any cards that are hosed by Rest in Peace but not by Grafdigger's Cage? (perhaps delve spells).

Are there other matchups you care about where those cards are relevant? A lot of people choose to run Grafdigger's Cage because it doubles as a disruptive spell against Tinker, Oath of Druids, Bolas Citadel. You might be able to fit more Cages in your list than Rest In Peaces if you're already dedicating space to beat those other decks. This might be a good reason to run a mix of Cage/RiP as well.

Seems like you're already accounting for the popular counter-answer cards in the current metagame (Force of Vigor) but keep in mind that kind of stuff changes all the time. Tabernacle of the Pendrell Vale was very good against graveyard strategies last year, but it looks like those decks have adapted by running more Strip Mine effects. Against Dredge decks with Force of Vigor I tend to share your instinct for running cards that generate some value even when they get removed, but I'm not sure how the latest crop of Hogaak lists changes the equation.

Like white dragon I'm also a big fan of Containment Priest, but I think you aren't wrong to be concerned about your ability to play 2 drops in a deck with only two moxes.

Tormod's Crypt and Ravenous Trap are cards that works really well alongside other hate cards. Crypt just buys time ... you won't win if you just draw Crypts in a slow deck ... but because they're free and create value through Force of Vigor, they can shore up the weaknesses of other hate cards (or make you more likely to win with a card like Tinker).

Some decks naturally lend themselves to run cards that are relevant in a match, but might not be something specialized. I've found cards that interact with the board to be reasonable (e.g. stuff like Tarmogoyf and Swords to Plowshares) as long as they're part of a larger strategy. I've had success with Scavenging Ooze+Deathrite Shaman+Tormod's Crypt, which are all cards that aren't particularly powerful enough on their own. When you're already running some number of those cards, that changes the value of other options. I don't like Surgical Extraction but I admit that it gets better in a deck with 4 Snapcaster Mage. Other cards to pay attention to are Wasteland, anti Hollow One cards like Dack Fayden, and creatures that sacrifice themselves to kill Bridge from Below. I suspect that your deck doesn't have any of these? Which might mean you have to dedicate more space than another list would.

The details of your deck are important here. My assumption from the name blue white BTB is that you're going to be too slow to rely on just Crypts/Traps/Leylines ... and I'm guessing you don't have enough creatures to make Containment Priest affect your clock, but you do have enough counters to try and fight off Force of Vigors. My instinct here is that you need a way to interact consistently on turn one. I would say if you're only able to dedicate 4ish slots to the matchup then Cage is the only thing that's going to get you there. If you're willing to dedicate more space (and I suspect you should), then you can run a mix of (Crypt or Trap or Cage for turn one interaction) with (Rest in Peace or Containment Priest to seal the deal).

It looks like the dredgey decks are pretty popular right now. As an "advanced excercise" you might want to look at a metagame and identify if there are any of those "relevant-but-not-dedicated" cards that happen to be good against several of the top decks. Skimming mtgGoldfish right now I see Golos stax, HogaakVine, and Outcome, and I notice that Dack is relevant against Golos/Hollow One/Mox Opal; Wasteland is relevant against Dark Depths/Bazaar/Academy; Null Rod/Collector Ouphe is relevant against Mirage Mirror/Mox Opal. If you were to play a RUG deck with those cards you'd already be down a path that pushes your sideboard in a strong direction. None of those cards replace your sideboard, but they act as force-multipliers to make your sideboard cards more effective, and inform which cards you should use. This won't help you tune a deck you already have built, but I find myself building decks sideboard-first quite a bit, and those lists have been pretty effective for me.