@JACO said in 6/24/17 - Long Island, New York - NYSE Open V - Power Eight, Workshops & Drains Tournament!:

NYSE V Shirts are finally here, with exclusive badass art, for a limited time only. Preorder in the next week if you want on-site pickup at the event. We also ship globally. Shirt colors this year are Platinum (light grey), White, Sky Blue, and Natural (creme). A portion of each shirt sold goes to support Nick and the NYSE project, and another portion goes to the artist Gilberto Rivera, who many of you have had the pleasure of playing against in previous Vintage tournaments. If you have some other shirt request color (pink, for example), please get it to me in the next day or two via email (jaco@eternalcentral.com), and I'll see what I can do. No dark shirts are planned for this round, because this image prints and stands out much better on light shirts. Order yours today:
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@wappla said in Vintage Challenge - 6/10/2017:

@vaughnbros actually everyone thinks that, but because people can't agree on what is fun, it's an idiotic way to make decisions.

Agreed, and this thread is a great example of why no matter what changes WotC does or does not make regarding the Banned & Restricted List, people will continue to bitch and moan, and we have over 25 years of Magic (and multiple iterations of TMD) as evidence. Not everyone will agree on what's "fun," because it's entirely subjective.

If you have data that you feel supports the scrutiny of a Banned & Restricted List change, present the data in a logical form with your argument. The endless droning on and on about "card X" is pushing other cards out of the format, or "card Y" is bad for the format are pretty useless, when they can be said about numerous cards in every historical format, and are simply a weak and generic proxy for good policymaking. We are dealing with the deepest card pool in Magic, and have many forgotten and overlooked answers to problems that exist. As more Magic sets are released each year new answers (and problems) will be printed.

WotC doesn't have a hard and fast set of rules or statistical metrics that they publish when it comes to B&R policymaking, because that would pigeonhole them in an adapting game, and prevent them from learning and using feedback on the fly. Not doing so affords them latitude to grow as a company, and to (hopefully) make better decisions going forward as they learn from successes and failures (insert your own snark here about failure).

Thank you to @ChubbyRain and @diophan (and associates) for their continued diligence in stockpiling and analyzing this data for us, such that we can continue to use it to have more intelligent discussions. It is much appreciated.

@The-Gremlin-Lord said in Sanctioned Vintage at GP Las Vegas:

The problem with Old School is that the B&R list is not consistent from region to region.

Could not disagree more with this. The differences between experimentation and areas should be viewed as a feature, and not a bug. Old School is not meant to be some hyper-optimized competitive format. It is meant to be a self-policing experiment that people enjoy while hanging out (and often imbibing), similar to EDH. As @Smmenen has alluded to, it can and should take on any form that you and your friends wish. The lists that EC provides are just a guide for what we think provide the most fun and balanced metagames given their restricted time periods, and the vast majority of people that have played in our events enjoy that direction.

Old School participation has consistently grown year over year the past 5 years, and that doesn't include just 93-94, but rather any broad historical look back at different eras for fun, and to do something different than the regular constructed formats allow. A format without Force of Will, but with stuff like Hymn to Tourach and Ancestral Recall and Balance just feels much different when you play it, and those differences are part of the allure.

NYSE V Shirts are finally here, with exclusive badass art, for a limited time only. Preorder in the next week if you want on-site pickup at the event. We also ship globally. Shirt colors this year are Platinum (light grey), White, Sky Blue, and Natural (creme). A portion of each shirt sold goes to support Nick and the NYSE project, and another portion goes to the artist Gilberto Rivera, who many of you have had the pleasure of playing against in previous Vintage tournaments. If you have some other shirt request color (pink, for example), please get it to me in the next day or two via email (jaco@eternalcentral.com), and I'll see what I can do. No dark shirts are planned for this round, because this image prints and stands out much better on light shirts. Order yours today:
http://www.eternalcentral.com/product/nyse5shirt/

@Hydra said in Grixis Therapy:

@diophan I'm curious, what are the reasons you are running Grixis Therapy over a version of Mentor? Is there a particular aspect of the meta that you feel Pyromancer handles better, or is this more a personal preference?

Grixis Therapy is lower to the ground (meaning a slightly lower mana curve), and the disruption (such as Therapy) comes online earlier than UWR Mentor decks can often cast Mentor itself, which often lends an edge in the pseudo-mirror (if even by a turn or two). If Mentor sticks, however, you can often be in trouble, which is why you will often see Sudden Shock in these decks specifically.

It's also a matter of your expected metagame, and what tools you want access to in fighting that metagame. The tools that Mentor and white offers (such as Swords to Plowshares, Stony Silence, Containment Priest, and Fragmentize) are often preferred over the closest black tools (Dismember, Null Rod, Leyline + Cage, Ingot Chewer).

@Topical_Island said in Player Skill & Deck Quality:

@wappla Ok, you win... player skill isn't a factor... wait do you even believe that?

And what the heck was Jaco doing playing Combo...?

And isn't the top of our collective bell curve still right of the average?

I was playing 2 Card Monte (ie. Combo) at Champs, because I thought it was very well-positioned for Champs again specifically (I have played it there 2 years in a row). I started 2-0 this year before the train ran off the track in a non-camera feature match where I got 3 total turns against Key-Vault (lost on second turn G1, first turn G2), and never regained a solid enough footing in the tournament after that, then dropped. It's not worth it to me to grind out playing all day for a 7-2 or 6-3 record for a T16 finish like some other people do. Once I'm either out of contention or sick of playing I drop from a tournament, as do a lot of people.

Regarding the topic at hand, there are a lot of things that go in to tournament performance. Selecting a deck for the metagame, getting paired against what you expect when you selected and built your deck, playing that deck tightly, and sometimes even drawing cards in the correct order (ie. variance, and all that you can do to mitigate it). There is an old saying that luck is when skill meets preparation, and that often holds true in Magic. If you do as much as you can to consistently put yourself in a position to win, and your process is good, that is the first step.

That being said, play skill is absolutely relevant, and there should be no expectation that players will perform roughly the same over the long haul with the same deck. Aside from technical aptitude and aforementioned variance, some players are very familiar and skilled with a certain deck (JacoDrazi, or Mentor Gush, for example), while many others may be picking up the deck for the first time that week, and this often bears out directly in tournament result metrics based on many in-game decisions that less experienced pilots are probably unaware are causing them to lose.

@Protoaddct the SMIP pod (and all pods on EC) are listed in the iTunes directory, and we may be putting them on SoundCloud and/or Stitcher in early 2017 as well.

@ChubbyRain said in Oath vs. Mentor Decks:

@Topical_Island

It's ignorant because it lacks knowledge of how the deck plays out. I rarely end up casting the Saheelis I draw...They get pitched to Force, discarded to Dack, floated on top with SDT or JTMS so that I can Oath at least one into the yard. The mana cost only matters insofar as it contains a Blue symbol and is less than or equal to 3 for Sun Titan. This may not be intuitive but it is literally "lacking knowledge about something in particular". I don't mean it as an insult to @JACO.

I've already mentioned my strategy for circumventing graveyard hate. As for Salvagers, I play on MTGO and so the Bomberman combo is not a realistic alternative. Outside of MTGO, Bomberman gets shut down by Null Rod and Sphere effects which are becoming more prevalent.

Understood Matt, and my knowledge of how these games play out is limited to a handful of testing games with/against Saheeli, and no offense taken. I often pitch Dack to Force, discard it to other Dack, etc. as well, and am sure many people play the same way. I do understand that Saheeli provides a potential combo and, but the point remains of the opportunity cost, and if it is demonstrably better than other cards in those slots (or accompanying the Oath strategy). In the games I have both played and watched, it doesn't seem like it, and just seems underpowered on its own, as I mentioned before. Is it your position that the small things Saheeli does is kind of the glue that holds Sun Titan Oath together because of the combo angle, or do you think it is replaceable?

I always liked Sun Titan in Oath, as it's potentially hard-castable and provides tons of value and a potential win (similar to Salvagers), but I am not sure that makes the Saheeli inclusion necessary, which is why I'd like to know more about your specific experiences with it. Every time I have seen Sun Titan Oathed in to play (or cast) in older versions of Oath it has also won the game (speaking exclusively pre-Saheeli), and that may be part of the reason why I just don't find the Saheeli addition all that compelling (aside from how underpowered I view Saheeli itself).

@ChubbyRain said in Oath vs. Mentor Decks:

@JACO said in Oath vs. Mentor Decks:

@jhport12 if you are playing Saheeli as a planeswalker in Oath, that means you are bypassing 2 planeswalkers that are just generally better in the metagame the past 2 years (Jace TMS and Dack Fayden) for the opportunity cost of having Saheeli in your deck.

The various versions of the deck I've played run 2-3 Dacks and 1-2 JTMS - the same as Kelly Oath. You aren't running Saheelis over other planeswalkers. You are running Saheeli + Sun Titan over Salvager and his Trinkets or Griselbrand and his Show and Tells/Vault Keys/etc.

Sorry, when looking at most of the lists I had seen I must have bypassed how many of each were played. Regardless of how many of each individual one are played, my point remains about the opportunity cost of Saheeli vs. other more powerful cards in Vintage (of similar mana curve).

@jhport12 if you are playing Saheeli as a planeswalker in Oath, that means you are bypassing 2 planeswalkers that are just generally better in the metagame the past 2 years (Jace TMS and Dack Fayden) for the opportunity cost of having Saheeli in your deck. What does Saheeli do against stuff like Ravager, Thought-Knot Seer, Mentor, etc.? It functions as a 3 mana Time Walk for your opponent, and is very low impact comparatively. I would rather play either of those aforementioned planeswalkers or even Daretti, Ingenious Iconoclast in those slots (which also usually changes part of the strategic footing of the Oath build in question).