I know Shattering Spree doesn't see a lot of play these days, but this is better than it in a lot of cases, right? While it's an additional colorless for the first one, generating additional colorless seems a lot easier than generating additional red mana for each target after the first.
I won an 18-person event yesterday with the Asia Vintage Champs winning list, swapping out Spell Queller for Dryad Militant. Played against blue decks every round (including Outcome once, where the high density of Stony/Null Rod really paid off) and got quite lucky in my top 8 matches, but the deck felt really good.
Assassin's Trophy BG
Instant
Destroy target permanent an opponent controls. Its controller may search their library for a basic land card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle their library.
Abrupt Decay has been on a bit of a downswing lately, but this seems to have potential in that same slot of flexible removal for BUG and/or Oath decks. Losing uncounterable hurts, but the additional ability to hit any permanent might make up for that.
My personal favorite periods of Vintage history have very little to do with the format itself, and more to do with who I was able to spend time with. My most active participation in the Vintage community was from 2003-2006 period, and I'll always look back fondly at periods 50-54 and 58 in particular.
This was shortly after I arrived at college and realized that half of the people on my floor played Magic, and several of them were interested in getting into Vintage. We really bonded over playtesting janky decks, and one friend of mine who has since passed away even won a Mox Pearl in a local tournament piloting a hacked together version of Burning Tendrils - turns out you don't really need power if you have 4x LED, 4x Burning Wish for Yawg Will.
During this period I got my first taste of a big Vintage tournament, piloting Oshawa Stompy to a top 16 finish at Andy Stokinger's Dual Lotus tournament in Storrs, CT, iirc, which also happened to the first and only time I met @Smmenen - he was kind enough to sign my Memnarch after smashing me in the round 2 of that event that didn't count. This tournament was great fun, and really sealed my love of the format and the community.
I'll always remember the time spent helping a friend tune an Affinity list featuring the newly printed Genesis Chamber and Skullclamp, culminating with him winning a Mox with it in a local event. That deck was super sweet and did some really busted stuff with the right draws. Subsequent to that, I worked tirelessly with the help of others to try and break Arcbound Crusher, exploiting its interaction with Genesis Chamber and Affinity creatures. This ended up not being quite as good as just playing Trinisphere, but it was really fun to work on and play, and one of the co-creators did top 16 an SCG Power 9 tournament with it so there was some merit to the idea.
After taking a brief break from the format and getting into the Vs System competitive scene for a bit, I circled back to Vintage. Being in Western MA at the time, I had the opportunity to connect with a great group of local players. It was great to be a part of the community again, and I'll never forget cramming onto the floor of a hotel room the night before a Waterbury with what felt like 12 other people. I remember very little of the Magic from that weekend other than @Brass-Man winning a huge game of Type 4, but I'll remember the experience forever.
The following summer I sold off my Magic collection to fund the necessities for my summer internship, and I fell out of the loop with Vintage and the community. It wasn't until after my friend passed away in 2015 that I came back to the format to help organize a Vintage tournament in his memory, and I'm really glad that I did.
Serious congratulations on making it to the end of this monumental effort. I look forward to picking up a copy when it gets compiled into a book.
One thing I'd love to see more of is gameplay videos that aren't just streams posted after the fact. I get why we don't have a lot of these, since they take more editing work and time commitment than just posting a stream, but I'd love to have more of these.
@mdkubiak I agree wholeheartedly. Let's let the players play for a while, let the dust settle and see what shakes out. Vintage should be by its very nature the slowest-moving format; restrictions every six months or a year are far too frequent to let the metagame correct for surface-level issues.
I just watched the replay of @hierarchnoble's stream with this deck, and it looks like an absolute blast. One thing that jumped out to me is that the mana base seems stretched a bit thin with the blue power, the black tutors, and the white sideboard cards. The black tutors also seemed a bit slow. I'm loving the discussion on this deck; with some fine tuning it could be a real factor in the metagame.
Stony Silence is probably the single best hate card against the deck, but I've found the best way to beat the deck is a combination of early disruption and a fast clock. Even if you land a hate card early, if you don't end the game soon thereafter they might find a way to draw out of it.
@dr-j Could a one-of Consecrated Sphinx be an alternative to the Geyser? Closes the game quickly, is a decent way to spend Drain mana, and makes it hard for your opponent to claw back into the game if you're ahead on cards.
@protoaddict I don't think it provides more as you add more stickers - "for each unique vowel on that sticker". It's an interesting one, but I'm not seeing the application at the moment.
@schmakt I just don't see how the black deck will ever be competitive with the others given its focus on land destruction and the use of demons as the win conditions. If I was trying to do something casual competitive with black, I'd either go with Storm combo or some sort of aggressive deck with cheap creatures and hand destruction (Thoughtseize, Duress, etc.).
@jaeastep I'm not in the area, but I'm excited to see the event! Best of luck!
This doesn't counter mana abilities, right? Because of timing rules?
Yes, people are trying it out to varying degrees of success in a bunch of different shells. Here are the published decklists to-date.
Justin (Iamactuallylvl1) has been trying it in almost every one of his recent videos if you want to see some other ideas.
@marland_moore I'm not even entirely sure I agree with your premise. You can play and be competitive with a wide variety of archetypes in the current metagame. Yes Tinker is the best performing deck, so people will tend to play it more than other decks, but you can certainly have success with any of the following, all of which show up in different numbers week to week:
@botvinik It's literally in the title. Houston.
I'm really excited for this. PTs used to be must watch events for me, and I'm looking forward to watching them again!
I agree with Marland here. Is Stoneforge --> Kaldra the absolute most powerful thing you can be doing in Vintage? Probably not, but that doesn't eliminate it as a way you can win games in the format. The video Justin posted proves as much.
@schmakt Luckily you won't need to find your DCI #, they got rid of those...last year I think. Whatever email address you're using for your Arena log-in is basically your new "DCI #".
