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.
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.
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.
@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.
@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.
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.
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.
@botvinik Details still to come, but I have to assume they'll have those available. They seem to do those for any big eternal event these days.
@thecravenone Off topic a bit, but can you elaborate on how that worked? Fatestitcher has Unearth, not Flashback.
I like that this card exists. If you need something dead, this does it, no questions asked. I've seen U/B control decks running Eliminate and I don't see why one wouldn't at least consider this card for that same slot if killing creatures was the primary concern.
Paper Vintage is in a bit of a downward spiral at the moment, and I don't think proxies or no proxies has much to do with it. There's no events because there's no players, so there's no publicity of the format because there's no events and so on ad nauseum. The only way this changes is with focused, local, individual driven effort to build a small player base and slowly expand from there.
@thecravenone said in Initiative to help save Paper Vintage:
I like proxies.
Me too! They're a great way to increase affordability and even let you get creative with the art and other things. I want more people to play Vintage, and there's no question that the normalization of proxies is by far the most practical and immediately impactful way to make that happen.
@madmanmike25 The card has been released for over a month and it has put up zero results. So yes, I do think that.
@botvinik Sorry, I shouldn't have used "no one". You're right, hatebears can effectively use the card, but broadly speaking no deck that has any significant metagame share is running it. You'll note that I called out white-based aggro as the biggest beneficiary of this card before it came out:
@madmanmike25 Literally all of them because no one is playing this card.
@lienielsen Was just an example. Insert any other planeswalker there if it's better for you.
