On turn 2, you now have Volc in play, you can play Tolarian Academy, but it taps for 0 until you drop an artifact. It was outright stated that "you lose on turn 3," so your "hope to race" won't work. On the play, you have that extra turn to get there, and it's no longer much of a puzzle.

If I may dictate that I draw a Mox for my Turn 1 draw, there's a solution in, Mox, Lotus, Academy, tap Mox for SDT, tap Academy for UUU, sac Lotus for BBB, D. Tutor for Vault, play Vault, Imp Seal for Key, play Key. Smile and pass turn.

If the Turn 1 draw is a dead card, then there doesn't appear to be a way around it without using Gifts, and since this was a Gifts article, it seems a safe assumption. Beyond that, are there any assumptions we can make here? Can we assume that we're going to counter Dread Return with Mana Drain to live until turn 3 and 4 mana? Is Ancestral Recall dead since we don't know what we're drawing?

This is the crux of the problem. Ben Bleiweiss is a professional Magic dealer. He has a much greater interest in seeing high prices for old cards than the health of the Vintage scene as a whole. On the other hand, we, as Vintage players, should care more about seeing infusions of new blood into the scene. Many more Standard players would play Vintage if they didn't feel immediately priced out.

Yes, they can just proxy a deck. No, that's not the same.

I can even hand someone one of my decks to a Standard player, and unless I have very nice proxies (not just the word "BAZAAR" sharpied onto a Plains), they won't know the cards. If Vintage cards were cheaper and more plentiful, we could get more people trying it out. We could maintain more than one deck at a time to lend to friends.

Expanding Vintage and keeping the prices of old cards high are two crossed purposes, and it's quite unfortunate that those who are best poised to serve as ambassadors of the Vintage format stand to lose the most because they'd see their collections lose thousands of dollars.

While both abuse the dredge mechanic and the interaction with Bazaar of Baghdad, there are 2 distinct styles of Ichorid. It's going to be tough to compare decklists if one person lists a "manaless" build and the very next one is a mana-Ichorid build with Breakthrough.

If this is going to be a comprehensive look at building Dredge, we should break down our decklists by the roles the cards play, rather than what type of card they are.

My current list (still testing a bit, sideboard is shaky):

Mulligan:
4x Serum Powder

Mana:
4x City of Brass
3x Gemstone Mine

Dredge Engine:
4x Bazaar of Baghdad
2x Fatestitcher
4x Golgari Grave-Troll
4x Stinkweed Imp
3x Golgari Thug

Disruption:
1x Darkblast (doubles as dredge)
4x Cabal Therapy
4x Unmask
3x Leyline of the Void
4x Chalice of the Void

Dudes/Win Cons:
4x Bridge from Below
4x Narcomoeba
4x Ichorid
2x Dread Return
2x Flame-Kin Zealot

Sideboard:
2x Emerald Charm
3x Contagion
4x Chain of Vapor
2x Pithing Needle
2x Oxidize
2x Ancient Grudge

My build is mostly "manaless," with the rainbow lands in for Fatestitcher and sideboard cards. My store's metagame has a few more Yixlid Jailers running around than Leylines, so the Charms are lower, and Contagion is a champ. I might even bump to 1/4, but I don't want to change the artifact hate or Needles, and Chain of Vapor is pretty much a catch-all.


Ichorid is a legitimate deck that can win tournaments. It's not just an annoying "draw out the match" deck like Turbo-Fog in standard. If you love annoying people, that's a problem you need to deal with, but the whole "Ichorid is annoying" is a strange trope. I don't see why it's any more annoying than Vault/Key packed with 16 counterspells and tons of draw, or lockdown like Stax. It could be a bit of elitism as people don't like having their multi-thousand-dollar decks beaten by a pile that costs under $200 aside from 4-proxy Bazaars.

The thing is, a lot of Moxes and other cards will get lost over time. I have known a few people who had a Mox or 2 in their casual deck. They've played Magic on and off for 15 years, they got the card when it cost nothing, and they don't care to sell it. They don't even care about the value, it's just a game to them. This one guy got a kick out of playing cards like his Mox Pearl, Fastbond, and Concordant Crossroads in an un-sleeved deck. He didn't mangle or abuse the cards, but that Mox will be trashed in another 15 years.

We have no idea of how many Moxes are actually still existent, or how many are available on the market (you can't count one that someone plans on keeping forever). Things get lost, as well; even if people care greatly for their cards, there's angry S.O.s and spouses, thieves, children, and accidents.

Regardless, there's still a hard cap on playing Vintage in a non-proxy environment. A circulation of under 15,000 is really low. Even if as many as 10K have survived the test of time, we won't see a huge influx of people like Legacy's seen, nor huge 1000-person events like GP Chicago. Then again, the community might prefer it this way. I've noticed an ongoing theme of people talking about "earning one's power" by winning tournaments. It's an essentially elitist attitude, as it limits participation to only those good enough to consistently win tournaments. Or shell out $3000, I guess.

If someone is saying obscene things in your presence and won't stop, call a judge.
If someone is making obscene gestures in your presence and won't stop, call a judge.
If someone is making obscene smells in your presence...

The real question is, how would you even know? If someone has a very good proxy/counterfeit, or even well-clipped CE, what's going to prompt the call to a judge? I assure you, there are very few Magic players who would indulge a request to remove their cards from sleeves to test for authenticity.

There are stiff penalties for this sort of stuff, but the odds that someone is going to call the judge, or that a judge is going to de-sleeve someone's deck during a deck-check are vanishingly small. Hell, if the tournament's small enough stakes, I could see a player with real cards dropping from a tournament rather than letting a judge de-sleeve his cards.

Getting back to the discussion, eventually Vintage will either wither and die as a format, or WotC will reprint the Power 9 in limited, but sufficient numbers. There's no way Vintage will be around for another 15 years without reprints. Imagine how long Baseball would last if "official" bats, balls, and gloves all stopped being produced. People would certainly resort to playing with tattered balls and worn gloves, but eventually even those would be in short supply as people removed them from circulation as "collectibles" and new players had no chance of ever getting their hands on one.

Goyf is going to be Extended-legal for another 4 years and 3 months, and is a main-deck card for green-based fish, as well as being huge in Legacy. It's just going to keep going up, and will hiccup a bit when it finally rotates out, but assuming Magic is still going strong, will be more than it is now.

I've generally got the feeling that aside from occasionally shutting down Planeswalkers, Needle was used mostly in Extended and eternal formats, so its price is again tied to the Extended rotation. M10 rotates with the Shards of Alara block, so we're guaranteed to see Pithing Needle in Extended for the next 6 years.

Waiting on cards that are Type 2-legal I kind of understand, Tezzeret's been sinking pretty fast, but Thoughtseize is a huge card in all formats, and it's just not going to drop that much in October, since Extended season demand will eat up all of the excess supply from the Standard players selling off.

This stood out to me. Is this really true? The card costs $10, maybe $15 at most, and has been in print for 4 years, and was reprinted in 10th. $10 seems like nothing compared to a playset of FoWs, Underground Seas, even fetch-lands. Sure, once you have them, you're all set, but isn't it the same with a card like Pithing Needle?

That, and if Vintage players didn't pick it up for the 2 years it was in 10th, why would they pick it up now in M10?

The past-set checklists are always a nice thing to see at the start of this sort of article. Overall, I liked the article, even if it's a bit self-explanatory, since none of the M10 cards are so weird that they'd require testing to figure out if they're good or not.

Adan:

Wiley and Meadbert answered this in Replies 15 & 16. Flame-Kin Zealot is a win if you have enough tokens, but if you don't have lethal damage, giving them the extra turn may be game over. Sadistic Hypnotist is a slower win, but it rips apart their hand, and they're forced to hope for Yawg Will, and even then, they'll have needed to have dropped 3 mana producers beforehand.

It's a matter of choice, but if you can't guarantee 6 tokens to swing with the Zealot, the Hypnotist looks better.

The mana burn is incidental to these examples. In nearly every format, combo is an all-in sort of thing. If they Stifle your Tendrils off Mind's Desire and you haven't got a counter for the Stifle or a second Tendrils, you're probably scooping anyway. Your hand's empty, there's no more gas off Mind's Desire, etc. The fact that you might mana burn to 10 instead of staying at 18 life isn't nearly as important as the fact that you're in top-deck mode with a deck that doesn't do well in top-deck mode.

I understand that Magic is a game of small incremental advantage, but the mana burn isn't the big concern in the Storm situation.

So what you're saying is that the Moggs and Grizzlies square off, prepare to fight each other (damage on the stack), then the Mogg suicide-bombs the Grizzly, and after that resolves, the damage on the stack should resolve? Sorry, I don't buy it. I don't buy the notion of Sakura Tribe Elder simultaneously being able to fight for all he's worth and ALSO leave combat forever to seek out a land. It's one or the other, bub. If STE is dealt lethal damage, he's in no condition to be land-seeking.

I really like these changes because it'll make players choose whether they want to do combat damage, or use sacrificial abilities. Moreover, because creatures will no longer be able to do both, we'll get some new creatures with bad-ass abilities that will be still be considered balanced because the choice is necessary.

Looking at your graph, Stephen, mostly what it looks like is that as of June 20, 2 different varieties of Blue Control got smooshed into one. Whereas a Vintage player wanting to shuffle up Blue cards could run Mana Drains or a Gush shell, the result was largely the same: a Force of Will-powered control deck. I can't honestly see the difference between 25% Gush plus 15% Mana Drain, and today's 40% Mana Drain.

The remaining changes, according to your graph? Flash was restricted, which nearly instantly killed that archetype. Brainstorm, Merchant Scroll, and Ponder being restricted made Ritual-based combo decks a bit less consistent.

I certainly hope for some unrestrictions, because the shotgun-style restriction approach was far too much at once, but it seems like it's 40% Blue before to 40% Blue now. You're definitely right that Mana Drains are dominating, but only because Mana Drain is the "new" official face of Blue Control, when it used to be a duo.

Well, Stephen dismissed it out of hand. It may well be the case that there is a true inability, but that can be rectified for the future. I know for DCI-sanctioned events, the decklists include a "Deck Name" spot, and from there, tournament reports can be relatively accurate. Obviously decks blur together a bit, and the line is subjective, but the information can be gleaned, and metagame reports for Standard have been written up for Star City Games that described the entire field from 200+ player tournaments.

It isn't asking that much from the community to have TOs list things like "Tezzeret Control: 16, Remora: 8, Oath 3, Ichorid 2, Charbelcher 1, Homebrew/etc. 3" in their report. At least then when we see 5 Tezzeret players in the top 8, we can see that roughly 50% of the players were playing Tezzeret, so it's not that disproportionate.

I did read the article, I saw this argument, but I don't find it compelling. This example means that the remaining 40% of decks are placing 50%. Take it to an extreme of "Broken Deck A" being 90% of the field, and 75% of Top 8s (90/75 is the same ratio as 60/50), that means the remaining 10% of decks are making up 25% of Top 8s! The real question, then, is to ask why more people aren't playing the deck that places disproportionately more often.

In your theoretical situation, I'd be totally fine with the metagame. Necro/Affinity/whatever is hugely popular, but does worse than expected. I'd play another deck to prey on the homogenous metagame and be happier for it. The situation that calls for bannings or restrictions is when a deck that is played 30% of the time is placing as 50% of the Top 8; when a deck places disproportionately higher, then something is going wrong. Popularity alone is not a reason to restrict something, and since you're unwilling to address whether Tezzeret's success in placing repeatedly in Top 8s is due to popularity, the argument goes nowhere.

It seems really foolish to just flat-out ignore what archetypes people played in the Swiss and only look at the Top 8. If fully 50% of the players were playing a Tezzeret/Time Vault Control deck, we'd expect to see 50% of the Top 8 playing that, and 50% of tournaments won by that deck.

If Tezzeret is played by 50%, but only makes up 40% of the Top 8, and only wins 30%, then it seems fair. If it was being played by only 30%, and won 50%, then it's disproportionately powerful, and would be something to be concerned about. Decks gain popularity, and are played for reasons other than being just the "Best Deck." I think it's important to discern whether Tezzeret is winning tournaments due to being overpowered, being played specifically by the best players, or due to sheer numbers. If you discount the notion of looking at the total players rather than just the Top 8, you're dismissing the "sheer numbers" possibility out of hand.

You absolutely have built decks around FoW, you just didn't think about it that way. Without the ability to counter turn-one combos, or threaten this ability, many blue decks just couldn't get anything done in Vintage. Tap nearly all your mana every turn to pay for Mystic Remora? Stop Grim Long and Charbelcher strategies?

Force of Will is the enabler of the deck archetype, and you're unlikely to ever find a deck with only 2 Forces, or a Forceless blue deck that couldn't be improved by 4 Forces. Much like how the fast mana of Workshop and Rituals enable their respective strategies, FoW enables its archetype. What you do within that archetype to win is another story, but I feel confident that if FoW was restricted or banned, the archetype would collapse under the overwhelming pressure of turn one combo decks.

Kataki effectively turns Moxes into mono-colored Lotus Petals (though 1 could pay for another and then be sacced, it roughly halves their artifact mana if they don't want to pay for all of them every upkeep). Nearly every Vintage deck runs artifacts, and Kataki slows down combos like Vault-Key, since going infinite requires 3 non-artifact mana to maintain, rather than 1. Remember, the first goal of a Budget deck is to survive until turn 2. Kataki isn't quite as good as Null Rod, but it seems pretty sweet.

Stephen, this was a very enjoyable article, and it made me want to sleeve up the deck to take it for a spin. One small quibble, and this is more about your writing style:


Ethersworn Canonist is pretty clearly a "she" or "her," not a "him." Using kinda-masculine, kinda-gender-neutral words like "guys" or "dudes" is one thing, but "him" is not a gender-neutral pronoun. Assuming the masculine would even be forgivable for ambiguous beasts like Tarmogoyf, but when an anthropomorphic creature is pretty clearly gendered on the card, it's strange to read an article referring to the creature with the wrong pronoun. It's about as jarring as if someone referred to Gaddock Teeg as "she."

This may be something to take up with the SCG editors as much as with you, but little continuity errors like this distract from the flow of the article as much as typos.

Regarding the content rather than the message: does this deck just kind of hope to find a way to get a creature to the graveyard to halt Bridge from Below against Ichorid? Did it just run out of sideboard slots, and main-deck creatures are sufficient? I ask only because the wisdom you've proffered in the past has been to run around 7-8 spots for Ichorid hate, and we're seeing zero here.

Is Thoughtcast really going to work with this deck? In order for it to be decent, you need 3, preferably 4 artifacts on board. You plan to pop the baubles to cycle them, or counter them with Arcane Denial, so it seems like you'll often be playing Thoughtcast as a Counsel of the Soratami, or even Inspiration! On the other hand, if you're keeping baubles on the board to make Thoughtcast efficient, you're hurting yourself as far as information is concerned. Since they're "slowtrips," you can't even pop them in response to a killer spell to draw into control elements.

The deck itself is an interesting concept, but I honestly don't see Thoughtcast as working out. Vintage decks are packed with artifacts, but we don't play Thoughtcast because it's not reliably efficient, and it's a Sorcery. Do you really see the benefit of cheap Thoughtcasts worth the pain of having to play baubles and wait for your cards?

That, and Baubles make mulligan decisions really tough. When you pull 2 or 3 in an opening hand, you have no idea what you're really looking at. Does this deck have enough resilience to deliver, or will it just be mulligan hell?

Looking at your list for the Coatl deck, you have 2 Trop and 2 Volc Island, but no red spells. Is there a reason why you wouldn't run 4 Trop Island instead to increase the chance of having green for Coatl?

While it is banned in Legacy, and thus possibly fits their so-far-ambiguous criterion for inclusion, I don't know that they're going to include it. Even if they were willing to reprint a $70 card in a $35 (MSRP) set, the real kicker is that Mana Drain is a 4x card. That means an already-rare set might end up getting to less than half the intended buyers. I imagine that the set will include cards that are either one-ofs for Vintage or Cube.

That said, I'd be quite happy if they did include it, at least if I were able to pick up one or more sets at or near retail cost.

I enjoyed the article. It's not really Stephen's fault that ARB is all-gold, and it'd still be a shame to just skip over this set with a 2-sentence dismissal.

One thing I noted was the aside about Conflux, telling Vintage players to set aside a playset of Noble Hierarchs, Transmuters, and a singleton Leviathan. I'm still pretty new to Vintage, and I've been trying to set aside Vintage staples whenever possible, but I was wondering if there's a list somewhere of Vintage staples that I could refer to.

This gets +1/+1 for every turn, guaranteed. Brainstorm, Thirst, A. Recall are all +3 for this instead of +1 for Dryad; Meditate is +4. Necropotence and Yawg's Bargain are Hatred.

Why's this better than Psychatog? Because you get to keep the cards, and the pump is permanent.

Tarmogoyf tops out at 7/8 in Vintage, and realistically would see 3/4 or 4/5 in the early game (land, instant, artifact, maybe sorcery). Wisescale is going to be 3/3 the first time it attacks due to draw phase alone, and anything like a Brainstorm puts it way ahead. Wisescale is a little more vulnerable to bounce, but Tarmogoyf can be shrunk by incidental graveyard hate.

It's not a grand-slam obvious inclusion, but I wouldn't count this one out yet. Getting bigger just for drawing cards is exactly the sort of creature that can be a star in Vintage.

I could almost see shoehorning this into a Remora deck. Drop this on the board, draw 4 off Meditate, a few more off Remora, and by the time your turn comes back, it's a 10/10.

It costs one more than Dryad or Goyf, but the extra is blue, which isn't tough, and it'll grow much bigger much faster than either of them. It seems like it has potential for sure. Hell, if Cold-Eyed Selkie and Noble Hierarch are seeing play, why can't this one make friends with them?

First and foremost, a thriving scene keeps itself going. Where American Vintage is now, some people don't even show up because the prize support or even attendance is questionable. It's a cycle really, and Europe has the cycle going, where hundreds show up, because they know hundreds will show up, because hundreds showed last time, etc.

That said, there are also huge differences between Europe and America. You have reliable public transportation, we need to carpool. You have more concentrated population centers. There's also a different culture in many parts of Europe, where young adults often continue to live with their parents in their 20s, opening up tons of disposable income that Americans seldom have. I've read articles about how guys in Italy are not moving out even into their 30s!

What's often also overlooked is the fact that over the past 8 years or so, Europe has enjoyed ever-increasing purchasing parity compared to the US. The Euro, introduced 10 years ago, was introduced approximately equal to the dollar. It's now worth $1.31 today. Europeans could come to America during the Bush years and everything was on sale. That includes Magic Cards. A lot of our Power flew over the ocean to Europe because Europeans could afford to pay more than Americans.

I for one am hoping that what WotC is doing with FTV: Exiled is testing the waters to see how (limited) reprints of popular cards affect the prices of the originals. If they find that an influx of new cards actually raises the profile of these (broken) cards and spurs interest (and prices), then they'll know they're on to something. If printing new border, foil Balance & Friends lowers prices, they'll know the Reserve List needs to be respected.

That being said, Ye Olde Beta Bling is enough alone to raise the price of cards dramatically. A card like Serra Angel, that's been reprinted many times over, and was an uncommon for most of its run, is $50 mint for Beta, and $75 for Alpha on Star City Games. Meanwhile, they sell 10th Edition (black borders again! ZOMG) for $3. Shivan Dragon is $2-3 for mint versions depending on edition, but $200 for Alpha/Beta, and still $30 for Unlimited. Popular cards retain value for old "bling" editions, even if reprinted many times.

Printing Power 9 cards with different art, new borders is not guaranteed to devalue the old ones. As of now, Demonic Tutor is $100/$75 for Alpha/Beta, $15 for Unlimited, $10 for Revised, and $7.50 for DvD. Let's come back to this in 3-6 months and see if this card finds itself devalued from the reprint. A lot of this theorycrafting just won't work better than seeing what actually happens.

Also, if this community prefers another gauge of prices than SCG, let me know, but I think D. Tutor is a good way to measure how a limited reprint might effect prices of old cards.

What's the cut-off for "too expensive" and thus worthy of being proxied? Personally, I play Charbelcher, and I "need" 7 proxies for my list: Lotus, 5 Moxes, Timetwister. I currently am also missing a Mana Crypt and a Chrome Mox, but I could get those if need be.

Other decks reasonably "need" more; your own Grim Long list from last week's article has Lotus, 5 Moxes, Ancestral Recall, Time Walk, Twister, Imperial Seal, and 4 Grim Tutors. Setting $100 as the bar at which many serious Magic players would balk on shelling out for a single card, your deck "needs" 14 proxies.

There are budget decks, including Christmas Beats and Ichorid, but in order to make Vintage Magic "fair," the average serious player should not have to choose from only a couple of decks because they're $1000 away from being able to make the proxy limit.

I think the real problem is not so much the quantity of the proxies, as the quality. I've lovingly created my own Lotus and Mox proxies, and while I'm not the best artist in the world, every opponent I face will instantly know what card I am playing. A little elbow grease and acetone, an hour with pencils, pens, and markers, and I get the joy of playing with a nice looking, if not real, Mox, instead of a Plains that was Sharpied up. Being able to "see" the cards, really adds a lot. I know there are legal issues to any one person doing too many of these and passing them off as "genuine" proxies, but I think this is a good middle ground between "not enough proxies to play Real Vintage" and "25 crappy proxies that all look the same." If Warhammer and other miniatures scenes can have a minimum acceptable level of work done for a presentable figure, why can't the Vintage scene have a minimum acceptable level of work done for a presentable proxy?

After nearly a 10-year-hiatus, I got back into Magic early last year, and I've already played in 2 Vintage tournaments at Pandemonium Books and Games in Cambridge, MA. This was starting from scratch, as I'd sold off my collection. Proxies were absolutely the only way to play at all, and I would have stuck with Standard (and drafts) only if not for proxies. One thing that I think these arguments miss entirely is that while the prices of power might decrease as a whole, the prices of peripheral cards increase. I've been trying to get my hands on Vintage and Legacy staples whenever possible. I'm trading for fetchlands, dual lands, Dazes, Remoras, and Meditates, Welders and Lackeys, etc. Players like me increase the demand for these cards, too!

If I won the Ancestral Recall that Pandemonium had for 1st prize, would I have kept it? Probably not, but only because I'd try to trade it for other staples like a playset of FoWs, or  Mana Drains. With limited disposable income, I have to trade for cards rather than buying them outright, but the presence of proxies has lowered that brass ring to the point where making a Vintage deck seems possible.

At some point, people need to decide if Vintage Magic should be like Chess, or not. Right now, the extreme price of Moxes is akin to having to shell out $1500 for a Queen, and $500 each for Rooks. Can you win a game of Chess without a Queen, or without Rooks? Possibly, but the game is healthier for the even playing field. Vintage Magic has a severe image problem even today, where in addition to the notion of "most money wins," a lot of people see it as "first-turn win, or bust." Win the coin flip, or you lose. Rather than arguing about what proxies are doing, I'd rather see people address the notion of making Vintage more accessible and less frightening.

Lastly, I think Ben's article was pretty slanted toward the notion that proxies impact the price of Vintage cards and Power. Yeah, when you planned on giving a Mox Sapphire as a prize, then proxies reduce that price, and the value of the tournament as a whole. If tournament organizers stopped using Moxes as prizes, and put up cash instead (like nearly all other tournament types), the price wouldn't affect tournament attendance. The health of the format and the game as a whole is not dictated by the price of the cards. Chess, Poker, Scrabble, Bridge, etc. all have phenomenally high numbers of serious players, and the barrier to entry is extremely low. Price people out of the game, and it becomes more like Polo, which is a sport I might enjoy, but I can't afford a horse to find out.