Are the lists posted anywhere, or will they be posted anywhere?

Interested to see how you like that, though I strongly advise against cutting the 4th Serum Powder.

I feel like the removing to Ichorid piece is a little bit overstated too; in Game 1 I'm expected to get my creature into play, not feed it to Ichorid, and except for certain cases, I'm likely siding it out in post-board games. I'm trying to think of a single game in the thousands I've played with Dredge where not being able to bring back Ichorid while having a DR target in the board cost me a game, and I'm not coming up with any... though in fairness I suppose that's not exactly the type of thing I'd be looking for. 

Then again, for a while we did play Sadistic Hypnotist as like a 3x DR target and those all fed to Ichorid, so there's that.

Thanks, great feedback. I just rewrote that section to clear up a couple of points and added a damage charge for each, based on quantity of Bridge tokens.

Since I know everyone loves playing against Dredge so much, I figured I'd write about it. You're welcome!

Free Article - Vintage Dredge, The Once and Forever Boogeyman

In this article I talk about Dredge in general, what an optimal list pre-B&R changes looked like, some of the new cards seeing play, and how to construct a Dredge deck for the new environment.

Also Cthulu, James Cromwell, and more.  Obviously only a deranged and broken mind would play Dredge for 6+ years...

Hope you guys enjoy this one, I had some fun writing it. Note that I formatted this like a "real" article with hover to view card names and formatted deck lists. I'll be going back to the previous two I wrote to do the same thing.

I think Dredge was pretty reasonable during the 4x TFK era. It had to be fast via Fatestitcher and disruptive via COTV, but it was extremely competitive despite seeing not a lot of play. At least in the NE, there also wasn't a devoted school of consistent Dredge players as developed over time. The fact that Tezz players had to devote cards for the mirror as well as Shops and Fish meant that sideboard space was constantly squeezed, as well.

Also just to note that I did enjoy this quite a bit, and it was a nice reminder of the era in which I first started playing Vintage as well (Late 2008). Great work guys.

I think the question here is more about, what type of Workshop deck becomes popular post-COTV's Restriction? Karn played an important dual role as a finisher and a remover of mana sources in the past, both in aggressive decks and very control-oriented lists, but certainly as a finisher has been supplanted by more modern options like Forgemaster (and to no small degree, Lodestone Golem); though this also has to do with less Moxen being played by many blue decks in the format and Shop decks being less likely to be packed with max Smokestacks, Crucibles, etc.

My initial thought process was that there are likely three cards to consider right off the top based on those that have seen play previously.

One is Null Rod, which is exceptional at shutting down fast mana proactively, but doesn't play well with Ravager, Forgemaster or Hangarback, among others.

Two is Karn, which is excellent for ending games quickly and for reactively eliminating fast mana sources.

Three is Ratchet Bomb/Powder Keg, which can sweep away fast mana and Mentor/Pyromancer/Bridge tokens, Oath of Druids, Delver of Secrets, etc.

It is worth noting of course that options two and three don't play nice with option one. I suspect that will become a key point of differentiation between Workshop archetypes. Null Rod will punish Moxen proactively much better than those other options, with the side benefit of potentially harming other Workshop decks that rely on activated Artifact abilities. Conversely aggressive Workshop decks could easily use something like Bomb to sweep away fast mana or other low-mana threats, relying on sideboard cards to protect against combo and Oath.

Absolutely, that does happen, but it isn't as common as Oath coming out and needing an immediate removal effect for it. If Oath were very popular I'd strongly consider going back to Claims.

The real issue I have with the deck is being forced to play Leyline of the Void. Once a certain tipping point gets hit where other Dredge players are using it, you're somewhat obligated to do so, too, but right now I'd much prefer Unmask in that slot by a wide margin.

Serenity has many advantages to Nature's Claim. It is immune to Flusterstorm and Mental Misstep, as well as Misdirection. It can hit an effectively limitless number of hate cards at once if it resolves. Against Workshops, it can not only remove all hate that isn't Tabernacle (which is only moderately effective anyway), it also conveniently eliminates their entire board position save for Lands.

It also has some disadvantages. Against Workshops, that one extra mana can be very significant. In the mirror, if your opponent and you both have Leylines in play, it sadly destroys all the Leylines, not just yours. Against Oath, if you play it on your turn following a resolved Oath by your opponent, they get a chance to activate an Oath trigger. You can't respond with it against Time Vault, though admittedly that and similar scenarios like Oath -> Time Walk are not a common occurrence.

In the metagame as it exists/existed prior to the 9/28 announcement, I think being immune to Flusterstorm and Misstep while having the ability to sweep away multiple pieces of hate against Blue absolutely outweighed the negative.

Whether that still holds up, we shall see.

Yes, correct. I lost a match with Dredge at Champs bc of having Claims, and won my top 8 match at TDG on 9/19 against Dredge bc my opponent had Claims.

EDITED: for clarity. Top 8 was at TDG, not Champs.

Obviously I'm a little bit late to market with this due to a 3-day business trip I had this week, but regardless, here's my take on the B&R changes and how they'll likely impact Vintage. I also provide the top 8 decks from the Top Deck Games Vintage on 9/19, which had 41 players:

Free Article - Analyzing the B&R Changes + Top 8 Decks from TDG 9/19

Interestingly enough there's a lot of singleton Dig Through Time and a winning Workshop deck with no Chalice of the Void in its main deck.

Plus, some nice innovations that I try to highlight as well.

I'm working on a Dredge article to have up hopefully by Monday, and will attempt to get a video/audio piece together this weekend for release next week.

Thanks and appreciate any feedback!

I enjoyed this, in particular the format / approach you took.

This actually harkens back to a series of decks I started playing in the spring of 2011: 
http://morphling.de/top8decks.php?id=1528&highlight=1#place1

Note that I pretty quickly cut Bob out of this deck, but the rest of the shell was pretty solid and I believe both Tom Dixon and Jake Gans won tournaments with versions of this deck.

While I was testing with Stephen's deck I kept thinking how it was close to that list. I actually tried Tinker/Sphinx for a bit before cutting it for 9/19, and I'm not yet sure whether or not it is worth trying. The artifact count is pretty low, but Dack Fayden helps make sure you've got an Artifact available.

Holy crap, I wrote something about Magic!

Dragonlords and Pyromancers: Attacking Post-Champs Vintage

Come for the analysis of Dragonlord Oath and Stephen Menendian's Gush Pyromancer deck, bask in the glory of my (quite possibly worse, who knows) version which was good for top 4 at the 9/19 Top Deck Games event, and behold the power of the best Trump card you've ever seen.

Side note: This is totally free and self-published, if you'd be so kind as to whitelist my site or to turn off ad blocking while you're reading this article, that'd be great, and if you're so inclined, go ahead and click those Google ads. They're tailored to whatever you're into, so I guess whatever you're seeing, that's your thing, you no good degenerate! Or be the song that fills my heart and replace your Amazon.com bookmark with this link: http://amzn.to/1VgwMMk

Still feel this way after how round 5 went?

It was great to see you though, as well as everyone else. I will try very hard to come to these more regularly, I had a great time today. My deck performing well certainly helped, even if Mishra did finally get me in the end.

See everyone tomorrow!

Cross-posting this from the comments of the podcast page:

I wanted to offer some thoughts on this podcast.

First, again, I thought this was an excellent podcast and will serve as a very good recap of this event, including the strategic shifts in the metagame occurring just ahead of the tournament and how folks approached the tournament itself in light of those shifts.

I particularly liked a few sections from this podcast and wanted to take a few minutes to write down a few thoughts.

The discussion on Engineered Explosives and the Sunburst mechanic with regard to common interactions with Workshops as well as Mental Misstep was excellent; this is a great example of something that helps players get an actionable improvement to both their understanding of some specific cards, and more generally with regard to how some of M:TG's rules interact. Same goes for Shattering Spree under Trinisphere and the Mystic Remora draw being optional.

As an extension of this thought process, it might be good feedback for the judge team for Eternal Weekend to take note of some of these interactions - which occur in Vintage quite frequently - and ensure that the judges for next year, from the head judge down, get to spend some additional time focusing on having a clear understanding of cost modification via Thorn/Sphere/Lodestone and 3sphere, and upkeep triggers like Smokestack and Wire, etc. From the stories relayed in the podcast, it sounds like these were the main source of questionable/problematic judge rulings.

I'd love to hear Kevin talk more about Mystic Remora. This is a card I played heavily for about 6 months in a Remora Gro build with Gush that was popular in the NE for a time in 2011 (including a win with 4x Remora: http://morphling.de/top8decks.... and one thing I found while playing it is that a surprisingly large percentage of players, when faced with this card, have no idea what to do, and make consistently baffling decisions. It was one of the main reasons I played it, frankly, as I felt like I got free wins from opponents just being completely flummoxed by the card. (Somewhat humorously at least to me, I was chastised at the time for trying to play both Remora and Gush together, but sometimes you just want to play all the best draw engines... this deck also played Dark Confidant - greedy, greedy.)

Steve, I spent about 3 hours playing your deck last night against a stock Mentor deck, where I felt highly favored, and against Will Magrann's list from Champs, where even after sideboard I felt highly unfavored (with the note that my draws were quite poor and my opponents were uniformly good). It is an interesting and pretty elegant design though I feel like in the NE, the approach for Workshops might need to be tweaked to account for regional preference.

Regarding Dredge, to the extent that you're able to do so, it would be interesting to see if there's any type of correlation between versions that performed vs. those that did not; for instance, was the quantity of Ichorids or Petrified Fields in any way statistically relevant, or did the transformative versions do better or worse than the traditional ones (assuming a statistically relevant quantity of transformative builds were in the field). I worked with Mark Hornung, Brad Granberry, and Brian Durkin on our list, which was an built on Sullivan Brophy's from the NYSE (and in fact my list was 73/75 of his for the event). While I dropped at 3-2 after my second loss in round 5, Brian made top 32 (I think losing a top 8 win and in), Mark made top 64, and Brad just missed top 64 at 69th, so I think there's still plenty of reason to believe that experienced Dredge players who had arguably the "right" list still did well at this event.

Looking forward to your next podcast!

Nice deck.  I may play this the next time I get to play Vintage, it looks like a deck I'd really enjoy playing.  Did you fly into Philly for the NY tournament, on Friday night?  I thought I saw you at the airport but I was flying back in from a week in Columbus, OH for work and my brain was fried.

My son woke up with a fever of almost 102 so I'm not going to make it.  Good luck to all who play.

This was a really fun tournament. I picked the right one to attend; great to see such strong turnout and a mix of new and old players.  Congrats on the win Tom. I'll do my best to see everyone again on the 24th.

I may be able to make this.

Really enjoyed it, though the number of times the format was referred to as a home of turn one kills was mildly annoying.  I still maintain that over the past five years, far more Legacy games I've played and witnessed are over by turn 2 than Vintage games.

Agree with this post.  I watched 2011's coverage and while Smmenen defended it at the time, it was easily the worst commentary I've ever seen. Only the last few matches where he was involved after being eliminated were watchable at all (and those were quite good).

While the coverage Sunday wasn't perfect, it was probably as ideal as you can get for Vintage - there were people who were watching because of the caliber of the coverage team; these guys hadn't done coverage together in a decade, and people who had no interest in Vintage prior were watching for these two.  I saw many commented/posted that the format was interesting/exciting, comments about picking up cards on MTGO for Vintage Masters, etc. 

I do wish I could've done coverage Sunday, as I'd been testing a lot of Legacy and no Vintage at all in the few months before this event, I think in terms of being good for the format, this was an ideal selection by Nick and GGS Live.

Anyone who watched the Saturday coverage, I'd be happy to hear any thoughts/feedback on that - PM me or email me.

Really enjoyed reading through this thread just now.

I dropped at 2-3 after having played some of the worst Magic of my life.  Doing coverage Saturday (after a long week at work) and not sleeping well on Saturday night left my brain completely fried.  Still, the rounds I played were fun and my opponents were good sports.

I'd encourage everyone to continue to give Nick feedback (both praise for what went well and constructive criticism for areas you felt could use improvement), and also to pass feedback about the event on to Wizards.  Nick, perhaps you can offer a suggestion as to who people can email to offer positive feedback on this event, as I think we'd all love to see a repeat of this next year.

I can definitely say that I had a great time doing commentary on Saturday; I also listened to all of Sunday's coverage and I think the coverage was easily the best Vintage coverage I've ever seen, not close. 

Nick, I know what an incredible amount of time, money, and energy went into this for you, and that hosting the best Vintage Champs event ever has been a dream of yours for a long time.  Congrats, you achieved your objective and then some.

And of course, a big thanks to everyone who came out and made this the biggest Champs yet.

I would assume zero proxies at all events.

That playmat is insane.

This event is going to be incredible.

Josh Potucek won't be playing, update your cards.  I *will* be playing, and am doing the Legacy commentary on Saturday.

I think Genesis Chamber is solid in the deck though in some match-ups it does have to come out.  When I looked at the list at first, I was like, "No way is that card a real thing." Then I played against it in a tournament and my opponent had one of those "Shop, Mox, Chamber, Memnite, (token), Signal Pest, (token), Frogmite (token), Skullclamp, pass" hands.  The synergy with Ravager, Skullclamp, Signal Pest, Tolarian/Gaea's Cradle, and if you choose to play them, Tangle Wire / Cranial Plating / Forgemaster, is part of what makes the deck so sweet.  I actually hated the hands that didn't have Chamber or Skullclamp, which was part of my issue with the deck in testing and the tournament.  It seemed like people who were familiar with the deck just countered those and then 1-for-1'd me or executed their gameplan before I could win.

When you say "opposing aggro decks" what are you referring to?

This deck is really sweet by the way.  I don't think it is a gimmick or a joke.  An aggro/combo deck that has a good Workshop match-up is a pretty good spot to be in.  The only thing I'd worry about - locally to me - is that because Shops had been quiet, folks had slacked a bit with their Workshop hate, and thus we had a Mishra surprise party last Sunday.  While the deck can withstand some hate, when you're staring down, oh, 3 Ingot Chewers and an Ancient Grudge by turn three, life can still be pretty miserable.