It's hard to lose a game without having cast 4 instants/sorceries by the end. Maybe against shops, Belcher, or TPS, if they get lucky and go off T1 or T2 undisrupted.

Right. With a corner case for copy effects, just for extra confusion.

I was about to post this as well.

So to start with, this is a blue Tarmogoyf. Tarmogoyf in the best case is a four-turn clock; if it takes two turns to flip this thing, it is also a four-turn clock (because it can attack the turn you flip it).

When it does flip, as you say it bounces your opponent's token swarms, Golems, etc (everything except Phyrexian Revoker, I guess).

Tarmogoyf hasn't seen much Vintage play in a while, but this feels like an upgrade and worth consideration.

When I was a young boy getting into Magic around the time of Ice Age, I was "ripped off" by an older teenager who traded me an Underground Sea for my Necropotence.

Boy am I having the last laugh now...

I was surprised by Kevin's enthusiasm for Kozilek. Emrakul is miles better on every axis except casting cost. Even in Omni-Tell I would play Emrakul over Kozilek any day of the week, as the 15 damage attack + sac 6 wins the game on the spot 90% of the time, and in the few cases where the opponent sacs 6, deals with whatever other spells I cast during my free turn, and still manages to untap and win the game (e.g. opponent has tons of life, a mentor, and an army of tokens), it's hard to imagine Kozilek faring much better.

So Orchard tokens say "Flying" on them. Do they actually fly on MTGO (ie, is it a bug in the text being displayed for the token, or a bug in the Orchard implementation)?

Obviously this is a big deal as I do not want random tokens blocking my Griselbrand.

What would you set Chalice to in a typical game? 0, 1, and 2 both seem really bad in this list before Oath comes down.

By the way I love the use of Void Winnower: it perfectly hamstrings both decks, stopping Tendrils, Empty, Metamorph, Duplicant, Tangle Wire and Smokestack.

I do have some questions though:

1. Planeswalkers

Every time I try Planeswalkers in an Oath shell I'm left unhappy, as they have anti-synergy with Orchard, and more generally with Oath's creatureless strategy: their effectiveness is countered by random Mishra's Factories, Revokers, etc. Is 4x Paneswalkers really where you want to be?

2. Resiliency vs Hate

The deck is all-in on the Oath plan (I guess the manabase does also support hard-casing the Oath targets) and so is soft to the usual Oath hate cards (Cage, Witchbane Orb, Aeon of the Gods, Leyline of Sanctity, and especially Containment Priest). I'm partial to Show and Tell as a plan B, and S&T is excellent vs Storm (the worst thing that can happen is Bargain or Necro, whose danger is minimized by the list's heavy hand disruption). Show and Tell is harder to cast and riskier vs Shops, of course (less risky these days now that fewer builds run Duplicant) but Shops is also the more naturally favorable matchup. S&T doesn't solve the Containment Priest problem but if the meta is Shops and Storm with very few decks that support white, maybe that's an acceptable risk.

3. Gitaxian Probe vs Preordain

Against Storm Probe is fine, but against Shops and Delver/Mentor life total can become a limiting resource, what with the Orchards and Mana Confluences forming a significant part of the mana base. Probe seems needlessly greedy here compared to Preordain.

It does help in that it kills revokers and neuters assembly workers and hangerback walker. It doesn't stop a single large ravager but that is what spot removal is for.

I'd also recommend an Elesh Norn in the sideboard for dealing with Mentor/Dredge/BUG.

This coy remark from Rosewater cements in my mind that the leaks are real

http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/137731890838/is-this-years-summer-special-set-something-old-or

This is pretty much the best outcome (short of officially embracing "playtest cards" in sanctioned Vintage) we could have hoped for. They backpedaled on the "no proxies at any store events" talk and officially endorsed the status quo.

I own almost all Vintage staples from Revised on (including duals, FoW, Jaces) but none of the older power.

Yes, while I'd love to believe this will "all blow over" like some of the posts above, I don't think many store owners will deliberately flaunt WotC now that a policy has been clearly articulated. A post from Reddit summarizes my feelings well:

This crackdown is an existential threat to Vintage and Legacy. There are already several reports of stores who have affirmed that they will no longer run proxy tournaments. I can't envisage a zero-proxy future where Vintage remains vibrant; the format will be reduced to MTGO and a handful of yearly tournaments run by volunteers unassociated with any LGS and who do not fear being blackballed by WotC.

It makes perfect sense for WotC to lay out a zero-tolerance policy for sanctioned tournaments, but forbidding unsanctioned proxy tournaments is mind-boggling to me. The very few times that I buy WotC product is when I am in an LGS playing proxy Vintage.

The age of vertically-growing creatures is over. This dies to Abrupt Decay, Bolt, Dismember, and other Mentor answers, and even when it sticks around it can't race Pyromancer or Mentor.

No, The face-down exiled copy has no characteristics and so doesn't count as a card named Hedron Alignment.

There is Compulsion, which is not-quite-scry and doesn't have hexproof, but is one mana cheaper, and a better card.

Forget about the win con as it is obviously just flavor text (though if the opponent gets paranoid and expends resources to stop a suspected Alignment win, all the better).

This card's main effect is *reusable* scry 1 for 1U. This means that you dig 1-3 cards during each of the opponent's EOT. This is nuts with Sensei's Top and a strong effect in general. Is it worth the price of a 2U enchantment? Probably not, especially in decks that could run Dack instead, but it's not an effect I will quickly dismiss. Note that Thassa and Monastery Siege are nowhere comparable because they only scry once per turn.

It's unclear what this card does vs Oath and Tinker that Containment Priest doesn't to more effectively for cheaper.

Yes, this is an evilly/poorly designed card. On your turn, when you're likely to have Surge, it is no better than Mana Drain at protecting your threats. On your opponent's turn, when you'd like an uncounterable answer to their threat, you probably don't have surge.

Except that Ghostly Flicker can't even hit Enchantments...

I consider the play trigger the main effect and the scry just a very minor bonus -- the scry is the textbook definition of win-more. That leaves this card as a really bad TfK; playable in Standard, maybe, but not here. I'll stick to the Oath that costs  .

This is a fine card. Clearly it's garbage outside of the control mirror, but in the control mirror will passively draw you cards for doing what you already want to be doing: chaining cantrips and fighting counter wars. It's not a burst of card advantage like Ancestral, Gush, etc, it's slow incremental advantage like Library, Remora, or Dark Confidant that you don't have to jump through hoops to enable and doesn't make you die when drawing Dig, Cruise, or FoW.

Is it better than Dack or Jace in that role? It doesn't die to opposing token swarms, but is vulnerable to all of the same removal that is included to fight against Mentor/Pyromancer.

I assume it's now OK to post spoilers --

I really hated the movie. The beginning was ok, and the new characters are awesome, but the writing, dear god, the writing. TFA is a "reboot" of ANH in the most literal sense of the word: you can line up the two plots and they match, point for point. I nearly walked out of the theater when the Death Star planet was revealed (really???! The Death Star was already tired when it came back in RotJ) and again when it became clear that the First Order were taking orders from Supreme Leader Kim Jong Muppet.

Kylo is a terrible villain. Where Darth Vader was ruthless, efficient, and menacing, Kylo is some angsty and incompetent teenager that the First Order has for some reason placed in a leadership position. The mind boggles.

The First Order has the resources to hollow out a PLANET and capture the energy of a SUN and yet it can't muster up more than a dozen ships to defend said planet's weak points??? And if you can just slip past the planet's defenses through hyperspace, the rebellion could have just launched an asteroid through hyperspace and had it come out right on top of the "temperature resonance regulator" or whatever.

JJ Abrams does his usual thing of having one character say, "the world will end in 30 seconds!!" followed by action scenes that would take at least 4 hours to perform. But at this point I'm just nitpicking. Watching TFA was a bitter disappointment after all the hype, and I wish I had spent my money re-watching The Martian instead.

Three matches on one night per week sounds about right.

I like the idea of earning points for playing each week. For example, 3 points for each game win, 1 point for each game loss, and 0 points for not showing up. Pairings can then be determined each week based on the running point totals (like if the league were a giant tournament).

Also definitely give people a way to notify you ahead of time if they cannot make it to the next week, so that they can be excluded from the pairings, rather than people ending up with a bunch of byes.

I've wanted something like this for a long time so I am in.

Maybe set up a Doodle poll for people's available times?

What makes you think so? The oracle says "You may cast that card for as long as it remains exiled." It's true you can only spend the mana from the *second* ability on the last card exiled, but other exiled cards remain castable.

I just noticed that you can exile multiple cards with Ice Cauldron, you can play those cards even without activating the Cauldron's second ability, and that if the Cauldron leaves play that does *not* stop you from later playing any spells previously exiled.

This makes the Cauldron a lot more interesting than I thought. You can stash away some gas before playing a draw 7, or use a LED to pay for a spell in your hand. You can hide countermagic in the Cauldron where it is completely safe from Cabal Therapy et al. Or use it for its intended purpose and cast Emrakul with two easy payments of 7.5 mana.

EDIT: And I just realized the Cauldron synergizes quite well with Voltaic Key, allowing you to e.g. spend X mana on your opponent's EOT to get 2X free mana during your main phase.

None of this is worth  , granted, but it's still a lot more interesting than I thought.

It's in my first post.