Str: 16
I can bench 340 and squat 450. I consider a 600 squat the minimum requirement for an 18 str.

Dex: 10
I weigh 235 and am not especially fast or agile, once i finish cutting to 220 I'll be an 11.

Con: 12
I have higher than average bone density and do regular cardiovascular work. I can run for about 3 miles at a good pace.

Int: 18
I have a 170 IQ on the stanford test and similar results on some unofficial higher normed tests (mega, titan, etc). My degree is in mathematics and computer science, and I do 3d graphics programming for a living so I do int-based work on a daily basis.

Wis: 11
I have an occasional insight, but I am no guru.

Cha: 14
I am self confident, good looking, and well groomed.

TSB placed five of the top ten at SCG P9:

#2 Eric Miller
#3 Marc Perez aka PTW
#6 Gronx
#9 Myself
#10 Ian Bennet

Ian and I both played 7/10 and had 6-1-1 records. We were screwed out of the top eight on tiebreakers. Had either of us made top eight our 7/10 decks would have ripped secondary assholes in the quarterfinal and semifinal opponents, playing U/R Fish and 4C Control respectively, leading to a TSB finals split with Eric Miller.

Although the gods of magic frowned upon our tiebreakers that day, TSB still put up another amazing showing in the most competitive vintage metagame outside of gencon.

My matches:
W 7/10
L Stax
W Stax
W U/R Fish
W U/R Fish
W Burn
W U/G Fish
ID U/R Fish

Full report to be posted later.

I'm going to be there along with the rest of the bus.

Congrats on the tourney!

We must have some kind of psychic resonance because we were looking into the same three things for 7/10:

1. adding trinispheres
2. adding wastelands
3. changing brainstorms for something else, or cutting them entirely

Damping matrix is an interesting sideboard choice.

I was also considering gorilla shaman main deck although karn serves the same purpose.

I'd really like to hear your reasoning behind why gilded lotus is bad.

Also was volcanic island ever a liability due to titan? I really hate playing some combination of 4 cities/gemstones/glimmervoids, but the potential for dis-synergy with titan seemed to override that. How bad is it?

It appears our decklists are converging towards an optimal workshop-titan build. It will be great when this deck is finalized and a tier one competitive archetype.

This question depends on two things, the format and the metagame.

Yes, the answer to the question "which is more important, best deck or metagame?" depends on the metagame itself.

But first let's look at how the format relates to this question.

Suppose we have a hypothetical format called "Type Academy". In this format there is a deck called Academy, and a number of other viable decks. The win percentages of Type Academy are:

Academy beats everything else 90% of the time
Everything else beats everything else 50% of the time

In this format the answer to the question is clearly "playing the best deck is most important to your success".

Now let's suppose another hypothetical format called "Type RPS". In this format there are three viable decks: Rock, Paper, and Scissors. The win percentages for Type RPS are:

Rock beats Scissors 90% of the time
Scissors beats Paper 90% of the time
Paper beats Rock 90% of the time

In this format the answer to the question is "considering the metagame is most important to your success".

Finally, let's suppose a third hypothetical format called "Type Balanced". In this format, there are dozens of viable decks. The win percentages of Type Balanced are:

Everything beats everything else 50% of the time

In this format the question is completely irrelevant, success is purely determined by luck and skill.

These are of course extreme examples, but they do demonstrate how the format impacts the question's answer:

1. The more dominant a single deck is, the more playing the best deck becomes important.
2. The more extreme win percentages there are, the more the metagame becomes important. This means lots of 80/20 or 90/10 matchups.
3. The less of (1) and (2) you have, the less the question matters and the more luck and skill matter.

(1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive. You could have a format with an academy-like deck, but another deck that beats it all the time but loses to everything that isn't academy. In this case both playing the best deck and the metagame will be highly relevant to your success. How much each factor matters, and which one matters more, depends on the particular format's win percentages.

Now let's look at type 1. Our format is fairly balanced (the BBS's and long's and gat's quickly get restricted back into obedience). Hulk and slaver might be the best decks right now, but not by a huge margin. The nigh-unwinnable 90/10 or 80/20 matchups are few and far between, but we do have plenty of 70/30 or 60/40 matchups. Therefore I think the answer is that both are equally important in type 1. I think you have decks that are good enough to do well most of the time, but at the same time you can have metagames which just totally hate you out. Personally I think that's a great thing, it means the format is balanced. More balance = more play skill matters (also more luck matters, but it's a good trade).

I'll be down there along with ptw and hopefully the rest of shortbus, dropping bombs on your moms with sundering titan and razormane masticores  

Azhrei's analysis is dead-on. This deck has more draw and more must counters than ug madness can contend with. 4 welders, 8 men, 4 loti, not to mention draw7's and tinker. With a deck like ug madness you cannot bet that your own draw/counter element will be sufficient to stop the insanity of 7/10. The only chance you have is mana denial (usually null rod) or hope that you get a god draw and 7/10 gets nothing.

This is a classic example of strategy superiority. 7/10's strategy is superior to everything in the environment except combo (which is faster) and hulk (which can sometimes equal it in brokenness). Therefore your only hope is to disrupt it's strategy, which I admit, is much easier than disrupting something like hulk.

We playtested the matchup vs ug madness and 7/10 had the advantage. UG has no answer to a resolved goblin welder or the titan. Once titan recursion starts, all of madness's lands go away and wonder no longer has an effect. Also the creatures in 7/10 are much larger than those in ug madness. Duplicant is a house in this matchup as well. The only thing madness can do is play null rod, and even that doesn't stop the titan's coming into and leaving play effect.

I'm not sure what you mean by that last line about the draw being slow. The speed at which this deck produces mana generally means the draw spells happen very quickly if not disrupted.

That is exactly how you should look at the deck, since that is exactly how it was built. We were playtesting with workshop slaver, and found a deck with a tremendous draw engine and an equally tremendous mana engine. The only problem were these bad ten mana timewalks called mindslavers =) Joking aside, we felt mindslaver was just not pulling it's weight and was holding the deck back from achieving maximum power, explosiveness, and brokenness. Too often it was merely a time walk and its effect was not worth the ten mana that was put into it. So we replaced it with the massive wrecking ball known as sundering titan. Titan has an immediate and gamebreaking that often hits 3 lands and seals the game. He is a tremendous beatdown and a 3 turn clock. He is also immune to null rod. Even if you get rid of him you lose 3 more lands. We feel titan is worth 8 mana, mindslaver is too often not worth 10. This change really alters the deck's focus from a prison deck to an aggro deck with huge engines of destruction. Once this was realized the decision to drop force of will for more men and a fourth lotus was made. It was not an easy decision by any stretch, but once we did we never looked back. FoW is strong in a control variant or a prison variant, but it is ineffective in this "aggro-combo" deck. It holds the deck back from going broken asap. Also the 16-17 blue sources really isn't enough to power fow consistently.

Yes the lack of forces weakens the combo matchup. It's a sacrifice we were willing to make as the change raised the strengths vs several other matchups.

This deck has at least as good a matchup vs hulk as slaver does. Sundering titan is an incredible house vs hulk, and almost always hits 3 lands. Often you'll take out their green source and they can't berserk the tog (if it's even out), then you proceed to go broken and play duplicant, memnarch, bosh or whoever and swing for 15 or 16 and win.

Mindslaver on the other hand is only truly a game winner if they have a tog in play.

If you want to play slaver I think the control variant is the way to go. If you are playing with workshops then this deck takes much greater advantage of the lotus/thirst engine's explosiveness and power. Like I mentioned before, mindslaver just holds the deck back by not properly utilizing the incredible draw/mana engine.

Keep thinking aggro-combo.

The deck is so tight for mana that there is no space for wasteland. Granted if you could somehow fit in four without disrupting the already fragile mana base, then do it, but I think such a task is impossible.

I like to consider 7/10 the new face of aggro. IMHO it's far superior to TNT and most other aggro. Instead of 4/4s on turn 1 and 2 you're playing titans, memnarchs and boshs. The deck's mana production is usually 3->5->8.

Consider the deck "aggro combo" similar to hulk's "control combo".

7/10 beats TNT since it's fatties are much larger and come out at almost the same speed. In general if the deck is allowed to produce mana without disruption it is extremely difficult to stop. Hulk can sometimes do it via ridiculous draw, but it usually doesn't happen. When the deck loses it usually defeats itself via bad draw, manascrew, or doing an obscene amount of damage to yourself from painlands and mana burn.

By overextension I mean the deck's focus rather than a particular play. For instance workshop slaver decks overextend via tons of artifact mana, few lands, and no way to deal with artifacts. So gay/r punishes this with null rod and wasteland.

I suppose overextension is the wrong term, since it implies a "playing tons of perms then getting disked" type of situation. Maybe I should say fish punishes decks that attempt to go "overbroken".

I would put fish below hulk and 7/10, but only just below. I'd certainly consider it a "tier one" deck, top deck, deck that wins lots of tournies, whatever you want to call it. But I don't think it's getting the respect it deserves.

First, the top 8 decks:
1 GAT
2 Hulk
2 Gay/r
1 Landstill/Oath
1 Dragon
1 7/10 Split

PTW won the whole thing with gay/r.

Myself along with the shortbus guys played 7/10 split, a deck we've been working on for the past month. TripleS piloted it to a strong 4th place finish. PTW was going to play it, but had to loan the deck out to a friend at the last minute and took gay/r instead, which turned to be a good decision.

82 players total. That's a large tourney. The metagame was extremely varied: just about every archetype you can think of was present. I think *consistency* was the optimal deck attribute here. In such a large tourney the consistent decks piloted by good players are going to win. The variance inherent in some archetypes, especially workshop decks, proved to be their undoing as they would invariably stall out some of the time, even if highly tuned and played by skilled players. In such a large tourney you are only allowed one loss before you are pretty much out of the top 8, so even if a powerful deck like 7/10 can roll over most opponents, it will not make top 8 if it stalls out more than once (TripleS had ZERO game losses coming into top8, but stalled out in the semis). That leaves zero room for play error since inevitably you will get the ass hand mulligan down to 5 and still have an ancient tomb as your only land. PTW *never* had to mulligan the entire tourney. I was mulliganing on average once every match.

Examining the top 8:
hulk: extremely consistent
gat: extremely consistent
gay/r: extremely consistent
dragon: extremely consistent
landstill: fairly consistent
7/10: inconsistent, but has raw power and explosiveness

As I said earlier, the field was varied and balanced so no single deck was there in extreme numbers. The top 8 is not indicative of the percent of the field comprised by each of the top 8 decks (i.e. the field was not 30% tog).

I really think that the consistency of 6 of the top 8 decks allowed them to perform so well in such a varied environment. Explosiveness and power only allowed one such deck to make it into the top 8.

I really hope this will make people understand that gay/r is a top deck. It always has been. It is not a metagame deck, and never has been. It is consistent, rewards good play, and punishes overextension.

7/10 is a really good deck and I hope the feedback we get will make the deck more consistent and broken.