That's like 112 pct?

My List should be:

-1 Gemstone Mine
+1 Mox Opal

Rob, while I agree that the forge master package makes it a little different from an espresso list, I feel that all the mono brown lists are traditional. It's an interesting question as to which is superior head to head, and I feel our opinions will be different barring testing.

Just to keep this alive. At the recent NEV in long island, i placed in the top 4 in a 29 person field that included 14-15 workshops decks. I was running this list without any changes, and i feel that had i played little tigher in the semi finals and been a little more willing to fight harder, i would have have progressed to the finals which i fully expect i would have won, as this deck has a good matchup against traditional shops ( out of the 7 rounds i played, 6 were against shop opponents ).

Don't forget winning a for the vaults at gencon

I think you are misattributing landstill's success to its mana denial strategy. While I agree that is certainly part of it, its real strength comes from its consistency and hyper linear strategy. It's one of the reason fish decks are not as successful, mana denial just isn't enough. I haven't been playing vintage for a long time, but since I have been It has been a steady progression towards more and more linear decks. Shops, oath, landstill, dredge. All decks that at their fundamental level choose not to actually play magic. Shops dropping a 4 turn clock tha prevents you from casting spells. Oath dropping a 2 mana I win card. Dredge.... Well lets just say its dredge. Landstill casting 5 ancestrals while having undercosted counter spells. These are strategies that do not encourage interaction, and are a large part of why the format is in the terrible state it is in.

While it would be nice to see blue decks get some spells back, simply saying that is the answer is naiv. What good is a three casting cost instant if you can't actually cast it, though I agree that's a discussion better left for another thread.

Yes because clearly being forced to play a mana denial strategy in order to be competitive is normal. The problem certainly isn't that lodestone golem in MUD is format warping.

Magnus,

I boarded the chains in quite a few times, but I really failed to see much use from them. I am hesitant to cut them only because if i do stick one on the field it becomes amazing.

The metamorph is honestly a must. I agree that without something on the board already it is a dead card, but this deck has so many targets of its own to copy, from welders to spheres to smokestacks, and With vintage becoming a more permanent based format,you have an almost endless Supply of targets from your opponents. It gives you Another out to tinker, or to any annoying creature/artifact your Opponent plays. Also you get a little utility against dredge as you can cast it an refuse to copy anything, killing bridges.

The sundering titan is actually your best win condition against fish decks. They are usually pretty mana light as it is an with a resolved Titan, it's hard for them come back.

I agree that the thorns are not good,  which is why I cut them from the board to add the tormods  and the needle. I think with 4 wastes, 1 strip, 1 tabernacle, 4 leyline, 1 crypt, 1 needle that you have enough hate against dredge.

Cavern of souls is excellent, with the number of missteps running around ts nice to be able to force a welder to resolve, also all your artifacts are constructs, so you can force a replica or trike or whatever if you need to.

I would like to maybe add a maze of ith, but this deck is already as tight as it can get. It took me ages and lots of discussion to decide to cut a smokestack for the morph, I can't possibly think what you would remove for a maze.

Magnus, it was great to meet you at BoM. I was the American guy who wanted your list. I put it together when I go home but couldn't ever bring myself to play it. A couple weeks ago i decided to play it at the latest top deck games event, and wasn't satisfied with it performance. But I persevered and looked to see if there any changes I could make that would be improvements. I decided on some changes, and brought it with me to GenCon to play at Vintage Champs. Unfortunately I got talked into playing bomberman and went 2-2 drop.  I decided to play 5c shops the next day in a small event (27 people ) for 3 from the vaults boxes. And let me say, the deck performed just as unexpected it would,
Bringing me the victory. It was a 5 round Swiss with a cut to the top 8, and in the swiss I went 3-1-1 with my only loss being to noble fish. In the top 8, I beat bomberman, dredge, and oath to secure the prize. The changes I made to your BoM list were

-1 smokestack
-1 gorilla shaman

+1 cavern of souls
+1 phyrexian metamorph

Board:

-2 thorn
+1 pithing needle
+1 tormod's crypt

Please ignore most of the posters in this thread who are Arguing with you, they either don't understand shops or are just bad at magic in general. This list is quite competitive, and clearly shows that shops can be a deck with as much subtlety as any blue deck. I would like to see what else you have come up with and look forward to seeing you at next years BoM

lost 0-2 to onslaught because he had a thousand hurkyls and i had to mulligan to 5. Like every single one of my recent games, i may as well have not even bothered playing as he just goldfished.

no, the governing body for competitive magic players is the DCI. this would be like the olympic commitee banning an athlete who just competed in a local race and the race organizers ( starcity ) not paying them.

try to keep up.

SCG isn't the governing body ?

I have made this argument in other places, but no one seems to be able to see the forest here because people are almost all too busy staring at the trees. The starcity policy that they just instituted says nothing about cheating, it says only if a player is under investigation. this is problematic because you could conceivably  be under investigation for unsportsmanlike conduct ( which isn't cheating ), win a major tournament, then be denied your prize if the dci bans you before you receive it.

it is not unreasonable to assume that you could win a tournament , and get in a fist fight with someone at the tournament hall before starcity pays you, and get banned by the dci, and then not receive your winnings.

it is also not unreasonable to assume ( with the incredibly suspect behavior that corporations in this country show time after time ) that starcity could straight up abuse this new found power of being able to apply things retroactively to deny someone else their prize.

everyone seems to be in support of this because bertoncini is a cheater, and people seem to relish in his getting his just desserts. But alex's cheating is such a small part of the issue now, and its all anyone can focus on.

Standing on the shoulders of giants is to be expected, its the way that humanity makes progress. I totally get wanting more people to play a game that we all enjoy. However, scrabbling up the back of said giant before they even get established is. If you can't see it, then i don't know what to tell you. Imagine if you had a great idea, something that you thought people were really going to go for, and you deploy your idea, maybe a card shop, maybe a bakery, maybe a paintng service, whatever you want to imagine it to be. And not a week after you open, someone you are familiar with, comes along and says, man, that was such a great idea, i want to do the same thing. in the same community, with the same customers. Now there is a demand, and sure, the community can certainly support 2 of the same business model, but the tactful thing to do, especially if its someone you know, is to wait a little bit, give them time to get established. Sure, you can run right out there and say "fuck them, i want my piece of the pie right now", but you know what, thats just ignorant behavior.

sarcasm and latent disrespect?  not quite sure what you are referring too, but I said you were a fairly smart girl irl. What about that is disrespectful i don't know. and honestly, the reason i don't shake some people's hands is because those games are not good. They don't do anything clever to win, they don't lead me into trappy plays causing to make a mistake, and to top it off, they spend ages deciding to make plays as complicated as choosing which basic land they want to lay in their mono-colored deck. The only thing they contribute to their victory is shuffling the cards well.  Then having the nerve to say good game, thats insulting. If you want to think i am ignorant or a douche, that's your is certainly your prerogative, but when you can say that you did more to win a match than just shuffle the cards, i will be the first to exclaim good game.

she is also a fairly smart girl irl. my point is that think of all the magic players you know, or all the people you run into on the internet, they aren't all terribly savvy. Like i said in my initial post, i think anything that gets people to play more vintage is a good thing, but doing this so soon after Nick got his invitational series up and running just seems tacky Ambi, and more likely to lead to brand dilution and confusion amongst players.

Yes because everyone who plays magic, and everyone on the internet is clearly a genius. God forbid that someone new tries to get involved and finds the concept of two simliarly named events from the same webste confusing.

That was a very helpful post yukon. And yes, people have been running online magic leagues and tourmanets years now. www.magic-league.com for example. But my point is that this is somewhat confusing, as it is not clear that it is a seperate thing from Nick's events. And honestly who knows, its quite possible that Nick will approve as this could generate him some interest. But my personal feelings are that this is poorly timed, and more could have been done to differentiate it from the TMD Online Invitational #2.

its not that it would prevent people from playing. its the internet, people have all the time in the world. but its an issue of brand dilution, now when someone says, "are you playing in the tmd online tournament?", what are they talking about? the invitational, ambi ducks event, what if i don't think to register for nick's next event because i think that i can qualify for ambi's? i get that people want this community to be strong, and having people play more vintage and test more is a great way to do that, but this seems incredibly poorly timed and really just like its riding on the coat-tails of nick's awesome idea, Ambi will certainly disagree with me, but i feel that if Nick never came up with his invitation, then this event would likely not ever have been conceived. 

I applaud the idea of more people playing more events, but perhaps you should consider letting Nick get his Project rolling and not doing brand dilution by immediately starting a second tournament series after his.

Nick Coss, Y U NO GIVE BAUER ALL THE PRIZES?

have a final that day.

I am having a hard time coming up with a deck other than Minus Six that would have more than 15 proxies chosen exclusively from that list. I suppose if someone had no forces or duals at all this might be helpful (and i feel like that is a corner case), but once you remove those from the list, there is nothing that couldn't be made under the current system. Also, as much as we like to rib people who come to an event with beta power but they are proxying  stuff like magus of the moon, sometimes you need those random rare ( scarcity, not value ) cards, that dealers just don't seem to have.

If only there was some worldwide network of computers Nick could have posted this information to.

That is a nice graphic Nick. Good luck all

Why are people complaining about having to post deck lists ?

I got Nick 2-0.

G1 i was on the ropes to two factories, but a resolved Scroll->Mystical->Tinker-> Dumb Fatty got there.

G2, he has a solid opener with T1 Trinisphere, but it was just lacking pressure. My mull to 6 saw me get tarn, island, underground, chewer, walk, recall. I drew into a hurkyl's and more mana while he made some factory beats, then EOT hurkyl's him, mainphase grindstone, recall, walk , then untap and play emerald and tinker for a painter, which netted the concession.


Congratulations to all the players in the Invitational, Hopefully these can become a semi-regular event.

I beat Rich 2-0, i actually took notes this time due to not being drunk so i will have a report coming, and Rich is going to put a report up as well

I beat Mark 2-1.

So its no secret that i have been having a terrible run at magic for quite some time now. No matter what i play my opponents either open with unbeatable hands, or i have to grind out a long and frustrating win. Storm hasn't done well for me, fish is mediocre, Faeries is too fair for the current meta-game and Dragon just doesn't seem to get it done for me. That left me with the choice to play dredge, shops, painter, or vintage control, all decks that i have had varying levels of success with. When i saw the players in this event, i assumed that Mark would be on dredge, Rich would be on his vintage champs list , Nick Coss would be on dragon, Nick Detwiler would be on shops, Shawn Anthony would be on ECW, Paul would be on some version of blue control with gushes and Matt Elias would be a wildcard.

With just theorycrafting to go on as i have almost no opportunity for playtesting, i decided to play my painter list from Gencon as i feel it has a solid matchup vs the blue decks, ( Rich, Paul, Shawn, Nick C. ) and reasonable matchups against Dredge and Shops. I changed the sideboard slightly to make the dredge hate more solid as i feel the combination of jailers with leylines is just better than running some number of spellbombs, needles and ees, but the tradeoff is that ee and needle could be brought in against other decks as well as dredge, and spellbomb has utility against dragon, where as jailer is pretty much dredge only. One other factor that led to the decision to play painter (and focus the board more towards dredge) was that i did not expect to see landstill, as painter is a huge dog to it, and removing ee and needle only makes the problem worse.

In hindsight, seeing what everyone else is playing makes my board decisions pretty terrible. Not only is there no dredge in the event, there is a landstill deck, and 2 non dredge graveyard based decks.

On to the List.

Bishops Painter

4 x Force of Will
3 x Mindbreak Trap
2 x Mana Drain
2 x Red Elemental Blast
2 x Pyroblast
1 x Hurkyl's Recall

3 x Mystic Remora
1 x Ancestral Recall
1 x Brainstorm
1 x Time Walk
1 x Gush
1 x Thirst for Knowledge
1 x Timetwister

1 x Demonic Tutor
1 x Vampiric Tutor
1 x Mystical Tutor
1 x Merchant Scroll

2 x Jace, the Mind Sculptor
1 x Blightsteel Colossus
1 x Tinker
1 x Yawgmoth's Will
3 x Painter's Servant
2 x Grindstone
1 x Vendilion Clique

1 x Tolarian Academy
1 x Strip Mine
1 x Mountain
3 x Island
2 x Underground Sea
2 x Volcanic Island
4 x Scalding Tarn
1 x Flooded Strand
1 x Misty Rainforest
1 x Black Lotus
1 x Sol Ring
1 x Mana Crypt
1 x Mox Emerald
1 x Mox Sapphire
1 x Mox Jet
1 x Mox Ruby

Sideboard

4 x Leyline of the Void
4 x Ingot Chewer
3 x Yixlid Jailer
2 x Lightning Bolt
1 x Hurky's Recall
1 x Misdirection

Report not coming as i can't remember the games at all as i had just returned from the bar prior to our match. I remember Mark having t1 Ancestral in 2 of the 3 games and t1 welder in 2 of the 3 games as well; I remember losing to a Battlesphere in g2 one turn before i could grind him out.

i hear painter even placed at vintage champs.

first!

Allen,

   It is unreasonable to think that because they were here first that they should be allowed a monopoly on tournament organization. This seems to be a case of let the market decide. Honestly, i keep going back to Blue Bell events because Nick puts on a hell of a tournament, just like how i am going to make the trip to NJ when his store opens. Not for any other reason. Similarly, i did not go to NYSE this past weekend because with my school schedule it was too far and would have taken too much of my weekend.  If Shawn had not had a vintage event in Bloom, then i most likely would not have played magic at all. If TOs are concerned that Vito is going to pull business away from them, then they need to give people more of an incentive to skip his event and go to theirs. What do you propose, no other vintage events until someone retires or closes ?