In what world is a set of power to play a blue deck a marginal cost?

Hexproof reads:

You can't be the target of spells or abilities your opponents control.

It is not the same as shroud, so yes you can target yourself with Dack.

Thanks for another article and the data shout out.

Not the biggest deal, but my delver list was 4C, not Jeskai like you wrote.

I think there are 2 important differences between what happened with gush in the last month versus this one:
*Shops did way better this time. To contrast with what Matt wrote above, in January there was 1 gush deck in the top 8 (I don't think Brassman's deck is philosophically a gush deck). Also I just calculated Gush's win percentage in January without mirror matches and it's 59%, as compared to the 66% that shops put up this month.
*Gush was not being gunned for last month and was played by very few people. Shops was thought to be the best deck going into this one.

My intent (and I imagine Matt's as well) with this data was not to be prescriptive. Rather this sort of data collection is so rarely possible that it is worth doing when it is relatively easy.

My personal takeaway from this data is that you cannot play a blue deck which has no game against shops G1 in the online meta. Shops is too large a portion of the metagame, and it is too difficult to be guaranteed a G3 win on the play, to fold in game 1 every time. Playing 4 mental misstep, 2-3 flusterstorm, 0 Dack Fayden, 0 artifact hate, 14-15 land, 4 gush, and having your only wincons require you to chain together spells presumably gives you a sub 25% chance of winning the first game. I think calling for shop restrictions running this sort of a maindeck is ludicrous.

Since I was interested I computed some individual matchups by hand. Assuming I didn't make errors during the process:

22-11 Shops vs. Gush
9-9 Shops vs. Dredge
12-2 Shops vs. DPS
6-4 Gush vs. DPS

The sample size on the last one is small, but that in particular was surprising to me. Perhaps the dominance of shops over gush implies that more gush players skewed their sideboards to do well versus DPS?

Pretty good turnout considering all the other Magic tournaments today. Thanks to all who played!

Hopefully this doesn't count as thread necro'ing; I didn't want to start a brand new thread.

If anyone is a patreon for VSL and hasn't seen it, it looks as though Randy is going to select the remaining competitors for the qualifying tournament by a vote. So if you want to see more vintage community members in the VSL, go there and vote!

In addition to this, I think it would be awesome to have a sidebar of people currently streaming vintage, similar to if you go to liquidhearth for hearthstone. This might be harder to implement, since we want people playing vintage in particular, and not streaming Magic in general. In general I really like the layout and the way Team Liquid's sites serve as portals for many games, whether it's hearthstone or starcraft or whatever.

Actually I think the fact that few people played it is the reason for the win percentage:

*People who pick up flavor of the month decks generally bring down its win percentage since they have little experience with the deck. See storm and oath.
*As a corollary to this, I expect the gush pilots for the most part were very experienced.
*Despite still being a good deck, it wasn't being gunned for. Therefore, fewer people had sideboard hate for gush decks (not that there's a lot to begin with) and didn't chose their decks to beat gush.
*Smaller sample sizes can have more skewed results. A few people doing well with the deck had a big influence on its win percentage.

I am interested in this. I picked up cards for a few decks. As far as I can tell Chaos Orb and (functional) Mirror Universe are the big omissions from modo. Anything else?

Thoughts for next month:

Rather than having a top 8 the last week just have it swiss only. That way more matches get played.
Assuming there are ~8 people again, have everyone play each other every 2 weeks. Having 2 weeks to play 7 matches should make scheduling easier. Maybe decklists should then be published in advance.

It's the latter, so only loan cards to someone you trust.

Should be fixed:

https://twitter.com/mtgworth/status/693320818084843520

Banisher priest is supposed to be containment priest. I'm happy they proved they can quickly roll out a bug fix, unlike for certain PTQs in the past. Thank you everyone who pointed this out.

What the odds that anyone at WOTC knows what regression testing is, or has ever taken a software engineer course for that matter?

At least not knowing whether spirit tokens have flying or not will create an interesting dynamic.

On the contrary, I'd say rather than being ironic that's exactly the sort of bug fix I'd expect from WOTC

After clearing my schedule, unfortunately this means that unless they can fix it by the tournament I probably won't play. I either need to cheat/abuse a bug or get crushed by oath.

Here's my first stab at a cube list:

Basic 48:
1 lifelink wurm
1 deathtouch wurm
1 germ
3 goblins
2 cat soldiers
6 soldiers
2 pack rat
3 robots
4 flying spirit
4 squirrel
3 zombies
2 faerie rogues
3 3/3 beast
1 */* elemental
4 plants
4 monks
4 1/1 elementals
1 2/2 wolf


extras:
2 faerie rogues
3 flying spirit
4 zombies
3 goblins
4-6 soldiers
1 2/2 wolf
2 2/2 vampires
X 4/4 angels
2 3/3 beast
1 */* elemental
1 cat soldier
X 1/0 elemental
1 morph
2 pack rat
2 plant
1 storm
1 */* avatar

Tokens that you don't have yet:
3 3/3 elephants
2 1/1 lifelink vampires
X illusion tokens
1-2 1/1 deathtouch wolf
kraken?

One bit of analysis I would have considered is Overwhelming Denial in Brian Kelly's Bant/4C mentor control deck. This is more of a hard control deck and has a couple slots that Rich tested with as mana drains on his stream. In my limited experience of playing this deck with mana drains in it, the drains would infrequently resolve in the blue mirror, even if I won the counter war, so gush or some other spell into overwhelming denial to counter a mentor would be huge. In general this card seems most valuable for hard control decks to actually have their counters stick against the pesky delver style countermagic.

Although Jori En is an incredibly interesting card, these predictions seem really high. Even if this card is great, the current metagame doesn't seem grindy enough for the popularity of this card to explode.

Fair enough. However I expect a large percentage of cubes whose owners are willing to shell out money on these tokens for are "good stuff" cubes whose token requirements are close to identical. One could look at the average cubes on cubetutor if interested: http://www.cubetutor.com/averagecubes in fact I'd propose a list if you are interested.

Looks like I'm going to lose since we have the 60 card mirror but I'm down a foil lotus petal

Are we letting higher seed pick play/draw or rolling?

This looks awesome and I'll donate on the kickstarter once it's live. One suggestion: can you make a cube collection?

As far as the vintage collection, is the 1/1 robot supposed to be a myr? If not battleball and genesis chamber see some play. Also if you're willing to add more pieces, a Dack ultimate would be cool.

Maybe they're deleting the reserve list so they can print Power 9 in this set

A lazy possibility, but a reasonable one, is that they will largely use the draft environment for VMA for Eternal Masters or whatever it's called. That was a fun set to draft and due to cost/being online only it was really underdrafted.

I'll be available EST Wednesday and Thursday evenings, in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday, and possibly Saturday evening. If the_unseen, qernavak, and Sullivan could message me to arrange a day and time I'd appreciate it.

Matt's answer is a good one.

In addition, I would say that the most common mistake I see people making is how frequently they desperation gush. If you are tapped out and your opponent casts treasure cruise, it is likely not correct to gush in response to try and find a force. The dividing line is hard to get completely correct, but if you err on the side of only desperation gushing in response to a truly game breaking spell, like will or tinker, you will be more likely to be correct.

I am interested in an up-and-coming format, called Typ 1. Similar to Old School Magic, there are some erratas to how certain cards work. Bulk commons from BFZ block now cost U, are an instant, draw target player 3 cards, and are limited to one per deck. I prefer to use Gift of Tusks. Similarly bulk commons from RTR block cost 1U, are a sorcery that let you take an extra turn, and are also limited to one per deck. I prefer to use Inaction Injunction. There are a few similar erratas.

In an effort to keep the power level of the format down, you may not play with an errata'd and a card with the same mana cost, card type, and rules text.

This is mind boggling. If this becomes policy becomes enforced Wizards is creating the strongest incentive possible for players without the cards to purchase actual counterfeits instead of using a sharpie to make a proxy. What is their next step then, stores lose their WPN status unless they examine all cards with a jeweler's loupe and UV light?

As a community I don't think we have much of a voice to Wizards. If Steve or Rich could get Randy to talk to WOTC that seems like the only way to get our message heard.

EDIT: I suspect this action is in actuality a response to the proxy modern and even standard tournaments that have been popping up. I have even heard of some stores allowing proxies at sanctioned non-vintage events (obviously this is a terrible idea). Since Wizards wants to stop this from cropping up and they can't give an exception to vintage this is what we're left with.

Thanks for the points Brian. I knew the reason had to be something other than just digging.

Can we make it so we don't play the same person multiple times in one week in the future? Out of my 6 matches 3 of them will have been against joel. I don't mind, but I could see it getting miserable depending on the matchup.

Based on these results it's pretty clear we need to restrict bazaar and workshop.

Yeah that deck isn't nearly blue enough for my tastes.

2 Dack Fayden
1 Island
2 Swords to Plowshares
3 Scalding Tarn
1 Mana Drain
4 Gush
2 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
3 Monastery Mentor
1 Snapcaster Mage
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Force of Will
1 Dig Through Time
2 Flusterstorm
1 Wear/Tear
1 Brainstorm
3 Volcanic Island
3 Mental Misstep
3 Tundra
1 Repeal
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Ponder
2 Preordain
1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Flooded Strand
1 Fire/Ice
1 Strip Mine
1 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
2 Gitaxian Probe

1 Pithing Needle
2 Ingot Chewer
1 Wear/Tear
1 Swords to Plowshares
3 Containment Priest
1 Supreme Verdict
2 Rest in Peace
2 Serenity
1 Stony Silence
1 Grafdigger's Cage