Hey all,
when Katzby posted the
link to the GenCon info in #TMD, my eye was drawn to this snippet:
Winners of Vintage Championship Prelims and official Vintage National Championships (held in Europe and Asia) will receive 2-round byes in the 2005 Vintage Championship.
The Vintage National Championships have been creeping quite quietly on us this year. France was big and highly advertised, but the Belgian and Swiss Champs went largely unnoticed. The German and Dutch Champs are coming up, although I can only guess that both are offering GenCon byes, too. I don't know anything about Italy, though. My point is that with these Open Nationals as qualifiers and the GenCon qualifiers in the US, the Vintage Championship at GenCon can now truly be called our Vintage Worlds. Basically, WotC has brought us a series of international qualifiers, some of which even pay for the ticket to GenCon. I wonder why Wizards has not populated that more widely? It is such a smart move.
What we have now is one big open sanctioned tournament in every country that "qualifies" for the really big one. You can compare it to GPs/PTQs (Open Nationals, Origins in the US) qualifying for a Pro Tour (GenCon), or just with GP trials (byes!) for the one Vintage GP we get (again, GenCon). But the fact remains that this is the first step to inter-connecting the Vintage community all over the World. This also leads to a huge culmination point that has almost the same value for Vintage as the World Championships have for the other formats. GenCon is the place where for the first time, a truly intercontinental player base can form on the basis of more than "just a visit". GenCon could (or will?) become the place where you go if you want to meet the best Vintage players of both continents.
That is an awesome development, so why is it kept so quiet?
Katzby also pointed out this:
# Vintage Format
# No proxies of any kind are allowed
The "no proxy"-rule is explicitly mentioned. That makes sense to me: Many players who will just come and play, without a grand scheme in mind as TMD'ers often have, might not get that "sanctioned" means "no proxies". All the big Vintage tournaments allow proxies: SCG P9, Waterbury, Eindhoven (don't know about Castricum), and a plethora of smaller ones even in Germany (Hannover, Berlin). (The big German tournaments still don't. That is an interesting tangent, too: After the store that organizes Dülmen dropped their prize support to Boosters only, attendance began to wane. With the rise of the Iserlohn tournaments, Dülmen has largely dropped out of the minds of many players. The Dülmen Vintage tournaments used to be enourmous -- now, they get 40-50 players, whereas Iserlohn is 80-120 and has surpassed Dülmen in terms of prize support and importance. I believe the new tournament series in Dortmund-Scharnhorst will draw further attention away from Dülmen, as the organizer is willing to put up P9, and Iserlohn and Dortmund already co-operate in terms of event dates. I doubt there will be much room left for Dülmen.)
With this in mind, envisioning competitive Vintage looks like the following:
local tournaments, big (SCG P9, H20bury) and small (Karlsruhe et al.), mostly proxy, some sanctioned
usually organized by local stores and dealers or from the players for the players
weekly, monthly, bimonthly || ||
|| ||
Open National Vintage Champs, Origins (sanctioned)
organized by stores or national TOs, supported by Wizards
once a year per country ||
||
GenCon Vintage Championships
sanctioned, supported by Wizards
singular eventThe progression from proxy to non-proxy is a natural one here. Players can always play proxy Vintage, all year. Then the big non-proxy events are for those who want to take their Vintage game to the next competitive level, and "Worlds" of course is sanctioned. In the light of the proxy debate, I really, really like that structure. This keeps the incentive up for buying Power, but also stops buying power being a necessity if you want to play competitive Vintage (unless you are in Germany, I guess, where the big tournaments are still non-proxy.) This also means that the tournaments in the top row should all be proxy events. Now that the rating byes for GP Philly will be determined by constructed rating even sanctioning doesn't man anything anymore.
Awesome. Comments?
Dozer
