[Free Article] SMIP: Preparing for the 2013 Vintage Championship

[Smmenen]

http://www.eternalcentral.com/so-many-insane-plays-preparing-for-the-2013-vintage-championship/



Teaser:

I am in the Nick Saban school of game-day preparation: process is everything. Studies show that students who imagine themselves performing well on a test actually perform worse than a control group. The explanation behind this counter-intuitive fact is simple: performance is a product of preparation, and students who imagine themselves doing well are less likely to prepare as intensively. Process is everything: from what you eat, to how you sleep, to how you practice, and manage your life outside of that process.

In this article, I want to focus on one particular aspect of any preparation process: developing a gauntlet of decks to test against. I will offer some specific suggestions for decks you may wish to include on your gauntlet for the 2013 Vintage Championship, based upon my experience competing in the Vintage Championship (I have 3 Vintage Champs Top 8 finishes thus far).

I will be happy to answer any questions.  I hope you find this article helpful.

Enjoy!

[H]

This is exactly what I was starting on just the other day.  You collected all the lists I was looking for, so thanks, I am going to put this to good use!

[Smmenen]

You're welcome!

I am hoping that this collection of lists and resources is of use to folks both who wish to compete in the Vintage Championship, but also are interested in getting into or back into Vintage more generally. 

I also included key resources for people to begin doing their own research.  As they say, give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him to fish, feed him for a lifetime...

What inspired me to write this article is my own preparation process, and, given my compulsion (ingrained habit) to write after years and years, I felt like sharing some of my work.  I have built many of the decks on this gauntlet as I've been preparing for the Vintage champs myself.

[LennoxLewis86]

Yes, I'm trying to get back into vintage. I'm sure this will be very helpful!

[vaughnbros]

This was a good article and I think it covers the metagame well.  The six archetypes you went through are a much better way of describing decks than the previous pillars.  For somewhere to improve in the future I think a quick write up on the general strategy or key cards of each deck would improve its readability to those outside the format.

[Smmenen]

I've never been a fan of "pillars."  I've hated that since it was first used, even if i may have inadvertently contributed to it in my writing.

In my old Metagame breakdown articles I would organize the format by "engine," and then again by "archetype." 

I think the best way, but the hardest understand is by "School."  This is what I do in my History of Vintage series, where I breakdown the six Schools of Vintage: Weissman/Control,  O'Brien/Prison, Restricted List Combo, Aggro-Control, Zoo, and Reanimator School.   The vast majority of strategies exist in those schools, and those that don't are either very simple to describe (i.e. simple Aggro) or reliant on single card strategies (i.e. Oath, Flash, etc). 

For outside or new audiences, I prefer the way I did in this article since these are all just heuristics anyway.  The six category of Dredge, Workshop, Combo-Control, Slow Control, Aggro-Control, and Combo are pretty comprehensible to anyone, even if there is some conflation, say, between Workshop Aggro and Workshop Control in this model.  (But not from the perspective of the O'Brien School, by which both tempo and control modes are inherent). 

I was hoping that this article would be useful for people new to the format, but also useful to those of you who didn't want to do the basic research of pulling out these decks for your testing gauntlet.