So, if all the casual aspect of the game has been "bled out of the format," what's the answer? I mean, you can't blame people for building decks that win and abusing every last angle that they can. [...] Just some ideas to try to make it harder to win quickly.
Vintage has one major defining element: Wizards wants to have one format in which all cards are legal, apart from the ante and dexterity cards. That makes the card pool so wide that it will never be possible not to find a deck that can win quickly. Vintage is so full of tutoring effects (come Portal, we won't even have deck space for all possible tutors anymore) that card restrictions are just able to keep real brokenness in check. But it lurks behind the surface, every time you pick up a deck.
Sure it feels dirty to go "Gifts, Recoup, Will, Ancestral, Tinker, Walk, Recoup Walk" on someone who has just played a Steadfast Guard. But looking at the prizes that most tournaments are played for, I think this is inevitable. Higher prizes draw a better crowd. I go to tournaments for the fun of playing Magic, but the higher the prize, the more I care about it. There is a point when the possible prize overruns the fun aspect. When playing for a Mox, do you allow take-backs when your opponent makes an obvious mistake? If you do, then well done: You have preserved your casualness. And you've become a casualty, too. A casualty of the prize-hunter, the "Spike", the tournament player, the sometimes shady rules lawyer (because players with as shrewd an honor as me don't
ask for a take-back. But that's a different topic).
When the prizes go up, the players tighten up. They build more cutthroat decks, they play sharper, they are generally more attentive. I remember the Vintage tournament at Worlds Berlin (2003?), held parallel to a PTQ. There were a couple of Vintage matches that were tight, where people stood and watched because of the crazy things going on, and the players were sweating because of the sheer complexity of the game -- at all tables. In the PTQ area, playing was tight especially on the top tables, so tense that you could feel it just walking along the tables. Not on the lower tables, though. In the x-3 bracket, play almost became playtesting. People were much more relaxed when they weren't in the run for the prizes anymore.
That relaxation is often translated as "casual". As some others, I was around on BD. I've seen this format evolve. Beyond Dominia was a small, intense world, trying to squeeze some tournament worthiness out of a cardpool that wasn't usually used for tournaments. Over the years, the power level of cards and decks has gone up – a lot. With the power came a loss of casualness. That's not to say BD was casual (it wasn't), but evolution was soooo slow that you could almost call it relaxed. The format developed faster, the decks became faster, and suddenly metagaming was possible! Before, you'd just look at "who is likely to come", and you knew what decks would be there. Then, you'd look at a major T8 and see those influences in your local tournaments. And today, you can actually analyze T8's for
trends and
metagame shifts.
What am I getting at? I started to ramble a little, so let me pull my thoughts together and find out what I was going to say... oh, yes, I've got it.
The players have always been clamouring for more condensating, more tournaments, more prizes, more innovation. It all has come, thanks to the community. Some are more vocal than others (Smmenen, lots of others), some contribute more than others (Zherbus, Ray, all tournament organizers). But with all that, it's just harder to be casual with so much expertise available and prizes as high as they are. I totally agree that Vintage has bled out the casual players from the tournament scene, and where it hasn't, high-powered players win. And since almost nobody wants to get beaten all the time, the casual players either step out or step up.
To be honest, I fear that the old casualness-tournament mixture, with only a minority really focusing on deckbuilding and metagaming, will come back once Legacy gets rolling. The Spikes among us will be attracted by the possibility of qualifying, and the newer players will like the lack of 300$ cards. I quite like the state that Vintage is in now, but I'd like to see more high-profile and more low-profile tournaments coming, and more players making the leap to the competitiveness. Otherwise, we will probably go back from the high that was 2004/05 and go back to something more like 2001/02, when all of this started. That would make me sad and play Legacy, whipping out the Vintage deck just for fun. And here's my last point of this overlong ramble: Even with all the "Spike" stuff going on, Vintage tournaments are
still more relaxed than all others, apart from pre-releases. The players are older, they care more about their cards, they are welcoming, and they don't complain about topdecking much, because the know it happens – especially in Vintage, where "broken things happen".
Oh, and all that comes down to this answer to the original question: There is no way to get the casual players back in if the current intensity of Vintage is kept up. Make the casuals into relaxed and friendly tournament players, and all is well.
Dozer
