[Result] German Vintage Champs

[Dozer]

So the tournament has come and gone. 127 players, just one short of eight roonds, played for a Mox Pearl and Foil Gemstone Mines in the T8. I did not play myself because I was covering the main event, the German Nationals, and did not want to forgo the money.

I hope morphling.de will get the T8-lists as soon as possible. I only have the players and deck types they played available at the moment, since I had to leave the event before it ended and couldn't take the lists with me.

The Top 8 was as follows:

Quartetfinals:
Rifisch, Rene (5c Stax) – Bergmann, Tim (Gifts): Tim didn't show up, so Rene wins 2-0.
Stys, Michael (Uba Stax) – Esser, Thomas (3cC) 1-2
Kötter, Carsten (Gifts) – Quandt, Marcus (Gifts) 1-2
Magera, Markus (CS) – Hittel, Matthias (Uba Stax) 0-2

Semis:
Rifisch, Rene – Esser, Thomas 2-1
Quandt, Marcus – Hittel, Matthias 1-2

Finals:
Rifisch, Rene – Hittel, Matthias 2-0

So 5-color Stax takes home the Mox Pearl, even though he didn't have to play the Gifts match. The field was mainly Gifts, Stax variants and Oath, as well as the usual random aggro decks. Most of the players were powered in one form or the other.

The Gifts decks in the T8 were pretty much standard builds except for that of Tim Bergmann, who ran 3 Cunning Wishes maindeck in place of one Gifts, one Scroll and something else.

I sadly didn't spend as much time with the Dutchies in attendance as I wanted to -- not any, to be precise, because my coverage job was a little taxing, more than I would have thought. Even though the turnout was good and the tournament well run, it could have been set up better, since by the time the T8 began, Nationals were already over and everybody wanted to leave instead of playing/ watching Vintage. Next time, the tournament should definitely either be a separate event or on Saturday of Nationals. (Alas, the venue would have been too small for that anyway...) And of course, the announcement policy was horrible. Nobody at Amigo, the German distributor, seems to be interested in Vintage anyway. Then again, Nationals was really badly run in parts, and the Amigo peolpe have their work cut out for next time.
Basically, our Nationals was a 163-person 4-slot PTQ, since the price payout was really bad -- Booster prices only, down to 40th with places 20-30 getting two drafts sets and 30-40 getting one. Apart from the flight to Yokohama for the Nationals team, the whole shebang was one big joke price-wise.

I'll be on holiday for the next two weeks, so unless someone else gets the T8-lists, I won't be able to tell you more unti then!

Dozer

[moses2k]

Well, the tournament was quite funny..
Regarding the lists: There were 4 stax,2gifts,1 control slaver,1 metagamed u/w
My gifts list was pretty much standard(no goddamn cwishes omg ^^)
Carstens list had a white splash and duress instead of MisD..

And of course i showed up but i conceded to Rene because we are teammates and he had the better matchups..

The Enslaver played cwishes md..

Tim

[forests failed you]

Just out of curiosity, what percentage of the field would you say was Stax or Workshop based control?

[moses2k]

I don't know the exact number..

But i played Stax 5 times in a row..

The % of Ws-decks was very high..

maybe 40% overall

and maybe 70% in the high seats

[forests failed you]

That is really interesting.  Do you think it is a regional thing, or a metagame thing, or what?  70% of the top tables is an astounding number. 

[nachtfrost7]

I was the one with the Gifts Deck including three Cunning Wishes, that has some elements of the Italian Tog deck.

For the tournament I testet mainly the following decks:

-5 Color Stax (with and without Welders)
-Uba Stax (Vroman’s mono red version with a different sideboard)
-Monobrown (with 4 Jester’s Caps maindeck!)
-Meandeck Gifts / “Cunning Gifts�

I used my “Cunning Gifts� deck with slips of paper with different cardnames in the sleeves for testing the Meandeck version,
because I wanted to be able to compare the advantage of each card in the deck.
So I ended up testing mainly the Meandeck version (and not the Cunning version) in the last weeks.

The night before the tournament I playtested the two remaining Workshop decks (5c and Monobrown)
and decided not to play them because they seemed to be to inconsistent.
I wanted a deck with a draw engine, counterspells and solid manabase for better consistency so I decided to play Meandeck Gifts.
(with a Fire/Ice maindeck as an additional Scroll target)

While driving to the tournament I still had the slips of paper in the Cunning Gifts deck and the Merchant Scrolls, Misdirections and sideboard stuff extra.

When I talked to the other players from our local tournaments we discovered that we play 4 different Gift Decks.
After discussing playtest results of the different versions we thought that the version with Duresses and Cunning Wishes maindeck
has a good matchup agaimatch up traditional Meandeck Gifts.

I sideboarded the Duresses out against every Workshop deck because I don’t want to fetch first turn for Underground Sea,
but the Misdirections are not useful in that matchup eithermatch upIn playtesting the Cunning Wishes won me many unsideboarded games versus Dragon (Coffin Purge, Snuff Out) and aggro decks (Firestorm).

I also had sometimes problems with first turn Welders with Meandeck Gifts version where the Cunning Gifts version has Skeletal Scrying
to remove the artifacts in my graveyard to prevent the exchange and three Wishes to get Firestorm or Snuff Out.

So I decided to play the Cunning Wish version just 30 minutes before the registration
and made some last minute changes by changing the second Thirst for Knowledge for a Merchant Scroll
and a Boseiju for a Mana Vault to speed the deck up a bit.

From the sideboard I cutted 2 Engineered Plagues,
which were important in our local metagame (vs Food Chain and Oath) for a Seasinger (Acroma, Spirit and Colossus) and a Sundering Titan (for the control mirror).
Meandeck Gifts can race my tinkered Colossus via Tendrils or bounce it.
The Titan kills the opponents manabase and cannot be handeled with Rebuild or Eye of Nowhere without loosing some lands again in the process.

I missed my Shifting Borders tech (against maindeck Maze of Iths or Bazaar of Baghdads) in my new sideboard a bit,
but the Pithing Needles should do the job better even if I have no access to them in game one.

So my deckchoice was determined by the desire to have a very consistent and flexible deck.


I played against:

Round 1: Rudy van Soest (5 Color Stax) 2:1
Round 2: ? [sorry, I can't remember his Name] (UR Fish) 2:1
Round 3: Sven Fischer (Bird Shit) 2:1
Round 4: Kolja Kukuk (Dragon) 2:1
Round 5: Björn Ortmann (5 Color Stax) 1:0
Round 6: Thomas Esser (3CC) Draw
Round 7: Michael Stys (Uba Stax) Draw

Top 8:
Carsten Kötter (CAB/Meandeck Gifts) 2:1
Matthias Hittel (5 Color Stax) 1:2


Marcus Quandt

[Dozer]

The T8-lists are up, and I'm back from holiday. Also, OliD has put up some pictures on morphling.de. As for the metagame question, I think that most people with Workshops actually felt that Stax was the strongest deck, so almost everybody who had Shops played some kind of prison deck. I had a short glance (really just a glance, and I don't know where they are now) over the decklists from the event, and I saw no Juggernauts. I think Workshop players around here have turned away from aggro- or TnT-style decks owing to both the high presence of Stax at the moment (think Vroman's win and Steve's article) and the higher power of the prison deck over the aggro strategies.

Dozer

[Smmenen]

The real effect of the restriction of trinisphere seems to be to have shifted Workshop players to Prison instead of beatdown.