Vintage Team Constructed - a possibility?

[Moriarty]

from MAGIC: THE GATHERING® DCI FLOOR RULES
Effective September 20, 2005

Team Constructed tournaments use Unified Deck Construction rules: With the exception of basic land cards, a team's combined decks and sideboards may not contain more than four of any individual card, counted by its English card title. (For example, if one player has four main-deck Naturalizes in a Team Constructed event, no other player on that team may have a Naturalize in his or her deck or sideboard.)
If a card is restricted in a particular format, no more than one of that card may be used by the team. No players may use cards that are banned in a particular format."

So let's say (for the sake of this argument) that a number of future T1 events were made Team Constructed events with the above mentioned Unified Deck Constructed rules. Let's say 4-player teams. Then this apparently remedies the problem of availability and entry-level cost to Vintage in a very elegant way: Each 4-player team would need no more than 1 playset of the expensive power cards and other costly stables, so for each player the entry-level cost to T1 would be about 1/4 of what it is now. In addition, the ability of pure budget decks to compete on the highest level would be higher because fewer than 1 in 4 opponents would play with say, Ancestral Recall.

The game would still be Vintage in the sense that you (or rather, your team) would be able to play with every Magic card ever printed, but subject to the Unified Deck Construction rules. The question is, would this metagame be very similar to the T1 we know now from certain semi-powered metagames (Europe) or would it be something entirely (too) different from traditional Vintage? Many serious T1 players are already now organized in teams that design decks together, test together, split prizes and so on, and this has helped the development of the T1. But how different would this experience become for them, and for the average individual player?

Moriarty

[jpmeyer]

I think it would be an interesting thing to try but you would run out of "good" cards really quickly (seeing how most powered decks have like at least 20 cards in common).  You could have say, a Gifts deck, but then if you wanted to play Fish, you wouldn't be able to play Force of Will in it, and then if you wanted to play Oshawa Stompy for the third deck you wouldn't be able to use Wasteland.

Ultimately, it would seem like 3/4 of the decks would be really suboptimal and thus it would probably just seem like 2001 with no proxies all over again on an even more extreme scale..

[forests failed you]

I think that would be a really interesting format, and that it would be a lot of fun to play.  The decks would still be able to contain really good cards, however the 'brokeness' factor would be minimized.  It would allow for more creativity among good deck builders because you would have to use more of the card pool; as opposed to, as JP said, playing decks where 25 cards are auto choices.  ie Drain, Force, Moxes and fast artifact Mana, and Brainstorm.

Plus how hot would it be to have Meandeck Vs Reflection Vs Shortbus Vs Michigan Vs Colorado going on.  I would be really interested to see which team actually has the savvies deck builders when it comes down to using the entire cardpool in a completely new way.  Somebody should hold one of these events because it would be fucking rad.

[jpmeyer]

Now that I think about it, combo would be insane because the chance of going up against Force of Will or Chalice of the Void is reduced so much.

[Machinus]

Now that I think about it, combo would be insane because the chance of going up against Force of Will or Chalice of the Void is reduced so much.

Not to mention wasteland, duress, mana drain, sphere of resistance, null rod, etc.

[KrauserKrauser]

Ritual based combo + Workshop based combo?

Sounds like fun

[Matt]

Hey, a way to make Suicide viable.

[forests failed you]

I was thinking the exact same thing.  It doesn't take away any cards from one's pool of broken cards, while at the same time is competative.  Not to mention Sui black is almost good enough to win against powered decks; but if you put it up against 1/3 powered decks it should be pretty good.

Sligh might also be a good choice if this were a real playable format.

[sampling_percus]

Would combo not just use up the teams entire set of power cards in one deck though? Is this kind of monster deck how current team constructed tournys are won?

[Jacob Orlove]

Would combo not just use up the teams entire set of power cards in one deck though? Is this kind of monster deck how current team constructed tournys are won?

You could easily build, say, High Tide, Dragon, Belcher, and FCG without a tremendous card overlap. Sure, they'd have to share a bit of power and be slightly suboptimal, but since you only need three decks, you could easily minimize that, and find a configuration that just runs over the people who try to play Sui or Sligh.

[Dozer]

I'd rather build one combo deck that can kill all opposing players and dedicate the three other decks to get it going. For example, you can build Dragon deck without P9, a dedicated removal deck, a dedicated control deck, and one deck that draws cards for the others. It depends on how many people are on a team, though. As far as I recall, it is usually three for team formats and two for 2HG (obviously). So if you go with three people, the task should be very easy. Basically, you can out-source a lot of the card advantage so the other decks have more room for business spells. The 4-card limit shouldn't be a problem then.

Dozer

[jpmeyer]

2HG just wouldn't work unless you banned Tendrils.

[Jacob Orlove]

Team magic is played with three simultaneous matches, not one six-person multiplayer game. Two-headed giant is a completely different beast.

[forests failed you]

Yes, for sure.  Two headed Giant Vintage would be absurd. 

However, a three person team constructed would be a lot of fun to try and design three decks from one card pool with.  I've been testing the Standard version because they are doing a few tournaments for it next year, and it is a blast.

And as Matt pointed out earlier, decks like sui would be viable because they don't take away too many cards from the card pool; yet are at the same time fairly decent decks.