Welcome to TMD. It can get a little stuffy and sometimes stagnant in here, but the density of good players who frequent this place is so far above SCG, it should prove quite useful to you. A few things from your initial post:
I have no real life tournament experience...i play a lot of Vintage online to keep my practice up.
Do know that this immediately squashes a lot of your street credit here. It's certainly not personal, but many of the heavies around here have been playing magic in general and T1 specifically for a long time and have played in a lot of tournaments. Since performance in tournaments is the main form of intellectual currency around here, you're going to have to prove you understand the format through good posting, and hopefully, future success in tournament play. Living in NYC should give you ample access to good events (PA, NJ, CT, and MA all have regular events), and there's a number of good threads available on how to collect a competitive vintage cardpool. It is widely understood that online play is a very poor indicator of what actually works well in live tournaments. Goldfishing combo and manabase are about all it's good for.
Any tough players to look out for? Is there a "best" player as far as you guys are concerned. At SCG you ask that and the thread immediately becomes a flame-fest! XD
Overly subjective questions like this are always bait for flaming, but interestingly enough, I was asked this exact thing when interviewed for a feature match at Waterbury. My answer was a bit of a dodge. Since events where people from all over come together (best of the best, like GenCon) are limiited I picked people from three main T1 havens (Shockwave, Kobefan, and Iamfishman) who's results speak for themselves, and who's posting I tend to agree with most. While Kobefan just ripped things up with lots of different decks, I picked the other two mostly because I've had personal experience playing against them and watching them in tournaments. This is why, although I'm sure they may be just as good, I didn't mention people from CA, CO, or other parts of the midwest. Generally, there's so many good players (I could have just as easily mentioned Shay, Smennen, Wette, Mons, Cron, Diceman, Brassman, etc), it's really hard to predict something like the T8 for Gencon.
