I often don't understand the audience you guys mean to write to (I've mistakenly given Smennen crap about this before), so disregard this if it's misplaced.
This article doesn't seem to build much on your existing work on goblins. Thorn is a significant new toy for this deck, but it's contribution isn't very difficult to anticipate or understand how to use. You drop it and keep on shopping. You don't offer much direction on the SB, or relate how it can be changed to synergize with MD thorn (outside of stifle's mana denial). I know you have limited time to work on this stuff, but there's zero context given to the crusher deck besides it being more aggressive.
Well how exactly do I 'build on it'? The deck really hasn't changed a good deal, I've basically just fine-tuned the existing design and added Thorn and explained why Thorn is likely not best in 9 sphere Stax; but rather in aggressive builds that can take advantage of the time delay the card brings to the table. As far as the sideboard goes, that's probably just a difference of view. I feel offering options and letting people come to their own conclusions tends to work better than just listing a sideboard and saying it's a hard and fast set of rules, especially when local metagames can severely differ. With Faeries in Standard I offered a sideboard and it was mostly unused, but people took the reasoning behind cards like Deathmark and Flashfreeze and ran with it in Faeries & other blue decks, despite not copying the board. For the most part I find it's simply better to offer reasoning behind what cards you probably would want in the board and what matches they'd truly benefit in.
I didn't offer a specific sideboard strategy, because I find them to be worthless in Vintage. I don't know about you, but I rarely have people agree on what the correct cards are to take out of a deck. Since I'm not offering a specific sideboard, I'm not going to go out on a limb and assume people are just going to follow general boarding ideas.
As for synergy with Thorn, that's literally all I could think of that didn't blow chunks. If someone wants to offer up Stifle Goblins, more power to them, but for me none of the additional mana-hating ideas I had worked well at all. So why waste words I figure?
The Crusher deck was a bit short on context and explanation and I apologize for that. In large part it was a bit of a 'bonus' since I had already written the article about Goblins, but got really excited about the Crusher deck and wanted to share the early draft of it because the testing results weren't 'strictly worse than GAT' unlike most of the decks we try out.
You're right that there's been few T1 articles lately, and for that I'm always grateful to have you and others (nicely done, DicemanX) contributing your thoughts. I was just wondering if there was anything in here that you thought was particularly useful or new for the TMD crowd?
If you don't like Goblins or thoughts on differing usage of Thorn, then I guess it really doesn't bring anything new to the hardcore/better TMD members. To be honest, that's not much of a shock. There's nothing I could write about aimed at them that wasn't blatantly obvious, such as 'Play GAT' or 'Play Gush'. What 'crowd' though? This is the deadest I've seen the place in years and by large part nothing new or interesting is talked about. Peter's article was the second or third really good thread I've seen since Gush was unrestricted. Maybe it's just my bias shining through, but what could I write about that'd actually be "useful" to you and isn't patently boring?
