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I have been trying keep up playing live weekly Vintage as best I can, but recently have been delving into some new avenues for Vintage--Magic Online and Vintage Rotisserie Draft. I would like to share my initial thoughts about both of these subjects. I will start with Vintage on Magic Online, as much has already been said.
Vintage on MTGO
I have been playing Vintage on Magic Online for about two and a half weeks at this point, and I am loving being able to play this much! There are people to play against constantly, something Vintage players west of the Mississippi have been craving for years.
Before the weekly Vintage tournament that we currently have in Minneapolis, Vintage was available maybe once every couple of months and was not well attended at that. I know it’s shocking, but Magic players in general are usually happiest when they have an opponent.
Secondly, I think one of the most important things Vintage on MTGO brings, and I am surprised I haven’t heard more of this, is the fact that proxies will never be able to become part of the format online. This brings about many good things.
The first one is that people who want to play the format, but don’t want to break the bank on Wastelands, Misdirections and Vendilion Cliques, are forced to consider playing non-blue decks, as the dual lands for those archetypes are very cheap online. I have loved getting to play against different kinds of decks, such as Goblins (Goblin Recruiter is not restricted), various Cavern of Souls creature strategies, and my favorite so far, the deck that killed me turn one with Courser of Kruphix.
If you are wondering how that happened, he played Fastbond into Courser, into lots of Bazaar of Baghdad and Horizon Canopy activations. After playing essentially every land in the deck, he finally played Thespian's Stage and Dark Depths with Slayers' Stronghold for the instant kill. If there were proxies online people would most likely be playing blue decks, workshops or any of the other known decks, and decks like these might never come into existence.
The only Vintage environment that has existed like this recently has been in Europe. Zero-proxy tournaments are much more common and the norm in some regions. If you are ever browsing through Vintage deck lists online and you are curious about some weird deck choices, I would venture to say that most of the time it is a no-proxy tournament held somewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Version 4.0
In terms of the new client I will keep it relatively short. The two things that have been the most prevalent and frustrating is how often I am disconnected. This happens the most by far and hasn’t cost me any matches or tickets, but is just time consuming and some of my opponents in the tournament practice room don’t always care to wait for me to reconnect.
The other is casting and resolving Flusterstorm on the new client. When I have had just one target for Flusterstorm I have had good success, especially if it is the only spell on the stack. When there are other spells on the stack it gets tricky.
The little red highlight doesn’t always show up on all the cards when you drag the cursor over it and I am not able to reliably counter multiple spells or one that is on the bottom of the stack. This has resulted in me countering my own spells or losing out on one copy and my opponent being able to pay for my other copies.
Besides that I have had a pretty good experience with the client, but also have been playing with this client for longer than the previous one, so my experience is pretty different from most.
Vintage Rotisserie
Now onto one of the formats that has been growing in popularity every time it streams on shotgunlotus on twitch: Vintage Rotisserie Draft.
If you haven’t heard of this format, I will give you a quick rundown. Basically, eight people snake-draft and all of the cards that are legal in the Vintage format are up for grabs.
A few of my fellow Vintage lovers who were willing to dive right in and had some spare time gave it a shot this past week. Our experience was overall good, but we decided to change a few things for the next time.
First off, finding enough people for an eight-man. We were so excited to draft that we decided to just draft with six people rather than waiting for two more. This was okay, but eight people would make the draft more interesting and competitive.
The second is that many of us theorized about having more than 45 picks. We had some people advocating or wanting to do 60 picks and have 60-card decks. This is a huge decision as it changes the power level of the tutors because you are less likely to draw singletons like you would be if you were playing a 40-card deck. We decided on 40-card decks and met in the middle on 56 picks.
In my opinion that was too many. I think that 45 is still the right number and that should not change. Especially since we did not limit the number of sideboard cards we could have, which is something else we need to consider for next time if we don’t do 45 picks.
Finally, and what I feel is the most important, if you plan to do this with your friends, do it in real life. We attempted to draft using Google documents and basically used Facebook chat to make our picks when we could not access the document online.
This meant that we spent multiple days finishing the draft and if one person was working, sleeping, or didn’t have access to Facebook or the document, the draft came to a halt for an unknown period of time. We are definitely doing this in person next time and I imagine it will be a much better experience. At least the banter will be a million times better.
In terms of how or what to draft it seems like the first few picks are very straightforward. You just take this card first pick every time right?
Our group had quite the discussion about what to pick in Seat 1 Pick 1. Quiet Speculation’s own Ryan Overturf was part of this draft and this discussion. I hope he will leave some of his thoughts in the comments or write an article on his experience with the format. These three cards were the ones that were a part of the discussion:
Looking back on the draft, if I was in the first seat I would have taken Ancestral Recall. My reasoning is that blue is obviously a very strong color to be in with access to all Vintage-legal cards, and there is a ton of fast mana available beyond the moxen. Even if most of the fast mana is gone by the time it gets back to you, picking up Time Walk and Snapcaster Mage on the wheel is a great place to be.
The archetypes are endless because of the depth of the card pool. With only one draft in, I am not in a place to say what is the strongest, or which archetypes seem good but are traps.
I ended up in U/R, taking Ancestral Recall with the second pick in the draft, and in terms of my experience in the second seat, I would venture to say that being on the wheel is a good place to be. When you are on the wheel you are free to take two-card combos without fear of somebody else taking one of your pieces.
Here is the link to the Google document we used for the draft.
And here is the list I ended up playing:
U/R Tempo
The rest of the cards I drafted were obviously in my sideboard. Again this is sort of tainted as we only had six people in the draft, but it still shows some of the different archetypes that people drafted. I think we all learned a lot about the format and I cannot wait to get another draft going.
The most fun thing for me about this was what we were playing for. The two top finishers after our round robin would choose the decklists that the two players with the worst record would have to play at the following week's Monday Vintage tournament. The opportunity the get people to playtest decks for you or make people play an archetype they would never consider is a good reason to take it seriously.
Needless to say the format is a blast and will only get better the more times you do it. I suggest you give it a shot.
I am looking forward to seeing what our worst record holders will be playing in a couple of weeks. I have one match left to play and am currently 3-1, so I am safe from having my deck chosen for me, but need to win to earn the right to choose someone’s deck for them. Let’s just say I went onto morphling.de and searched for Top 8 deck lists with Temporal Mastery in them in case I do win.
Let me know in the comments what you would pick in the first seat in Vintage Rotisserie and I will see you next time.
I’ll start off by saying that I think that the deck I ended up with is trash. If you want to try and draft a Mishra’s Workshop deck, then you really want to black. You want to have Nether Void, the Abyss and probably some number of the actually good black cards like Thoughtseize.
I know it looks like I might have been trying to draft Workshops from the start, but I was actually trying to draft a big mana deck. Martin taking Tolarian Academy really, really hurt my ability to take advantage of the picks in my pool to do anything but shops. I thought that Gaea’s Cradle would be a good fallback, but Daniel jumped on Green Sun Zenith and Dryad Arbor, which made that play soooooo much worse. I didn’t think things through especially well and just went into a Workshop deck that could abuse Channel, as I felt that Channel was the best card in my pool and it just didn’t seem right to try to do something even weaker than what everybody else had at their disposal.
While I didn’t want to be Shops necessarily, I do like a big mana deck that can put the breaks on the opponent’s development. Tangle Wire and Plow Under are definitely cards that I wanted in my deck at every point in the draft, and from the matches that I’ve played so far they haven’t disappointed, which doesn’t surprise me because they’re Cube all-stars.
I don’t think that I could have picked Academy higher than Martin took it and ended up with the cards that I wanted for my deck- Grim Monolith is every bit as Important as Academy. I also should have prioritized Basalt Monolith higher, as I wasn’t comfortable playing Power Artifact without having more than just Grim to interact with (and Mana Vault for infinite mana on the upkeep, though this line is considerably more risky).
Anyway, my deck didn’t end up how I wanted it to, and if I had the first pick I’d snap off Ancestral Recall. I found that it was pretty easy for people to want exactly what I was looking for as the Sol Ring deck, but as the Ancestral Recall deck you can really just do whatever you want because you have the most efficient source of raw card advantage in the game. Lotus is the pretty clear pick over everything but Ancestral, but I don’t think that I’d be especially happy being the Black Lotus deck. VRD pushes people towards blue decks, and the level of interaction is high. If people just counter or blow up what you lotus into then you’re just down a card, though to be fair Lotus would be totally sweet in Martin’s bag of two-card combos.
Good article. Interesting what you say about lack of proxies creating innovative decks. Constraints breed creativity. Will be interesting to see how the format evolves with so much more Vintage being jammed on a daily basis.