Congrats to the winner, Blinkmoth Nexus, and the rest of the Top 8. Thanks to Ryan for his help with data collection. Attendance was down this week, but prizes remain excellent. 32 out of 42 players broke even. If you are considering buying into Vintage on MTGO, this is certainly one of the draws.

Total # of Players: 42

Top 8 (Top 32

1. Blinkmoth-Nexus - Ravager Shops
2. TheLastGnu - UW Stoneblade
3. BadBrain - Ravager Shops
4. Ecobaronen - Esper Mentor
5. Mlovbo - Ravager Shops
6. Lux-Adrastos - DPS
7. Hrymfaxe - Ravager Shops
8. Butakov - Ravager Shops

Metagame Breakdown (Spreadsheet

There was both a lot of Shops and it did quite well. It will be interesting to see if the metagame adopts measures such as Moat and Stoneforge Mystic as ways to combat this.

Is Moat good against Shops? I usually don't play the draw decks, but I'd suspect it would, more often than not, be a dead card in hand. Zero Dredge in the field, and still blue decks did poorly (compared to their nemesis) - maybe they overcompensated against a ghost?

As always, thanks for the superb write-up, sir!

@BazaarOfBaghdad Thanks! Always appreciate kind words.

Moat is excellent against Shops and generally feasible with Mana Drain and EE helping to overcome Spheres. Unfortunately, my 10th place list is misbuilt. @DBatterskull and I wanted to test a red splash in the deck, but we allowed greed to get in the way of fundamental deck building. The key thing is to always have a plan, not just a random assortment of good cards, and access to By Force blinded us from executing the deck's previous plan or sticking Moat, Jace, or Baneslayer Angel and leveraging a win that way. By Force was awful in that it stretched the mana base making it difficult to cast these double colored spells. I lost a game 3 to mlovbo because I was stuck with Baneslayer Angel in hand, while my By Force couldn't remove the lone Factory beating me down. As for Dredge being absent, I don't know. This was a weird event - it felt like the usual Shops players showed up but many other players. Summer plans, perhaps?

I am interested to see the number of anti-shops cards that the PO decks were running, and also to know whether or not the shops decks were running null rod. same for how many stonys the mentor decks were running.

I guess in the top 32 lists we have 2 null rods in the 1st and 11th place shops decks.

12th place mentor deck has 1 stony in the board, 20th place has 3(!) in the board, and 32nd has 1.

I'd say all of the top 32 PO decks are softer to shops than my list...