In an article from February 12th, the deckist publication for Vintage will now occur once weekly (Sunday along with Commander) and will feature 5-0 decks that must have at least 20 different cards.
Do we expect this to be good? Bad? Same? It sounds like we'll get about 5 lists a week; a Dredge, Oath, Combo, Xerox, Blue Control. Seems bad.
Seems bad- we're going to lose out on seeing a lot of tech.
I'm pretty sure that Esper and Grixis PO fall within 20 cards of each other, despite them being different decks.
In a related note: a challenge for @brianpk80 : 5-0 with an Oath deck so different from other Oath lists that we get 2 Oath decks published. The threshold is 20 cards, and I think it's in the 75.
It's awful. With a format so small, the more available lists we have, the better for format diversity and ultimate health.
It’s an absolute joke. Vintage has such a homogenized meta, that an Oath deck and a Mentor deck could be within 20 cards of each other. If it wasn’t for the land’s, it would be like 15 or less. This is just WotC pigeonholing Vintage into Standard and Modern and saying everything is equal. The hell its not, otherwise we would have gotten leagues ~ 2 years earlier.
I think we might be overstating the impact of this change. We're not going from 100% visibility to 0% visibility. Two years ago we were getting 0 decklists each week from WotC, now we'll be getting maybe 3 to 6? Nowhere in the announcement did they mention anything about changing reporting for Vintage Challenges, where our most interesting data comes from anyway.
Note that the stated goal is that they show a wider variety, and higher number of decks. In standard they expect these changes to pretty dramatically increase the amount of decklists seen each week. If it turns out that these changes decrease the number of decks released in vintage, it's totally plausible that they could use different definitions for "distinct decklist" in different formats - the fact that they're releasing vintage on a different schedule than standard already implies their up to the possibility of tweaking numbers on a per-format basis. As they said in the article linked:
"We don't necessarily believe we've found the sweet spot just yet"
And while this change as stated will definitely reduce the variety of similar-but-strategically different blue archetypes we see, it will increase the visibility of decks just outside that 20-card difference limit, things like BUG Control and Ritual Combo, the Hate Bear decks we were seeing a few months back, and stuff like Saturn's Helm of Awakening deck he keeps spiking Challenges with.
There's also a non-zero chance that this change incentivizes people to run sufficiently different cards in order to increase their chances of getting published decklists. I think it's fair to interpret that as a good or a bad thing, but there's potential upside.
There's no doubt in my mind that this change will make the data we have less accurate, but it's clear that WotC has different priorities than accuracy, and those priorities aren't in and of themselves bad.
In the worst case scenario they fail to adjust the formula to meet vintage-specific requirements, and we end up going down to 4 or 5 published decks a week. 1-2 blue deck, 1 shops deck, 1 dredge deck, 1 other. Vintage was fine with 0 MTGO decklists a week, and it'll be fine with 5.
In the event that these changes result in genuinely important technology and/or decklists missing from the reported results, I highly suggest you just post those decklists here instead 
I’d like to agree, but the issue is that we’re are both getting less data and less quality data. We’ll be far less likely to see shifts in meta since Blue decks generally are pre made with about 30 cards already. If they lowered the threshold to 10 cards for vintage I would be satisfied, but I fear that as is we’ll miss too much. We already have a dearth or tournament reports across the format... it’s not like Standard which has at least 1 major GP every weekend along with SCG events, etc. MTGO is really one of our only tools for decklist publication these days.
@brass-man said in MTGO Decklist Publication:
In the event that these changes result in genuinely important technology and/or decklists missing from the reported results, I highly suggest you just post those decklists here instead
Would it be a good idea to create a dedicated "5-0 Thread," where anyone who 5-0's an MTGO Vintage league is encouraged to post their decklist and matchups?
@maxtortion I'd love it if people posted their cool decks here whether or not they 5-0'd, but I certainly don't have any issue with that sort of thread if someone wanted to make it.
@brass-man said in MTGO Decklist Publication:
@maxtortion I'd love it if people posted their cool decks here whether or not they 5-0'd, but I certainly don't have any issue with that sort of thread if someone wanted to make it.
I totally get that, and wasn't meaning to be results-exclusive. I love to see cool decks, 5-0s or not.
The idea behind my suggestion is to get a more thorough snapshot of "what's winning" as opposed to "what's cool."
@brass-man said in MTGO Decklist Publication:
@maxtortion I'd love it if people posted their cool decks here whether or not they 5-0'd, but I certainly don't have any issue with that sort of thread if someone wanted to make it.
This is the primary reason that we publish all of our results - see the cool shit, even if it didn't work out! (Shoutout to Junk Reanimator last weekend)
The week summary of Vintage league 5-0 decklists is as follows:
Shops
URW PO Mentor
UBr PO
Dredge
Standstill
Inferno (Kelly) Oath
PO Burning Tendrils Oath
DPS
UR Delver
That article is so strange. They are a business that says "we know our customers want more data, so we're giving you less."
@maxtortion said in MTGO Decklist Publication:
In a related note: a challenge for @brianpk80 : 5-0 with an Oath deck so different from other Oath lists that we get 2 Oath decks published. The threshold is 20 cards, and I think it's in the 75.
That could probably be done.
One disappointment I had is that a few weeks ago, I 5-0ed with a list I was looking forward to seeing publicized. I don't care much either way if they publish a result with another instance of an Oath or ordinary 1xGush deck I placed with, but this one was special. They had routinely been posting results for maybe 60 days without interruption and then they randomly decided not to publish any results that day. It was a Glint-Nest Crane deck with oddities such as The Immortal Sun, Coercive Portal, and Whir of Invention. It also had Mishra's Workshop. Not giving this deck its day in the sun was a tragedy.
I since changed the file, so I had to reconstruct it as best as I could recall. It would help if I could just link to the Results site, but alas, no entry on February 10th...
