@brass-man @moorebrother1
This is absolutely true. I experienced this as well. I never won a major event with the Academy combo deck I built almost 4 years ago, but it reached plenty of people (I hope!) and to this day I still get questions about it here and there.
Innovation isn't that difficult, take any deck concept that has been tried before in any format or one that you imagine up (within reason of course, it still needs to be "good") and build a shell around it, play a bunch, tweak it, and you're done. Further tweaks will happen if you play the deck across multiple events, but you have the rough draft ready already. A lot of things can be carried by the raw power of the restricted list and if you're not looking to break the format open, there is a lot of brewing space.
You know why you chose specific cards for your decklist in your head, but others who look at it do not. Only by explaining your card choices in a well-written way will make people curious about the deck, and probably give it a try. You could even give a brief timeline about the evolution of the deck or something like that. Even if nobody is interested in trying it, people like Vintage content and will read it!
I don't know about decks that win random tournaments because I hardly have the time to look up all results that ever get posted. Heck, I could hardly look at all the results of MODO even, unless I really wanted to. However, I do enjoy reading content and if a deck is featured there, it's a lot more likely I'll read about it there.
last edited by Hrishi