Welcome to 2019 everybody. And what a start to the Vintage year it was for the north east Vintage Scene. We started the day around 10:45 at Deal Me In Games with 2018 Vintage Invitational for the store Championship. As one of the few remaining monthly Vintage events this capped off a big year of play from some of the regions best players.
Round 1 saw
(1) Dan Miller vs (8) Greg Hoover
(2) Zach Dobbin vs (7) Dean Harris
(3) Dan Barkon vs (6) Josh Barkon
(4) Joe Brennan vs (5) Nick Dijohn
The Quarter final round saw
Zach Dobbin (shops) take down Dean Harris (dredge)
Josh Barkon (shops) taken down Dan Barkon (shops)
Nick DiJohn (PO) take down Joe Brennan (rug)
Greg Hoover (shops - traitor to blue mages everywhere!!) get a message 15mins into the start time that Dan Miller was actually defeated by the alarm clock.
Semi Final saw:
Josh Barkon defeat Zach Dobbin
Greg Hoover defeat Nick Dijohn
Finals saw:
Josh Barkon defeat Greg Hoover 2-0
Congratulations to Josh Barkon on winning first place. His prizes included a round 1 bye to the noon event, free entry into the noon event and very nice looking Mishra's Workshop. Josh Barkon is the 2018 Deal Me in Games Champion.
Congratulations to me (Greg) for 2nd place. 2nd place prize pool included a bye in the noon event, free entry into the noon event a nice looking Revised Underground Sea!!
Josh tuned his deck for a shops heavy meta, keeping the sphere effects in his sideboard and faced shops all 3 rounds of the invitational. In game 1 of the finals against me, we both mulled to 6. I scryed and kept a steel overseer on top with 1 in my hand. Even then I was thinking I should have bottomed it. I had 2 mana in my opening hand with a steel overseer and I think a ravager and just really needed more mana. My turn 1 draw was overseer. Turn 2 was workshop. Scrying to the bottom means I draw workshop on turn 1 and have a much more explosive opening which I dont think Josh recovers from. As it was, he beat me down pretty quick.
Game 2 we both got off to quick starts, Josh played an early wurmcoil. I followed up with a metamorph on his wurm coil. Josh pulled another wurmcoil and had a prettycommanding board state. Until I drew my super-secret mirror tech - memory jar. I played memory jar off my workshop (2 inspectors in play), drew 7 more and proceeded to dump my hand and give me a pretty commanding board state. 2 blocking errors in back to back turns (he attached with a 15/15 wurmcoil and I chump blocked and didn't sac to ravager either time) cost me the game as despite the massive life game, I was able to beat josh down to 25 when he won. Josh also had a blocking error that ran him into a 3 for 1 in my favor. But in the end, I couldn't effectively answer a 15/15 wurmcoil and 3 thopter tokens.
Invitational decklists will be posted this week as Jason is compiling that data. This is something I usually do but with a big change at home for me, my time to do that is a bit more limited than it used to be.
Congratulations to our top 8 invitational participants - Dean Harris, Joe Brennan, Dan Barkon, Dan Miller* (kind of a participant), Zach Dobbin, Nick DiJohn, Greg Hoover and especially our Champion Josh Barkon on a job well done.
*We had an alternate lined up (Leon Anton who tied me for 8th and lost his play off game to me) but Leon also could not make it.