52 players registered for the P9 Challenge this month. Luckily I was able to take it down with a list similar to what I played last month, incorporating a couple changes Rich and I made to the deck for this trimester of VSL. Congratulations to the rest of the top 8!

Top 8:

1. diophan - Grixis Pyromancer
2. Becks84 - DPS
3. Princess_Power - Esper Mentor
4. i_b_TRUE - Grixis Thieves with Remora
5. ChubbyRain - Jeskai Nahiri Gush
6. ConradKolos - UW Landstill
7. desolutionist - TKS Vault/Key Gifts
8. Lexor19 - White Eldrazi

Remaining 4-2s:

9. wappla - Jeskai Delver
10. thediabetical - Esper Landstill
11. MRP900 - DPS
12. nucleosynth - Grixis Pyromancer
13. Call1Me1Dragon - White Eldrazi
14. maciek1618033 - Thing in the Ice Storm
15. Boin - White Eldrazi
16. Egget - Jeskai Mentor
17. oRS - Burning Omnioath
18. evouga - Control Oath

Top 16 Decklists:
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/mtgo-standings/vintage-premier-2016-07-31

Metagame Breakdown:

A few things that immediately jump out at me. First, the top decklists were very diverse, with some truly innovative lists. Gush was a huge chunk of the metagame, but even after removing mirror matches had only a 50% winrate. The other big takeaway for me was the disappointing performance by shops, in particular versus gush. Matt noted that a larger percentage of the gush decks were lower to the ground with JVP, which assuredly contributed to this.

This time around we decided to post a link to the googledoc. The reason is twofold. First, if you see any errors please let us know (we removed all wins resulting from byes and no show opponents). Additionally, if anyone would like to play around with the data using different classifications than we did, you can do so by copying our read-only googledoc. If you want to and have questions on how the formulas work, shoot one of us a PM.

Link to the googledoc:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bw83RAwwspCi8DAS30Kvt0zRtCEBXDmt2bjKilpAJzY/edit?usp=sharing

As usual, huge thanks to @ChubbyRain for working with me to compile the data.

@diophan said:

14. maciek1618033 - Thing in the Ice Storm

For clarification, I watched a couple of maciek1618033 games and it looked very similar to my UBw Blizzard deck from a while ago. I didn't see Tendrils but it Thing, Cabal Therapy, Jace TMS, Snapcaster and a white splash for removal were all present.

Oh and congrats on the repeat, Ryan

Thanks, as usual, and nice job to both of you!

Congrats everyone who made top 8! Especially for desolutionist, who expertly dismantled me in Round 4.

And thanks diophan for gathering the matchup data -- how are you able to do this? Does MTGO allow you to export tournament data?

@evouga Unfortunately not. Matt and I have it set up to parse WER files for paper tournaments, but there's nothing like that for online tournaments. Once an event is concluded, all the participants are allowed to watch the replays. From these, we figure out what type of deck everyone is playing. We also need to enter who played whom each round, along with the result. Thankfully Matt cleaned up the way we were previously doing this, so we can do the latter task while the tournament is still going on while we're waiting for the next round to start.

@evouga MTGO can't even give players with the higher seed choice of play draw... We input round by round results manually and use replays to classify decks.

Many thanks mangs.

Congratulations to Ryan (diophan) and the rest of the Top.

further proof that gush is too much of the meta and that storm is still the best deck of the format. thank you data charts. btw what exactly is other? did someone play a sweet off the wall deck you couldnt identify?

I sometimes see rogue decks like Infect+Blazing Shoal, Elves, Lorescale Coatl aggro, etc in the 1 vs 1 queues. I'm guessing some of these are legacy decks that people are trying powered versions of.

@snowydude said:

further proof that gush is too much of the meta and that storm is still the best deck of the format. thank you data charts. btw what exactly is other? did someone play a sweet off the wall deck you couldnt identify?

BG Painter's Grindstone/Death's Shadow/Spoils of the Vault/Blood Pet 0-X goodness...

@evouga said:

I sometimes see rogue decks like Infect+Blazing Shoal, Elves, Lorescale Coatl aggro, etc in the 1 vs 1 queues. I'm guessing some of these are legacy decks that people are trying powered versions of.

You are being optimistic...one player in one Power 9 ran what appeared to be a M15 Precon. He stuck it out the entire event and ended up 1-6.

@snowydude said:

further proof that gush is too much of the meta and that storm is still the best deck of the format. thank you data charts. btw what exactly is other? did someone play a sweet off the wall deck you couldnt identify?

Im not gonna get into gush, but there is no way DPS is the best deck of the format, not in paper anyways

@ChubbyRain I got the idea from your post in TiTI discussion thread some time ago, so thanks. It's getting less and less stormy though.

Congrats to the winners!

@rikter im just going to go with "scoreboard" 66.7% win rate against the field. just edging oath out by 5ish%

wait wait how can you claim dps is not the best paper deck? what pratell do you think is the best paper deck. also while your at it whats the best online deck?

@snowydude The sample size is way too small to start making claims like that. There are a huge number of factors that influence every event. You can take "scoreboard" on it's own when the sample size is large enough to eliminate variance.

@Hrishi in case it wasnt obvious that post was somewat sarcastic. not 100% but ya know not super serious.

how many players exactly do you want in a vintage sample size? its not like we can just throw a 300 man vintage event together.

Congrats diophan on the back-to-back.

Looks like one take-away is the return of black. 11/18 decks played it.

@ChubbyRain said:

one player in one Power 9 ran what appeared to be a M15 Precon. He stuck it out the entire event and ended up 1-6.

Everybody knows that if you want to win a Vintage tournament, you need to use the Jace precon.

Kidding aside, congratulations to Ryan for back-to-back victories.

More than that, big thanks to Ryan and Matt for doing this analysis for us.

congrats @diophan for knocking me out of two of these in a row!