[Free Podcast] Vintage Championship Preview

Smmenen

Wherein we cover:

The Q3 Metagame
Post-Kaladesh Vintage Updates
Food and Restaurant Guidance Near Convention Center
Vintage Champs Metagame Prediction

http://www.eternalcentral.com/so-many-insane-plays-podcast-episode-58-2016-eternal-weekend-preview/

0:01:00: Announcements
0:10:00: Old School and Columbus
0:18:00: Q3 Metagame – Paper
0:29:30: Q3 Metagame – MTGO
0:43:30: Eternal Extravaganza 5 Results
1:05:00: Predictions
Total runtime: 1:33:04
SHOW NOTES

– Eternal Weekend
– Vintage Champs 2015 Coverage
– EC Old School 93-94 at Eternal Weekend 2016
– Books on Eternal Central

ajfirecracker

Another entertaining, thoughtful episode. Great work, guys.

Good luck to everyone at Eternal Weekend!

Thank you for doing these. A couple of things to address:

For clarification, we break Dredge down into "Anti-hate" and "Pitch/Transformational" builds based largely on the SB strategy. Anti-hate decks are geared to remove resolved hate pieces with Ingot Chewer, Wispmare, Nature's Claim, Barbarian Ring, etc. This would include Fatestitcher variants as, though they are more aggressively built game 1, they are still trying to fight on the axis of "Hate-Antihate" in games 2 and 3. This is opposed to Dredge lists that transform into Dark Depths combo, Doomsday Lab Man (don't laugh, I have a 4-0 with it and Lance Ballister has done work with the deck though it is very difficult to pilot), Hermit Druid Lab Man, or combinations of these. These decks typically play counterspells as that facilitates both the Dredge and Transformation strategies, but they are trying to circumvent the "Hate-Antihate" battle. It just so happened that the one Dredge pilot with a transformational SB was running @ajfirecracker's list with Vengeful Pharaoh in the MD and Hexmage in the SB. The terminology he uses for his list is "Pitch Dredge" and so we decided to use that. If there were more diverse transformational strategies, we would have used the more encompassing term of "Transformational Dredge." Hopefully that addresses any confusion there may have been.

I am also concerned about Steven listing win percentages for individual deck types as the majority of them he mentioned had N=1. These aren't necessarily good deck choices for Champs as the people running them tend to be consistent pilots of those decks with greater experience and familiarity so the win percentage is skewed. This is in addition to the variance inherent in any tournament of Magic, which is exacerbated with a small sample size. For instance, Brad Gutkin, the Blue Moon player, faced Shops in 4 out of 7 swiss rounds, which is a very favorable matchup for the Blue Moon pilot (and Brad ended up winning all of them). This is not an attempt to disparage Brad in any way, I'm just trying to emphasize the randomness that you get when you look at individual pilots and caution against over representing results based on one player.

Since this has been a point of contention for me since the Lodestone Golem restriction, I feel the need to draw attention to it. I am of the firm belief that the win condition played in Mishra's Workshop decks is of secondary importance. If you are running Mishra's Workshop in your deck, you are fundamentally the prison deck against every matchup, whether your kill condition is Thought-Knot Seer, Fleetwheel Cruiser, Mishra's Factory, Darksteel Juggernaught, Arcbound Ravager, whatever. Mishra's Workshop coupled with the saturation of artifact prison elements is fundamentally broken and many tournaments have acted as prime examples of this.

Edit: Thanks for the podcast was informativish.

@socialite And if people were campaigning for the restriction of Fleetwheel Cruiser, then you might have an actual point rather than just a troll post. Remember, the debate was between Mentor and Gush. If you want to consider Gush a pillar of the format (which I know you do), then fine, make the comparison to Mishra's Workshop, but that wasn't the point of my post.

Also, your first comment in 19 days was a troll of my argument and a backhanded compliment? Well done. Try offering something constructive for a change or contributing something of value to the Vintage community.

@ChubbyRain said:

@socialite And if people were campaigning for the restriction of Fleetwheel Cruiser, then you might have an actual point rather than just a troll post. Remember, the debate was between Mentor and Gush. If you want to consider Gush a pillar of the format (which I know you do), then fine, make the comparison to Mishra's Workshop, but that wasn't the point of my post.

Also, your first comment in 19 days was a troll of my argument and a backhanded compliment? Well done. Try offering something constructive for a change or contributing something of value to the Vintage community.

I don't subscribe to the concept of "Pillars" it's always been flawed and I find it exacerbates discussions in the most negative of ways.

There are some deep-lying issues about classifying a deck as a Gush deck but not a Force of Will deck or a Preordain deck, or a Mental Misstep deck.

My post is no less "troll" than yours and I find it rather humorous that when you re-frame the statement it sincerely shows just how irrelevant and incorrect the point you're trying to make is. The fact that you constantly frame my statements as "trolling" is beyond tiresome, almost as tiresome as the highly visible and biased narrative you've been pushing for the past five months at almost every turn. Perhaps if this forum were less concerned with masked whining I'd be more inclined to post at higher intervals unfortunately this site isn't the epitome of logical discussion.

Vintage currently has a huge issue with aesthetic panning rooted solely in cognitive biases and I'm afraid it's going to strangle the format to death faster than any "broken" card.

Providing a counterweight for these discussions is constructive, unless you're a huge fan of echo chambers.

Thanks for your time Matthew.

davidlemon

@socialite

The analogy between Gush and Workshops isn't a bad one; I think everyone knows what you're getting at. Just a couple things, though:

Gush is a bigger part of the meta than Workshops (they're both huge parts obviously, but still) and
People can play other blue decks if Gush goes away. The same can't be said about brown decks if Workshops goes away.

I know 2. gets at your point about Pillars, but I don't think any shops players are going to pretend that they're being protective of the card Workshops purely out of wanting to keep the meta "balanced" or "for the good of the game" or whatever. We all want to keep our pet deck. And having to go from shops to, I dunno, hatebears or some other prison-ish deck would be much more painful than a Gush player being forced to switch to a big blue or Thoughtcast deck. Anyway, that's how I feel about it.

@socialite I'll message you to continue this if you're willing as I don't want to derail the thread.

nedleeds

The kill condition absolutely matters, that's why nobody swapped actual Juggernaut in for LSG after its restriction. There is no disruption from Juggernaut other than your opponent laughing at you. A clock that stacks a disruptive effect is what makes shops able to close out games against decks with real mana bases and removal. TKS sort of does this but is uncastable with many hands making it unreliable over a longer event.

The casts question of how many people is an important one, if you expect 10 rounds again and don't have byes I think asking for shops to get 24+ points is a huge ask. If you think the event will be much smaller given the Friday, the Halloween, and the location change then shops or a thorn deck might be a good choice.

Lodestone is more than just a secondary win condition if that's what you're saying. As just a one of, it's the crown jewel of any Workshop deck.

@nedleeds The kill condition matters more in aggro or prison lists, less in control lists. It's the Andrew Cuneo approach to Control in which the win conditions are sparse and often have multiple purposes (for instance, Karn Liberated or Blue Sun's Zenith). Gush decks are fundamentally control decks (yes, even in the Landstill matchup), and the player's who have the most success with the archetype are those who understand this core principle regardless of if they are running Delvers, Pyromancers, Mentors, Nahiris, Doomsdays, or Oaths. This doesn't necessarily have anything to do with restriction - it's just an insight into metagame dynamics and deck construction but one that is often obscured by selection bias as we tend to remember the cards that end the game rather than the cards that get us to that point. But @socialite is right in that this isn't the proper thread to discuss this and my bringing it up at worst is whining, at best is a distraction from the work @CHA1N5 and @Smmenen did. So I apologize and I regret bringing it up - it's been a rough week and I'm exhausted.

To @nedleeds point about what decks are capable of going 8-1-1 and better, I think that's a good way to look at it. We do have empirical data on this in the form of EE5, EE4, NYSE, and the TMD open. Those events were 7-8 round affairs so the decks in the Finals or Top 4 are basically equivalent to an 8-1-1 or better record. Going by those, Ravager Shops in the hands of a very skilled pilot like Will Magrann or Montolio is definitely capable of top 8'ing if not winning. The other major contenders would be Gush (either Mentor, Grixis Pyromancer, or Nahiri) and I think Tribal Eldrazi made the finals of EE4. This isn't to say other decks can't pull it off, but if I was a betting man...

@ChubbyRain said:

@nedleeds The kill condition matters more in aggro or prison lists, less in control lists.

I realize you're trying to sweep this discussion under the rug, but I doubt Steve and Kevin are patiently awaiting feedback on this particular podcast... (It was very short)

I'm just wondering about the quoted statement... Seems like a gross generalization. I think actually choosing the right win condition for a control shops deck is a lot more difficult than you're making it seem. For one there isn't a standard control shops deck that you can look at for direction while there are a ton of Aggro Shops decks to be copy/pasted. I think deciding any card (win condition or not) for any non-mainstream deck is extremely difficult and all 75 cards are very important regardless of what strategy you're playing.

Maybe you're alluding to Dromoka in Gush theory?

Smmenen

Actually, I was hoping for a discussion of the podcast predictions and other topics discussed.

Let's save the Mentor v. Gush discussion for another time.

davidlemon

@Smmenen

I think the time is right for Dredge to sneak in a win. It's flying under the radar right now, which is always when it's at its most dangerous. There's not much combo (it seems like no one plays DPS offline), there's lots of Shops, and the format just feels slow in general. If a good Dredge pilot makes it through the early rounds unscathed by Belcher or one of these glass canon Paradoxical Outcome decks, I think they'll have a great shot. Sideboards at the top tables, based on EE5, will look like:

2 Containment Priest
1 RiP
1 Crypt
1 Pithing Needle
1 Ravenous Trap

That's pretty smooth sailing.