@desolutionist believe me, you would have gotten sick of seeing lurrus real quick. Bad timing though for sure

Him and the BUG guy are very much playable. Magus of the Chalice seems incredibly good. Iam glad wizards does not shy away from printing powerful new cards.
However the modern magic design heavily favouring creatues and creature based decks, printing hate for spells and not printing powerful spells anymore concerns me a lot. (Yes i know they printed cruise and dig, but not because they wanted to pront good spells, but because they underestimated the power).
One of the reasons i love vintage is that it is not another boring creature based format, that spell based decks are not only viable but very strong and that creature combat is not the only good win condition. I fear that if the modern design philosophy will go on, in time Vintage will be a creature dominated format as well...i dont want to play just a fast modern.

I am very glad that you are not on the R&D team, they are already going way to hard in that direction.

Lets just make Vintage like every other format! Playing a 2 drop creature on turn 2, winning by attacking, interacting by blocking. Wouldn't it just be so unfair if somebody could counter your cool creature? lets make them all uncounterable, we wouldn't want someone to interact with you outside of combat. Somebody drawing more cards than 1 a turn seems kind of unfair, lets stop that with something...i know how about an ability on a 2/2 so we can attack and block with it?! Uh this guy is trying to produce more mana on turn 1 or is trying to not play basic lands, that seems kind of unfair, i am not doing that so he shouldn't be able to do so as well! Lets get something that hoses non basic lands or any kind of mana acceleration, better lets put that on a creature! This other player wants to play multiple spells in a single turn, i don't understand that, isn't it supposed to be 1 (creature) spell a turn? Lets enforce that by...mmh let me think...putting some hate on a creature! That player is trying to win by some kind of spell or combination, that seems complicated and unfair to me, he should try to win like everybody else by attacking with creatures! The proper way!

Don't draw cards!
Don't win by casting non creature spells!
Don't put 2 things on the stack at once!
Don't counter my creatures, in fact lets just get the stack out of here!
Don't cast more than 1 spell each turn.
Play 1 land a turn
Play 1 creature a turn
Attack
Block
That's magic!

Alright i am sorry for the rambling, you probably get how i fell about that design approach.

the TSI Coverage is currently up at
https://www.twitch.tv/tmdbrassman

Come join us to look at drunk idiots playing wacky Vintage paper Decks!

This much.

@volrathxp common tricks from the top of my head:

• triggering things by casting pyroblast on a nonsensical target. For example, triggering mentor or dack by casting pyroblast on a land.

• common sensei's top tricks like tapping top, holding priority and untapping it with key to tap it again to draw an extra card and put top in hand. Or the tapping top and in response bouncing it by any means (PO, repeal...)
  If you want to draw with top, but don't want to have the top on your library as the first card you can activate tops order ability and in response put sensei's on the library to draw your card. Now when the order ability resolves, you can order sensei's anywhere in the top 3 you want.

• there is value to be gained with triggers that have a scaling factor which is checked upon resolution. For example if you have a Aetherflux reservoir on the battlefield and you cast 2 instants in a row you can gain 3 life total if you let everything resolve individually, or you can cast the second instant while the first reservoir trigger is still in the stack to gain 4 life instead.

• since probe is restricted there are a few sneaky bluffing possiblies available again. Letting a blind cabal therapy on you resolve even though you have a misstep in hand to counter it might be worth it in some situations. Most players will not name misstep with the therapy if it resolves and you save yourself a misstep and some life. (The cost of course is that your opponent could hit something else, sees your hand etc.)

• An oldschool bluffing trick would also be selectively skipping to your second main before casting a spell to bluff having a mana drain in hand.

There are so many more...

@wagner said in Single Card Discussion - Lavinia, Azorious Renegade:

Seems the only type of interaction people are willing to accept is counterspells because it's somehow "fairer" to gets things countered instead of not being able to play them.

Counterspells take some thought to use. You have to keep up mana (or blue cards to pitch, or nothing at all in case of MM i guess...), you have to choose what is a thread that has to be countered, what is just a bait, what you can handle in a different way etc. You have to think about using your counterspell to discrupt your opponents plan or to protect your own, when to pick a counterwar, and when to just hold back. It is most of the time a 1for1 trade and can be played around by your opponent.

Permanents that say "opponent cant do X" are a very different beast. They are not reactionary, but instead preventetive. They are not a 1for1 but instead a Y for 1, while Y should be a high enough number to make is worth it. Because just hating a card you dont know your opponent even has in hand, is not nearly as powerful as handeling a specific card that they already drawn and payed mana for. So you basically you have to carpet bomb a bunch of their deck to get your hits.
You cant play around those kinds of cards in game, or at least not very often, but instead "playing around" those cards consists of deckbuilding choices instead of gameplay choices.
It doesnt take skill to play these cards and it doesnt take any skill to play against these cards. These cards basically just limit potential choices to be made by both players immensely. When a card says "You cant play your cards" there is literally no choice to be made. This is just bad game design, there is nothing interesting about it.

Hexproof, Cant be countered, protection and other mechanics in the "you cant interact with me" vain are guilty of that as are cards like Lavinia, CotV (which sometimes at least has a meaningful choice on what number to set it, but its 0 or 1 95% of the time) , Leyline of the Void, RIP, Cavern of Souls and many more.
I get that hate cards are needed, and while i personally dont like the gameplay of hatebears style decks (i dont believe lavinia is only playable in those kinds of decks btw.), i can appreciate well designed cards that hate specific strategies. Cards that say "if you want to do X, you can but Y will happen" instead of "you cant do X"
Scap clan berserker , Thalia or Mystic Remora are examples of hating spells while still giving your opponent a meaningful choice.
Dont print cards that say "Opponents cant draw more than 1 card each turn" instead print cards that say "whenever an opponent would draw a card other than the first one of their turn, they have to pay (1) for each card"
Dont print cards that say "Hexproof" instead print cards that say "whenever this creature becomes the target of a spell or ability an opponent controls they have to discard a card"

Edit: more card ideas: "whenever an artifact enters the battlefield, it's controller discards a card"
"Whenever a card is put into an opponent's graveyard from anywhere, this player loses 1 life"

TLDR: "X cant be done" cards are incredibly boring, dont take any play skill from both sides and are just very lazy and bad game design. The more cards like this see print, the worse MTG gets as a whole.

@ajfirecracker

There's nothing special about Leyline's opening-hand attribute that makes it superior as a 4-of.

And this is, i think, the very core of our disagreement in the matter.

I am afraid there are too many permutations to make a useful list unless you try to categorize them. (with x disruption spells, without any disruption, playing around spell y etc.)

I would love to play in those dailies but im just not willing to invest in mtgo. Im building my first real Paper Vintage deck atm and that just has priority over mtgo. If the software would be better i would probably consider it, but as it is its not worth the money for me.

[
W
Creature- Human Wizard
Magecraft - Whenever you cast or copy an insant or sorcery spell, Clever Lumimancer gets +2/+2 until end of turn.
0/1
]

This seems incredibly pushed. Just 1 white mana to get your win condition on the battlefield.
Since this doesn't trigger on Artifacts or Enchantements the ability seems not on Prowess level quite, however it does trigger on copied spells, which means this is quite insane with any storm card.

I think this card is immensely pushed and could see play in pretty much all formats.

@meldesmond Ah, T-shirts, i see. Thats a pretty ncie collection you got going there. Would love to see some pictures!

Sorry English isn't my first language: What are 'tees' ?

The more i think about this the more i realize that i cant quite put my finger on why exactly i think crossover IPs coming into MTG is a bad thing. It feels to me like some MTG identity is lost, however it is replaced by something else.
I am still thinking that this isn't a good development, but i cant really rationalize why i think that currently.

As many of you already know Hasbro announced in an investors earning call that they will have Crossover MtG Products with other IPs naming Lord of the Rings (Hobbit etc.) as well as the Warhammer franchise.

TLDR: Crossover bad, pessimistic view.

While i like Lord of the Rings as much as everybody else, i am highly concerned about this. No i am not saying this will the death of magic or anything as dire as that. On the contrary i strongly believe that a Lord of the Rings Set will be financially speaking a massively successful if not the most successful Set ever released if correctly developed.

That aside: for a long time a have the feeling that MTG is, while not dying, getting worse by a thousand cuts, some of which are more personal and some are pretty widely spread not liked by the player base:

• creature power creep
• asymmetrical hate pieces
• some art direction
• some borders
• some mechanics
• general WotC greediness
• Lack of WotC testing for eternal formats
• The resulting massive bans for nearly every set

And i would like to add to this list: Crossovers with other IPs.
Until now we had 3 kinds of Crossovers happen all of which where handled differently:

First of we had silver bordered crossovers like My little Pony and Transformers. I personally do not care at all for these, but i see that some people really liked these. I see no negative to this approach and would be fine which WotC to peruse more crossovers in this manner, since none of these cards are legal in any official formats.

The second type was more intrusive and i am of course talking about the Ikoria/Godzilla crossover. In this case the crossover was handled as official alters of existing cards. All the Godzilla names and Artwork was printed on cards that where also available as "normal" MtG cards with different artworks and names.
This felt strange to me to see Modern military hardware or buildings together with normal MTG cards, however with time i believe that this kind of crossover is not that different from people just altering their cards anyway with which i have no problem at all. Its your cards you can do to them whatever you want, and you can play whatever version of a card that you want, even if i don't like your specific version.

The third kind of crossover is pretty infamous and had a ton of backlash, but, and that's way more important, was financially incredibly successful. This was a clear sign to Hasbro and WOTC that fan backlash is worth it if the product still sells. (this is of course just a presumption by me). Why was this product so hated by most fans? First of all it was very limited and expensive and secondly the cards where newly designed cards, not reprints, that where only available in this version, and where black bordered, meaning legal in official formats. Now this was not just a fun thing to do, but it was actual legal, official cards that depicted modern real world weapons, equipment, clothing and faces of real people (we had real faces on cards this done before, but in a very different context).

I fear that these new crossovers will be black bordered and will change mtg for the worse while still being highly financially viable.

Yes it is Lord of the Rings and i am myself very much eager to see this crossover. However this is just one of them, pretend it isn't Lord of the Rings (which at least is a fantasy setting) but any of the other IPs that will surely follow if this makes enough money.
Warhammer (already confirmed), Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter, Battlefield, Stranger Things, Cyber Punk, Grand Theft Auto, Song of Ice and Fire, Breaking Bad...
Sure some of them you might like, but now we don't have a choice anymore with playing these cards. Together with modern power creep and card design you wont have a choice to just not play a playset of [Going Warp Speed] in your deck because it synergizes so well with [Professor Dumbledore] if you want to stay competitive.

I know this seems pretty over the top and pessimistic, but is it really that different from The Walking Dead?
And if this makes money, which i am pretty sure it will, why would WotC and Hasbro have any reason to stop? For the last couple of years they definitely showed that they prefer short term profit over the long term health of the game.

Edit: Added pictures and TLDR and Poll

Iam actually really excited for this

@botvinik That sounds like one of the most valuable flusters

Love that thread idea

@duke ah so we arent alone, and that format actually already exists, nice!
Ill check out mtgoldframe for sure

@brass-man Thank you so much for your very detailled response! I myself have gone through the B&R timeline to get the list, but just wasnt fast enough to post here, sorry!

My go to deck for this era would definetly be TPS.

As for the B&R List: I agree that there are many cards on there that seem pretty harmless conpared to other, even unrestricted cards of that era, however since i myself did not play Vintage back then, but actually just startet out with magic in general around that time, my own judgement on those cards is purely theoretical.

Another good point brought up is that the metagame back then was highly regional and very slow to develop compared to modern times. Iam aware that this might let the metagame of that period seem more open and wide, while in modern times it could very much happen that a couple of best decks will dominate the meta by a lot. A counterpoint to this is the wide range of 93/94 Decks that are absolutely viable and see play.

Generally i like to test the format with the orginal B&R List before making any changes to it.