@fsecco yes i agree. In my mind, the potential is that we have a very easy way to target any chosen creatures on the battlefield (whoever they belong to). I don't know what we could do with that in the maybe future but i like the potential of it.

There is a cycle of cards in Legends that have a nice potential. The black one is Touch of Darkness (the other four are exactly similar). They never saw any play back in the days but there is a nice combo that is played in Commander with Horobi, Death's wail.
When Horobi is on the field, Touch of darkness is a 1cc instant wrath of god that hits only opponent and that can't be countered (very difficult to be more true). Quite neat !
Horobi is not Vintage playable but if a Vintage playable similar card was printed it could lead in the death of all creature decks and so would deserve some restriction.

I am not an expert but, because of the high power level of vintage cards, could it be that making 1 for 1, in ritual and not knowing what you may find in opponent hand, is not good enough for a vintage control deck ? Counterspells sound better as some are free (or sort of) and can be played with more information. I mean discard might not be broken enough for modern vintage ?

@nightowl974 I can only agree with your analysis about french Vintage. We managed to keep a small communauty in Lyon and we are playing once a month (btw you are much welcome if you happen to be around). Beside that and the once a year EW, there are no other tournaments in France that i heard of for a very long time.

I hope the card is a true one (black is notoriously bad at dealing with artifacts) because a black sword to plowshare is just a living dream. However, i agree the card is quite narrow but will definitively see some play.

@Stuart He was true when saying that people were ready for the shop matchup. Some people were even paranoid about it : i met a BUG deck that was running (post side) : 4 trygon predator, 4 nature's claim and 3 energy flux. Obviously i lost ...
Shop is sort of similar to dredge : when you take it seriously, you win against it.

@ChubbyRain
I post here not very often, first because english is not my mother tongue and it is not always easy to be crystal clear. But the main reason is that much too often people are reading half sentences, or understand what is written according to what they think and not to what is written, or just jump on one word usually not very important and very soon we are talking about anything but not what was the real point, play on words or whatever rhetoric tool so they don't need to answer embarrassing question or argument.
I am targetting and judging no-one here and i am probably included too but it is very frustrating and making me post even less. Maybe my english is so bad that people don't understand me but i am tired to spend my time explaining again and again what i wrote and that people missread, especially when it is about small details of really not much interest.

So to answer your post :

• I have no idea if comparison is interesting or not and that's the only reason i was still following this talk. I had hoped i could learn something interesting that could help me to improve my play level. When i said in my last post that i agreed with you that this talk leads nowhere, i meant that in the i-don't-know-how-much posts that i read i did not see much and my bet for something interesting to come was very low.

• I did not hijacked your exemple, i aknowledged it and went one step further in the analysis : one time mana has some interest in a shop deck of course but IMHO the real point is the next turn. My decision process for mulligan or keep takes that in account and if i want to be really on the safe side i usually consider one-time mana source as some kind of bonus rather than mana source. Of course, some times it is worth the risk to have your black lotus-ed inspector getting a FOW. Talking about one-time mana in shop deck is an interesting topic but i am not sure it really belongs to that thread so i did not elaborate much in my previous post.

@chubbyrain my post was only answering an obviously false statement (a few posts above) saying that the two opening hands were exactly the same. No more no less.

As for city of traitor, i know what it is worth in Legacy, and nowhere did i write it was a bad card in vacuum. It was only an exemple for what it is worth.

Your exemple illustrate exactly what i was pointing at : a keep or mulligan depends if your hand allow a safe mana/game development (i mean, will you be able to play some cards that turn and the next one). The 2nd hand is an obvious keep because of both lotus and inspector.

That said, i agree with you that this thread and talk is leading nowhere.

Workshop + mox or Lotus + mox in opening hand can't be more different :

• workshop + mox is a almost 100% keep (unless mana full opening hand)
• as for lotus + mox, there are 2 cases. If i have also a land, i will play it and so my amount of available mana won't be the same. If i have no land, that hand is a 100% mulligan.

There is a huge difference between one time and reusable mana in shop decks (that's the reason why city of traitor is just bad in shop decks). Basically, in shop decks, lotus is closer to some kind of a 'dark ritual' than anything else : its function is to give some reach (by casting higher cc card or more cards) once.

@protoaddct

About Aaron post, i am happy that Wizard decided something. I think a choice (which ever) is best that no choice here. On the other hand, i am not very happy about the way it was told and what was used to backup that choice.
About my post and your answer, maybe i should have said "mana curve" instead of "average casting cost". My point was, if we want to be fair we must also consider that fact that 3 mana in opening hand is not the same when most of your spells cost 1-2 mana or when most of them cost 2-3 mana. Basically i agreed with what you said, just adding something for fairness.
About the computation, that is more or less what i had in mind. I am not sure if it is really usefull to do that but the scientist in me is a bit curious about that now. I am far from being a statistical expert but i will have a look to see if i can compute something simple but significant enough.