@nedleeds Yes. I said given that Workshops exist, why is LSG not broken? I agree that Workshop is a broken card, but it isn't going anywhere, for many reasons.

Saying LSG dies to removal is not a good argument, I don't think. Every card can be answered. Is Oath broken, for example? Maybe, but saying it isn't because Disenchant is in the format is not a good argument, in my mind. Isn't it a better question to ask, "How often does the presence of LSG in the format as a metagame consideration, and in a game as a card, lead to games where skill (of deckbuilding and play) does not determine the victor?" For example, remember Delver, when Treasure Cruise was legal, just two years ago or so? It was unbelievably frustrating to play at that time if you weren't on Delver. You'd outplay your opponent, they'd topdeck a Cruise, and win. Wins earned off the back of overpowered cards, not overpowered players, were all over the place.

To put it another way, I love playing intricate games against good players. I hate losing to bad players who lean on brokenness to win (though I don't mind losing to a pile of restricted cards -- it happens). And, importantly, it feels uninteresting to play against good players who have to shoehorn themselves into a broken strategy because it's too good to ignore.

How is that not an optimal framework?

If I had to go to champs tomorrow, this is what I'd run:

## 4c Keeper

Mana
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
2 Volcanic Island
2 Tropical Island
1 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Strip Mine
2 Wasteland

Spells
3 Deathrite Shaman
3 Snapcaster Mage
2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
1 Tinker
1 Blightsteel Colossus
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Dack Fayden

1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Dig Through Time
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor

2 Mana Drain
3 Mental Misstep
4 Force of Will
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Murderous Cut
1 Abrade

Sideboard
2 Null Rod
3 Grafdigger's Cage
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Yixlid Jailer
1 Ravenous Trap
3 Ingot Chewer
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Mountain
1 Toxic Deluge

I need to work more on Mentor. Shops is very solid. Storm quite good, though I might try and make MBT/a 3rd Rod work. Eldrazi is good, though tense.

Thoughts:

• Tried white, but the mana doesn't work.
• Abrade is the real deal, folks. Perfect card for this deck.
• Wasteland is a requirement for this deck idea to work reliably. You must keep their mana occupied, whether through Wasteland or through answering your little threats. So, cutting Wasteland while keeping the deathrite/leovold/1-for-1 removal core of the deck just doesn't work very well.
• Leovold is really good against Mentor.
• Thoughtseize is good against storm, bad against shops, semi-decent vs Mentor. Not sold on it either way; but I think its value is too variant to be worth it in the context of a large tournament. Also I'm not happy blind-fetching a sea into Wastelands in a shops-rich environment, given how tenuous the mana situation here is.
• I wish there were more good draw spells for this deck that aren't Preordain or Gush in Vintage. Merchant Scroll is a good addition for this archetype to this end.
• Dack is really powerful here. I think this is the best Dack deck I know of.
• I don't know which black removal spell is best. Murderous Cut is, I think, like 5% better than the rest but it's very close.
• The tutor package is beautiful, and Tinker is a very clear improvement imo. The improvement your shops match gets by including Crypt alone is notable.

I haven't heard a consistent framework from anybody (Wizards included) to decide what are and what are not good game features of Vintage magic, and then an argument for whether the restriction fits that framework. The arguments are pretty he-said/she-said-ish, where one side sounds like "I like blue cards" and the other, "I like workshops." But that isn't a good way to decide what is a good game feature.

The germane question to me when deciding a restriction is, Is the card broken? "Broken" to me means that players can earn wins off the back of a card -- through deck construction AND play -- that don't require skill; that they can in fact win despite performing poorly, and can avoid losses despite making mistakes. I don't mind losing to a player who draws well, but I can't stand losing to players who make huge mistakes and don't afford me the opportunity to capitalize on them. When players make mistakes with Force of Will, you usually win. When players make mistakes with Shops, it's often very difficult to capitalize on them because of LSG.

This is true of deck construction and metagaming, which to me are two other "games" within Magic. LSG is so good that no Shops deck can reasonably not play 4 copies. Again, players are restricted from flexing their skill by having to play 4 LSGs; and when you sit down across from a Shops player, you KNOW they have 4 LSGs in their deck. These are not good phenomena.

Which is not to say Shops are not skill-intensive to play. They are. But LSG gives a floor to bad players and, in a roundabout way, a ceiling for good players, that is unbalanced and unfun. Caw-Blade was the same way: the games were skill-intensive and the good players won more often, but having every deck start 4 Jace 4 Stoneforge was just as a kind of empirical phenomenon ungood for everyone.

I understand that people like Workshops, and I really value their place in the format and enjoy a good back and forth Shops game. I do think however that LSG is a broken card and that having 4 of him in your deck therefore makes it too consistently good. Talk of blue decks' brokenness seems just silly to me -- they have broken cards, yeah. That's why those cards are restricted. LSG should be too.

(The question of Gush is harder, imo, but it's probably also broken.)

@themonadnomad check http://mythicspoiler.com/newspoilers.html

I second @Soly -- memorizing piles is not the way to think about it. You end up using the same 5-ish piles over and over again with maybe one or two cards different (swapping a duress for a flusterstorm, or something) in about 90% of cases anyway, so as long as you know the basic piles you should be set for memorizing. The thing to learn is tactics: knowing the ingredients to piles that you need in order to solve certain game situations. Then you identify your constraints in a game and compose a pile to account for them.

The main things to know are:

• how much mana do I have access to?
• how many draws do I have access to?
• how many land drops do I have?
• what disruption can my opponent have?

Then given this information, you can identify what resources you lack and need, and construct your pile to give them to you. Make the pile satisfy exactly the constraints you need, and devote everything else to countering disruption.

For example, to win with Lab Man you'll need 6 draws and 3 mana at least. If you have a Gush and Gitaxian Probe in hand, and 3 lands in play without another land drop this turn, then 3 of your draws are already accounted for. You need 3 more draws. Ancestral probably does this best for you. So then you need 4 mana total. Get lotus, sapphire, ancestral, lab man, and a piece of disruption.

One important thing to note here is that extra turns can be thought of as just stand-ins for more mana, land drops, and card draws. Time Walk, for example, can act as a Black Lotus that draws you a card and nets you a land drop if you have 3 tapped mana sources in play when you cast it. If you don't have access to Time Walk, then passing the turn behaves the same way, except with the huge disadvantage of giving your opponent more mana and cards and hence more potential to disrupt you or win. (For this reason, pass-the-turn piles are usually not advisable unless necessary or afforded with multiple pieces of protection.)

Other points:

• it's often right to hold onto a gitaxian probe early in the game to use as a zero-mana way to draw into a doomsday pile
• brainstorm piles are really hard, avoid making them if you can
• a fetchland can act as a draw spell by fetching a land out of a doomsday pile
• sensei's top has neat but very complicated interactions with doomsday. Goldfish a few piles with it in play to get used to it.
• the longer you wait to cast doomsday, the more mana you'll have, and hence the more disruption you'll be able to afford yourself post-dd. Balance this against how much time you're giving your opponent to kill you or lock you out.

So sweet. Thanks a ton, Steve. We all appreciate your work very much!

Is there some way in all of vintage's card pool to gain a bazillion life easily (= reliably by turn 3-4)? If you just have 4x this + some combination of 30 cards aimed at finding it and/or gaining tons of life then you have a deck. Note they help each other out in multiples. Is there some reliable artifact-based way to gain tons of life? I've never known a workshop deck that had that as a goal so can't think of anything off the top of my head but this + workshops + incidental life gain could be a thing. Is there a card that's like, "Sac X artifacts: you gain X times 2 life" or something? If so could soft-prison them then just win eventually with this.

@gkraigher dude, relax. It's day zero. Let the shit shake out for a while. Have you even begun brewing decklists and testing them?

I thought Reid Duke put it best so far:

Vintage remains structurally the same. Workshop has gone from “pretty clearly the best strategy” to “still one of the best strategies.” In my opinion, that’s the sign of a perfectly reasonable, subtle change to the Banned and Restricted List.

http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/eye-is-banned-ancestral-vision-and-sword-of-the-meek-are-unbanned-what-now/

sometimes in a blue deck with 15-17 lands in it I'm tempted to add 1-2 lands to my sideboard just to keep up with spheres from shops. It's possible that this is useful on double duty as dredge hate and extra generic lands against shops. Worth some research.

@Lysandros Your post is a bit confusing to me but if you were saying I was being passive aggressive about Shops players not being skillful or their decks not being difficult to play, I wasn't, and said so. Honestly. A good Shops match against a good player is fun. Outplaying someone is fun, and being outplayed is also fun. What's not fun is outplaying someone and still losing because they drew their busted card. That's true generally speaking -- was true of Cruise, as I said. If it happens too often the card in question should be restricted, period. So the question is, are busted interactions happening too often and if so, what can be done about it?

To your question about why I don't play the deck -- I just don't like playing with Shops. I didn't play with Cruise two years ago either because I didn't like playing with Delvers and stuff. And I shouldn't have to feel compelled to, though I do (or did). I feel that's another strong symptom of a problem.

@nedleeds said:

There are more blue or hijacked blue restricted cards than Lodestone Golems. It's doesn't trouble you to lose to those? What's the difference? Losing is losing. You just chuckle off Tinker Blightsteel with a gentlemanly smirk, but a Golem sends you packing? Makes no sense to me.

The difference is that Tinker was restricted and Golem wasn't. So Golem happened way more often. That's the difference. If Tinker were a 4-of I would complain about that. T1 Tinker happens very rarely. T1 Golem happened often.

Saying I should "man up" about something doesn't address anything I said. I like playing against Workshops but as I said I think Golem is overpowered. I would agree that my notion of 'fun' is subjective but the notions of skill really aren't. There are good players and bad players, period -- and I'm not saying I'm good, by the way. But I know when I've outplayed my opponent and when they've outplayed me, and too often I saw LSG forgiving bad play unfairly. I would furthermore argue that forcing Shops players to adopt LSG holds back good players from being their best, but that's a subtler point.

Are we still on for Sunday, in light of Coronavirus?

This is much better than Lab Man in Doomsday:

1. It costs 1 less mana.
2. You can draw up to 3 (!!) fewer cards with it to win the game
3. If you have zero cards in your library when its ability resolves, you still win. So unless your opponent counters Doomsday or the creature, you just win now if you can get your library to zero cards. (Before, you'd have to get your library down to zero cards, THEN cast a draw spell, THEN hope they don't have removal OR bank a counterspell for it.)

These are all gigantic improvements. Often in tight games playing Doomsday you will find yourself one mana or 1-2 card draws short of being able to combo off and will have to pass the turn, usually resulting in a loss. This happens a lot -- in maybe 25% of the games you play where both you and your opponent have reasonable draws, I'd say. It's especially common against shops, where the presence of a sphere will tax you one or two critical turns because you either couldn't afford Lab Man, or couldn't afford to cast a draw spell after he resolved.

Also, crucially, because you don't have to include as many card draw spells in your piles, you can now include more counterspells, duresses, artifact removal, or cards like Time Walk and Yawgmoth's Will in your piles to provide extra resilience.

Basically, this card takes the bare requirements for Doomsday to be a win down by a huge amount, and therefore either speeds up your kill, improves its resilience, or reduces the number of resources you'll need to win off of it, all for basically free over Lab Man. These are huge improvements that should be tested for.

What's the over/under that 3+ of the champs top 8 this year feature this card?

@brianpk80 There's no way they had Vintage at all in mind when designing this card. It's designed to either be a commander, or to slot nicely into the GW Cat beatdown archetype they're bolstering. The new cat avatar bro is very strong; this is to go with that.

Played with her today. She really screws up combat. Like Banding++. Give it a whirl, kids.

Thought-Knot Seer, kind of.

That said in many cases I think your notion of redundancy doesn't really matter. Like, having a second Null Rod does nothing more than the first, but, it may be important to cast the second one to reduce your storm opponent's outs from, e.g., 4 to 2, if they have 2 Chain of Vapor and 2 Hurkyl's. Same goes for Grafdigger's Cage, or single-use redundant cards like Tormod's Crypt.

@thecravenone The main function of that removal spell slot is to kill shops creatures. UB4 + double spheres is totally uncastable unless you have already won the game. What you want to do against shops is just grind their threats and spheres down and emerge on turn 4-5 with an at least healthy mana base, a decent board, and some cards in your hand, and you will usually win. The bridge to get there is to 1-for-1 remove their stuff, and Snapcaster is a good tool there to buy back a removal spell and trade/chump in combat to help you make it to the end game. With snuff out he's totally useless. I think Dismember is very strictly better in this list than Snuff Out given the presence of Snapcaster, and Cut is probably better than Dismember.

Snuff out was a house for me at EE and the 5 weeks after of top 4s and top 8s
Also not sure why we're eschewing fatal push here?

Snuff Out is a real option. BUT: 1. It can't be Snapped back, and 2. Fatal Push is approx. as unreliable as Murderous Cut and can be misstepped. That said it is close; I think I give the nod to Murderous Cut over all.

yar the main nod I give to bot over sphinx is, Sphinx is terrible against shops and Tinker is amazing against shops. Metamorph is at an all-time low so Tinker is almost always GGs. Meanwhile, in a world full of Precursor Golem, it's very easy to cast a sphinx (if you can cast it) and still lose to their onslaught. Meanwhile, they're both about equally good vs. blue decks, on average, I'd say.

If I had to go to champs tomorrow, this is what I'd run:

## 4c Keeper

Mana
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Emerald
1 Black Lotus
1 Mana Crypt
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Polluted Delta
2 Underground Sea
2 Volcanic Island
2 Tropical Island
1 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Strip Mine
2 Wasteland

Spells
3 Deathrite Shaman
3 Snapcaster Mage
2 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
1 Tinker
1 Blightsteel Colossus
2 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Dack Fayden

1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Brainstorm
1 Dig Through Time
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Demonic Tutor

2 Mana Drain
3 Mental Misstep
4 Force of Will
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Murderous Cut
1 Abrade

Sideboard
2 Null Rod
3 Grafdigger's Cage
1 Nihil Spellbomb
1 Yixlid Jailer
1 Ravenous Trap
3 Ingot Chewer
1 Ancient Grudge
1 Abrupt Decay
1 Mountain
1 Toxic Deluge

I need to work more on Mentor. Shops is very solid. Storm quite good, though I might try and make MBT/a 3rd Rod work. Eldrazi is good, though tense.

Thoughts:

• Tried white, but the mana doesn't work.
• Abrade is the real deal, folks. Perfect card for this deck.
• Wasteland is a requirement for this deck idea to work reliably. You must keep their mana occupied, whether through Wasteland or through answering your little threats. So, cutting Wasteland while keeping the deathrite/leovold/1-for-1 removal core of the deck just doesn't work very well.
• Leovold is really good against Mentor.
• Thoughtseize is good against storm, bad against shops, semi-decent vs Mentor. Not sold on it either way; but I think its value is too variant to be worth it in the context of a large tournament. Also I'm not happy blind-fetching a sea into Wastelands in a shops-rich environment, given how tenuous the mana situation here is.
• I wish there were more good draw spells for this deck that aren't Preordain or Gush in Vintage. Merchant Scroll is a good addition for this archetype to this end.
• Dack is really powerful here. I think this is the best Dack deck I know of.
• I don't know which black removal spell is best. Murderous Cut is, I think, like 5% better than the rest but it's very close.
• The tutor package is beautiful, and Tinker is a very clear improvement imo. The improvement your shops match gets by including Crypt alone is notable.