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    Botvinik

    @Botvinik

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    Best posts made by Botvinik

    • RE: Un-restricting cards

      Narset and Karn are incredibly unsafe unrestricts miserable play patterns and extremely forcing, I honestly think unrestricting mox emerald would be better, gush being unrestricted would instantly break doomsday. Chalice may be balanced but also creates miserable play patterns and makes the format worse, 8 spheres is probably too many but unrestricting thorn is probably doable as long as you restrict sphere. Git probe is another doomsday card which also has a habit of greatly decreasing the impact of skill on the game.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Un-restricting cards

      @marland_moore
      Hullbreacher doesn't cast impulse twice and dodge swords narset does the difference between the two in power level is colossal. Once again chalice is in theory unrestrictable but it makes a worse format so I would vote against. Gush is MASSIVELY better than ragavan in blue decks in general and when doomsday enters the picture comparing the two becomes laughable.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Houston, TX | 4/10/2022 | Full Proxy Vintage at Asgard Games

      @revengeanceful
      Well I missed that because I am a clown.

      posted in Vintage Tournaments
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Vintage 101: The 2020 Vintage Mailbag

      It was a main deck null rod build that tried to fix some of the issues that the deck had with top decking dead by removing the mana artifacts. The meta at the time was generally quite soft to the rod so having 4 main deck you could play without worry or hesitation was very strong.

      posted in Vintage News
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      Botvinik
    • RE: The Walking Dead Secret Lair to be Unique Cards

      Thanks wizards I hate it.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Jeweled Lotus on Ebay for $100,000 and $88,000. Please spread this as a scam before someone gets hurt.

      @joshuabrooks I agree with you that people have to learn lessons. Maybe learning a lesson by losing $100,000 is a bit much? What bothers me most though is that the scammer would win with $100,000 in their pocket. What kind of lesson does the scammer learn? They would learn that they can get rich easily by taking advantage of people. Then other bad people will see what the scammer has done and then you have more people doing scams. And then it cascades from there, repeating this same process over and over, creating thousands of scams. Lets stop it now while we still can.

      This is the argument I find most compelling.

      posted in Off-Topic
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      Botvinik
    • RE: [STX] Solve the Equation

      @moorebrother1

      There is a 4-C lutri omnath deck that works surprisingly well it has a pretty modern rampy feel.

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Vintage 101: Interesting Times Ahead

      @covetousrat
      I believe the goldfish website itself has the continuations of this series.

      posted in Vintage News
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Vintage Boardstates!

      I didn't screen shot it but I had a game in eternal weekend where
      Op) Ancestral
      Me) Ancestral
      OP) FOW
      Me) Brainstorm
      OP) Dig Through Time
      Me) Flusterstorm

      I thought that was pretty cool.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: [MH2] Void Mirror

      @lienielsen

      This is a bit extreme but I agree with the spirit of the argument.

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik

    Latest posts made by Botvinik

    • RE: Dark Depths

      Been messing around with it for a bit and fast combo seems like hell to play against but the grindy decks don't have any good solutions so far.

      posted in Vintage Strategy
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      Botvinik
    • RE: [CBC] Green Slime

      @protoaddict

      That does look good.

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik
    • RE: StoneBlade

      @iamactuallylvl1
      That list looks real nice to the point where I think I'll take it for a spin.

      posted in Vintage Strategy
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      Botvinik
    • RE: StoneBlade

      @brass-man I did in fact miss that.

      posted in Vintage Strategy
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      Botvinik
    • RE: StoneBlade

      The ledger shredders look like the worst card in the deck by a mile as to name one they take at least 2 turns to get bigger than delver. How did they work out for you in practice?

      posted in Vintage Strategy
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      Botvinik
    • RE: RUG OF SMOTHERING

      @babau
      That helps a lot.

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik
    • RE: RUG OF SMOTHERING

      @babau

      That is one life for the first spell two for the second. Its not dampening sphere, you don't get the first one free right?

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Format Inertia

      @thewhitedragon69
      I haven't seen the reanimation card you referenced is it actually 43 CMC because there are some cool uses for it if so.

      On a more serious note I see my statement as a superset of yours rather than a rebuttal. I attempt to express among other things how the abstract concept "old card good" generates the feelings expressed here.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: Format Inertia

      @thewhitedragon69
      What's notable here and I think a source of some of the statements in the thread is that the dropoff between the good and not great decks in vintage is larger than in other formats. This combines with the extremely proactive and often fast plan of tier vintage decks to make a rogue deck experience that many players may feel less happy with than the similar experience in other formats. The existence of a relatively small list of engine cards that are just better than anything else also contributes to the difficulty building and using rouge decks without them simply becoming "bad X" where X is a known deck. This can make the format feel stagnant. The culprit is in part the old cards but I would argue that simply saying old stuff to good is not a good analysis. I believe that a significant part is that the decks in vintage are all good cards most of which have unique jobs which is not true in many other formats. Take legacy as an example, the legacy decks that play uro are very common and powerful and the positioning and card choices of these decks in legacy is shaped by uro. He is a massive card advantage engine in the late game that they plan their entire game around and a lot of the card selection in these decks is driven by that as well. Uro is also bad. Its a 3 mana version sorcery speed version of an effect that didn't cut it in modern as a 2 mana instant. But that's fine, the legacy lists are a bit loose combo is much slower or more fragile and often both, the graveyard decks are not usually launching massive boards on turn one and two and if they do they rarely have any good recourse vs a tabernacle or wrath and they certainly aren't drawing into forces with the same discard engine they use to vomit all those bodies in play. For a while the best control deck in vintage ran 4 vengvines and 4 hollow ones. Having a plan to handle all of that both pre and post board puts a much greater strain on deck slots. And their MUD deck is a joke. This gives a much greater degree of freedom to decks that may possess significant weaknesses but have a few key strengths as well which is often the profile of rouge decks. There is a lot less room to put in a bunch of new cards and try to attack from a new angle because if you are not killing at PO speeds those slots need to be keeping you alive. (This is also why pox is a legacy deck and not a vintage deck you have the freedom to do not powerful slow things like tapping out to cast a smalpox on turn two without needing to have force backup(or multiple forces if its doomsday)). This means that shifts in vintage are usually going to be a lot more gradual than those in lower power formats as there is a lot less room to operate. Now in terms of slower shifts, a few cards here and there, the format is more lively than it has been in a while, saga, ragavan, and dress down are all thriving and these are only a few examples.

      Sorry about dropping a small essay here but I hope that is was informative or at least interesting. I haven't been as active as of late in vintage so take what I say with a grain of salt but this is what I noticed as someone who plays just about every format these seem to be the vintage specific properties that I think have been relevant to the discussion here.

      posted in Vintage Community
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      Botvinik
    • RE: [NEO] Patchwork Automaton

      @serracollector
      To the best of my knowledge it sees some fringe play. It is very disappointing to topdeck late bit exceptional in the early game.

      posted in Single-Card Discussion
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      Botvinik