An unrestricted Windfall, sounds like it would slot far too easily into a PO deck. Turn 1, dump hand, don't have PO, but do have Windfall. Refill hand at expense of opponent, play more artifacts, and cast the PO I just drew.

Now that it is relatively clear that restricting Gush didn't solve the Blue Mentor problem (and that it really didn't solve the Shops problem, which I never expected it to), I can see the argument for un-restricting Gush.

That said, all I can see 4 Gush doing is: 1) give Oath a way to keep up with Mentor (barely... maybe), and 2) give Mentor pilots a choice between PO and Gush depending on the meta. Oh and Doomsday players, right?

I find the argument compelling that Mentor just outclasses any other win condition for blue decks and merits restriction. Regarding Shops, I also found as an Oath player that there were many times when Shops would handily kick my butt if they landed enough sphere effects plus a Tangle Wire early on. Workshop should be restricted, but I'm not sure it ever will be.

In my head, the best short-term fix for the meta would be un-restricting Chalice combined with the printing of a Red, Green or R/G hybrid mana cycle card that kills an artifact (or colorless permanent) when it cycles, thereby circumventing tax effects.

Four chalice would hinder cantrip decks and PO decks. And while they would strengthen Shops and White Eldrazi, both of those decks would have to change to fit them in. Cards that cycle to kill an artifact, or do damage to a creature, or destroy a colorless permanent, would be a wonderful addition to Vintage--so long as they aren't a blue/white spell. They would cut down on Shops/Eldrazi, but not to exclusively to the benefit of the dominant blue deck.

This is slightly off-topic, but it annoys me endlessly that blue and artifacts are so overly represented in Vintage. It shouldn't be hard to print cards in Red, Green and Black that made those colors more competitive. I am heartened by the printing of cards like Harsh Mentor and Ramunap Excavator (the latter not necessarily being good enough for Vintage). I leave out white only because White Eldrazi (or Thalia Eldrazi, really) is already competitive. In sum, I wish there was genuine color balance rather than an endless series of design mistakes for blue cards.

The fact remains that there is no single dominant deck. This alone means that a restriction just isn't necessary.

If you're tired of facing the same decks over and over again, that just means that you play Vintage on MTGO and get to play in 2-5 Daily Events every week.

Since I started playing MTGO Vintage, I've played Saheeli Oath exclusively. I've managed to do pretty well in the face of Mishra's Workshop, Preordain, Gitaxian Probe, Gush and whatever else people are moaning about.

If you hate Shops, play the thing that always beats it for awhile. If you hate Gush Mentor, do likewise.

The last time I went to a paper Vintage tournament (with more than 5 players) was back in 2008, so I know nothing about the paper meta to the extent it differs from MTGO (which it sounds like it does).

That said, I am curious whether people think there is just a strong bias towards playing Gush Mentor on MTGO that 1) overtakes the reality that paper Vintage is more diverse (specifically with Shops & Dredge, I assume); and, 2) reflects the possibility that many people just want to play the "best" blue deck even if a White Eldrazi deck (or a Shops deck) would perform better.

I'm really in speculation mode, but I just wonder if there's a psychological bias involved. Unlike some players, I don't dislike Dredge or Shops--I really enjoy their existence because it demonstrates the strategic depth of Magic and the various lines of attack that can win a game (by way of example, I play R/G Lands in Legacy). But I think some people will never play those decks even if one of them became the "best deck" in the meta.

I'm not trying to argue that Gush or Mentor (or Probe for that matter) shouldn't be restricted. It's just that sometimes in any given meta, there is an assumption (like in some economic theories) that everyone is a rational actor--when it's pretty clear that not everyone is.

My current take (which is very subject to change):

Someone noted that the Vintage metagame moves slower than others. I think that’s true. However, it moves a lot faster these days because of MTGO.

It’s also true that older players can’t always devote time to playing. I haven’t played Vintage online since March or so: which I believe had the effect of removing Saheeli Oath from the front of the Vintage metagame page of MTGGoldfish. So that’s a piece of evidence for how one player can on MTGO can impact the makeup of the perceived metagame, albeit modestly. And I'm not saying others weren’t on Saheeli Oath, far from it, but I put up a consistent showing with it for a couple of months in the face of Gush Mentor.

I think any Shops problem is solved by a removal spell for colorless permanents that ignores tax effects (like through cycling, but also is not Blue or White). NEW cards can solve old card problems, especially for Shops. And I apologize now for making this a theme in almost every post I write.

For "Cantrip" Mentor, however, I think you have to unrestricted Chalice. Let’s be clear, Misstep and Chalice only really hurt creature decks that don’t play Cavern of Souls. How common is that in Vintage these days? I also strongly agree with someone's comments that Misstep helps keep combo in check (even if it doesn't do as much against PO decks, which is why we need Chalice back).

I would love to see a format where Turbo Xerox and PO decks have to contend with CotV, while Shops decks have to contend with artifact removal that can’t be inhibited by tax effects. I will openly speculate that such a change could allow for other cards to be unrestricted, including Gush, Probe and even Lodestone.

Although, if TMD speculation on a restriction's impact was consistently correct, we wouldn't be in the current mess right now.

Can we try to disagree without mean-spirited snarky personal attacks?

I'm at a place where I'm actually trying to understand why restricting Gush and Probe didn't changes things. And that isn't just a matter of berating other people, it's a matter of trying to understand how all the pieces on the board interconnect.

One argument is that Gush and Probe weren't less essential to Mentor than they were to other decks that really needed them in order to be competitive. Another argument is that Mentor is the real problem because it is the nearly perfect condensed threat in a format with 0-cost mana rocks and 1-mana cantrips. Another argument is that MTGO doesn't properly reflect the community as a whole and that it also facilitates a herd mentality about what deck to play.

All of these could be a factor, or even none of them could. It's actually a genuine intellectual, psychological, statistically, mathematical challenge.

At this stage, the thing I am most annoyed about is the angry oversimplifications and personal insults. I've started making an effort to make sure I am not contributing to that atmosphere.

But back to some of the substance of the matter:

If reduced variance is king, then one thing I will point out is that there are different ways of reducing variance and 4-5 decks in particular make me think of these ways.

1. Reduce variance by having fewer unique cards. If Shops has a ton of 4-ofs, and even some 5-ofs (Moxen), variance is reduced dramatically even though some people may not recognize it as such. Eldrazi decks function in a similar way.

2. Reduce variance by cantrips that dig into/filter your deck. This one is more obvious and represents the Turbo Xerox ethos: Brainstorm, Ponder, Preordain, Dack, Ancestral, Cruise, Dig, etc. This can be Mentor, but is also Oath. This category is massively overpopulated with card choices because of Wizards' design mistakes.

3. Reduce variance using a unique card or engine that creates massive card advantage, but faces strong hate. This is Dredge and Paradoxical Outcome. Bazaar creates massive card advantage in a consistent manner with the help of the Dredge mechanic and Serum Power. PO creates massive card advantage through zero cost artifacts aided by a little bit of digging (Thirst for Knowledge, Brainstorm, Ancestral). One is hurt by graveyard hate, the other by Null Rod effects and tax effects.

I will continue to argue that we shouldn't be looking to restrict any more cards (except maybe Mentor). What we need instead is new cards that counteract the two dominant strategies. Shops is easy to fix--just create a spell that kills artifacts in spite of tax effects. I've said cycling in the past, but someone pointed out to me today that Channel is a keyword ability that exists and would accomplish the same thing without drawing a card.

Cantrips are also combatible: unrestrict Chalice. 1) Creature decks have Cavern of souls, and 2) Chalice helps prevent the format from being all about 1-mana spells. That may not be enough, but it would be worth unrestricting and then assessing.

As of today (and my opinion could change tomorrow), I think that Mentor is a genuine problem. And if Lodestone can be restricted, Mentor sure as hell can. Every time Wizards restricts a blue spell, it hurts most blue-heavy decks (Storm variants, Oath variants, Doomsday, etc.). Mentor remains the best "condensed" threat for the cantrip-driven decks.

While I recognize the raw power of Gush, in a format with Paradoxical Outcome and many tax effects, I don't know how truly overpowered it is. I actually like the Probe restriction more because free information that doesn't costs mana or a card, just life, hurts the play experience.

That's how I feel today, anyway. Some of it will probably change tomorrow.

I used to think that Workshop was too powerful and needed to be restricted--in part based on the abstract principle of "a Black Lotus every turn for artifacts is wrong." I don't believe that anymore, even though I believe the Shops deck is pretty strong right now.

1. I have come to learn (like many of you) that the power of a card isn't measured in isolation. Workshop was just a Tier-1.5 or 2 Vintage card for many years because there just weren't enough good artifacts to make it matter.

2. Cards like Brainstorm, Gush, Dig Through Time and Treasure Cruise only seem "obvious" to us because we've been around the game for awhile. On the surface, they don't look very good. Just think back to when you were a teenager who once fell in love with Scaled Wurm because it was huge (or some other janky card). It is only in the context of fetch lands and Dack Fayden that these cards begin to warp the format. I mean, if tomorrow all fetchlands were banned, how broken would Brainstorm and the Delve spells be? Not very.

The only reason Shops decks are a problem right now is because they can too easily lock players out of the game backed by a quick clock of Ravager/Ballista.

The moment Wizards prints artifact removal that circumvents tax effects, Shops becomes a manageable card (and by extension archetype) again. Cycling, Channel or a new keyword is all it takes. One new green or red card and we're fine again.

Just like people in Standard have been clamoring for the re-introduction of hate cards to keep broken cards in check, all Vintage needs is 3-4 new cards that nerf Shops and blue (or blue cantrips, depending on what you think the problem is).

A pyroblast with split second, or a cheap flash green creature that can't be countered, but itself counters a blue instant (or has a Notion Thief ability)... nothing would be weird about such cards (Magic history is full of them) and they would cut two dominant Vintage pillars down to size.

After all, Wizards went in a deeply draconian (and totally deliberate) direction when it created Grafdigger's Cage and Containment Priest. Seriously, we already lived in a world with Ravenous Trap, Tormod's Crypt, Relic of Progenitus, and god knows what else I might be forgetting.

If I had a single directive to Wizards it would be this:

Print new cards that make it easy to unrestrict old cards because they become broken no longer.

I personally find it hilarious that the proposed answer to problematic blue cards would be be a blue mana-producing land. So absurd.

That said, Wizards would probably love it. The bias towards blue makes perfect sense in a game created by nerdy people without any perspective. They label it the color of the mind or intellect and I can hear them thinking, "Intellect should be the most superior attribute because I'm think I'm smart and I want that to be the most important quality for a person to have."

I guess if the game had been made by hippies, then maybe green would be the best color. And goth inventors would've chosen black, naturally.

Slightly off-topic rant over.

I was going to say that once you move toward tags, you might end up devolving into 'card tagging.'

Would it make sense that tags would be categorical? Like "Win Condition: Mentor/Planeswalker" or "Win Condition: Oath into Griselbrand" or "Card Engine: Thoughtcast/Paradoxial Outcome" or "Card Engine: Gush".

This is the exact kind of card that I would hope Wizards prints more of:
--A non-Blue, non-artifact card that has Eternal format impact
--A disruptive creature that isn't White or Colorless.

I particularly like that it hurts durdling cards like Divining Top and planeswalkers.

The fact that it is only for opponents is particularly impressive. I don't even mind that it hurts Saheeli Oath.

Now just make a Green flash creature pitch spell that counters blue/artifact spells!

@Khahan said in Vintage Restricted List Discussion:

@ChubbyRain said in Vintage Restricted List Discussion:

@Jeb-Springfield said in Vintage Restricted List Discussion:

Because stale metagames bore me. They aren't competitive, they aren't interesting, and Vintage will not grow as a format if the metagame is going to remain solved for years at a time.

One man's stale metagame is another man's playground.

Building off of this point: a stale metagame with two tier-1 decks is very different than a stale metagame with five tier-1 decks.

A "solved" Vintage with 5 competitive decks will always offer some variety and shifts over time.

@brass-man said in February 12, 2018 Banned and Restricted Announcement:

@chubbyrain Ah, I think I get you. If you're saying that it's a bad idea to print risky vintage cards with the idea that they can be restricted or fixed with another printing later, I guess I have to agree! I do think it's easy to look at the few mistakes WotC makes and ignore the hundreds of bad metagames they fixed before we saw them ... but vintage does have a longer tail, so the potential downside is bigger here.

From my perspective, answer cards only have the risk that they don't work. Artifact removal that isn't affected by tax effects isn't likely to break Vintage. Grafdigger's Cage hasn't broken the format, for example.

@brass-man We might just share a similar addiction.

On that point, one-for-one against Shops isn't bad if the spell can be cast for normal cost (i.e., through Channel or Bloodrush mechanics that avoid tax effects (but do NOT avoid Revoker, I believe, which creates nuance).

Dack Fayden is a very good example. Grafdigger's Cage (SB card) and Containment Priest (MD in White Eldrazi) are others. Containment Priest is nicer to me because (to my mind) it helped bolster an archetype. Harsh Mentor had that kind of potential, but wasn't quite impactful enough.

I would love to see a Goblin, Elf or Zombie with an anti-Shops or anti-Xerox power.

@mdkubiak I am definitely cognizant of the fact that WOTC doesn't really spend time designing for Vintage or Legacy for that matter. There is practically no economic incentive for them to do that.

Because I have seen people discussing Damping Sphere on Eternal Facebook groups and it's relevance to Vintage/Legacy, I was more making the point that the card doesn't achieve relevance.

More than anything, we need NEW cards that combat the two primary power centers of Vintage: blue Xerox and Shops w/tax effects. Damping Sphere in Dominaria appears to have been a valiant, but comically-bad attempt at that. I seriously wonder what genius said to themselves, "This will stop Xerox AND Shops."

Wizards needs to print cards in B/R/G that counteract the dominance of Shops and Xerox (I exclude White because it already has most of the hate bears and functions as a lesser-Shops with less vulnerability to artifact removal).

We need Root Maze on a (cheap, not the 3cmc Thalia) creature. We need Naturalize as a Channel ability on a card. We need cards that come out early to hamper Xerox (cheap, not the 3cmc Leovold). A red creature that makes instants and sorceries cost 1 more. A green creature that makes artifacts cost 1 more (tax the tax deck). A black card that does something else Vintage-relevant, like 1cmc spells cost 1 more (weird, but maybe it would work). If they can print Cage to nerf Dredge and Oath (in a surprisingly flavorful way), they can spend a few slots on cards to hit the two strongest engines of Vintage.

At this stage of the game, every color should have tier-1.5 card selection and counter (in a color-appropriate flavor). There should be a green "Force of Wildness" that pitches like FoW to counter artifacts or enchantments, for example. A black instant that says, "For each card target player would draw this turn, they must discard a card or sacrifice a permanent instead."

Blue can be the best at selection and counter, but the other colors shouldn't be cut off entirely. Blue has been given the best cards and then has fetch/duals to splash their win conditions (Mentor, Oath/creature, Tinker/Blightsteel, Tendrils, etc.). The only reliable counterbalance has been a broken land and all the tax effects that are fit to print. Ravagers Shops has the challenge of its ability to anything in response to removal, but if you could afford to cast more than one removal spell in a given turn (due to tax effects) you might have a shot.

I'll stop there for now, since I have to go to work in the morning.

I've noticed a shift lately to Unmask/Leyline Dredge vs. Pitch Dredge. Curious to know people's thoughts.

I've found that with aggro Workshop being a tough matchup, the ability to land a Leyline of the Void is huge. I also have found that Serenity has been a terrible SB card for me. Arcbound + Mishra's or Ballista make it much less effective of a sweeper.

The Dread Return package is usually the first thing I cut, so I'm glad to learn that is how others approach it. I usually cut my lone Golgari Thug, too.

I have only infrequently sided out Serum Powder because I thought it was essential to the deck. I guess I will have to reconsider.

Post-Board, are there any hands people consider keeping where you don't have Bazaar? Sometimes I have a hand with good counters and/or anti-hate cards and I wonder if I should just keep. I don't want to over-assume the criticality of Bazaar, but then again it's almost hard not to.

Ahhhh, thank you! I had auto-yielded the triggers, so I didn't notice. Another sign that I should really go to sleep.

Yes, good games as always!

I just played a match where my opponents played Balance against me as I'm playing Dredge with a ton of creatures and zombie tokens out. When I had to choose a creature, I chose a Narcomoeba.

But then after Balance resolved, all of my zombie tokens remained. That's a bug, right? Balance doesn't say creature cards, does it?

A quick Google search didn't really answer my question, so I came here.

I'm relatively new to playing Dredge and I've taken a liking to Hollow Ones in the sideboard (along with 3 Anglers).

When you sideboard out cards for your anti-hate, or win conditions that rely less on the GY, what do you take out?

I don't understand fully which cards are best to remove and why.

Just got back into MTGO Vintage with the advent of the new leagues. I've tried Punishing Oath 4 times and Saheeli Oath once.

Saheeli Oath still feels way too clunky in spite of recent restrictions--the threat package is just too many cards. Not particularly happy with Punishing Oath, either. I have only played one Shops deck and instead have faced a ton of Paradoxical Outcome decks.

What play style do most people adopt? Sometimes Oath feels like it should play as a control deck, but then my hand is always full of crap. When I go aggro, I just get hit with multiple hate cards. I have died with zero artifact kills in the face to 2 Grafdigger's Cages waayyy too many times this past week.