congrats to @Montolio for the win! Well played to Rich as well!

Just gotta love Brian Kelly's deck!! I think Brian's a great ambassador for vintage magic since he shows everyone how innovative you can be and still have success. Masterclass!

SOLVED! I finally managed to get this issue solved myself. Just in case someone else will get this problem I'll write down the solution here. The issue was with something called FIPS security encryption which basically checks that every program applies to certain high-level security encryption standards upon launching said program. Most programs usually enforce an override of this upon installation but this for some reason was not the case for me whereby the FIPS algorithm threw out the MTGO client every time I tried to start it and caused a crash. The solution which eventually worked (I tried everything from re-installing windows to messing around in the regedit) was to right-click the MTGO icon, select the security tab-->advanced--->auditing and there click the "disable inheritance"-button, apply and happy times are back : )

@moorebrother1 You do realize that for many of us MTGO is the only place we can play vintage since there is no paper community, and for younger players the only way they can afford entering the format? I think without MTGO, vintage would be rather dead by now.

@moorebrother1 You use terms as "most of us" rather vaguely without any tangibIe evidence. I know it seems that many long time players are not satisfied at the moment. I do wonder, however, if there has ever been a metagame in vintage that people playing at that particular time were happy with (having fond memories now is not the same thing). The format is the most boken of all and I think these discussions are just part of that brokenness.

I agree with the original post that something is off with the discussions lately, @HouseOfCards post as a good point in case : ). Flaming is not adult behavior, that's something adolescents do. I do, however, agree with @HouseOfCards that the proposed rules seem too rigorous and would probably mean nobody would post anymore. So a good initiative @thecravenone but maybe a bit less strict with the rules?

Been testing this card a bit and, I don't know, I'm leaning towards it not rely being any good. A paradoxical outcome it is not. It does not net you any mana at all, or even break even, which means you might manage to draw a bunch of cards but struggle to have sufficient mana to do anything with them that turn. So in a deck full of fast mana I would use paradoxical above induced amnesia every time. Maybe Fastbond could help a bit, but still get the feeling we are crossing the river for water. Any other first impressions out there?

Having faced several post-restriction Shops decks on-line I would say that the deck has not suffered much in power level. Sure, maybe the nut draw has been mostly hampered but the matches surely felt just as hard and borderline impossible as ever before. Turn one sphere followed by turn two Karn, Silver Golem and then more spheres+wastelands is no easy lock to break free from. I discussed this with one of my opponents, the excellent shops pilot BlacklotusT1, and he felt that play-wise the restriction had not affected his deck. He just disliked the poor justifications for the banning. I agreed with these sentiments. So I would be very careful not to start removing the safeguards against shops both in mainboard and sideboard.

@brianpk80 said in Turbo Xerox and Monastery Mentor:

This isn't a case of facts being in dispute. It is an actual philosophical difference. Your view measures a card's restrictability as a function of the quantity of appearances it makes in a series of tournaments that are recent in nature, relative to other cards doing so or the total pool of played cards. It focuses almost exclusively on a specific metagame at a specific point in time, namely, the present. I assess cards' restrictibility in terms of their effect on game play, raw power level and relative power level vis-a-vis other existing cards, and intangibles like "fun" factor and "outrageous!" factor, the appraisals of which elude verbal capture and recall the Supreme Court's obscenity test from the 1960's, "I know it when I see it."

Being a scientist myself I would say that you Brian have a qualitative approach and Stephen's is quantitative. The former is usually better when seeking deep understanding of a phenomenon and is used with low-n samples whereas the latter seeks to get the big picture, the overarching patterns so-to-speak, but needs a much higher N to work reliably. Just as in science, I think both of your approaches are needed here: we need to see the patterns but also to know why these are. Whether the sample sizes in Vintage are sufficient or not for a robust quantitative analysis is of course hard to tell, but Magic's just a game after all so doesn't need to be that serious and strict all the time.

@msg67183 I don't know. For some reason I feel Lavinia slots best into normal big blue control decks but it'll be interesting to see how things pan out : )

@juice-mane Agree about the As Foretold deck, really fun to play. Been tweaking it a bit and learning how to play it properly but 5-0 does not seem within reach for me : )

@msg67183 I don't know. For some reason I feel Lavinia slots best into normal big blue control decks but it'll be interesting to see how things pan out : )

@john-cox Thank you and Happy New Year from Finland (only 2 hours left here...)!

So UW control with Lavinia in it seems pretty absurd. You can counter everything but opponents can't FoW or misstep back. Throw in wastelands to keep the opponent's land count down and caverns to safely land Lavinia and other humans (Snapcaster, baby Jace and finisher Mentor) and you're good to go : )

@smmenen fully agree. I returned to vintage in the winter 2016 leading up to Lodestone Golem's restriction, and this if by far the best metagame during my period of playing modern vintage.

Good article in general. The keep or mulligans might benefit from you telling us whether we are on the play or draw. For instance the hand with possible t1 mana drain is a keep imo on the play but hardly on the draw (since we might get blown out before our t1).

@john-cox the one benefit with disenchant over fragmentize is that you can float mana in response to stony silence or null rod and blow them up on the opponent's turn.

@smmenen Thanks for this, very interesting read.

@nedleeds Now you're talking : ) A similar classic vintage skill is to have Oath, orchard, mox, FoW+blue card in opener.

Based on the best streamers I watch like @The-Atog-Lord, @ChubbyRain and Brian Kelly, a thing which they are really good at is to always thoroughly consider their options before making a play and also to plan for the worse (because things can go horribly wrong quickly in vintage). Sounds easy in theory but so hard to do when you play yourself. Another important thing is to always have the old card-frame version of every card