@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

@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.

@moorebrother1 so four questions and here are four answers (in the order of the questions): yes, it's good for vintage since it keeps the broken spells in check. Yes, it's probably hampering innovation by taking up a lot of slots in most decks. No, we are not too reliant on them imo, and no, I don't think counterspells would be something that would make players from other formats not want to play vintage. There are far more actually broken things in vintage to drive people away than counterspells.

@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.

@john-cox so ugly imo. Then again, I only accept Beta basics so I'm probably too narrow-minded to give an objective opinion.

@yespuhyren Might be a dumb shops-noob question, but which 2 additional moxen do you run to get to 7 in total?

@chubbyrain Haven't tested in PO shells but in a UW planeswalkers control list and then in a UW Stoneblade list. I've liked DS a lot in both since both lists are geared towards keeping up counters while leveraging advantage from the planeswalkers/stoneforge mystic (i.e by not casting spells). That said, I too am struggling in the PO matchup and I've even boarded out sphere against them in favor of Mindbreak trap and more other counters.