This thread reminds me to never test in and become a judge. The amount that frequent players try to act like they have an authority on rules, rulings, and tournament proceedings without any formal training is staggering, and the extent to which people let emotions on their play or their attacent to a tournament mix with their judgements regarding the former shows a severe lack of perspective. I just don't have the mental stamina nor desire to fight through that.

@Katzby was head judge for the event and I ask you to take a moment and ask yourselves if you even know what that means, especially on the scale of organization and his level of interaction with so many aspects of the event, only one of which is unprompted statements of concern of a player doing well. The fact that he has come here and given a very clear case of the facts he's seen, what was analyzed of Joe's play/shuffling/card choice and the steps taken for the sake of fair play has more than cleared up my mind on any issues in the precedings. Not because I see him as an authority and not because I take his word for thinking there was no cheating, but because every reasonable action to safeguard was taken and no actual unambiguously malicious manipulation was observed despite much accusations and hearsay from people in this thread. No one has ever been DQ'd on "I feel like he's shuffling lotus to the top" and I don't think it's starting now.

Just because it was sad to see watching the VSL a day late, I want to spell out how to win the game after your library is milled save blightsteel. For those that didn't see, this happened to Owen Turtenwald yesterday as he subbed in for LSV as he was off watching his kid being born (much congratulations to him!).

The game state is Kai, tapped out (even his Painter's Servant), with a Dack in play so he wins the game if he gets to activate him. Owen has just drawn his Blightsteel which shuffled back into his deck after Grindstone finished doing its thing, bringing him up to 8 cards in hand. His hand is:

Yawgmoth's Will
Time Vault
Voltaic Key
Tinker
Land
Land
Sensei's top
and, of course, Blightsteel

Yawgmoth's Will, we all know, is just about at it's best when you have your deck in your graveyard, but with no cards left in deck and staring down defeat, Owen takes a look at his graveyard, and concedes. However, he is, in fact, able to take another turn if he ends it with 8 cards in hand so he can discard the Blightsteel, Yawg's Will or no (as he control's both replacement effects). So how do we win? The answer, as with all silly plays, begins with the unholy pairing of Mentor and Yawgmoth. The play goes as follows:

Play land
Play Yawg's will (6 cards in hand)
Play mox pearl, mana crypt and mentor with the aforementioned cards from the graveyard.
Play Lotus (1 monk) crack for UUU (as mox sapphire is actually stolen by Dack at the moment)
Play all of your other 3 mox (4 monks)
Gush, returning 2 islands, hold priority, and then flusterstorm the gush (back to 8 cards in hand and 6 monks on the table)
Cast Time Walk off the other floating blue and off color moxen ("enough" monks)
Then, go to cleanup and discard the robot (and hope MTGO actually does the replacement effects correctly).

From here it's as simple as playing the 2 one drops out of your hand on the Time Walk turn and attacking for precisely 1 billion damage.

Cheers to Owen for being part of the VSL and no judgement intended. This is notably a line that doesn't really require any out-there cards and only requires you to have gotten Yawg's will to your hand before the herald of your grindy doom and have a one play in your hand for the Time Walk turn as well as enough islands to Gush your hand up to be able to discard, so far enough from magical Christmas land to be worthwhile to keep in your back pocket.

@ChubbyRain said:

And for each copy of Tendrils.

This is nuts. Finding flusterstorm(s) to counter tendrils is trivial with this guy out.

Also, for all the people doubting Cavern, is DRS and this guy not enough to at least get the ball rolling for Cavern on Elves?

Results with the deck:

Played 2x TKS Ravager shops, 2x Paradoxical of some sort, and Dredge.

went 1-1 vs shops, beat dredge, and got that "turn 1 vintage format" experience from both Paradoxical Outcome decks.

In the end I feel like if it was still a Gush Mentor heavy era, then this would have done better, but Mana Drain is really slow and was never useful and TKS was cute, but in the end not too effective. Trinisphere and being able to Trinket for Chalice was very good, but not enough to carry the whole deck. Seems like you'd do better just playing as shops.

If Fastbond wasn't restricted, it maybe create some sort of BG lands deck with Gitrog and Crucible or something, but that's honestly not a bad thing.

A lot of what's needed to understand these situations is actually hiding in the tournament shortcuts section 718.

Most importantly:

718.3. Sometimes a loop can be fragmented, meaning that each player involved in the loop performs an independent action that results in the same game state being reached multiple times. If that happens, the active player (or, if the active player is not involved in the loop, the first player in turn order who is involved) must then make a different game choice so the loop does not continue.

This is important for using RIP + Helm when someone has a Blightsteel in their library. As it is two competing replacement effects (RIP and Blightsteel) when the robot is milled, the controller of Blightsteel chooses which effect to use. However, as this creates this kind of fragmented loop, the player must state how many times he replaces the effect, and then must make a different choice (i.e. letting it get RFG) afterward. Therefore RIP + Helm mills a player, regardless of what's in their library. Note, that this is not the case for Grindstone + 2 Blightsteel as the player is not making a choice there, just applying the effect, so that becomes a mandatory loop.

Another example of this in Modern is if two people have the Melira/Anafenza + persist creature + sac outlet combo. If active player has infinite damage and non-active player has infinite life, the loop of: "I deal 1 million damage" -> "I gain 1 million life in response" requires the active player to make a different choice and therefore non-active player survives. However, if it is the opposite turn, the infinite damage player wins. This is not relevant for MTGO, per se, as there are no automated loops, but it does show the universal nature of this concept as well some of the issues of putting automated loops into MTGO.

Back to mandatory loops, inaction is always permitted:

718.5. No player can be forced to perform an action that would end a loop other than actions called for by objects involved in the loop.
Example: A player controls Seal of Cleansing, an enchantment that reads, “Sacrifice Seal of Cleansing: Destroy target artifact or enchantment.” A mandatory loop that involves an artifact begins. The player is not forced to sacrifice Seal of Cleansing to destroy the artifact and end the loop.

718.6. If a loop contains an effect that says “[A] unless [B],” where [A] and [B] are each actions, no player can be forced to perform [B] to break the loop. If no player chooses to perform [B], the loop will continue as though [A] were mandatory.

So, while a Dragon player must choose a different creature to reanimate if they have no win con, the opponent never needs to swords the dragon to prevent the draw.

Hopefully this helps.

The logic on the books for 3 gush is just that 3 Gush with the 4-8 cantrips the deck runs means you'll not get 'Gush flooded' and always have lands to pick up when you draw one. Than being said, the card's so good, I don't see why not since extra gush can always pitch to force and the card is downright necessary to resolve in the mirror. Probably just have to work taking out 1-2 in the shops matchup into the sideboard plan.

That being said, I just recently topped our local monthly with Grixis and only played 3 Gush, but I did lose to Mentor, so take from that what you will.

I wanna get back to Petal a bit.

I think the best way to analyze the effects petal would have is not to look at decks like storm or outcome, but to look for decks that play petal but not offcolor moxen. These are decks that are going to be significantly improved because they rely on quick early mana that's on color. Not to say that the affect on yawg will decks is irrelevant (though for outcome, where you need to use the mana multiple times to be good, I think it's not play more), but just that you're competing with more slots and getting less value.

What decks does this refer to? For the most part, we're talking about white hatebears/Eldrazi getting a boost, both of those decks being notorious as white decks starved for white mana and the end result is more early hate pieces. Other decks that aren't meta right now (at least for playing petal) include Merfolk getting earlier lords and still playing somewhat to their nullrod plan, though I'm not sure we'd see 4 petals there, and Doomsday which is fairly tight, but really needs it's fast mana to be on color. This isn't everything, of course, just a quick search on mtgTop8, but it shows that people are barking up the wrong trees with petal.

@evouga here's Brassman's list from a while back:

Andy Probasco - Tiny Robots
4 Ancient Tomb
3 Arcbound Ravager
1 Black Lotus
1 Cranial Plating
4 Genesis Chamber
2 Hangarback Walker
4 Lodestone Golem
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
4 Memnite
3 Mental Misstep
4 Mishra's Workshop
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Phyrexian Revoker
4 Signal Pest
4 Skullclamp
1 Sol Ring
1 Stripmine
4 Tangle Wire
1 Tolarian Academy
4 Wasteland
SB
3 Grafdigger's Cage
4 Leyline of Sanctity
3 Thorn of Amestyst
3 Tormod's Crypt
1 Trinishpere
1 Umezawa's Jitte

@evouga

This is an iconic masters ruling change, so you won't see it on modo until a bit after that set's released.

@vaughnbros
In your scenario, I think you still just have enough because you're getting 2 zombie tokens off each therapy so they need 2 swords.

I really hope this doesn't just slot into cookie cutter dredge lists, but I don't think so. They're usually pretty tight and this card 'does nothing'. What'd be more interesting would be if you could make a lands dredge deck that could take advantage of this for survivability and in general play around cage since a lot of sideboards rely on cage to give slots that work vs both oath and dredge.

I just wanna play this and then Gush to kill a monastery mentor. Notably, this guy essentially counters one half of mentor if they try to stop you from killing it since each spell they cast draws you a card which counteracts prowess (or the monks, I guess).

This card seems super real. If we're willing to play merchant scroll for ancestral, this card feels better. The only aspect of the card to break that I didn't see above was fetching channel, though I feel like there has to be something that abuses it being a 1/1 (especially if it just needs having 1 power cuz then it plays super well with rector too).

@evouga I'd only seen it in the IMA release notes before, but thanks for finding this.

@evouga

This is an iconic masters ruling change, so you won't see it on modo until a bit after that set's released.

Playing Bane of Progress was my biggest pleasant surprise for tech that worked well. Kelly oath's main plan is hard to execute vs shops and Bane is really good at turning games around, especially with how hard shops is pressuring your life total these days.

The only thing that's glaring is spell snare. Most people just play flusterstorm in that spot because of how much better it is when your opponent has misstep. That being said, I know there's some upside where it can counter things fluster can't, but you really need to think about why the card's in the deck. one of the main reason you run counterspells, especially more mana efficient ones, is combo and spell snare just doesn't stop your opponent from going off on its own. That ends up being too bad to justify the other upsides.

As a finer point, I'd think critically about energy flux in your board. 3 mana ends up being a lot vs shops, so if you're trying to use it to end the game, sure, but it needs help getting there which means it's not exactly working as an anti-shops card as much as you want it to. I'll also say that energy flux tends to do nothing vs other decks with artifacts, if you figured there'll be more flexibility.

This time was a blast! Thanks to all the people sticking around to the end for our thrilling finale!

@Aaron-Patten

I'm not sure Ponder even can be said to be related to Gush. In Vintage today, Ponder is not too different than Preordain, so unless we want that fine dividing line to be the line between unrestricted and restricted draw (makes me too at PO if so), then there really isn't a reason for restricted Ponder. Unlike brainstorm, it really only gives you 1 more card to use in your hand.