I like the hate bears, personally. I like non-haymaker decks having a chance. 2/2s don't "stop you from casting spells" like trinisphere did. You can cast them...just remove the creature. Yes, that means you can't run a linear 59 cards with a single hurkyls. You ACTUALLY have to run bolts, plows, etc. GASP! The ones complaining about the hate bears are the ones who love linear strategies and don't want competition...just to win fast and brutally. They are probably the same people that kill cats and smack babies because it shows their might against a clearly inferior opponent.

I love Vintage - and I have massive contempt for the format. My contempt doesn't come from the brokenness of decks. I wasn't even feeling contempt when turn 1 Workshop-> Trinisphere (a.k.a. have FoW or you lose) was common. Granted, I was the one casting trini off workshops, but I digress .
I feel contempt for 2 reasons. One - I hate blue. I find the overwhelming number of cheap/free counterspells to be discouraging to play against. It's like playing against a shops lock, but it doesn't matter if you are on the play or draw because they have their lock for free on turn 0. I am also bitter that blue has had the most broken spells since the beginning and it continued through Urza's block. Not until afterward did they start balancing the color wheel. Just consider the 1 mana for +3 cycle. Ritual, bolt, healing salve, giant growth, ANCESTRAL FUCKIN RECALL. Counterspells are also the ONLY answer to every spell, permanent or stack. Every color has permanent removal, but only blue can reactively stop spells. Blue also has bounce to remove ANY permanent without restriction. It's just an absurdly unbalanced color.
My second reason for contempt is more for the player base. The people are cool as far as being people. They are shitty for clutching on to the blue vs shops vs dredge triangle that's been vintage since ravnica. Humans is a nice innovation and I love the new survival list. I actually run Dark Depths myself because it is universally deemed fragile and slow - and I love to prove that wrong. I like when people innovate and I like a wealth of different, viable decks (thus why I love Modern now). I can't stand when people take a deck off the internet, swap 4 cards, then add their name to it like they invented the list. Further, most people won't even try to come up with anything new because they figure someone else already made the best deck, so they'll just netdeck it and win without needing to be innovative at all. Most people copy an exact 75, and it is sickening to me. I hate it even more when people take a netdeck, change 2 cards and rename it as if it's their own invention. That's like me taking a stock 60 merfolk deck, swapping 2 silvergils for 2 merfolk tricksters and calling it Miller Merfolk...or taking Huckleberry Finn, rewriting page 67 and saying I wrote the great-American novel with my name on the cover. Magic plagerism, I consider it. Awful (if my contempt didn't come across enough).

I think counterspells are interactive in that both players act/react, but interactivity is NOT what most anti-blue players gripe about. What they really mean when they say "Counterspells are uninteractive" is "When my opponent plays counterspells, I don't feel like I'm even in the game." There are many games vs control that go like so:
Player A - plays land, mox, 1cmc spell
Player B - missteps
Player B - plays land, ponder
Player A - plays land, spell
Player B - FoWs
Player B - plays land, mox, ancestral self
Player A - plays land, plays bigger spell
Player B - mana drain
Player B - plays land, Jace TMS, brainstorms
Player A - plays land, casts spell (not a threat with Jace), resolves, casts real threat
Player B - Gush, FoW
Player B - mox, tinker for BSC, brainstorms with Jace, time walk.

In that game, Player A hangs around a few turns and there's plenty of interaction. In reality, Player B was solitairing and Player A was basically draw/land/pass for all intents and purposes. Player A may well have never sat down at the table and would have been as much "in the game."

I feel like the format has changed a lot with new printings and restrictions, but I think it is not necessarily bottlenecking in a critical mass as much as it is turning directions like a winding road.

Back in its heyday, it was gushatog, oath, and trinishops with an occassional fish deck (literally blue fish). That was 2002ish. Then planeswalkers came out and that card type got pushed to the limits with narset, oko, karn (consider that the OG "this is too busted" PW, Jace TMS, is now virtually unplayable!) But now we're seeing a new direction to the game - creature's matter/self mill. With Thassa and Jace o' mysteries and underworld breach to go along with arcanist, delve spells, etc., milling yourself has become a win condition.

Cards like DRS started the creature push, but now vengevine, hollow one, stonecoil, collector ouphe, and others have made the game slow down from the "chain my gushes" days of magic and made the attack phase as relevant as it was in old school times.

The only storm cards we really got any time recently was PO, and since then ouphe, karn, narset and such have just punished the "draw deck/drop jewelry" strategies. The game looks fundamentally different, but not in that there's only 1 viable deck from saturation. As a guy who always hated the shops/blue-draw/bazaar triangle of the vintage format, I'm very happy that we've finally broken that trifecta. Those are still powerful axis cards, but decks not even running or needing those engines are doing great things. BUG is a deck, oko oath is a deck, thassa+consult is a deck, hollow vine is a deck, fastbond is a deck, and to a lesser extent fringe decks (like my own welder deck) have become playable and respectable in the meta - hell, even freaking NINJAS...I repeat, NINJAS, have the ability to win. And of course dredge, PO/storm, shops, and xerox are still decks. That's more diversity in viable strategies than I've ever seen in vintage, honestly. Any of those decks can play well and win, whereas before only the three axis REALLY could win and fringe decks had barely a puncher's chance. I think Vintage is as good as ever, if not better.

Put it this way - I ONLY played vintage from 1994-2008 and then modern came out. Vintage got stale to me and Modern became my go to format. But in the past year or so, Vintage is now my fave format again. That says a lot about the meta to me.

@kistrand To piggy back on this, plan for the worst case scenario, but don't always act like the worst case scenario is the case. For example, if your opponent is on blue, has drawn some and has 5 cards in hand - he MAY have FoW, so you have to carefully consider casting that clutch spell. But if you DON'T cast that spell, and have nothing you could topdeck to push the spell through next turn, then not only did you virtually give them FoW in their hand, but you also gave them time to dig more and actually find FoW.
Sometimes they have the stop, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you cast your spell and they counter and it seems crippling (but if you held it in your hand, they'd STILL have the stop, so does it matter?). If you never cast the spell out of fear of a counter, then they ALWAYS have the stop, whether a counter is in their hand or not.

This might actually have the most utility vs survival. Obviously you hit survival with the enchantment mode. But you can hit Hollow One with the artifact mode and an untriggered Vengevine with the grave mode. Pretty solid I say, and potentially maindeckable.

I think yes. While it may irk some current players, they won't quit the game over it. We are hooked. Magic is heroin. Won't quit over something like that.

I think price IS a deterrent to many many people. It's a deterrent to me and I'm a 38 year old dude with some coin to waste. So many players I know won't invest money in the game and have bad assumptions about vintage. Without trying it, they won't play it. Without proxies, they won't try it.

So let's say you let the guy play kitchen table with proxies. He likes it. He's all in on the format. He's getting good and wants to play a tourney. The tourney virtually reads "$20K entry fee". He goes back to Modern FNM because Vintage at any competitive level is now unattainable.

Vintage should allow proxies. The prices are just stupid. If you want prices to stay high for collector value, fine. If you want it just to keep players out of the game, that's different. The ability to competitively play this format should not be determined on if you have a fat wallet or were lucky enough to start playing the game in 1993.

@wappla As primarily a Modern player now (I rarely play Vintage due to location, but the narrow options of viable decks is also a turnoff), I think you have a wrong view of diversity. In modern, there are 20ish linear decks, zoo/burn/GW CoCo/eldrazi/jund/death's shadow/etc. (all of which are viable depending on the meta), but there are also various combo decks, mill, lantern control, Esper control, Bant, Grixis, etc. There is real diversity (not an illusion).

Many cards are on a similar power level, but some are more powerful in certain builds and less so than others. Kalitas, for example, is a powerful creature in Jund. He is much less good in something like BW tokens. Vintage however...ancestral is just best in everything that taps islands, so there's no real thinking about what fits where when it comes to several staple cards.

Modern doesn't have the problem of people not knowing what is optimal...it's just that different lists can have different cards be optimal, and a card that is optimal in one strategy is just okay in another. Also there are a ton of solid decks that are viable choices to win any tourney. The entire color pie is equally competitive. It's not just blue splashing whatever support color. You can run into a billion different decks in a big tourney and your SB needs to really account for a lot of things (and your deck be fast enough or resilient enough to beat lots of other strategies). On the other hand, vintage basically has a big handful of cards that go in every deck and a chunk that is different depending on kill condition. Every blue deck runs ancestral, walk, FoW, (and lately gush), etc. Every shop deck runs thorn/chalice/golem, trini, etc. Vintage tourneys are basically a field of X workshops, gush decks, and bazaar...an occasional storm or oath deck in the mix.

You think in-game choices are all that matter, but many of us like deck building as much as the in-game. Modern also has a slew of in game choices outside of some super-linear aggro decks, but I disagree that in-game is all that matters. Winning with your own deck creation is also very gratifying as opposed to just grabbing whatever list so-and-so played and tweaking 2 cards. To me, that's letting someone else do the heavy lifting and claiming victory on the back of their work.

Side note, if you think your card choices/in-game decisions don't matter in Modern because you face one of 4 decks and lose no matter what, you have not been playing enough modern...at least not well. Play decisions matter a LOT in anything that's not all burn/creatures, of which there are a ton of choices. That's also where deck building choices come in - you need to build versatile decks that handle a lot.

I personally like being able to choose between one of 50 decks or building my own and being able to win a tourney. Having to pick between 7-8 deck choices to have any viable chance of winning is far more limiting to me. It seems you'd like a format of just 1 deck where the only decider of win/loss is how you play the deck. That's basically poker. And while I love poker, I also like games where I have choices and freedom to design outside of the game play. I don't like rock-paper-scissors. A format where a multitude of strategies and card choices are viable and equally powerful to the rest is a good thing IMO.

@desolutionist It seems to me that your beef with Vintage is more a change in your perspective in life overall. If you're looking forward to spending more of your free time on family and business and only occasionally playing magic, then the game as a whole is likely becoming a lower priority to things that matter more in the grand scheme.

I think there were lots of great cards in this set for vintage.

The basic lands for example are beautiful art and they tap for mana as well as any basic from Alpha onward...so they have the same raw power as similar cards from the most powerful sets ever. That's strong.

Further, every blue card in the set was bomb. They all did what any card must do in vintage...pitch to FoW.

@marland_moore Those three pillars have been there for a LONG time. At one point, Mana Drain was considered a pillar. This got displaced by FoW. Dark Ritual was considered a pillar at one point, but it was so saturated with blue running alongside rituals (TPS, doomsday, etc.) That it is essentially all "blue soup," i.e. draw a ton of cards and counter/bounce anything you play.

Workshop has been a pillar since its unrestriction.

Bazaar has been a pillar since Ravnica.

Some consider null rod (and similar effects) to be a pillar, notably with humans-esque builds. It's kind of the "fair" pillar, if it's a pillar at all.

You've made clear what you want the format to be, and you've asked if the pillars make the format too limited or unhealthy. The answer to that question is, "It just is." It's not a matter of healthy or limited. The existence of those cards in the format make it limited in a sense, but also make Vintage what it is. Workshop and Bazaar are two of the unparalleled engines (in terms of newer comparables) that I mentioned earlier. Nothing stacks up to them, so there will never be anything that rivals or displaces them (that have yet been printed).

M1 and M2 added new toys for Vintage, but they did nothing to solidify these pillars, as they have been long standing for over a decade (or two? Am I that old already?) The limits of what is competitive in Vintage has been so for a very long time. The only way to change this and add more deck diversity is with bannings/restrictions...but then you're basically playing Legacy. Rather than try to change Vintage, it's probably best to either A) accept Vintage for what it is, or B) play other formats.

@botvinik I think you kinda said what I said. The "best" vintage engines create a threshold of efficiency/power that newer cards just can't match. That's why derpy, fun, slow cards that work in other formats are just bad in Vintage.

Yes, the strength of vintage decks mean every slot in a deck needs to efficiently contribute to winning or not losing, but that's still a byproduct of decks being the sum of their parts - where the parts are the best spells and engines in the game.

Vintage will always have a clear tier of best engine decks with a +/-8 card difference between variants of the same beast. That is unless they print something massive like dredge from Ravnica that gives gas to a new engine. They are trying some things like that. There's that one new card that returns all enchantments and artifacts from the grave to play. That could be huge. But it costs 37WWWWWW to cast, and it just does "grave-based" worse than dredge/hollowvine. They MAY come up with the next PO or dredge someday but WotC is pretty careful to not break standard with things like that. PO and Dredge were actually not great in standard, but kicked moxen and bazaar into high gear in Vintage.

To be fair, you CAN have any number of decks/archetypes in Vintage....they just won't win. If you want to have fun with whacky brews, you can make any deck you want. If you want to win, play the best cards ever printed for what your deck is trying to do. If you want your cake AND to eat it too, well, that's just never happening.

@serracollector It's a house in Standard, but I think Traxos just does what this wants to do but better. Yes, this has ward 2, but it doesn't have trample or "vigilance", requires 6 artifacts cast to be the same power of Traxos, and a Force of Vigor really still handles both since getting 2 mana available behind a FoV is small fries in Vintage.

@botvinik I think that's kind of the thing. Every once in a while, you get a new card or mechanic that makes a new deck or archetype. Bazaar was a dud for the most part outside of reanimator decks until Ravnica gave us dredge. Rootwalla was a thing, but Survival played it better than bazaar....until Vengevine and Hollow One were printed.

But those are really just 1-2 new decks in the field. You need an earth-shattering printing to get 1-2 new decks. In Modern, there is such a parallel in card power that you could build 50 vastly different competitive decks. That doesn't exist in Vintage. You can build about a dozen competitive decks and another dozen tier 2 decks that are usually less likely to win than the tier 1. That's just because the power threshold is much higher on older cards.

New sets usually provide new solid payoffs (Hollow One) and answers (Force of Vigor), but most of the enablers/engines like Workshop, bazaar, oath, survival, yawg will, standstill, moxen occur pre-modern. Breach/PO are really the only engines I remember that have been printed in a very very long time that are post-RL sets.

And vintage needs engines. It has some "fair" decks like humans and Oko-bears...but the engine decks are usually the top performers and the threshold for "winning." And as I said, Spikes dominate the Vintage landscape.

So to complain about the deck diversity in Vintage, even though Spikes and engine-power barriers cause a threshold for top tier winnable decks, is akin to complaining about why the NFL doesn't have more trick plays and gimmicks in their offense...it's because those tend to get blown up more often than not by tried-and-true approaches. Every once in a while you may get a new Wildcat or West Coast offense approach, but people trying to run the triple flea-flicker play because "it's fun" will lose 99% of games. And Vintage is more for winning than playing fun, whacky things.

@marland_moore FWIW, I am a brewer and hate net decks. I never play tier anything, in any format. But I also recognize I'm in the minority and by a wide margin.

Modern, while having a smaller card pool, actually has more diversity than Vintage or Legacy because of when that card pool started. ABU cards and L/AN/AQ/D cards (even Alliance/Ice Age/Urza Block) had bonkers powerful cards that aren't in Modern. Cards like Ancestral Recall are just so far superior to any other printed card, it doesn't matter that there are a billion other cards to choose from - you play it because it's the best. If you are playing blue, you play sapphire, you play lotus, you play ancestral, you play FoW, etc. If you play artifacts, you play Workshop.

There's some decks that kinda 80% build themselves because 45 of the main 60 cards are just the best cards printed and playing anything worse is just like owning both lotus petal and black lotus, yet choosing to play petal on principle. When you get to Modern, you have lots of choices of parallel effects that may fit a niche better than another: night's whisper vs chart a course vs faithless looting for example. In Vintage, you have Ancestral Recall and 40 other options that are just flat out worse in every realistic scenario.

The power level of the best cards narrow the field out of necessity to be competitive. You can choose to play faithless looting instead of bazaar of baghdad in a Vintage dredge deck, for example, but you will just lose 99 out of 100 times for that choice. When you have clear-cut bests in a format, it narrows the tiers considerably. Vintage has lots of viable deck options currently, but it'll never be remotely close to the variety of Modern for this very reason.

@marland_moore @marland_moore To my earlier point, I don't think it's an issue with tinker being such a superior deck that nobody can play anything else...it's that it is very strong and enables wins, so a lot of people WANT to play it. That's how you get the majority of people playing the same decks.

Your premises are:

1. "My issue with Vintage isn't that there are top tier mainstream decks, it is that most people only appear to be playing the top tier mainstream decks."

That's because the majority of people like to stomp face and find losing unfun. They play the tier decks because they are battle-tested and equate to lots of wins, even covering up lack of skill in some cases (yet even highly skilled players would still use it). It's like bringing a gun to a fight - why bring a knife when you can use a gun? And whether you're an expert marksman or a novice, gun still beats knife 9 times out of 10.

2. "I do play top tier decks but part of the fun of the game is play the outside the main stream decks."

That's part of the fun...FOR YOU. But...the majority of people like to stomp face and find losing unfun. They play the tier decks because they are battle-tested and equate to lots of wins, even covering up lack of skill in some cases (yet even highly skilled players would still use it). It's like bringing a gun to a fight - why bring a knife when you can use a gun? And whether you're an expert marksman or a novice, gun still beats knife 9 times out of 10.

You're basically salty that a large portion of players are Spikes. You want players to play fringe decks and brews and have fun just for the sake of playing. You seem to not like the fact that 50%+ of players just want to kick your face in with cardboard as frequently and easily as possible. That's the nature of a competitive game - you'll always have competitive people that just want to win, your concept of fun be damned.

I think the main thing is that there are more Spikes in magic than any other type. People want to win, period. Therefore they play the best decks. There are a lot of Timmy's and deck-builder types, but Spike is 60%+ of MtG...so the statistics bear that out.

@botvinik This card would have been monster in 4x Karn days, but now that it got the axe, it's have to be a UG fish deck if anything. Otherwise, swan song is just better...or spell pierce.

@botvinik said in [NEO] Boseiju, Who Endures:

I'll agree that they DID live in a world alone. Now, I think, they have a new addition to that party. As far as the 4-of inclusion of Boseiju, if you are running green, the first one is always, at worst, an untapped land. The second, at worst, is always an extra green mana land drop for the turn (tap the 1st, sac it to the legend rule) that you can get back with crucible effects. The 3rd and 4th...assuming there's NO artifact, land, or enchantment in the matchup you want to blow up, just adds to your odds of drawing #1 and #2 early when needed. I suppose in those cases it is close to a dead card....but then again, there are equally and probably more cases where FoW is a blank.

The BEST case, you have 4x game wreckers in 1 card, whereas forces are a 1-for-2 (unless you pay 5, which nobody does). I think green is just a less played color in general, and it has no room in a UB storm deck, but if you lean on green at all, this card is assassin's trophy on crack.

There have been decks running blue that don't run FoW because they can't support the blue count to pitch-cast FoW. I'd be hard pressed to think of any deck running green that doesn't at least run 1x-2x Boseiju going forward. There have even been UBg storm/doomsday decks that splash just for assassin's trophy to stop null rod or other show-stoppers. This card is just 100x better.