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 I sold off my collection (and rebought) many times. The barrier to me is not so much that I can't afford the cards, but that I feel it's stupid for me to play with such expensive cards. Why would I shuffle up a ferrari that can get dinged in shuffling or have a beer spilled on it and "total" it? Those high priced cards would stay in my binder or a vault, and I'd only play with proxies.

@lienielsen I'd think it could be even more busted now. LotV was always a solid stop to the deck, but now we have FoV, and the flash decks were mainly UGx. They could remove your turn 0 leyline or turn 1 cage to still oops-win on their turn 1. Anything you have to "cast" to stop them likely isn't resolving. Macabre fairie would be your best bet!

@marland_moore I hear you. I'm 40+ myself now. My heyday was 2001-2006, and then I dropped off the competitive scene entirely. But even back then, I played and won with my homebrews. The Man Show and The Riddler were probably my two favorite decks ever (always loved Workshop, but hated prison). Turn dudes sideways for the win!

In the grand scheme, magic is a blip, but it has a way of keeping you sucked in. I've quit and rejoined a dozen times and sold and bought my collection three times already. Now I'm hooked on MtGA and can't bring myself to uninstall it. I have a balance in life, but could be far more productive without magic in it. And I think that might be why some people are Spikes. If it's just fun, it is really something that should be an occasional treat and not take up much time or money - like ice cream. But if you are investing time and money in it, you probably only feel "productive" with that effort if you are winning. If you drop $1000 a month and 200 hours playing, but just "have fun" with jank and get blown out all the time, it's certainly not productive. But if you can leverage that time and money into a career, notoriety, sponsorships, championships, etc., then magic becomes a vehicle for productivity more than "fun."

Why is this good? I don't see how it works with Tinker, PO, or Saga.

I think Coval meant that most Vintage players (and could be expanded to all formats) are not good at playing competitive magic. There are many ways to play. I love to build fun decks and hate netdecking. My idea of fun is winning with my own build, not JUST winning. To some, that's being a bad player because their goal is, above all else, to crush their opponent every...single...time.

When it comes to competitive play, that IS the only goal - to win. There are several players a lot better at maximizing wins than most. The pros are a small percentage of players, but all they do is win. Fun is a side effect for real competitive players. They also tend to be the people that play competitive poker and the like as well, and/or dump hundreds of dollars and hours per month into buying and playing magic.

Most of us like to free play or toss in some spare cash here and there and just play to kill free time.

@protoaddict I think a better plan would be to use Shadow of the Grave. You can use actual dark rituals that way instead of the lesser red rituals and can chain several of them together for much cheaper. Using that with actual wheel, windfall, bazaar, LED, etc. should net you a considerably monstrous hand and more likely left over mana to cast some of it. At 3R, this thing is eating up a lot of mana. Granted, Shadow is more vulnerable to grave removal, but it seems like it could be much more useful earlier and cheaper with Dark Deal, Mindslicer, or other cards that disrupt the opponent as well as provide for discarding. Heck, Bazaar(s) + Shadow alone is super cheap and would net you cards.

@protoaddict I think the big difference here though is Meddling Mage shuts off a strategy period, until you remove the mage. This is just a speed bump at best. Costing 2 more for oath of druids is not a very big deal. maybe it buys you a turn, but I'd rather any generic sphere effect instead. This is also strictly SB, because naming this blind, unless you scouted your opponent in a tourney, is just bad G1. PO has no trouble generating crazy mana. If they are POing for 3U just to draw a couple with no mana floating, you are winning anyway. The tax is annoying for the namesake card, sure, but hardly game winning like MM might be.

@protoaddict Hollow One is a thing, no?

@botvinik See Aether Gust. Ruling should be the same and the spell's owner chooses. That makes this nigh unplayable as a 2-for-1 that delays a narrow subset of Vintage spells for just one turn.

I bet the blue card is something like:

Sadness
2UU
Flying, Flash
3/2
When Sadness enters the battlefield, counter target spell or ability.
Evoke-Pay 1 life

Because why wouldn't blue just get the best?