@griselbrother said in LCV September -21 Players - Top16 Decklists:
Well, Mentor is probably the best card ever printed, so it's no surprise. It really should be banned. And I'm very liberal in regards to the banned/restricted list.
best card ever not modern playable confirmed
You know, I bet this format would be better if WoTC didn't let a few Twitch streamers make the restriction decisions for the past 3 years.
We found the Anticipate of discard effects.
Count on vintage players to never get set abbreviations right.
Shops is the tempo/prison deck you're imagining the format is missing. Mishra's Workshop and Ancient Tomb are very obviously what you need to have to facilitate playing 30 creatures.
They can push non-artifact creatures ad infinitum, if the broken mana's not there, they're all just marginal sidegrades over each other and you can't get them into play fast enough. Archetype needs at least Caverns 5-8. The current Survival decks are good evidence of this; they're using Bazaar as mana accelerant broken enough to facilitate a hatebear gameplan. No accident the most successful Thalia decks of late use either Ancient Tomb/Eldrazi Temple or Bazaar of Baghdad.
@smmenen As you well know, the issue then becomes that any subsequent printing can undo the effect of the narrow restriction and push Shops back to a problematic place. You then have an unnecessary card on the restricted list (the one you hit to tailor) and the need to add another.
And this is arguably what happened when Walking Ballista (or Fleetwheel Cruiser or Thought-Knot Seer) was printed. The meaning of the Chalice and then Lodestone restrictions was destroyed by new printings. To restore the meaning of those restrictions, you had to narrowly tailor again, by adding Thorn to the list. We now have add three Modern-legal artifacts to the Vintage restricted list in as many years and are discussing adding another.
While I agree the strategy of narrow tailoring can be effective at achieving desired metagame percentages in the short term, it leads to restricted list inflation in the long term, as we have seen.
Can a judge confirm that this does not remove the artifact spell restriction of Workshop mana?
Pitches to Force, a big upside compared to many other Oath fatties.