Decisions - via medium.com

I looked at blue draw spells, decisions in Magic, and cognitive biases involved in Vintage players' perception of their format.

People like drawing cards. We get excited when we get to draw cards. We don’t get excited when we exile a creature. We don’t get excited when we counter a spell. Because we really like drawing cards, we form emotional attachments to draw spells that don’t necessarily exist with most other types of cards.
People love getting more options. And they should. More options correlate closely with winning the game.

@Topical_Island What you and many people seem to be missing in all this is that this isn't a fight over what the metagame looks like. It's a fight over the fundamental principles of the format. As I said last week, many Vintage players believe Vintage is the least restrictive format. Vintage is a place to play Mishra's Workshop, moxen, Time Walk, and Bazaar of Baghdad. Other people believe Vintage is a place where Mana Drain is good.

The first group are and will continue to be so upset by the Gush and Gitaxian Probe restriction because these cards are obviously acceptable in a format where you can play Mishra's Workshop, moxen, Time Walk and Bazaar of Baghdad. We don't just object to Gush and Probe being restricted, we object to the idea of restricting cards simply to adjust the metagame and in the absence of dominance or power level concerns.

The second group argues that it's fine to restrict cards to tailor the metagame to meet their arbitrary tastes. They can't present an argument against Gush other than their preference of Thirst and Drain to it. They also believe that preferring Thirst of Knowledge and Mana Drain to Gush is reason enough to restrict a card in Vintage. The specifics of this last restriction are important, but it's the DCI's validation of this belief that is so alarming and worth combatting at every turn.

The proper remedy is the immediate unrestriction of Gush, Lodestone Golem, Dig Through Time, and Gitaxian Probe. None of these cards performed well enough to deserve restriction. Golem, Gush, and Probe were all VSL-complaint restrictions, while Dig was randomly restricted for being "comparable to other restricted card drawers", a profoundly dumb reason.

Full article: Fair and Broken - (Pure MTGO)

I wrote a bit about the Gush-Workshop metagame, Oath of Druids, the restricted list, tempo, card advantage, and fair and broken cards.

Excerpt:

I get why people talk about it. The format is regulated by people who know nothing about it and never cite evidence for their decisions. For all we know, our sound and fury actually does affect the DCI’s process. By refusing to explain their decisions, the arbiters of the format encourage a belief that our arguments help determine its future. This is really quite awful. So, while I don’t partake in the discussions, I don’t blame those who do. For all we know, a well enough argued forum post could land Elspeth, Sun’s Champion on the restricted list. A pithy enough tweet about Lodestone Golem could send the card straight to the banned list, to begin its eternal sleep beside Shahrazad. Furthermore, if we agree that it is plausible that public discussion of restrictions influences DCI policy, then it becomes difficult to ignore arguments we find dangerously unsound.

Wow! I wonder if it has anything to do with everyone playing Paradoxical Outcome and Esper?

Top 32
53 Thorn of Amethyst
56 Ancient Tomb
11 Ingot Chewer
2 Lightning Bolt
0 Young Pyromancers

Gush decks can be favored against Thorn decks whenever they want, they just sacrifice win percentage against other opponents. That's what happens in a real metagame. To improve some matchups, you get worse in others. EE had 1 Thorn deck in the top 8. In P9 Gush won a majority of its matches against Shops and shops had 45% win rate on the day. This is distinctly not a problem.

thanks for the feedback, all.

glad there is still an audience for Magic articles that don't end with decklists or sideboarding guides.

@Smmenen Additionally, the DCI's decision to so obviously ignore available data and heed complaints increases the likelihood people will complain in the future.

The vocal complaints this last cycle were motivated by the perception that the DCI is inappropriately influenced by anyone willing to promote MTGO on Twitch each night.

The practice of privileging of vocal celebrity opinion over both popular views and match data is deeply troubling.

I wrote about Monastery Mentor (as always), Orwell, bad cards, mana curves, and Brian Kelly.

Full article (via PureMTGO)

You don’t have to work too hard to hate that monk. Monastery Mentor is such a fantastic expression of what the color white looks like when it’s overpowered. Mentor is white weenie in the nuclear age. He’s the perfect white version of Ancestral Recall. For many Vintage players, a format with so much creature combat is unnerving. Something just seems off. When everything is too perfect, you get this nausea. Complaints pruned the format of all the unpleasant cards, Golem and Chalice. Everything is great now! You can play Sylvan Mentor or you can play Jeskai Mentor. Freedom is Slavery. What's more white than dystopia?

I've been playing this archetype a lot over the past two weeks, and it has potential as an anti-Shops weapon at least until Workshop, Ballista, Tangle Wire, or Sphere gets restricted in a few months. I went 3-2 in non-mirrors in the P9, but have also cashed my last six daily events. The deck has very good matchups across the format. Being pre-boarded for Oath and Dredge, the two decks people most like to play to try to pick on Shops, is just ridiculous.

Some advice:

• Play 4 Thalia, Heretic Cathar. She is great in every single matchup. She creates free wins against Shops and Eldrazi if you have her early enough. I have beaten Dredge with her, the smaller Thalia (Smalia), a Wasteland and no other hate. She is great against Paradoxical Outcome because often their only out is topdecking Tolarian Academy. If I had a dime for every Mentor pilot who has wasted their turn trying to flash in a Containment Priest to ambush something I'd have enough to buy a fifth Thalia, and she's like a $4 card! Steve's dismissal of her is ignorant; she's probably the best creature in the deck. I don't trust the judgment of pilots playing fewer than 3.

• Play 4 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. This is obvious but for some reason people keep playing 3. I like that not everyone plays 4 because it makes it really quick to figure whose lists to ignore.

• Play 0 Thought-Knot Seer. The card is weak in your close matchups and unnecessary in your good ones. Cutting this improves every other card in your deck. Your Wastelands get better. Your Thalias get better when you can actually use your Wastelands. Your Reality Smashers get better when you cast them instead of letting them sit in hand. Your Displacers get better because less often does activating them mean a TKS is rotting in your hand. Your mulligans get better. You get to cut some temples for Flagstones, which makes your sideboard options a lot better. Crutching on Temples to cast your mediocre Thought-Knots ripples through your sideboard. By cutting this vanilla 4/4, you improve like 30 cards in your 75.

• Play 0 Vryn Wingmare. Three mana for an X/1 is embarrassing against Ballista. This card isn't garbage but usually people who play it are replacing some number of Thalias, which is incorrect. Your worst matchup is Shops. If you build with that in mind, it's at least 50/50, so build with that in mind.

• Play 0 Lodestone Golem. This card probably shouldn't even be played in Shops right now.

• Play 2-3 Mental Missteps in the board. You don't need redundant Thorns affects. They are marginal against combo because you don't have time to play them all. Misstep is actually good on the draw. It's a blowout against anyone trying to play Swords to Plowshares. This was the lone suggestion of mine Steve actually took, and his matches in VSL illustrated how great a sideboard tactic Misstep is against Gush decks.

• Mulligan aggressively. Very rarely keep hands that don't have a turn one play. Use the scry rule.

• Eldrazi Displacer is good (and probably correct right now) but not an automatic include. I have played lots of similar, reasonable board-affecting cards. Stoneforge Mystic, Smuggler's Copter, Fairgrounds Warden, Gisela, the Broken Blade, Linvala, Keeper of Silence, Archangel Avacyn, Toolcraft Exemplar, Ranger of Eos, Walking Ballista, Hero of Bladehold… there are a lot of rares and mythics you could play.
  I turned off the Copter after Ballista came online because of how much removal rational blue players should have for their Shops matchup. Additionally, having an empty vehicle in the face of Ballista isn't a great feeling either.

The core of the deck is so strong it's hard to tell which auxiliary cards are better or worse. It's easy to play the deck, even get good results with it, and have no clue about where your wins are coming from. You have to be pretty honest with yourself and detail-oriented to evaluate what is actually good. You can't be results oriented because even good results are misleading. This is what leads people to continue playing 3 Thalia or Wingmare or Thought-Knot Seer. I've played:

4 Copter, 4 TKS (gave it a second chance to rule it out definitively)
4 Fairgrounds Warden, 2 Gisela, 0 TKS
2 Fairgrounds, 2 Gisela, 4 Copter, 0 TKS
4 Displacer, 4 Copter, 0 TKS
4 Displacer, 2 Fairgrounds, 2 Gisela, 0 TKS
4 Displacer, 2 Fairgrounds, 2 Linvala, 0 TKS
4 Displacer, 1 Fairgrounds, 1 Gisela, 2 Linvala, 0 TKS

What you should take away from that sample is that the core of the deck is so strong that a lot of your other creatures end up being marginal. Displacer is probably correct at the moment because of Shops, but even then, playing 4 Fairgrounds Warden and Linvala/Gisela also seems fine in that matchup.

This deck has an absurd number of matchups that are just close to byes, and it's lone "bad" matchup isn't even that bad. It's the best deck I've played since Rally the Ancestors was in Standard. Contrary to Steve, I think it's a pretty easy deck to play, and I don't doubt its pilots get an edge from lack of mental fatigue.

The decision is intellectually dishonest but crystal clear.

@p3temangus Stsung said the big points. A) Delver is built to win along any resource axis: Life, Mana, Cards, even library size with JVP emblems. B) Delver is built to maximize the quality of the good cards in this format. The necessary conditions for this are the following:

1. lowest reasonable mana curve
2. most generic possible cards
3. casting the good cards multiple times

1. lowest reasonable mana curve
When the average casting cost of your deck is low, you have granularity in spending mana, meaning you spend all of your mana every turn but also can cast most of your cards even with very little mana. Tapping out every turn means Misstep and Force of Will are better. Misstep only generates a mana advantage when you pay life instead of mana for it. Force of Will generates more mana if you are tapped out. Having a low curve means you can Preordain and loot away mana sources much more aggressively. Low mana curves also mean your draw spells are better since you can use the cards you are drawing with them sooner. My build of the deck has the lowest curve in the format outside of Dredge. More mana granularity means more decisions, which means more flexibility. JVP is the paragon of decisions, flexibility, and mana optimization.

2. most generic possible cards
You want all your cards to have as many functions as possible so that they are never dead. Lightning Bolt kills creatures and planeswalkers and opponents. Path to Exile only kills creatures. Lightning Bolt ends games. Sometimes it's Time Walk. That's generic. I don't like playing Dack Fayden or Wear/Tear because they are too expensive and too specific. Dack loots and steals artifacts and is a slow alternate win condition. Jace does much more than that. He loots, flashes things back, and gains life, and is a slow alternate win condition.

3. casting the good cards multiple times
JVP also casts the good cards multiple times. Time Walk and JVP is usually just as good as Voltaic Key and Time Vault. Taking three turns in a row in an aggro-control deck is usually exactly the same as taking all the turns, because the game ends on or immediately after the third turn. JVP turns the deck into a combo deck because any game you draw Ancestral or Time Walk early enough you have a decent chance of casting them twice.

Jace, Vryn's Prodigy, is exceptional in this deck because our ability to race Thorn decks means we get a lot of value out of his +1 ability. I started playing 4 shortly after Dig was restricted, cut Dack, and haven't looked back. Jace has been better over the past year than Dig Through Time was when Dig was unrestricted. JVP can create advantages in every resource.

@trius Except they don't take a knee for sportsmanship. It is the higher +ev play than running their offense- less risk of injury or disastrous negative outcome.

They are needlessly giving you information (about their decision making, play patterns, attitude, possibly deck contents), so you should be actively pleased when they do this.

Been following this thread for a while but finally have something (kinda) to contribute.

In the past, I dabbled with Thalia in Gush token decks and found the combination of Thalia and free counterspells to be the best possible thing you could be doing against other blue or combo decks (2 year old list for reference) The deck was critically weak to Workshops, however, because I was basically taking a Gush deck and adding 4 more cards that were bad against Shops to it. Can we get a couple Thalia to fit in one of these Force/Survival decks?

Here's a 62 card GUWB version with 17 blue cards that needs cards cut. Thalia eats into the blue flex count just a little too much it seems. Maybe someone with more confidence can't find the non-blue cuts. Cutting Jet and the black splash and going straight Bant would get you to 61, but with 1 fewer mana source than @kaluma's BUG (only 3 DRS/Hierarchs here because I added a fourth mox.) Maindeck Squee is another unfortunate casualty.

// 60 + 2 Maindeck (What to cut?)
3 Thalia, Guardian of Thraben
3 Deathrite Shaman
1 Elvish Spirit Guide

Survival Core
4 Basking Rootwalla
4 Hollow One
4 Vengevine
4 Survival of the Fittest
4 Bazaar of Baghdad

17 Permanent Mana Sources + Lotus
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Jet
1 Forest
3 Misty Rainforest
2 Tropical Island
2 Mana Confluence
1 Savannah
1 Tundra
1 Bayou
2 Windswept Heath

12 Blue cards + 5 random cards that are also blue = 17
1 Ancestral Recall
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
1 Time Walk
1 Treasure Cruise
1 Wonder

1 Vendilion Clique
1 Trygon Predator
1 Leovold, Emissary of Trest
1 Jace, Vryn's Prodigy
1 Spellseeker

@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.

@stuart Nah that splash is all about Energy Flux

@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.