Vintage 101: But Do We Have Second Vintage?
Howdy folks! It's time yet again for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we are diving into the Lord of the Rings set that is upcoming and how those cards may impact Vintage. We've already reviewed some of those cards, but we've got more to talk about! We've also got some paper Vintage to discuss, from an upcoming event this weekend to an event last weekend!
Worth noting as well this past weekend was also 4Seasons in Bologna, but we will cover that next week once we have more data on that event.
Without further ado, let's dive right in!
How the Ring Destroyed the World
Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth is coming very soon, and with it comes a bunch of cards that will be Vintage legal. Outside of the cards we've already reviewed (including The One Ring which is likely the most playable Vintage card) the rest of this set sofar doesn't seem to have a ton of cards that will have an impact on the format, but there are certainly a few worth talking about. We already talked about the Ring Tempts mechanic as well in an earlier article.
Boromir, Warden of the Tower
This is a lot like a Lavinia, Azorius Renegade in that it prevents free spells and it's one-sided. It being 2W is an interesting upside to Lavinia because it can be cast off a Black Lotus and is less color intensive in general than Lavinia is. You can also cast this off Cavern of Souls and two off-color Moxen which is a big upside. I could see this seeing play, and it's a beefier body than Lavinia is with Vigilance even.
Stern Scolding
This card is intriguing. It counters a lot of different cards in Vintage, stuff like Ragavan, Lavinia, DRS, etc. That alone makes it very interesting. Not sure if this will see much play at all but it has some potential.
Orcish Bowmasters
This card is gas. Being two mana is an absurd upside to this card and the fact that it makes a creature both on ETB and also as a draw punisher, while at the same time dealing damage to things is pretty groovy. This makes it really hard for Bazaar to play Rootwallas out, since this can shoot Rootwallas in play and make a big enough creature to block their other creatures.
Combine this with Wheel effects and it's even more wild. I definitely think this will see play.
Cast into the Fire
The really big upside of this card's modality is exiling an artifact. This can do some damage to smaller creatures (Ragavan for instance), but not many creatures fit this bill, so this is unlikely to see play given there are a bunch of other ways to deal with artifacts in the format. Still, interesting enough.
Sharkey, Tyrant of the Shire
Sharkey's here to chew Bubblegum and turn off all your opponent's Urza's Saga's, and he's all out of Bubblegum.
Oklahoma Land Run Open 6/15 - 6/18
Upcoming next weekend on June 15-18 is the Oklahoma Land Run Open event in Oklahoma City, OK. This is a multiple day event with tons of events for Vintage, Legacy, and even other formats like Pioneer and Modern. There's even a Team Vintage/Legacy/Modern event going on!
The main Vintage event on Sunday the 18th is giving out a Mishra's Workshop as first place prize!
You can find all the details about these events here.
Team Serious Invitational - The Land 4 6/2 - 6/4
This past weekend was an awesome private tournament event held by my good friends in Team Serious known as "The Land". I've talked about The Land multiple times in this column, and this is the 4th iteration of the event. The Land itself is a pretty awesome place out in the middle of relative nowhere, and it has some absolutely gorgeous scenery. The event was organized primarily by my good friend Rajah James, the 2022 NA Vintage Champion himself!
During the course of this weekend and the primary highlight of the weekend is a full proxy Vintage event. This year's event had 38 players in it overall. I could not make it to this event because of other obligations, but these events are generally very fun (and a little crazy). This year's event was again streamed live by our good friend Robert Wilson of Buffalo Chicken Dip Legacy. You can check out the VOD for the event below.
You can also find all of the decklists for the event here and the data sheet here.
Prizing for these events is always generally pretty sweet since they are usually done as prize drafting at the end of the event. We did get a sweet shot of the prize table!
Now let's look at some metagame data for the event!
There was a pretty even spread across archetypes here for such a small event, as is usually the case with many TSI events. People show up wanting to play something fun for sure.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | Player Name |
|---|---|---|
| Doomsday | 1st | PatV |
| Breach | 2nd | Max Gibson |
| Breach Oath | 3rd | Robert Wilson |
| Esper Saga | 4th | Tom Basketball |
| Esper Saga | 5th | kaischafroth |
| Esper Saga | 6th | Stuart Ziarnik |
| Initiative | 7th | Charles Rolko |
| Azorius Displacer Kitten | 8th | Andy Probasco |
Very heavily slanted Top 8 with a lot of Esper Saga and Breach in it. The conversion rate of Esper Saga here is pretty gross with 3/4 of the pilots making it into the Top 8.
The winner of the event here was PatV on Doomsday.
Definitely a very solid list here, reminiscent of discoverN lists. The Ray of Enfeeblement in the sideboard for Initiative decks is absolutely sweet, and the split between Sheoldred and Murktide is nice too.
The Second Place finalist was on Breach.
Really strong list here as well. Hullbreacher is very punishing and having Blightsteel Colossus as a main deck Tinker target is very sweet.
Overall this looked like a super fun event, but I want to call special attention out to the best list I saw here and that was from our good friend Nat Moes of the Serious Vintage Podcast. Oath of Druids featuring Yargle and Multani!
Absolutely STUNNING.
Vintage Challenge 6/3
The first Challenge event of the weekend was the mid-afternoon Saturday event. This event had 60 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Vintage Streamers Discord.
You can find all of the Top 32 decklists for this event here and the datasheet here.
Initiative was quite popular here overall, and it had a really solid win rate too. Combo Shops did less good but was still popular. CounterVine decks did the best out of every other deck in terms of sheer win rate.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| Oath of Druids | 1st | desolutionist |
| CounterVine | 2nd | JUJUBEAN__2004 |
| CounterVine | 3rd | Firetruck |
| Initiative | 4th | J0SE |
| Initiative | 5th | FerMTG |
| Combo Shops | 6th | kokoko098 |
| Doomsday | 7th | Phill_Hellmuth |
| Initiative | 8th | scipios |
Lot of Initiative and Bazaar in this Top 8 for sure. However, at the end of the event it was Oath of Druids that won it all.
Very interesting list for sure here. Crop Rotation is an incredibly interesting addition to this deck as a shuffle effect and allowing the deck to find utility lands like Bojuka Bog and Wasteland. Having the main deck Planeswalker be Jace is also kind of interesting, especially with Oko in the sideboard.
The Second Place finalist was on CounterVine.
This deck is aggressive and so incredibly powerful. It has some super strong starts and does some crazy things.
Also in this Top 8 we have Initiative, so let's look at the highest-placing one.
I continually dig seeing Phyrexian Censor in these decks, but Anointed Peacekeeper seems quite good here in this event with all the Bazaar decks.
Vintage Challenge 6/4
The second Challenge event of the weekend was the early morning Sunday event.
You can find all of the Top 32 decklists for this event here. There was no data sheet for this event due to technical difficulties. This basically means there are no fancy graphs to look at and we have only the Top 32.
Let's take a look at the Top 8.
| Deck Name | Placing | MTGO Username |
|---|---|---|
| CounterVine | 1st | Gn42 |
| Dredge | 2nd | vwxyza648204 |
| CounterVine | 3rd | Firetruck |
| Oath of Druids | 4th | desolutionist |
| Doomsday | 5th | discoverN |
| Lurrus PO | 6th | Sprouts |
| Initiative | 7th | J0SE |
| 4C DRS | 8th | CrazyDiamond513 |
Bit more variety than Sunday's event. Still a bit of Bazaar. It seems like Bazaar had a pretty good weekend overall, including winning the event on CounterVine.
Ghost Quarter and Karakas are definitely interesting sideboard options. They make a lot of sense though versus certain decks (for example hitting Lavinia with Karakas) or having additional land destruction versus other Bazaar decks or Workshops decks.
In Second Place we had Dredge.
No frills here and there doesn't need to be. This deck is a lean mean machine of Dredging power and it does what it does very well. There's not much reason to really try to iterate on this deck because it just works.
Further down the Top 8 we had Lurrus PO.
I love seeing Haywire Mite in decks. It's such a cool card and it seems so good versus a lot of different things but primarily is really good versus Bolas's Citadel.
Around the Web
- Justin Gennari has some videos for us!
- noprops has a video on Boros Initiative. Check it out here.
The Spice Corner
You can find this past week's 5-0 lists here.
MONO RED PRISON.
Wrapping Up
That's all the time we have this week folks! Thanks for your continued support of the column and join me next week as we continue our journey into Vintage!
As always you can reach me at my Link Tree! In addition you can always reach me on the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the Vintage Streamers Discord.
Until next time!
