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Vintage 101: Eventapalooza


Howdy folks! It's time for another edition of Vintage 101! I'm your host, Joe Dyer, and this week we're covering a few of the more recent events including the Season Showcase Challenge for Season One! In addition to that we're also talking about some of the cards in Commander 2021!

So without further ado, let's dive right in!

Vintage Commanders Go!

We did get another set of spoilers this past week, this time for Commander 2021! These decks are all based on the Strixhaven Colleges, and there are five decks in all. Let's take a look and see what catches our fancy!

Veyran, Voice of Duality

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

This only triggers off instants and sorceries, but there are a fair amount of those flying around in this format and makes Flusterstorm rather interesting with cards like Monastery Mentor, Managorger Hydra, or even Young Pyromancer. It's essentially a spell Panharmonicon effect, but it is in blue so there is that. Blue/Red might be too restrictive, but I actually kind of want to see where someone takes this card. It seems really interesting.

Osgir, the Reconstructor

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

While the second ability does need to tap, I find it extremely intriguing of being able to make copies of cards in your graveyard. If you can find a way to untap this thing repeatedly in a turn, there could be some shenanigans for sure. Also it's sort of a "Ravager" effect up top in that it can boost another creature by sacrificing artifacts, but costing four overall may not cut it. I'm hopeful that artifact master Justin Gennari will break this for a weekend and get everyone playing it.

Angel of the Ruins

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

Goblin Welder is certainly a card, so is Goblin Engineer. The upside of this card is that you can Plainscycle it into your graveyard to be abused by Welder, and then use it to take out opponents Moxen or Sylvan Library or something similar. Not only that, it's a 5/7 flier at that, so once its in play it can certainly lay down the beats. This is pretty cool.

Octavia, Living Thesis

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

The biggest strike against this card is needing eight instants or sorceries in the graveyard. If you can put this into play, it's effect is absolutely brutal and it's essentially impossible to deal with thanks to the Ward 8 ability, but making that cost reduction happen is pretty difficult. I also would not want to Oath into this, because it gives you incentive to play other creatures to abuse with its Magecraft ability.

Keen Duelist

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

Dark Confidant hasn't really shown up a lot lately in Vintage, mainly thanks to the overall power level of cards like Dreadhorde Arcanist. Double sided Confidant ability is not so great here unfortunately.

Laelia, the Blade Reforged

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

Relic of Progenitus... Thought Lash... this might be too fragile but the applications of its power are pretty endless. It's definitely interesting. It's only too bad that this one won't initially be on Magic Online in Treasure Chests.

Ruin Grinder

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

This is another card that has a cycling ability with an actually relevant effect on it when it enters the battlefield, making its utility with both Goblin Welder and Goblin Engineer  potent. I'm actually curious to see how Welder variants can adopt these cards because they seem like a slam dunk for those kinds of artifact value based decks.

Pest Infestation

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

This is certainly not better than Force of Vigor or even Nature's Claim, but cards like By Force see play, and the creature token creation aspect is certainly interesting by creating a clock at the same time as you are blowing up stuff. There could be a world where someone might want that, and I've learned to never put cards like this out of the back of my mind for very long.

Brainstorm

$ 0.00 $ 0.00

This seems good, right? Totally restrictable. /s

Mythic Society Weekly Vintage 4/7

In order to help drive a bit of traffic this way, I'm also going to start poking at some of these weekly events being held by The Mythic Society. These events are held via Magic Online and are held every Wednesday evening. Registration is easy by simply subscribing to Mythic Society's Patreon. These events are definitely fun because they're very casual FNM style events.

Let's take a look at some of the interesting lists from this particular event.

At the top of the heap in this event is a good friend of ours, David Lance (fellow member of Team Serious, winner of the Mishra's Workshop Eternal Weekend event) on Bant Midrange!

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The Bant Midrange deck is really very powerful. Cards like Archon of Emeria are very real and very good in this format. It looked also like David expected a lot of Shops opponents in this small metagame, bringing the A-Game of four sideboard Energy Flux!

The next list is super sweet. It's PO, but it's got some SPICE!

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Managorger Hydra is sweet enough, but Xantid Swarm is really groovy as is Uro, Titan of Nature's Wrath. In addition, the deck has Green Sun's Zenith to tie together finding the disruptive elements, which is really super cool indeed.

The last list we'll be looking at for this particular event is LITERAL TWIN.

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Well, I wasn't joking. It's Splinter Twin in Vintage! Seems like a really fun and interesting list overall. Definitely intriguing that's for sure.

Be sure to continue to check out the Mythic Society events, and also maybe join them! The more players the better and they don't cost much to enter at all!

Vintage Showcase Challenge 4/10

This past weekend was the last Showcase Challenge event of Season One. This event feeds into the Showcase Qualifier at the end of the season here, and as such tends to draw a really powerful crowd to it. The way these events work is that the Top 8 competitors of the event are qualified for the Showcase Qualifier, and these Showcase Challenge events cost Qualification Points (QPs) to enter.

Thanks the efforts of the Vintage Streamer's Discord we know this event had 127 players in it overall, which is solid.

You can find the Top 32 decklists for this event here. Let's take a look at the metagame breakdown!

BUG Midrange continues to be one of the most popular decks in the format, but in this event it was followed very closely by a lot of Ravager Shops players. Ravager Shops has been steadily and consistently performing well in the format, and is definitely a deck worth keeping your eye on. Overall however, the general health of the format continues to show itself through its diversity, and even more interesting is the fact that Lurrus has steadily seen a decline in play and has only really seen play in either Breach or as a fringe card, and even then the amount of play it is seeing in Breach is also declining as more players navigate back to typical Breach builds.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name Placing MTGO Username
RUG Midrange 1st slow_brz
Oath of Druids 2nd Miharu_Fuyumiya
Ravager Shops 3rd StaticGripped
Breach 4th Shir Kahn
Dredge 5th Wizard_2002
BUG Midrange 6th lancer0410
Doomsday 7th zachattack23
Standstill 8th brianpk80

This is a really solid Top 8, plenty of diverse strategies in various pillars of the format, and some neat decks as well. Also, just no repeats of actual archetypes, which is sweet. At the end of the event however, it was slow_brz who took it all down on the RUG Midrange deck.

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This is solid. Slotting in a singleton Hullbreacher is really interesting and definitely very powerful at the right time. This pilot also metagamed appropriately for the Shops crowd by having main deck copies of Collector Ouphe. This deck is really powerful and very interesting to play for sure.

In Second Place, we have the veritable gold standard of Oath players, Miharu_Fuyumiya.

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This list is Miharu's signature list for sure. Four Oko and Niv-Mizzet + Griselbrand is pretty much their bread and butter, and it really works for them. Worth noting that there are no other Oath targets in the sideboard. The only ones are Niv and Griselbrand.

In the Top 8 itself, we had a solid showing by Ravager Shops, piloted by David Lance (StaticGripped)!

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The Ravager lists increasingly have become far more aggressive over time, implementing cards like Chief of the Foundry to further push their clock but to also get around cards like Collector Ouphe (Ouphe doesn't do such a good job when it's facing down a bunch of 4/3s or better). Definitely a solid strategy to consider right now in the format for sure.

At the bottom of the Top 8 we have the perennial Spice Master Brian Kelly on a UW Standstill variant.

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Sacred Cat spotted. All is right in the world. Also note the Torpor Orb in the sideboard. Brian definitely came prepared to try to deal with Doomsday and Thassa's Oracle based decks for sure.

Outside of the Top 8 we had a sweet PO list further down, with Court of Grace?!

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Main deck Kambal is a real statement here to other decks that are heavy on noncreature spells, and Court of Grace is supremely interesting. I wonder how many times this pilot managed to cast this card and win with it. Definitely very interesting stuff.

Vintage Challenge 4/11

Our second Challenge this weekend was the early morning Sunday event, which had 52 players in it thanks to the data collected by the Vintage Streamer's Discord.

You can find all of the Top 32 decklists for this event here. Let's take a look at the metagame breakdown!

Again BUG and Doomsday are pretty neck and neck in these events, as they often are in the Sunday events. A lot of the players in this particular time frame tend to really enjoy Doomsday, and a lot tend to really enjoy fair midrange piles, and BUG is a great example of that.

Let's take a look at the Top 8.

Deck Name Placing MTGO Username
Doomsday 1st Diem4x
Breach 2nd Lord_Beerus
Hatebears 3rd Boin
Jeskai Control 4th SenpaiBlank
Lurrus Breach 5th burrarun
Ravager Shops 6th medvedev
Jeskai Control 7th geekyjackson
Golos Combo Shops 8th Darkmattergun

Again, a relatively solid Top 8. A few repeat decks but nothing too insane, and the only thing really not represented is Bazaar decks here. At the end of the event however it was Diem4x that took it all down on Doomsday!

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Doomsday is widely regarded as one of the better combo decks in the format at this point. It's win condition requires some very nuanced ways of dealing with it, and relying on straight counter magic generally doesn't cut it, because of the amount of countermagic the DD pilots usually run as well. This particular list is fairly stock for the most part these days, but it is still nonetheless a really strong deck.

In Second Place we have Breach!

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This is the non-Lurrus variant, as has been noted before that the card has slowly been working its way out of the lists here. This is more of the straight Jeskai variant however, not even utilizing cards like Vampiric Tutor or Demonic Tutor. I actually really dig the Intuition here which is very interesting. Thought Scour is also very interesting as well.

Also in the Top 8 we had a showing by Mono-White Hatebears.

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This is a Lurrus deck so the primary big thing missing is Archon of Emeria, but I don't think that is too hateful. Luminarch Aspirant is a really threatening card the longer it is left unchecked, and when paired with cards like Thalia it can back-breaking. There isn't a ton of synergy here with Lurrus outside of rebuying creatures or Lotus, but maybe that's good enough. Rebuying Remorseful Cleric every turn versus Dredge doesn't seem too bad really.

At the bottom of the Top 8 we have Golos Combo Shops.

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This is a solid and powerful deck. An evolution of the "Two Card Monte" style deck, this just seeks to pack in a bunch of two card combos enabled by the power of the ramp manabase of Workshop decks plus Golos. This deck can win a number of ways and having to play around each possible way makes it very interesting and intriguing to play against.

Around the Web

  • Jarvis Yu goes over his Vintage Showcase Challenge matches! Check that out here.
  • DETH IN VINTAGE!

The Spice Corner

Lutri Dryad Valakut.

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What I'm Playing This Week

I'm doing a little Showdown of the Skalds this week, obviously!

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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 Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and Patreon! In addition you can always reach me on the MTGGoldfish Discord Server and the Vintage Streamers Discord.

Until next time!



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