As you’ve probably heard by now, the Power 9 are coming to MTGO. For months, all we had was a vague implication. Now we have some actual confirmed details. Not many, but enough to fuel legitimate speculation about what it means for the Vintage format to finally come to Magic Online. Vintage Masters will be coming to MTGO next summer. Styled after this summer’s successful paper product, Modern Masters, but unhindered by the reserved list, the online-only set will offer a premium draft environment at a premium price. Will this be a shot in the arm for eternal Magic, perhaps even the start of a renaissance for the Vintage format?
The paper tournament Vintage scene is largely considered to be dead. This is not entirely true, but it’s practically true for about 98% of the geographical area of the United States. Vintage is obviously an expensive format to play — even a competitive Legacy format player would have a steep entry fee of about $3500 cash on a few Moxen, two pieces of Big Blue, plus Black Lotus. There are many people who would pay that price, but not if there’s nowhere to play the format. Over the past month, I’ve watched my current LGS and my former LGS, both in small midwestern towns of about 20,000 people, successfully launch weekly Legacy events. This will never happen for Vintage. Unless your area already has a Vintage scene, you are unlikely to ever reach the critical mass of players with the means and desire to make it happen.
Magic Online solves that problem by bringing all of us from our own disparate little bergs together. But even with the entire Magic Online player base from which to draw, the critical mass is only barely met. What is the potential player pool for Vintage? Let’s start with the people presently playing Classic. The current season of the Classic Quarter league has 38 entrants. The Classic community has done a fairly good job getting Daily Events to fire once a week over the past couple months, but we’re talking no more than a couple dozen people involved with that effort, most of them league regulars. Even being very generous with the numbers, there are likely no more than 100 people who have played competitive Classic with any regularity over the past year. That’s enough to support regular tournaments, but still surprisingly low when you compare it to the total population of Magic Online. In the time you spend reading this article, 100 unique users will have joined Theros draft queues.
The next group to look at is current Legacy players. Perhaps some of them are not interested in Classic because it is not full Vintage Magic, and next summer could be a prime opportunity to recruit them into the fold. But it’s also possible that many of them simply prefer Legacy. There’s a perception — somewhat true at the local level, but less so at the $5K level — that you can “play anything” in Legacy, and people do. Vintage, on the other hand, has a reputation as a four-deck format: Shops, Dredge, Storm, and the blue deck du jour. Much like Legacy, this does not appear to be a fair assessment at the local level where nearly all Vintage is currently played, but online it is very possible the metagame will consolidate like this. Magic Online players will have a much easier time changing between decks than paper Vintage players do, with card availability and fraud not being a concern online. This is a major advantage over playing eternal formats in paper, but it also undercuts format diversity. Will the Vintage environment that develops be appealing to Legacy players?
Moving further down the ladder, could Vintage Masters inspire people who are not eternal format players at present to become such? It seems unlikely. Most dedicated drafters sell off their singles to pay for more drafts. Casual drafters who open one or two pieces of Power 9, but don’t have eternal collections, will still be at least several hundred dollars worth of lands and spells away from putting together a Vintage deck. Could the prices come down enough to change that? We could presume that Vintage Masters will be drafted with a structure similar to Modern Masters was online, and there were widespread complaints about the low EV of those drafts. There were also “phantom drafts” for people who wanted to enjoy the draft environment at a lower cost, and of course those drafts add nothing to the digital card pool. Real MMA drafts were nevertheless popular enough to affect prices of many Modern format staples, crashing the price of nearly all the rares to below 5 tickets. The mythics saw some decline, but those seeing heavy competitive play rebounded very well. If several key cards end up at rare instead of mythic, perhaps the price of the format will come down considerably, but will it be enough to lure somebody to dive all the way into Vintage who doesn’t have an eternal collection right now?
Speaking of the price, the Power 9 will probably not end up being the real bottleneck for this format, for the simple reason that they’re all restricted. You don’t actually need more than one copy of any of them. Players will need four copies of Force of Will, but will only need one Ancestral Recall. Time Vault is a good illustration of this. It has nearly the mystique of the historical Power 9, sees play in most of the blue decks of Classic, is restricted, and is banned in all formats except Classic/Vintage. It was only drafted in Masters Edition IV, and it has no other online printings. You can have a Time Vault right now for about 5 tickets. If the Vintage Masters draft format fires regularly, there will be far more Moxen opened than the current Classic player base needs. They aren’t legal in any other format, including Commander, and there’s no use for a second digital copy, so where will the excess Power 9 wind up? Does this make an expansion of the player base nearly inevitable? Or will the excess just go to the hoarders?
I suspect you will see a lot of people talking about getting into Vintage next summer. Despite the excitement surrounding the format’s debut, most of the current Magic Online population won’t take the plunge. Perhaps the real growth in the future will come from people who don’t even play Magic Online right now. This event could be a great opportunity for WotC to make a huge push for Magic Online. You could see paper eternal players going digital, perhaps even some lapsed Magic players drawn back by the chance to play with Power 9. But if that’s to happen, it’s going to require the new MTGO software to be more appealing than it has been up to this point. Maybe the government can declare the new MTGO client to be in a state of emergency and lend WotC a few guys off the Obamacare website’s “tech surge” team to whip it into shape between now and next June. In exchange, WotC could trade them the guys who made the Magic Online classifieds section – the US government could use a dose of “ugly but kind of functional” right now.
Amidst talk of a potential Vintage resurgence, Legacy continues to be the most popular eternal format, in large part thanks to the support of the Star City Games Open tour. This past weekend saw nearly 400 players enter their Legacy Open, and the format was also played as part of their Invitational tournament.
Let’s start with the Invitational. The Top 8 featured four Sneak and Show decks, two Shardless Agent BUG decks, an Esper Stoneblade, and a UWR Delver deck. There was a Standard portion of the event factoring into those results as well, but three of those Sneak and Show decks went x-1 or better in Legacy. Let’s take a look at one of the lists:
Sneak and Show by William Jensen
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Sneak and Show is getting a bit too popular for its own good. Show and Tell gets better every time a new big mana “oops, I win” card is printed, and WotC seems hell-bent on continuing to print them. It has been the trend in the past year for S&T decks to go mono-blue and use Omniscience, but Jensen’s list is a throwback to old school Sneak and Show. The red mana gives him access to Blood Moon out of the sideboard to fight BUG decks, which looks great.
The success of Sneak and Show at the event is a bit deceptive. To begin with, Invitationals have an odd metagame. There are a lot of players who qualify based on performance at one or more Standard Opens, and then find themselves having to play eight rounds of Legacy, a format about which they may know very little. Some try, unsuccessfully in most cases, to play a budget deck like Burn or Affinity and do well enough in Standard to offset Legacy performance. That isn’t a good strategy, but there are enough of those people in the room that a fast and powerful combo deck like Sneak and Show can feed on them for easy wins. There is also something to be said for playing a comparatively easy and straightforward combo deck in a long tournament. Eight rounds of piloting High Tide or Storm combo in the middle of a three-day event could be mentally exhausting. Finally, you might also give some credit to the pilots of these decks. Of the notable Sneak and Show players in this tournament, the legendary William Jensen has returned to the game and Top 8’d two Grands Prix this fall after a long hiatus, Brad Nelson is a former player of the year who has enjoyed a solid rebound from his previous slump, and Gerry Thompson is a star of the $5K circuit.
But despite those caveats, the appearance is that Sneak and Show was dominating, and appearances matter. Show and Tell is probably not the card WotC would like to be the face of the format. The deck’s successes will continue to fuel the chatter about a possible banning. In the meantime, the card is up to 84 tickets on MTGO. I’d hate to be holding onto a playset of those if the banhammer falls. Should it be banned? I’m not a fan of combo decks, but compared to other combo cards, it at least has the virtue of being a bit more fun than some. Even if it resolves, Show and Tell allows you an opportunity to guess the opponent’s play and react with a free play of your own that you’ve chosen to neutralize theirs, which is more interactive than many combo decks permit the opponent to be. The matches are mercifully short, and don’t involve the self-indulgent ten minute turns of High Tide and Storm. I’m not sure if banning it would actually improve Legacy. But it’s the type of card that just seems to have “BAN ME” written all over it, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time.
The Top 8 of the Legacy Open was more varied, and a surprise deck won the event: Bant Stoneforge. As a fan of the deck, I couldn’t be happier. Magic Online veteran Reid Duke took this blast from the past to the top of the standings, sailing past the combo decks despite having his playset of Force of Will in the sideboard!
Bant Stoneforge by Reid Duke
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Looking more like a Blue Maverick list, Reid’s deck relies on mana acceleration to power out Green Sun’s Zenith for hatebears to fight combo in Game 1. In matches against “fair” decks, he has some great fighters at his disposal with the Stoneforge Mystic package and a full playset of Knight of the Reliquary, a card that has fallen off the face of the earth in recent months. This is also a Jace deck, and it’s worth noting that despite the change to the legend rule, the battle between opposing Jace decks is often won by the deck that lands Jace first. Thanks to Noble Hierarch and GSZ/Dryad Arbor, the Bant deck should win the race to 4 mana – though it does lack any copies of Spell Pierce that could help Jace resolve against other blue decks.
The remainder of the Top 8 featured two Sneak and Show, Reanimator, two Delver decks, and two Elves decks. Elves, really? The black splash variant has been a nice evolution of Elves over the past year, proving an old dog really can learn new tricks. Nothing too surprising here, but I have to highlight the fact that Ben Wienberg has a Ruric Thar, the Unbowed in his Elves’ sideboard as a Natural Order target. You just gotta love Legacy.
Finally, I want to wish good luck to any paper Legacy and Vintage players attending Champs tournaments at Eternal Weekend in Philadelphia this Saturday. I was disappointed to see the events removed from GenCon, and even more disappointed to see them moved to an event outside my travel radius. Oh well, we’ll always have MTGO.
I played around with a Sneak and Show list in Legacy back in like 2010 (When Show and Tell was $10, if that). It just couldn’t get there. Looking at the list in your article, it’s almost exactly the same except now Griselbrand has been printed. That card is that good. Or maybe it’s because these days Survival of the Fittest is banned.
Griselbrand is indeed just that nuts. If Yawgmoth’s Bargain weren’t banned, I’m sure people would have been S&T’ing that into play, and Griselbrand is likely better if we’re ignoring the mana costs. I still play Zoo in paper, and occasionally online, and I have found that I can put enough pressure (or project the threat of enough pressure) on their life totals to make the activation for 7 life too risky, but in most situations the downside of having to pay 7 at once is offset.
I was getting back into Legacy just as Survival was starting to break through. It still amazes me a bit how that card took over the metagame on the 5K circuit practically overnight. Part of me still thinks the metagame should have been able to adjust to it, and that back in 2010 the Legacy circuit was still new enough that those events were populated by locals with pet decks they didn’t want to abandon. But once everybody decided they’d rather play Survival than try to beat it (and why not, it’s a fun deck to play), that seemed to seal the deal. No telling how many good decks it may have kept down in its day.