Vintage Guest Post

Here we have a tournament report from Aiden who managed to make 4th in his first ever Vintage tournament.

Guest Post: A Vintage Newbie

Hello everyone, my name’s Aiden and I’m writing this guest post to give a new player’s perspective on Vintage. I first started playing Type 1 a couple of weeks ago and it is already one of my favourite constructed formats. Here I will outline my journey so far.

Getting started

I must admit that my first impression of Vintage was how darn EXPENSIVE it is. As a budget player this was a major drawback, with the most expensive card I own being worth around $20. However, Josh’s enthusiasm for the format was infectious enough for me to put the effort into proxying up Jorge Requesens’ Bomberman list. I chose this deck for a few reasons. Firstly, I actually owned a few of the cards, such as Auriok Salvagers, Trinket Mage and some Spellbombs. Secondly, I wanted some game against the notorious turn 1 Vintage wins, and free counterspells like Force of Will and Mental Misstep gave me a measure of security. Finally, I’m a combo player at heart so having access to the Salvagers/Lotus combo made the deck much more enticing.

My first few games with the deck were akin to a baby giraffe learning to walk – I wasn’t really sure what to counter or even how to use Library of Alexandria properly. However, after comboing out, drawing my deck, having infinite mana of all colours and still not being able to win that turn I made my first change by replacing a Spell Snare with a Pyrite Spellbomb. I’m an impatient man, I want to win now!

Lead-up to the tournament

At this point I was still not that excited by Vintage. It was cool playing with broken cards and everything, but it just didn’t excite me. When Josh first contacted me about travelling to Adelaide for a Vintage tournament I was sceptical. In the end I figured I may as well go, at least it’s something interesting to do over the weekend. This is when the awesomeness began. Within a half hour, members of the Vintage community which I had never met before had offered to lend me hundreds of dollars’ worth of cards making up the bulk of my deck. Upon arriving in Adelaide the trend continued, with the hospitality of strangers never ceasing to amaze me.

Now, there is a point to me emphasising the generosity of other Vintage players. At the start of this post I mentioned how expensive the format is, and how that put me off initially. Well, part of the reason for that was that I assumed the kind of people with thousand-dollar collections would be elitist, and generally not be much fun to hang with or play against. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead, they were very enthusiastic to have another person enter the format, and were extremely patient with my noobishness and gave me plenty of pointers. I learnt a lot from playing against them the night before the tournament, and actually felt somewhat competent by the time I went to bed.

The tournament

Round 1: Dredge – Toby

My first round opponent borrowed his deck from a friend and hadn’t played it before, so he didn’t really understand what he should be doing. Add to that a sprinkling of bad luck when he kept mulliganing and missing Bazaar of Baghdad, and I had an easy 2-0 win.

Round 2: Snapcaster Control – Socrates

I went into this game feeling pretty good as my personal goal was just to win *something*. To my amazement in both games I seemed to have counters for all of his relevant spells and even got a combo kill in there. I had just won the first 2 rounds of my first Vintage tournament! One of the highlights of the game was killing a Sensei’s Divining Top, which is not easy when your only answer is Engineered Explosives.

Round 3: Stax – Lee

I won game 1, but game 2 was very close and went for a long time, with the end result being decided by a couple of timely Spine of Ish Sah’s on his side. Since it looked like we would go to time, Lee kindly scooped me through as he could not make top 4 with a draw.

Round 4: Cobra Storm – Josh

At this stage both Josh and I are 3-0, so we just draw into the top 4. We play for fun anyway, Padawan vs Jedi Master! Josh beat me handily, with some blisteringly fast Cobra action.

Semi-finals: Stax – Dan

This round is where my story ends. Dan simply had the cards to beat my deck, and I was crushed under the weight of three Lodestone Golems in one of the games.

Moving forward

Well there you have it, my first foray into playing Vintage. I was pleasantly surprised by this fading format and the community around it struggling to keep it alive, and would definitely recommend giving it a try. In terms of modifying my deck for future games, I would probably try to fit a Consecrated Sphinx into the list somewhere to make use of Mana Drain mana and give me an end game. I would also better tune the sideboard, perhaps adding a Grafdigger’s Cage.