Well it has been a while has it not?
With the Serious Vintage crew getting their act together after almost a year I was inspired to do the same after almost exactly two years since I last wrote for this blog. A lot has certainly happened in two years.
I have completed my Degree; I have worked at a new job, initially casually, then full time, and now back to part time (we will get to that later); I have become engaged to my wonderful fiance; and for almost a year now I have become increasingly ill.
Around March last year I noticed getting headaches in the afternoons at work. I simply assumed it was the light coming in through the windows (I had moved offices). Within a few weeks it had spread to also include intense pain in the mornings when I woke. These headaches were not traditional migraines as I had none of the usual side effects like photosensitivity/auras etc. Shortly after that it became that not being in pain whilst awake was a rarity and something truly special. Self medicating for a few weeks had done nothing to ease my life of constant pain and I started what would become my frequent association with my doctors. Tests, CAT scans, MRI's, multiple emergency visits, and doctors appointments could find no reason for these headaches, and only prescriptions of painkillers of ever increasing strength were forthcoming. I saw a specialist for six months who was not able to find any results despite a hospitalisation, and multiple drug courses (some with very negative short term effects).
I am no longer able to work or do many of my old activities for any period of time without causing stronger headaches to compound my already wrecked system. I went from having over 100 hours of personal leave stored to having none in a few short weeks. I had to be let down to three, then two, and now only one day a week at my workplace. Driving is particularly awful as I get incredibly motion sick if I am in a car. The days are long spend my days mostly locked (virtually) in my home trying to find work/amusement in my membership to the Australasian Society of Linguistics and various games. I am getting slightly better at cooking than I was so there is that.
Why is this relevant you ask?
Because last Sunday I had FUN. I was truly enjoying myself for possibly the first time in many months.
Last Sunday I played my first Vintage event since GP Sydney (Oct 2015), which was one of the first since MASTERS 2015 (July 2015). It saddens me to see how little Vintage I played compared to 2-3 years ago where I was out nearly twice a month all year long. What makes this especially important is I did not play much during the post cruise delver meta and the subsequent up until chalice got restricted.
I had lent out many of my Vintage cards to Isaac Egan to take up to CanCon in the weeks before the tournament and he had done quite well with my Mono R Bridge Stax list taking second place. He played with the exact list I won the GP Sydney Vintage side event last year. I was expecting to pick up those cards before the tournament. That ended up not happening but I decided to stay for the tournament itself.
The list I had sleeved up before I had shelved my cards for the better part of a year was Rich Shay's painter list with
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy. It had worked out extremely well in the few playtesting sessions that I had with James 'Jimbo' Dowling and I had not yet played a base blue-red deck in a tournament yet. I guess I am still in 'the old guard' of Vintage and love playing with my
Underground Seas. I had tested Delver quite a bit but I can't remember actually taking it to a tournament.
Since I had very little experience playing Vintage in the past few months I took to rebuilding the Painter list. Jace, Vryn's Prodigy had seemed like one of the weaker cards and when I saw a list without them that had done well (made the finals at a 28 person event) I decided that since the cards were all together anyway I would just play that list.
The list I played was:
Painter 2k16 - Peter Flugzeug
3 Volcanic Island
2 Underground Sea
2 Island
4 Scalding Tarn
2 Polluted Delta
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Strip Mine
1 Black Lotus
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mana Crypt
1 Sol Ring
2 Grindstone
1 Sensei's Divining Top
1 Blightsteel Colossus
3 Painter's Servant
1 Dack Fayden
2 Mystic Remora
1 Tinker
1 Time Walk
1 Merchant Scroll
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Yawgmoth's Will
4 Force of Will
4 Mental Misstep
4 Pyroblast
1 Red Elemental Blast
1 Flusterstorm
3 Thirst for Knowledge
2 Gush
1 Brainstorm
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Dig Through Time
SB: 1 Flusterstorm
SB: 1 Engineered Explosives
SB: 1 Shattering Spree
SB: 1 Rack and Ruin
SB: 3 Ingot Chewer
SB: 1 Illness in the ranks
SB: 1 Mountain
SB: 2 Nihil Spellbomb
SB: 1 Pithing Needle
SB: 3 Blank (I forget to put in Grafdigger's Cages)
Red Blast/Pyro have always been powerful albeit niche counterspells. Being able to play these cards reliably thanks to
Painter's Servant is THE reason to play this over a more streamlined Big Mana Blue deck such as Grixis. Playing the Grindstone combo is two mana more expensive than Voltaic Key/Time Vault and in a format where everything is so compact that is a HUGE drawback. Since Dark Confidant left the format (along with the arrival of good spell draw engines in the form of Khans of Tarkir's delve spells) and Delver's rise many blue mages have increasingly turned to these blue spells to provide their card advantage. Many blue lists are now eschewing tertiary colours to streamline further. The blue mirror has become an arms race over who mas more Misstep/Mis-d, flusterstorms, redblasts, and now with the advent of storm again Duress/Thoughtseize. I would propose that the past two years have given us some of the "bluest" blue decks in history. If that is the case, REB becomes less conditional in such a field. The Pyromancer gush decks in particular have been using these cards in great numbers to one-up the other blue decks. Even decks which have moved away from the consistency on two colours are still relying on blue spells to act as their draw engine (i.e. Mentor).
The majority of the spells above in all these other decks are dead in certain matchups (i.e. Misstep against Workshops). Painters power comes from REB being a card you can keep in in the Workshop/other matchups, freeing sideboard space that other decks need to replace their blue-centric cards etc. This means that the painter deck can match the other decks 1 for 1 for counterspells and then add any number of blasts on top of that should the pilot choose.
Obviously the deck has been given a shot in the arm with the addition of
Thirst for Knowledge (you no longer have to play bad cards like
Intuition) and all of these factors together have left Painter in a rather good position for the metagame. The deck straddles the line between the hyperconsistant U/R decks but keeps some of the punchiness and combo-esque feel of the old Grixis decks. It preys on blue control decks and has the couterspell density to combat the blue/combo decks on the ground. It also has a more fluid board plan against the bogeymen of the format being Dredge and Workshops.
I do not believe Painter to be the best deck in the format because it does still struggle with Workshops which are still a large part of the global metagame but it is a very solid choice for a small field and it is certainly a blast to play.
My Tournament
There were 9 players for NLG's monthly Vintage event. There were even a few fresh faces which was great to see. From my perspective Vintage is in a worse state from when I was last writing for this site in 2013 but the VSL and the advertisement Vintage has received since it went online has been a big factor in it looking like it is on the up and up.
Round 1) Ben McCoy - Tezzeret
Ben is a regular and a great guy to have at tournaments. He is another of the old guard and always a pleasure to play against. Our first two games were quite quick with him topdecking Lotus like a boss (80% of the time it works everytime) on his second turn and I had no Force of Will for his Tezzeret. I had exactly two lands in play, cast Gush in response to his Tezzeret floating UR, finding and playing ancestral and not hitting either a blast or a Force. QQ QQ :)
Unfortunately for Ben he had to mulligan to 5 in our second game and while it took a while he was never really in the game. I did manage to cast an early Yawgmoth's Will which just put me so far ahead.
Game three was a good decider and while Ben was stuck with very few mana in play he managed to keep his hand full of counterspells. I had to play very carefully and cautiously. It was about turn seven when our first big counterwar happened over a main phase gush of mine which I ultimately won thanks to playing Problasts. From that point I was always a card ahead of him and managed to turn that into a victory.
A total of 0 damage this round was inflicted to an opponent. All 12 damage between the three games was self inflicted. Ah Vintage...Don't ever change
Round 2) Stephen Meade - U/R Delver
The semi mirror would be important here. Stephen and I had been testing prior to the tournament starting so we both new what the other person was playing. This match really showed the arms race between blue decks. I simply had more Missteps, Blasts and Remora's which let me leverage these important cards into the win. The games themselves were not too interesting from a technical viewpoint but successfully Red Blasting a Young Pyromancer just feels good.
We played a few more games before the next round started.
Round 3) Jared - Bridge Stax
Jared was a guy whom I have seen around though I don't believe we had ever played before. Going into our games I did not know what he was on (which I really should have considering the size of the tournament). After our first game I was convinced that he was playing my shops list from GP Sydney. Unfortunately for me he was not playing the red version and now having seen more I believe that he was playing something similar to the VSL lists that Luis Scott-Vargas and Eric Froelich have been playing.
During the whole tournament, the only time I ever had a Mana Crypt on the field was against Jared and it happened nearly every game I played against him that day.
I managed to take the first game by despite taking 9 damage from Mana Crypt. I had to pass the turn with both Painter and The Grindstone in play and was one Red blast away from being ground out myself when he played a Phyrexian Metamorph on his last turn to copy the Grindstone.
I lost to the Workshop core in game 2 when the combinations of Phyrexian Revoker, Mishra's Factory, Wastelands, and my own Mana Crypt were enough to seal the deal against me.
Game three I simply Vintaged my opponent with an early Tinker in Blightsteel Colossus. I even had the Force for whatever relevant card he had. I do remember that it was a pretty all in play, should he have been able to answer it with say Metamorph (Force) and an Ensnaring Bridge it would have been unlikely that I would have won.
Round 4) Marco - Oath of Druids
Round four was a marathon session in which we finished our second game on turn two of the final turns. What has especially brutal about this is that he completely smacked me around in game one. I think I died on his turn three or four. It was a Orchard, Mox, Oath, Force, and blue card type game. He was playing two Griselbrands as his targets which had been a spot of amusement in his testing before the tournament as he had activated his oath with one Griseldaddy in his hand and the other on the bottom of his Library. A rare occurance but not impossible.
Remember those missing Grafdigger's Cages from earlier....yeah....
Our second game was the marathon and probably lasted 45 minutes. I don't believe either of us was playing very slow but I simply could not find a win condition. To be fair I had boarded out the Colossus and one of each piece of the Painter combo so I was stuck with a single grindstone as a win condition. I locked down the board early with Explosives on two, Illness in the Ranks and a Needle of Griselbrand. I discarded my Grindstone to a Thirst for Knowledge early and was digging to find the card. I finally found a Dack Fayden when turns were called and I finally found my Yawgmoth's Will with three cards life in my Library. I was able to resolve the Will and won on the spot with effectively a 45 card hand.
As we finished in turns my final record for the swiss was 3-0-1. Not bad for my return to Vintage. I was getting ready to pack everything up when they told us that we were cutting to top 4 and that I was about to have a repeat match vs Marco. I was feeling quite ill at this point but decided to persevere and play out the rest of the tournament.
Top 4 vs Marco) - Oath of Druids
We sat back in our chairs and got ready for another long slog. Without Grafdigger's Cages to help out I knew I was at a disadvantage in the early game but my deck was stronger in a vacuum with a much better late game.
It was not be be however.
Marco's Oath deck did what Oath decks are want to do and it exploded on itself. He game me a 1/1 early which took him from 15 to 7 before a Painter joined in on the fun and finished him off. I believe he was drawing his oath targets and non relevant lands when he needed business spells.
Game two was much the same only this time I had Illness in the ranks.
Final) Jared - Bridge Stax
Finally I got to the end of the tournament and sat down to face Jared again. I knew I had lucked out in our first round and was hoping to do the same. It was unfortunately not to be. I managed to to a singular point of damage to him in three games. In both game one and game thee the shop core proved to be too strong. Once again I managed to deal some 18 damage to myself with Mana Crypt.
Red Blasts played an important role in the game I did win and this may have hurt me in game three as I kept the hand based off an early Painter with a Reb to deal with anything with the mana to cast both. I did not have any dedicated artifact destruction and it cost me precious turn trying to find some which was enough for Jared to take game three. Perhaps I should have mulliganed but the had itself was not terrible.
Conclusion
Throughout the day I had a blast. It felt great to be playing Vintage once again and I even took the time to rebuild my cube as soon as I got home.
After a year of ennui I feel like there is something exciting out there and I will do my best to keep this up/keep playing Vintage.
