FWIW If I were Mike and Vintage was my responsibility, I would create a business case on making Vintage vibrant and hopefully it shows a strong ROI which could persuade Hasbro management to allocate the necessary budget.

I’m pretty sure I understand what you are trying to say. It is my opinion that asking for WotC to invest money and resources into Vintage is a lot less productive than offering solutions that they can easily implement immediately. We have absolutely no understanding of how WotC allocates budget and spend for any facet of MTGO. I would be willing to bet that Mike would love to have 1-2 people per format on his staff whose only responsibility is dedicated to thinking of ways to improve their specialty format. Is that ever going to happen though?

1) Market/Advertise to a different demographic – they need to spend money to attract and retain Vintage customers. This has to be more targeted marketing than the current focus because Vintage players are different than Standard ones.
2) Develop/Implement innovative tournaments that have greater appeal to the Vintage player. This means dedicating resources to understand what the Vintage player wants and code Vintage specific solutions for us.
3) Prize support desires differ from other players, understand what those needs are and address them.

To your point on Vintage being part of Mike’s job, sure but I do not want Mike to think about Vintage an hour a week during coffee breaks. I want someone at WOTC who is responsible for ensuring a vibrant Vintage scene. Someone who right now is under a lot of scrutiny because of our current state of affairs. Someone who’s bonus relies on attracting, retaining and driving the Vintage format. Or do you think this is Mike and he just hasn’t been able to get results?

For me it’s not a big deal, I never played vintage irl but for those who are used to playing for a mox or something like that, it might feel that paying 6 tix to try to get 6 ou 11 Standard packs is almost playing in tournament practice.

I do agree that a big tournament that has other tournaments feeding it, is a good idea.

On the variance, I understand your point but being on the wrong side of those things also happens in other formats. On the draw, facing Champion of the Parish turn1 and turn2 Burning-Tree Emissary + Lightning Mauler, that’s 3 creatures attacking you for 7. Even on the play, if you didn’t have a removal spell, you’d be in a pretty bad situation. Those kinds of draws are present in every format. Thoughtseize into Pack Rat was also pretty good. Delver into flipping Mana Leak left you in a pretty bad spot. These things simply don’t kill you as fast but they are as opressive as turn1/2 kills in Vintage. The power level of the whole format is much lower but many times they win the game right away, only the confirmation of the win comes later.

“but the feeling of hopelessness is far higher in Vintage when those things do happen.”

I get that. But that’s just how the human mind works. Some of those Standard situations don’t feel as bad because you at least got to play some magic, but in reality you didn’t, you just think you did. You can’t concede because they have have several lands in hand or they might even mess up or you might have an out but some of those games, if you saw their hand, you’d know you were dead on turn 1 or 2. I think this is something some people need to understand so they give vintage a chance. But most vintage players understand this, I think.

On a side note, to me, it feels much better to lose on turn1 than to play a long game while my opponent is bouncing all my permanents every turn (like in pauper before they banned the cloudpost temporal fissure deck) or some other decks lihe that. I know I can’t concede because there is a chance they mess up, or that they don’t have/find a card they really need or maybe even timeout on MTGO. But you end up losing most of those games anyway and it’s much more frustrating. But not everyone is like that I guess.

What resources need to be allocated to Vintage that aren’t already done? That is my question more or less. Mike Turian’s job is to oversee all OP on MTGO, which includes niche formats like Momir and, yes, Vintage. If he truly doesn’t have the time to spend a couple minutes during his day to think of ways to improve Vintage, then it’s a time management issue at WotC (and not necessarily Mike’s fault). It’s not like he has to schedule day-long meetings to figure things out. Heck, they could do it during a coffee break, at dinner, or after work (WotC employees hang out together after work, right?). Assigning specific people to manage Vintage is not necessary. Things don’t change as rapidly in Vintage as other formats. They just need to keep Vintage on their minds, which is the difficulty, I suppose. Setting up a tournament, like the one I outlined, might require a short meeting one time to organize an action plan/delegate tasks, and another meeting to confirm that things are completed before implementing. It’s not a huge time requirement, as I see it. Maybe WotC’s internal processes won’t allow for something that simple, but perhaps that is the problem more than anything else; things simply take much more time and effort than they really need.

Hi Guilhao,

Thanks for your feedback. Regarding the 4-round events paying out in standard packs, there will never be anything more offered to Vintage players for playing in a 4-round event with a 6 tix entry fee. In addition, there is no chance that Vintage would get a higher entry fee for a 4-round event as WotC employs a “one size fits all” approach to OP.

The only way to get around that is to create a “new” event. I’m not advocating for strictly the same structure as PE’s in regards to entry fee and prizes, what I’m proposing is a new structure where the 4-round DE’s feed into an end of season Championship, just like MOCS. There, Vintage specific promos could be awarded in addition to various prize packs (could be VMA, or any other older set like Masques block or Tempest, for instance).

With regards to variance, I don’t really want to get into too much of a discussion, but I’m not trying to say that other formats don’t have variance. They all do because this is a card game. Sometimes you have the cards and sometimes you don’t. But what happens in Vintage is vastly different than Standard/Modern, etc. All the playskill in the world won’t help you win the coin flip against Workshop decks, draw into all of your Dredge hate cards (in excess/opposition to the Dredge players anti-hate card measures), or ensure that you have a Force of Will and another blue card in your opening hand to avoid getting Tinker’ed on Turn 1. Yes, these things don’t happen too often; I’ve played enough Vintage to know that all too well, but the feeling of hopelessness is far higher in Vintage when those things do happen.

The 2nd point I don’t agree is that a 4 rounds vintage event is bad because of variance. I don’t think that’s the reason people want bigger tournaments. The reason is that we build 1000+ tix decks and play for a few standard packs. Not very exciting compared to irl vintage tournaments.

Also I don’t think vintage has more variance than other formats. I actually think it rewards skill way more than Standard or Modern. Yes, sometimes people win on turn 1 or 2 but even those draws can be disrupted and they are the exception, not the rule. Standard games can also be won or lost in 3 or 4 turns. Sometimes you are dead but you still don’t know it and it just takes longer, so that doesn’t leave you feeling as bad as losing on turn1 because you think you had a chance when you didn’t. I’ve won games that seemed really hopeless and I also lost games I was sure I was gonna win in vintage. It can happen in other formats but it’s not as common. I don’t have the numbers but most of my matches go to 3 games, more often than in other formats.

4 rounds tournaments will always have a huge variance and while you can 0-2 losing twice to turn1 kills, you can also die on turn4 to monored twice in Standard. To me, that’s not any different.