Readers of this week’s QuietSpeculation article will know I am on a Vintage kick this week, just having played my first event. While you won’t be playing in a Vintage Pro Tour Qualifier or Grand Prix in the foreseeable future, the possibility of playing in an event, even if it’s unsanctioned, is there, and I think everyone should give the format a shot, especially if you can do so without having to pay for the deck.

I’m frequently a late adopter of things (I was late to the party on Twitter, for example, and now I write a Twitter article. Funny how things turn out), but if I do adopt something I had previously thought I wouldn’t enjoy, I often try to convert as many holdouts as I can because I understand their reluctance and want to let them know I used to feel the same way and now feel differently. Vintage has a bit of a reputation for being a dead-before-you-play-a-spell format, but I feel that if more people gave it a shot, they might like it a lot more than they think. People who are already Vintage fanatics exhibit a near-evangelical fervor for the format, and finally having played in an event and done well, I can see the appeal.

I’m writing this from the mindset that you either love Vintage—in which case you’re going to get a kick out of seeing people you like profiled and/or possibly will see someone you should be following—or you don’t think you’ll like Vintage, and I hope the people who are passionate about it can change your mind. I truly believe if you don’t think you’ll like the format but you and some friends proxy some decks up and give it a shot, you’ll become true believers, just as with me and just like the Vintage proponents I want to tell you about. I present to you Who to Follow – Vintage Edition, Part 1.

Nat Moes a.k.a. Grandpa Belcher

Where You Know Him From: Eternal Central, The Serious Vintage Podcast

Current Title: Vintage Zealot

Social Media:

Twitter

Facebook

Eternal Central Profile

LegitMTG Profile

Google+

Serious Vintage Podcast

Sources close to Mr. Moes confirm he is not actually a grandfather, but rather a penitent man who feels partly responsible for inflicting Goblin Charbelcher on the rest of us. Introduced to him on Twitter, I have a hard time contextualizing him as anything other than “Grandpa Belcher” with his Moff Tarkin avatar. For one reason or another, I’ve followed him on Twitter for years now despite not caring about Vintage for more than a fraction of that time. If that’s not a testament to his tweets being entertaining and appealing to a broad range of Magic players, I don’t know what is.

At the very least, you’ll want to listen to the most recent episode of Serious Vintage. It’s all about Gen Con, and nothing will whet your appetite for the best five days in gaming like a podcast that spends seventy-five percent of the running time talking about things at Gen Con that aren’t Vintage. Learn the ropes from experienced attendees, and figure out which events to play in, which non-Magic attractions you want to hit up, and, most important of all, where to eat in Indianapolis so you’re not stuck in that two-hour line at Steak and Shake (seriously, people, Steak and Shake is literally next door to a quality brewpub called The Ram). If a Gen Con primer isn’t enough reason for even the most ardent Vintage hater to check out the quality info this man is fixing to dump on you, I feel sorry for you. Also, if you’re not planning on going to Gen Con, that’s kind of a huge misplay.

So, this isn’t a tweet by GPB, but since it’s about the value of the ’cast and it’s a tweet by someone whose opinion I respect, I figured, what the heck.

“Okay, Jason, I’m convinced. I’m going to play in my first Vintage event, by virtue of you having written this article. Where do I go to play?”

Okay, I don’t believe you, but Nat is good for that kind of thing.

He’s kind of like MTGMom, but he mostly just tells people where to play Vintage, and there’s less of a chance of him taking a break because he got pregnant.

Finally, he’s a big proponent of something I consider insanely fun, which is Vintage Achievements.

These are like the achievement checklists from some recent prereleases, only more fun and with actual prizes. Click the link, and check them out—some of them are hilarious, some seem impossible, some seem almost too easy (I managed to earn the most overall achievements at the Kalamazoo event because I swung with Signal Pest a lot, and it felt like cheating), but all of them make the event all that much more fun. What do you think of unlimited proxies and prizes for having all five Moxen in play or having 10 counters on a permanent? And people think Vintage is an inaccessible format . . . 

Stephen Menendian

Where You Know Him From: StarCityGames, So Many Insane Plays Podcast

Current Title: Vintage Expert

Social Media:

Twitter

Eternal Central Archives

StarCityGames Archives

I’m not sure how much effort you want me to put into convincing you that the 2007 Vintage World Champion is worth following on Twitter, but I feel strongly that he is worth the follow, so I’m going to try my damnedest. Like Nat Moes, I have followed Stephen on Twitter almost as long as I’ve been on Twitter despite not having any interest in Vintage. In a lot of ways, Stephen is among the game’s finest historians, and having him as a resource is incredibly helpful. He’s been writing for StarCityGames for literally a decade, and his memory stretches back even further than that. Speaking as someone just coming off a great weekend where my local game store ran a successful Vintage event, I can see the relevance of an article like this written all the way back in 2004.

Speaking of said event, I was in need of a deck to play, so having Vintage players in my Twitter feed was obviously incredibly useful to pick up advice about the format.

In addition to writing for SCG and Eternal Central, he will frequently write great posts that you can view for free on The Mana Drain, such as this one, which links to a full write-up article on Eternal Central and which got me interested in trying to find the best Young Pyromancer variant to battle with. Inevitably, time was too much of a factor, and I ended up playing something much simpler to pilot, but picking up an endorsement of a deck from one of the premier minds in the format was an obvious factor in the calculation regarding which deck to play.

Speaking of a memory that goes back further than most players’ . . . 

It couldn’t hurt to have someone else in your feed apprising you of upcoming events either.

Stephen is among the game’s best writers in my opinion, and he’s taking it upon himself to write a complete history of Vintage—a daunting and thankless task—and he tweets useful information about a format he knows better than almost anyone. I think if you give him a follow, there’s almost no way you’ll regret it, and his enthusiasm for Vintage will infect you the way it did me.

Brian Demars

Where You Know Him From: StarCityGames

Current Title: Magic Pro

Social Media:

Controversy!

SCG Archives

Best Finishes

Facebook

Okay, put the pitchforks down. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I didn’t include a Twitter link for Brian DeMars. There is a very simple explanation for that. Brian doesn’t appear to be on Twitter. This has happened a few times in the past—people I have really wanted to include in a WtF installment have not been on Twitter, and I’ve been forced to exclude them. In fact, I really wanted to include Brian in this installment about RIW Hobbies because Brian gave me a lot of guidance right when I was starting to become good at playing Magic, and he was responsible for a lot of positive experiences I had playing at RIW Hobbies during a few summers in the mid-2000s. I felt that I couldn’t include him in that article, and I saw this in the comment section.

As though I didn’t feel bad enough already! When I say Brian taught me to Brainstorm, I mean he was literally the person who showed me the utility of that spell in Eternal formats. My friend Rob Weathers and I stopped into RIW one day when I probably should have had a summer job instead, and we were durdling around playing proxied Vintage decks. I had everything except the Power and was debating whether I should buy the stuff and build a complete Vintage deck. I ultimately did not, and I didn’t play my first Vintage event for eight more years. What was the deck in question? It was Brian DeMars’s Welder Slaver, a deck that used Goblin Welder to infinitely recur Mindslaver and take every one of your opponent’s turns until you made him or her make plays that were so bad you could kill him or her. I cracked a fetch land for a blue dual on turn one and went to Brainstorm during Rob’s end step, and Brian stopped me and explained that if you’re going to dump a bunch of uncastable junk on top of your deck like I did, you should keep the fetch land to shuffle the junk away. It’s an obvious play to someone who understands the game, but it may have been one of the moments that completely changed how I thought about the game, and it shaped me into a better player. It’s possible he doesn’t even remember that day, but I feel that it was the first step toward becoming a more thoughtful and smarter player, and I have him to thank for it.

Given that I (and a fan) felt that Brian should have been included in an installment already, coupled with the fact that this is not a democracy—and as the dictator of WtF I can decree a non-tweeter can have his day in the sun—I recommend following Brian’s article series on StarCityGames and poking him on Facebook until he makes a damn Twitter account. Seriously.

Brian DeMars to the rescue! I read a lot of his articles (he writes on the free side of SCG, so there is no excuse not to check a few out, even if you don’t think you care about Vintage), and this one had a ton of great deck ideas. I ultimately settled on this guy and piloted it to a third/fourth finish at a twenty-nine-person event—not bad for my first foray. The one change I made was adding a Staff of Nin to the sideboard, and I brought it in so often I might want to squeeze it in main deck somehow.

The point is that Brian compiled a lot of interesting Vintage decks and talked about the metagame and each deck’s place in it, and he does so on a weekly basis. Brian didn’t just teach me a card interaction specific to a given format—he taught me to recontextualize how I thought about the plays I was making and how they fit into the broader scope of everything I wanted to accomplish in the game starting on turn one. I can’t promise he will trigger a paradigm shift in your thinking, but read some of his articles for free. Brian DeMars writes about the game in a way that makes people love a format that frankly is a pain in the ass to find events to play in. He compiles decklists, analyzes trends, and gives solid strategy advice, and he does it all where you can read it for free.

Brian also wins at Magic—a lot, and not just Vintage events. Read his articles, and we can hope he’ll jump on Twitter soon. I realize the point of Who to Follow may be for me to find people for you to follow on Twitter in some people’s minds, but the occasional exception needs to be made. Maybe you should make an exception if you’re currently avoiding Vintage. You’ll never know until you try.