[Report] Jin is my Co-Pilot - 1st with Reanimator

[Jakgotbak]

I wrote an excessively rambly report about my first-place run through a 53-man tournament with Reanimator.

You can check it out here. (http://www.westcoastlegacy.com/press/2011/jin-is-my-co-pilot-reanimating-to-1st/)

Sorry about the formatting. I swear it looked better when I wrote it.

[Ozymandias]

Actually, I was dead no matter what I did. If I kill your land, you just Truth my zombie tokens, block Ichorid, go to 3, and then get Blazing Archon instead of Norn.

[lorddotm]

You're a boss. Stop thinking you're not. I'm allowing you to get second at SCGLA (I'm winning it, sorry).

[Purgatory]

Nice report, thanks for writing this up for us! I wish someone would take care of some of the formatting issues (mainly <br /> stuff) which would make it a lot easier to read.

I especially like how cool you played it in G3 of the finals, well done.

[aljiichiban]

Nice finish with the deck!! Do you think it's viable/better to keep 2 SnTs main or was it a metagame choice as well?

[Technics]

Nice finish with the deck!! Do you think it's viable/better to keep 2 SnTs main or was it a metagame choice as well?

From talking with Kevin, I would have to assume he would agree it's the correct call for any meta. It just lets your drop things out of your hand when you don't have the discard outlet, and there are so few times where it is a draw back to you.

[Koby]

At the point when you're casting Show and Tell in game 1, you might as well just play dedicated Show and Tell plan and ignore the graveyard completely.

[Jakgotbak]

At the point when you're casting Show and Tell in game 1, you might as well just play dedicated Show and Tell plan and ignore the graveyard completely.

I don't see it that way. I just see SnT as another band-aid on the inherent design problems this deck faces.

The deck doesn't want to draw fatties. It just doesn't. In a perfect world, it wants to draw Entomb every game and get to choose the right fatty for the situation. But we shuffle our decks and you can only play 4 Entomb, so the deck needs a Plan B for getting a fatty into the yard.

Enter Careful Study. So now we have 8 ways to get fatties into the yard, but half of them require, you know, having a fatty in hand, so we up the number of creatures in the deck. But how many is right?

6? Nah, surely not enough. 7? Better, and probably right. 8? Maybe just right, maybe too many, but at least our Careful Studies are more likely to be active and not just card disadvantage.

But the drawback of having 8 fatties in your deck is having 8 fatties in your deck.

Now you have 8 draws that, unless you have a Careful Study or a Brainstorm plus a fetchland, are just dead. 8 cards that, when drawn for the turn, are like a free Time Walk for your opponent. Anyone who plays Vintage knows how much it sucks to draw your Tinker target, how utterly hopeless it feels to skip a draw step in a format this powerful. Well, multiply the chances of that happening by 8 and you start to see what we're dealing with here.

So how do we address this? There was a time when we ran 3 Hapless Researchers. I'm not exactly sure why he fell out of vogue, except that without Mental Misstep, we needed to slow down and find a Thoughtseize more often before combo'ing. I opted for the Show and Tells as the more active play to make when I inevitably draw something I'd rather not.

I don't know if it's actually right, but it feels like the best of a bunch of bad options.