Played a 3-rounder back in Portland last Thursday; there were about 14 decks present.
-Round 1 vs UW miracles (2-1): Game 1 they never have CB, but I never draw a single piece of countermagic. Game 2&3, they can't stick CBs.
-Round 2 vs Infect (2-1): They get game 1; guessed wrong tapping down Factories for Pierce vs Glistener (getting targeting by kill spell on my turn); they also had Daze and last card is pump spell and I was already at 5 poison. With 0 to 2 poison counters I probably don't tap down b/c I'd be less scared of pump spell + Berserk in hand. Game 2 and 3 they get overwhelmed by Delver/Factory, red spells and some Standstills.
-Round 3 vs ANT (2-1): Pretty normal stuff happening; in Game 3 Duress gets bounced back by Expansion // Explosion and their hand crumbles on the turn they went for it.
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Decided to spend an evening perusing the scriptures [the first 100 pages of this thread], which covers ~early 2008-late 2009. Found an old video that shows a relatively stock idea of what was going on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckDFiQA14eQ.
Really interesting to see that 4x Dreadnought, 4x Factory, 2-3x Trinket Mage was enough to compete in the format; but less surprising when you see CB/SDT being used to cheese out wins like it does. It was a different age (no Delver), but I can see how this now-dubious threat structure (without any sources of spell damage) was uniquely weak to Decay. The deck today operates nothing like the old one, but this seems to explain the blanket statement you'll often get of "that deck is bad because Decay."
Among the more surprising things is the deck designs of classic Dreadstill (Ur, Ug, Ugr, etc) never led to [as far as I can tell] a burn/tempo variant more closely resembling today's builds - this seems to be due to Tarmogoyf destroying creative space of Goose/Grim + Bolt?? Less surprising is how this threat-light, slower construction led to a need for yard hate, which we don't really need anymore (certainly not 3 slots of completely dedicated yard hate like Crypt and Relic). Trinket, which seems unplayable today, helped to explain the amount of cards that didn't help the deck win (Needle and EE primarily) since you were apparently trying to sit back and lock the out with CB rather than needing to be proactive. The sideboard was mostly ok-ish playables by today's standards, but there was a noticeable chunk of cards that rapidly evolved: Chill -> Annul/Threads of Disloyalty -> Submerge/Bolt (note that Bolt was in the board, and rare to be in the 75 at all until later in '09).
As alluded to earlier Dreadstill is being played in many color combinations; if white = StP/O-Ring, if black= Confidant/Seize, if green = K-Grip/Goyf, if red + green = Firespouts. By page 100 we begin to see the deck (and probably the format) coalesce around Goyf [and Submerge]. Not too surprising to see Goyf up there in the B/R thread poll due to the diversity killing; even as bad as Goyf is with Standstill (wrong cmc, sorcery speed), these versions [3-4 Goyf, 3-4 Dreadnought, 2-3 Trinket, 4 Factory] begin to dominate the discussion - almost certainly b/c you can't beat 'em unless you join em.
My impression up to this point is that Goyf merely existing increasingly required its incorporation, which locked the deck into poorer deck construction [looking through the 2019 lens]. Goyf paired with Counterbalance (rather obtuse, but so wildly overpowered that you couldn't pass it up) probably hinders significant creativity until late 2011 (Snapcaster printed; Surgical earlier in that same year). I haven't read ahead yet, but I imagine Snapcaster will drive the deck away from Goyf towards white (StP/SCM; this would be an improvement) until we enter 2012 where WotC prints a better CB/SDT deck (Terminus/Entreat) and then Decay makes CB + not enough threats [i.e. poor construction by 2019 lens] unplayable. I imagine Confidant has some role to play, but having a tough time theory-crafting where it could have became a dominant Dreadstill playable...I think probably between Terminus/Entreat's printing and Decay, because you'd be tired of playing the worse half in a CB-mirror, but would have access to SCM/StP [for Goyf]...such that you drop Counterbalance, maybe....
Starting out this interesting journey back to a legacy long before I began [~Khans, late 2014], I have been surprised that classic Dreadstill is so profoundly different than current iterations, where we're more focused on counting to 20 (or another unified objective). The classic got so many of the pieces right (Factory/Standstill/Bstorm/FoW/Daze/Stifle/Dreadnought), but like what the heck was going on with this sideshow of SDT/CB/Trinket Mage/reactive-only Trinket targets? Question for you @Rood and the old guard: I get the incentive to cheese wins off CB (since the card has always needed to be banned), but why no focus on building Dreadstill towards the current iterations [i.e. using 1-drop threats and Bolt]? Is the answer to that question simply Goyf rampaging through the format?
The more important questions @Rood is what exactly was Team Hammafist, and also our deck apparently has a theme song?? On an unrelated note, K-Grip all over the format...really???
