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It's interesting to see how much Vintage has changed over the last year. Back when we ran the first Power Nine event, the tournament was an interesting mix of casual, semi-competitive, and competitive players - with the first two categories vastly outnumbering the last. A year ago you'd find a lot of players from "back in the day" who came out because they were interested in slinging some of the old spells again, but these players weren't frequent tournament goers or frequent Type One players.

But what you see at a Power 9 these days is very different. Much like the changes in Vintage deck design over the last year, where decks have become leaner and meaner just to compete, the field itself has become vastly better prepared and more competitive. The big prizes and acceptance of proxies have lured large numbers of PTQ players to the events, and we've also seen an entirely new class of player created - generally referred to as "Vintage Pros." These are the guys who are traveling up to ten or fifteen hours just to make it to the tournament site, and they are doing this with frequency. This is not something we saw with any regularity last year (aside from the occasional trip to large conventions like GenCon, of course).

One of the interesting developments resulting from the changing player base at these tournaments since last year is the change in attitude of Vintage players toward what is generally considered to be "the best deck." Previously, you would generally get a radically diverse field of decks played even at the larger tournaments, where many holdouts would simply grab their favorite deck and change some sideboard slots, or perhaps tune their favorite archetype for the possible metagame. What you are starting to see now is that the field generally coalesces around a couple of highly-competitive deck types, with variations within an archetype accounting for much of what we would call "diversity" at the bigger tournaments. There are very few Suicide Black, White Weenie, and even 4-Color Control decks running around here today, while the number of players running Severance Belcher, Fish, Oath, and Mishra's Workshop-based decks is actually pretty staggering.

Additionally, you now find that the Vintage tournament metagame changes from week to week, with what occurs at last weekend's Waterbury influencing this weekend's Power 9, which in turn influences Vintage events around the country and around the world the week after.

In short, the Vintage community is slowly becoming a community of highly competitive netdeckers, similar to what you'd see at the PTQ and Grand Prix level in the rest of Magic. Except, of course, that these players run sixty-card decks worth thousands of dollars and are notoriously sensitive about criticism of their own playskill and deckbuilding abilities.