Event Recap

With Vintage being a format that either entirely ignores set releases or is all abuzz; RTS42 was certainly a weekend of the latter. We had 15 wizards descend on Tweedy’s with their (Fantasti)cars fueled up to see what was what. As always, our eventual winner booked a ticket to the end-of-year Invitational as well as some awesome extras.

If you’ve been following the Magic Online data and results, it might not surprise you to see Raker (feat. The Fantasticar) dominating the meta share and results - and only at an RTS event would Goblins be a meaningful share of the room’s meta. We had a few counter-strategies fight to the very end but, alas, the colorless strategy was too strong. Robin’s goblins battled valiantly and were able to take down one car-driving eldrazi in the Top 4 but they ultimately ended up as roadkill. Congrats to Colin and welcome to the Invitational!

Decklists

  1. Colin Logan - Raker
  2. Robin Mannas - Goblins
  3. Caleb Ray - Raker
  4. Ian Files - Esper Lurrus
  5. Connor Michelson - Raker
  6. Kai Schafroth - Doomsday
  7. Charlie Stein - Temporal Tinker
  8. Johnny Angulo - BW Scam
  9. David Dech - Raker
  10. Justin Bruce - Goblins
  11. Nicholas St. Martin - Raker
  12. Rob Johnson - Oath
  13. Brian Tweedy - UB Lurrus
  14. Chris Huckabee - Oath
  15. Paul Garrett - Countervine

At the time of writing there are a number of events on the horizon. We’re getting to the final rounds of our School’s Out MS league, our Houston brethren have a Vintage $1k in October, Houston Hurricane charity event for some Old School and Premodern, and numerous BCDL events before and after all of this. We’re also continuing to see increased weekly and monthly events around Austin for Vintage and Premodern - it’s a great time to sling some old cardboard in Texas!

TO B&R Thoughts

Note: The following commentary is not a complete reflection of the individual opinions of RTS Event Organizers or the community as a whole. This is written as of the June 29th, 2026 B&R Announcement.

Ahead of the official B&R Announcement I was a bit nervous about the numbers that Raker lists were putting up online. Through numerous league results and two Challenge events, we saw Raker with Fantasticar showing up in droves (no pun intended) and dominating left, right, and center - often handling its expected predators with ease. Normally, I’m not too quick to jump in line with the “ban or restrict the thing” stance. With how deep and powerful the Vintage card pool is; plus the far reach of the internet (between Discord and Twitch/YouTube) for crowdstorming, I often want to trust that the Vintage community will find ways to handle problems ‘in house’ and without much fuss. Historically, Vintage has been able to absorb a lot of scary printings, but not all of them. Some of the cards have become answers or new format textures (Force of Negation/Vigor) while others are powerful but hard to solve through a normal restriction approach (Bolas’s Citadel). There are others however, that do cross that line - they result in too many early non-games or shift the normal deckbuilding costs too far that keep things otherwise more in check. Instances where the card’s raw power rate might be scary but the danger alarm is the ease with which, in Vintage, it results in an incredibly fast and hard-to-interact with play pattern that basically bucks the sense of balance you otherwise expect (within reason) in games of Magic. You can do the very powerful thing but there’s going to be a cost to doing so.

Why did Fantasticar set my Spider-Sense tingling (which is not just a metaphor any longer but an actual Magic card)? The concern was that The Fantasticar seemed to line up with Vintage’s most abusable existing resources while dodging many of the normal checks that keep comparable threats in line. The mana cost of (3) is obviously not the same conversation once Mishra’s Workshop, Ancient Tomb, City of Traitors, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Sol Ring, Grim Monolith, and the Moxen enter the chat. There is no deckbuilding constraint added with this in Vintage that might exist in other formats besides “what slots in the deck does this card take?”. Then comes the trigger condition. “Cast your fourth noncreature spell” may sound like a hoop to jump through, but Vintage artifact decks are already built to jump through that hoop incidentally. Moxen, Lotus, Top, Monolith, Ring, Bauble, Vault/Key pieces, Tezzeret, and other cheap artifacts or engine cards are not awkward inclusions; they are the things the deck wanted to be doing anyway. The Fantasticar does not ask Raker Shops to become a gimmick deck. It rewards the deck for following its normal script. The payoff is also very much above rate. Four; 4/4 flying haste creatures represent sixteen evasive damage immediately. That is not a normal “snowball this over a few turns” threat. Arcbound Ravager, Patchwork Automaton, Scrawling Crawler, Wurmcoil Engine, Argentum Masticore, and similar Shops cards can all be powerful, but they usually require combat steps, board context, or continued investment. Even when those cards are scary, the opponent often gets a turn cycle to respond. The Fantasticar can turn a pile of fast mana and artifacts into an active; near-lethal threat before the opponent has really played the game.

The lack of meaningful drawback is the part that pushed it from “strong” to alarming. Traxos, Scourge of Kroog was a huge artifact creature with a real restriction. Ravager asks for your other permanents and combat math. Masticore asks for mana and discard. Wurmcoil is powerful but slow by Vintage standards. Bazaar aggro decks like Dredge or CounterVine can create sudden bursts of creatures, but they are tied to Bazaar of Baghdad, opening-hand constraints, discard requirements, and graveyard vulnerability. Fantasticar does not ask for that same sacrifice. It fits into the same infrastructure the deck already wanted and was highly successful with.

It also dodges a surprising amount of normal interaction. Since The Fantasticar only becomes a creature when its controller chooses to make it one, it can often sit on the battlefield as a noncreature artifact and ignore creature removal until the moment it is ready to convert. If the opponent points removal at the tokens, that may already be too late. If the opponent tries to counter the fourth spell, that isn’t stopping the Fantasticar trigger. The play pattern asks for very specific answers at very specific times.

It seems that Fantasticar is not merely asking opponents to respect a new threat; but instead pushing Raker toward draws that could outpace the normal answer suite Vintage decks rely on. That is, without going to extreme lengths to beat Raker that results in a continued narrowing and speeding up of the format. That distinction matters because this did not feel like a normal rock-paper-scissors adjustment where one predator rises to check the new best deck. Fantasticar seemed to ask very little of the deck playing it while forcing everyone else to make very specific concessions. When the answer suite has to become narrower, faster, and more precisely timed, while the threat simply slots into an already powerful shell, the concern is no longer just balance. It becomes warping. At least right now, it felt like we went from a format that could easily claim to have a dozen viable decks to a much more warped separation of what is and is not even a consideration.

As for the announcement itself. While I was hopeful that we’d see something more tangible, the thing that causes most of my frustration is what felt like a failure to meaningfully engage with the week of data from online results. The Vintage section of the B&R article reads as if it was written before the online release of The Fantasticar and was not meaningfully revisited in light of the early Magic Online results. It writes as if performance of The Fantasticar in actual Vintage play “is yet to be seen”. I can understand wanting to not make a hasty decision but I would at least want to see an acknowledgement of the signals already out there.

I get that Vintage (and at times it felt like Legacy as well, granted I haven’t touched the format since 2019) isn’t a primary focus for the company. It’s not going to be a revenue-driver and the audience is, naturally, sizably smaller than other ‘current or rotating’ formats. With that though comes a typically more entrenched community - one that is a bit more ‘protective’ of its format in terms of identity and play experience. Vintage has long fought against the misconception that it’s a Turn 1 Format with previous restrictions alluding to drivers behind a decision circling around preventing non-games. I think I would have reacted quite differently to the announcement if there had been a section noting something to the effect of, “while we are seeing high play rates and win percentages of decks employing The Fantasticar since the release on Magic Online, we feel it is still too early to decide if the format is able to reasonably react to and answer this new threat or if action is required”. It’s no different in decision outcome but the context of the decision is markedly different. In one case they’re trying to not overreact to early data points while in another they’re not acknowledging those data points exist. I work as a data analyst when I’m not poorly playing Magic and I cannot imagine releasing an analysis report that doesn’t even acknowledge the live data that the audience is pointing to as a sign of a problem. At the minimum, there’s a callout that says, “yes, we know the data exists but no, we haven’t had a chance to evaluate how significant it is to the overall results or if it’s an outlier”.

This could be an element of the trappings of timing between set releases and announcement dates but, would anyone have been upset if an announcement went out last Wednesday or Thursday indicating that either the B&R announcement in full, or at least the Vintage announcement, was going to be delayed by 1-2 days to allow for an assessment of the new data being surfaced by and leading to concern within the community?

With all things, time will tell. It’s possible that by the time this article even goes up things will have settled out completely different. I’ll remain hopeful that this gets handled, one way or another, but in the meantime I have an Old School deck to build.

~kai