Such a great vid! I managed to get my kids back from school while watching it.

As a side note, I didn't have any children at the beginning of it.

One thing to note is that during the astral slide days, "combat damage on the stack" was still a thing...and was massively impactful. You could block with everything, blink all your stuff out with damage on the stack, eternal witness was such a gamechanger in those types of environments. Just thought I'd shout this out since I didn't see it mentioned.

"i'll make a new format, we start with howling mine" literally last week's arena midweek event lol

He turned your Inkmoth Nexus
into a Blink-Moth Nexus 😀

Impressed by Seth's pronunciation of the word "Steppe"

Seth: “This might be a grindy match”
The near 2 hour long video in question.

imagine winning a magic world championship and having to go back to school the next day😂

One of the key things about Astral Slide back then was that damage used the stack. Game 1 for example, Seth could have been attacking with his Eternal Witness. If Richard decided to block with his Inkmoth Nexus, Seth could then put lethal damage on the stack onto the Inkmoth Nexus and then Astral Slide his Eternal Witness to save his Eternal Witness while also killing the Inkmoth Nexus. In my opinion, Astral Slide lost a lot a huge chunk of its offensive power when Combat Damage stopped using the stack.

A tiny thing I just noticed, but that really makes this series shine is the attention to detail in the choice of printing for the cards. They are all in the era appropriate sets, which is really cool.

In game 1, there was at least one point where Richard could have gotten some damage in after Seth spent all his mana on cycling, because Kessig Wolf Run grants Trample. So, even though the Solemn was blocked, you could have still gotten damage in.

I had time to take a shower and drive to a different city in the time game 1 took, and it's still not over WOW

This is a weird matchup.  I feel like Seth needed to lean on oxidize out of the board for the inkmoths, along with wing shards saved for only inkmoths.  Wraths/slide for everything else.  I also felt like Seth focused too much on cycling dragon instead of casting it and beating down.  That said, I picked Kessig to win because astral slide is pretty bad against very good ETB creatures.  Entertaining games either way!

Imagine if Seth just kept making 5 angels a turn. 😂

Damn, Richard's really having to stretch for that 10 min video length

To answer the reason why CoP:Red was in the Astral Sideboard: Goblins was the 3rd most played Deck in the Format

The slide deck I remember fearing was a Naya version, with the red cycling damage dealer.

Happy Easter gents! Stoked for today's episode!

Best MtG content on youtube right now.   Keep it up.   I've forgotten, in a world of Arena, how dynamic and fun watching actual players play Magic really is.

I love that you guys have built the decks with the era-appropriate printings of all the cards. Even the basics! Nostalgic!

Seth did not really (I know I know) play all this well in this matchup :/  but it was a pleasure to see those decks in action !