I've written before about the Shotgun Lotus Vintage Rotisserie Draft Series, and at the end of that piece, I mentioned an upcoming series: the Vintage Super League, hosted on Randy Buehler's Twitch channel. Tonight marks week five of the series, and it's been reasonably entertaining so far.

There have definitely been some growing pains. The first two weeks of the event were plagued by issues with Twitch, but even worse, hand cams had not yet been instituted. It's hard enough to follow what's going on MTGO version 4 in general, but with no hand information for either player, that issue was even further exacerbated. By week three, however, Shotgun Lotus figured out the hand cam issue and the stream took a giant leap forward.

Each of the competitors is taking a turn at commentating. Thankfully, LSV has been doing a round or two every week, which has been great. There's a wide range of commentating skills among the participants, so who you get will have a large impact on your viewing experience. Maybe it had to do with internet lag, but one player in particular was very prone to awkward silences.

I have similar feelings about the Vintage Super League as I have about the Vintage Rotisserie Draft Series: it's great for Magic content to have varied, cool events like this. Probably because of the difficulty of making a stream work from ten different locations (each participant plays remotely), the VSL is nowhere close to as pleasant or smooth a viewing experience VRDS. However, it's been improving every week, so if you've been waiting for the growing pains to pass, tonight might be a good time to start tuning in.

And just so you know, every round is recorded and posted to YouTube. For some reason, my computer struggles with Twitch playbacks, so it's nice to have an alternate way to watch. Being on the east coast, I will probably never catch the stream live, but it's nice to have the replays available for workouts and bottle feeding my son. If you like to see powerful Magic played by powerful mages, checking out the Vintage Super League is a reasonable line of play.