The biggest irony of this finale? The damage that David Mills did to his beta dual lands from shuffling in this tournament likely exceeded the dollar value of the prize he won by playing with them. If you factor in 19 years of appreciation, of course :) I'm the one providing color commentary on this game, talk about nostalgia!
On the other hand, duals were relatively cheap back then. About 12 dollars if memory serves me well. If card hoarding for profiting in the secondary market was a factor, he could have bought a bunch of duals then, along with some other 1997 gems (like wasteland, FOW, etc...) not only to compensate the damage inflicted to the deck, but to speculate a bit. By the way, that's why cards became so expensive in the first place. FOW was like 50 cents. But anyway, it's a great pleasure to reply a comment from such a legend.
@@manatutormtg Looks at card underneath the card he draws to complete his opening hand. Also, I didn't notice this until re-watching, but one of the cards was upside down, a warn-able offense. David Mills was known to be a notorious cheat.
Gotta admire how calm they're keeping their hands, compared to the feverish exhibitionistic OCD shuffling you see now a days. Also gotta admire the unsleeved Beta duals >.
There are actual *several* advantages that you gain from shuffling your hand around instead of keeping it in one place all the time - and *none* have to do with "annoying your opponent". For example, if you keep shuffling your hand before and after you draw for your turn, your opponent can't tell if you are going to play the land you just drew or another you might have kept in your hand from your opening 7 - thus, your opponent doesn't know if trying to "mana screw" you with stuff like a Tectonic Edge is likely going to be worth it. Another upside is that shuffling your cards around pretty much "forces" you to keep looking at different cards - and that *can* actually prevent tunnel-visioning on a particular spell on occasion.
Most people don't get that Buehler was trying to confuse Mills with this move. Check out the MTG Rewind where Buehler tells Marshall Sutcliffe about this ;)
he was at 14 or 12 live from what I can tell, rushing into necro seems like a poor play when you are constrained on mana and are facing a frenetic efreet, there isn't any rituals or free spells in this version of necro.
funny to see all the non blue dual lands seeing heavy play back then lol. no one plays with plateau today ! also fun to see how poor was the level of players, this is a pro tour final and you get to see someone dieing from a 2/1 creature with a bolt in hand. LOL !
