Regensburg part II

Last Friday, I attended what is here known as Starkbier fest. The lederhosen was on, the maß was drunk, and the beer was stark.

I'm the dude on the left, the beer is a Löwenbräu doppelbock. So far good times.

Strangely, I had a slight hangover during Saturday. I spent the evening doing the perfect thing for a slow day, playing me some old school in Regensburg!

I had collected a few new cards since last time, in particular a Vesuvan Doppelganger. Fun fact about Vesvan: if you let it copy itself, it'll get more instances of the copy ability. Hence, you could potentially play a really strange sequence if you combine it with creatures with activated abilities which you could use during your upkeep; or with Xenic Poltergeist to do shenanigans with different artifacts.

Martin played a new build, a clearly unbeatable Elemental deck, with 3 of each of the Fire, Water, Earth and Air. When your Serendib Efreet and Su-chi stares down at an Air Elemental and an Earth Elemental, times are though. I think I got into some Guardian Beast/Disk lockdown once, but 12 big dudes and infinte Mana Drains are hard to beat. Alex also had slimmed and improved his deck from last time, now with the full playset of Triskelions, and Abysses aplenty. No basic lands though, so my redwhite deck had some edge if i managed to get a Blood Moon down. I'm starting to think that it's correct to play Howling Mine in red/white btw, and probably cut most of the creatures. It's kinda hard to play a weenie properly if you have to have 8+ slots for maindeck hate (Cities in bottles, Blood moons, Dust to dusts, etc). I got to buy one of his Strip Mines (with the Tower), so now I finally have that one for my blue/black deck as well. I guess I'll be finished with that deck sometime before 2015. These are the latest additions:

When I was about to leave, the awesome Martin and Alex gave me a ridiculously sweet parting gift:

 

These are two books covering the metagame, decklists and tournament rules in Germany around the time of alliances. This was pretty much when many of concepts we use to play now evolved (i.e. when they actually restricted Balance). Last week I mentioned Land Equilibrium as a card I'd like to see in a deck; behold the land equilibrium deck (the MCM tournaments were btw huge tournaments in the mid 90's):

Also included are things like the Ali from Cairo deck, multiple versions of Weissman, and lots of tech and tricks before we all had access to this on the web. One of my favorite things about a few of the lists can be shown here:

Yep, that list wants to play with Library of Leng from A/B/U, as the revised and 4th versions have slightly different text (in particular, the newer versions remove the discard phase, where Necropotence used to give you cards in pre-6th rules). These lists are from before oracle text was a thing; and if you wanted to play with Iron Star you'd be well advised to find one from unlimited. Times have changed for sure :)

/mg