Game night in Gothenburg

Last weekend a few players gathered at Freepace and Jenny's apartment to playtest, trade, and drink beer. I got the chance to meet Felipe Garcia for the first time, an old school player from Seville, Spain, who moved to Sweden last winter. Felipe is an architect, and his artistic talent have recently made quite a few of the Swedish old school players go to him for playmat alterations. Before this evening, all I knew about him was from seeing his alters, but I must say it was a real pleasure to meet him. Very nice guy :)

One of Felipe's works, this one was recently made for Axelsson. Now this is a really cool mat. Do you spot the card in the design that's not shown among the cards above it?

Felipe had been playing Legacy and Vintage in Spain a few years back, but when the tournament attendance declined he opted to trade away a lot of his collection to finish a long time goal; completing his Beta set. This made his collection for deck building in 93/94 pretty interesting, as he had access all the restricted cards but only had a single copy of many other staples (e.g. Disenchants and Counterspells).

Well, turns out Hurkyl's Recall is an even better answer to Transmute Artifact than Counterspell.

Felipe's deck had drawn some inspiration from Viktor "Oldschool" Peterson's The Dragon, and there were a lot of sweet one-off shenanigans going on. It seemed like a great deck against most of the field for the evening (Project M, Tax Edge, RUG Aggro and Juzam Smash), though it struggled against Jenny's BR Deadguy deck with Sedge Troll and the full playset Underworld Dreams. Jenny btw bought her first card just a few weeks ago, a Black Lotus. It's all downhill from there ;)

Double Underworld Dreams is a pretty good answer to the Library (and his Wheel in hand).

 After a while Kenneth joined us after finishing hosting a beer tasting. Kenneth is pretty well known in the Swedish beer meta, and his claims to fame includes producing the acclaimed Arbetarporter. He also played a few times at the pro tour in the 90s, and piloted Mats Karlsson's Enchantress deck last n00bcon. Since then, he has gotten his hands on the full nine himself from a player in Denmark. He had been looking to upgrade the condition on a few of them, and luckily we had our binders with us and could do some trades.

Trading away my Emerald (EX/NM) for Kenneth's signed Emerald (GD/FN), an alpha Regrowth and some cash. Looks good in a sleeve, and it'll still cast Killer Bees on turn two ;)

I got a really nice gift from Freespace btw, a Darth Vader playmat. Would be pretty cool to get it signed by Dave Prowse and James Earl Jones in the future. I like that the sides are black, it just asks for some additional alterations :)

If it would have been 1994, I probably would have glued those cards to the mat to pimp it.

It was a very nice gathering, and I hope we'll get the chance to do it again before BSK. I need to playtest flipping Chaos Orb while inebriated a little more before a Giant Shark is on the line. We'll end with some pictures from the evening:

That Blaecorn Unidragon from Clown Shoes is a surprisingly good imperial stout. Also, binder browsing :)

Kenneth vs. Jenny. Freespace pointing at beer.

Kenneth draws a basic forest to make his apes into 2/3. "Forest, now that's a really broken card." Those playmats are both kinda disturbing btw.

Double Juzam vs Candelabra and Library.

No real need to bring out the loupe, scale and black light. That Lotus on the left is a pretty obvious fake on touch alone, though the seller had tried to disguise it by poor condition. Impressive weight around 2.3 grammes btw,  almost 35% heavier than a real one. (note for all the doomsayers, this is an old fake, nothing new that will "ruin magic" yet again.)

Magic!

The old "Braingeyser for 17".

Some more trading. I'm thinking about building something monogreen, and Old Man seems like a good card against all the weenie decks popping up. The magazine in Felipe's binder is a Duelist #1 btw.

The Vault I traded away, a few days later. One of the fun things with trading wb cards to artistic players :)

As you probably have noticed, I got a new banner painted by Kalle last Thursday, and felt it was about time to make some changes in the design of the blog to commemorate it :) Feel free to give feedback about the new design.