Old School Mtg

Kalle Nord wrote this detailed account of the BSK 2012 finals, complete with turn-by-turn actions and lots of pictures. Enjoy! After BSK in November, where we ran out of time to play the final, we have been puzzling hard to find a final date when we both could play (we live in different cities). Finally something happened, and at Saturday the 15th this month, Elof came over to my place to battle it out! My first intention was to film the entire final, but some things just don't add up as you want. Instead I had to film the entire thing with a crappy web cam, which I then could backtrack as notes when I would write the report. But the camera is not the only thing crappy with my computer, so the recording stopped 2 minutes into the second duel, creating a small gap in the match. Trying to do a report in this way is not anything I would recommend, it takes fucking ages! The recordings were blurry, small, mirror reversed and overall hard to decipher. I constantly had

Home in Gothenburg and joining some friends for pre-Christmas beer and magic tonight. Life is easy. As an early Christmas present, I present one of the sweetest decks I've ever seen in the format; the Moss Monster deck. The deck is a pile of Aisling Leprechauns, Ifh-Biff Efreets, green circles and green wards. If you've never seen someone play Lifelace on an otherwise match-winning Earthquake in order to survive completely unscathed due to circles and wards, you have something to add to the nerdy part of your bucket list. I'm sorry that I don't have any more complete pictures of the deck (it's all bb and looks beautiful). Per Olofsson is doing it right. CREATURES (10) 1 Moss Monster 3 Aisling Leprechaun 2 Force of Nature 2 Ifh-Biff Efreet 1 Verduran Enchantress 1 Veteran Bodyguard ENCHANTMENTS (13) 1 Gaea’s Touch 1 Cyclone 1 Sylvan Library 4 Green Ward 4 Circle of Protection: Green 2 Spirit Lin

Dan Holm was one of the first players outside of Gothenburg that joined the old school community. His first tournament was the GP Rotary in 2010, and he followed that up by winning BSK 2010 with a deck that contained big fliers, Moat and Spirit Link. Since he usually is busy during the Easter (and hence n00bcon), the last time we saw him before BSK 2012 was at BSK 2011, were he was defeated in the top8 by eventual winner Robert Schram. This year he played in the BSK top8 for the third consecutive year. The deck was created by n00bcon top4 competitor Nesid, and consists of 4 Erhnam, 4 Mishra, lots of mana acceleration, burn, and lots of restricted cards. His first turn, first game, first match of the tournament was btw Channel, Mind Twist, Chaos Orb. A nice way to start the tournament :) The Erhnam Deck CREATURES (4) 4 Erhnam Djinn ENCHANTMENTS (1) 1 Fastbond SORCERIES (13) 2 Fireball 1 Recall 1 Demonic Tutor 1 Timetwister 1 Time Walk 1 Regr

Last Saturday marked a historical event for the 93/94 community, when our hero Fab gathered a crew of old school players to duel in Toronto. The reports state went very well, and Fab has hopes of over 10 people joining up for a coming tournament in the early months of next year. He sent me some pics and a video of good people playing good magic; enjoy :) (click the images to expand them) (That's an awesome flip, and it almost makes me want to retract our one-card errata on the orb.)

I've been posting more frequently recently. I guess that it has to do with the fact that I have a working connection after 6 weeks, in combination with the fact that during these six weeks people from around the world (well, Canada and Germany at least) have contacted me and expressed their appreciation of the format. Also, I'm in exile from my playing crew and my cards, and feel some urges to play again. Tonight, after an after-work data base workshop on videolink from Stockholm, I walked home to my place in Munich. I found a dark backstreet pub and considered future topics for the blog (now that some people actually read it occasionally). How do we build decks without power? Is Ironclaw Orcs and Gaea's Avenger much better than people think? Why do we allow Chaos Orb? The question I've got from both the Germans and the Canadians was "how do we start a community". I'm not sure. It might sound highly corny, but I think the secret ingredients are passion a

Viktor, aka Oldschool, has a great talent for building strange but somehow functional decks. He won n00bcon 2011 with a deck that used Sylvan Library and Millstone to get Colossus of Sardia into the graveyard and animate them with All Hallow's Eve. He missed the Warcon top4 on tiebreakers with the innovative Land of the Lich; a deck that wins by abusing Lich with cards like Diamond Valley, Dark Heart of the Woods and Fastbond. This BSK he again surprised by going top8 with a strange brew that maindecks two Field of Dreams. The idea is that field of dreams combos well with cards that otherwise might have a more random effect. With the field, you'll always hit with Petra Sphinx, and Nebuchadnezzar becomes much more effective. Even cards like Word of Command and Millstone gets a great deal better at controlling the game. The fact that the field can also kill a random Land's Edge or Nether Void for one blue mana is just gravy. The sideboard is btw "14 cards against The D

The BSK finals was held yesterday in Gothenburg. After an exciting but fairly short final (just above the hour), Elof emerged as the champion after a Demonic Tutor for Fireball in top-deck mode. Elof. Your parents will love him. This is his second shark in two tournaments! A longer report and more pictures will be provided by Elof/Kalle during the coming week. At the same time there was a smaller tournament at the same location, I'll be sure to post about that as well when I have more info. The champion being crowned means that we can also finally update the pimpwalker points score for BSK. Currently we have the following t8, with a little more than 3 months left of the season (but no really big tournaments left): 1. Egget    60p 2. Pefken    56p 3. Elof    41p 4. Schram    39p 5. GaJol    29p 6. Mg    22p 7. Honka    21p 8. Almelund    20p The Toronto crew headed by Fabian Sanglard held a first gathering yesterday to get a feel of the format. Apparen

I've moved four times in the last four months, in three different countries. Not long before that I'd been living in the same spot for over 6 years. Life and living situations changes as I get older, and it gets harder to keep in touch with my friends and many parts of my nerdy side. I like me some nostalgia every now and then, and I really feel that this format is a good excuse for me to meet both old and new friends. As I stated previously, I'm sorry that there has been no movement here since BSK. I've changed country and moved twice since then, and sometimes it feels like a solid internet connection in Bavaria is more of luxury than a necessity. By now I'm settled however, and access shouldn't be a problem anymore. These are exciting times! The last 6 weeks has been great for our community. We've had BSK 2012, which was the largest BSK to date (second largest tournament overall), and at this point our hotel suites has become almost a convention in it