Old School Mtg

A few months ago I mentioned that a German player had contacted me about old school Mtg. Since I'm currently working in Munich, which is about an hour and a half away from Regensburg where he lived, we decided to meet up. I met Martin at the station and we walked through the beautiful city, passing by Catherdral and the Bridge, chatting about nostalgia and good times. We came home to Martin's place and I met his family, got a beer and had a look at his amazing collections. It hard to explain the feeling properly, and my few pictures are horribly blurry, but among other things a got to see the serra angel statue, pretty munch everything done by Rebecca Guay, and a complete collection of He-Man figures. Moxen! He-Man! After about an hour we went to the local pub to play. The pub was called Die Tankstelle, a place with wooden interior, rock music, beers served at the table and mostly a few regular as customers. It felt very much like Rotary Pub in Gothenburg, definit...

If you get enough old school players and beer in one room, the results will inevitably be Magic: the Charades...

Magic's very first B&R rules simply stated that you could not play with more than one of each artifact, and no more than a total of five artifacts in your deck. That didn't live for long, and in January 1994 (after Arabian Nights, before Antiquities) USENET provided the first ever proper banned/restricted list. The banned cards were the ante cards and Shahrazad; the restricted cards were a pile of power and randoms. Cards like Orcish Oriflame was restricted due to the 2-mana alpha version, Dingus Egg was restricted since it was to good with Armageddon. Cards like Balance, Mind Twist, Channel, Library of Alexandria and Chaos Orb were free to play as 4-offs. Flash forward to the autumn of 94. Three new expansions have been released (Antiquities, Legends and The Dark). The tournament scene has grown, the successful tournament players understand the power of card advantage, and the control decks have evolved to the best decks in the game. This is where we come in, these ar...

Daniel "GaJol" Nilsson has a great love for the spirit of the format. I've never seen him play blue, or with the high end power cards, but he can easily play with a set of Abyss and alpha Scrublands or Bayous in case his decks needs some colour splash. In terms of price, his creations are not averse to compete with cheaper versions of the deck; in terms of awesomeness, he runs them over. I've seen him compete in tournaments with a deck that ran on 16 lands due to the fact that he couldn't find the last 5 basics (that didn't go well btw), I've seen him prox Juzams for Su-Chi in order to test properly, and I've seen him hang out for hours to play and drink beer with other players after he's been out of contention to the top8. Last BSK he ended up in the top4 with one of the strangest decks in the tournament; a mostly black creation that won with Warp Artifact, Haunting Wind and Underworld Dreams. For some reason, maybe due to his very casual and frie...