Old School Mtg

In about 4 weeks we'll hopefully have a 93/94 tournament at Warcon in Varberg. I wrote this report after last year's tournament. The report was written in Swedish, as the blog's readers were pretty much only Swedes a year ago (that may also have something to do with the fact that the blog was in Swedish). Today only about 1 in 20 readers are Swedes, so I post a crude translation of my old tournament. During the Thursday before the Warcon weekend I'd just moved in with my girlfriend, and there were a lot of moving dust on a lot of walls. Luckily the jigsaw fell together in acceptable time, and by half past ten Saturday morning I was waiting by Marklandsgatan to get picked up by the Mirth Mobile and cruise to Varberg. The Mirth Mobile consisted of Max, Honka, Kalle and me; and we had nothing in terms of plans for the weekend or how long we should stay at the convention. I'd chosen to hedge my bets by bringing a sleeping bag with me, but that only served as an incite...

Arabian Nights had a lot of new and innovative design. It's easy to forget exactly just how many new things were introduced in this set; lands with other abilities than just tapping for coloured mana, spirit link abilitys (El-Hajjaj), cantrips (Jewled Bird), coin flipping (Bottle of Suleiman) and minus-counters (Unstable Mutation) were all introduced here, just to name a few. One thing that I found particularly sweet were the cycles of powerful creatures. Of course Alpha had introduced a cycle before this; the 'boons' that gave you three of something for one coloured mana (Ritual, Salve, Ancestral, etc). Arabian Night took it one step further with the introduction of Djinns and Efreets. Four of the colours originally had one Djinn and one Efreet each, and these creatures proved to be some of the most powerful creatures printed for years to come. Cards like Juzam Djinn, Serendib Efreet and Ehrnam Djinn are reasons why City in a Bottle is powerful card. White didn't g...

Tax Edge is probably the deck I've played the most with in 93/94. It's a fairly cheap and competitive deck that relies on the interaction between Land Tax and Land's Edge. My older versions of the deck were mostly an upgrade of white weenie; cutting the weeniest of the cards, but playing 10 or more creatures to support the combo. This list (with a minor change) placed top4 at last years Warcon: Sideboard is Moons, Blasts, Circles, Karmas, Cities and an Angel This is a very fun list to play, but it's far from an optimal one. It lacks e.g. Shahrazad and Wheel of Fortune, the Swords are far worse than Chain Lightnings here, and it is kind of unfocused when trying to support both combo, aggro and and hate in a single deck. "What is this strange card type? Cre-a-ture?". Stalin is confused during Gråberget Champs 2012. A creatureless version of the deck was first shown off by Gustav "Tysken" Schmidt at n00bcon 4. This deck supported Ho...

We'll step right in. If the 93/94 format would have a hall of fame, Pefken would be an auto-include. Apart from winning n00bcon twice, he also looks one step beyond the meta, and finds non-traditional powerful decks that can beat the field. At n00bcon 2 he won with a zoo deck, and at n00bcon 4 he reinvented Parfait to take him to the top. Last n00bcon he lost in the top4 against Elof (the Varberg Juggernaut) with a creature heavy deck I henceforth will refer to as Moon Midrange. Moon Midrange relies on under-costed and powerful creatures combined with unfair spells. It has some relation to the Ehrnam Deck, but supports cards like Blood Moon and Detonate, as well as playing a double digit amount of creatures. Note the sideboard shark :) Next up is the Power Monolith combo deck, courtesy of Kingen (the guy who took time to take pictures of all the decks shown here). Power Artifact combined with Basalt Monolith will generate an arbitrary large amount of mana, and Transmute Arti...

It's been a hectic week and a half. I just started a new assignment in Oslo, and the weekend included both a birthday for a two-year old and a bachelor party in Gothenburg. It's quite a bit easier to travel to Gothenburg from Oslo than from Munich btw. Speaking of Munich; Alex, one of the Bavarian heroes that I played 93/94 with in Regensburg, asked me about additional lists from n00bcon. On that same note, a Philadelphia (Philadelphian?) old school player named Brian had that same request today, so I figure that it's high time for some more lists. I'll post four sweet decks today, and try to update with four more before the end of the week. I apologize that some of the pictures may look a little blurry, it is possible that the photographer had a beer or two during the event. We'll start out with Glenn's RG burn list. This deck had the distinction of being the highest placed non-blue deck in the tournament (yeah, restricting Mana Drain was probably a good idea...