Old School Mtg

The initial plan was to take an early train to Varberg to get to the convention around 11 am. My weekend began with a trip from Oslo to Gothenburg, and as my girlfriend was leaving Gothenburg for Stockholm early Saturday morning, the idea was to get to the central station early with her and get to Warcon in time for their legacy tournament. A few weeks ago, we learned that Warcon would not host a 93/94 tournament like last year however, so the timing restrictions were suddenly off. As a community, we are not adverse to finding our own solutions for these kind of things, and Kingen took the initiative to host Kingvitational 0.5 in it's place. Erling, aka Icelander, initiated this years road trip from Gothenburg, and around lunch the car consisting of him, me and Åland were on the road. This is what I had sleeved up: Double Sol'Kanar!  We arrived at the convention site at 3 pm to meet up with some old faces. Elof and a few more were playing the legacy tournament, and P...

A little over a week ago, WotC posted a Magic 2014 rules bulletin. The changes in comp rules and Oracle errata affected both of the two cards that we had a previous errata on in 93/94. City in a Bottle didn't receive functional errata, but the comp rules changed in in a way that makes our errata unnecessary. Expansion symbyl is no longer a characteristic, and now City in a Bottle instead removes all cards originally printed in Arabian Nights. This includes e.g. Revised Kird Apes, but it does not include Mountain, which was originally printed in Alpha. We hence remove our errata on City in a Bottle (as it's no longer relevant), and use the Oracle version from now on. Chaos Orb actually got functional errata! This is the new Oracle text on Chaos Orb: 1, Tap: If Chaos Orb is on the battlefield, flip Chaos Orb onto the battlefield from a height of at least one foot. If Chaos Orb turns over completely at least once during the flip, destroy all nontoken permanents it touche...

Every collectible genre has a "Holy Grail", some item that will be the crown of the collection. These holy grails are often known by people that don't know about many other aspects of the hobby, and are such a part of pop culture that they all have sections on Wikipedia. These items are extremely rare, but obtainable if the buyer has a big enough wallet and enough time to search. Inverted Jenny, a Holy Grail of philately. It's cheaper than the single existing Treshilling Yellow, but on the other hand not unique.  For Comic Books, the Holy Grail is Action Comics #1 from 1938. This may not be the single rarest or most expensive to buy comic book ever (e.g. the insanely rare ashcan edition of Flash Comics #1 has an asking price of $5 million), but it is still the most coveted comic book of all time, and it would be the crown of any collection. 10 cents well invested in 1938 Video game collecting, like most other, also have some actual unique items, such as Ni...

Today's topic is a little different than usual. Most of the examples and the pictures that I write about today have been taken from the page Apathy House (http://www.apathyhouse.com), but I feel that everyone should be aware of the basics on the topic, so I summarize it here. For some more info on tests and such, see the post Spotting fakes part II . 93/94 is a format with very expensive and rare cards, many which fetches sums up to and above a thousand dollars. A friend once said that even though there were only 4300 black bordered Lotuses ever printed, and that a lot of them may be lost to time, there probably exists more than 4300 black bordered Lotuses. Faking magic cards is both easier and more profitable per unit than faking e.g. $100 bills. So how do we spot fake cards? There are two obvious rules we can start with. First; fake cards tend to be in very nice condition, as it's both harder and less profitable to fake a card in a worn condition. Second; fake cards are p...

Personally, I can go either way with the rounder corners of alpha cards. I usually don't care that much about black or white borders either, as long as there is consistency among the cards in the deck (e.g. I would much prefer to play four autumn Mishra's Factories than two autumn and two winter). However there are some cards in alpha that I really think are much sweeter than the beta or unlimited versions. Today I'll show off three of my favourites; maybe you've missed them. There are some very well known differences between particular alpha and beta cards. The uncommon Orcish Artillery is about 5 times more expensive in alpha than in beta due to the misprinted mana cost (1R rather than 1RR), and the same huge relative prize difference can be seen in Elvish Archers (which is an 1/2 in alpha, and a 2/1 in beta). One less known 'misprint' from alpha is however a card that currently is correctly printed, and the beta (and subsequent) versions have been errated t...