Old School Mtg

It's easy for people to find things they don't approve of. Be it jazz music, Elvis's hips, horror films, or Dungeons and Dragons. One of the latest crazes about this have been violent video games. Before the GTA era however, Magic was seen as a dangerous influence by many of the more fundamental groups. As last weekend's tech session in Gothenburg didn't pan out, I'll instead write a little about the dangers of playing Magic. Beware! The flavortext may be even worse when it's read backwards! To set the stage, in the mid 90's there actually was quite a big stirring around the morality of RPGs. Magic joined the ranks as the first fantasy card game, and even big media was somewhat worried. Washinton Post had this to say (Under the Spell of 'Magic' by Aimee Miller; Washington Post; 7-27-94. ): "Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, which became an infamous tool for occultists, Magic has not developed an outside mythology. 'This draws on the m...

I felt I needed to do a hat trick on the Shakespeare references in the last three titles. I'll stop now :) BSK 2013 coming up! In ten days, I'll be going to Borås for one of the two "nerd peaks" of my year. I've got the hotel room booked, my vacation cleared for Friday the 1st of November, and I'm ready for some last-minute tech this Saturday with my team mates. Good times will be had. It's a little sad that many of the formats old key players wont be able to make it to this BSK though. Kids and work in other countries makes arrangements like this hard to attend (as well as the fact that BSK collides with Bazaar of Moxen this year). Of the 6 old shark winners, only Viktor "Oldschool" Peterson will be able to join, so the field seems wide open. Additionally, at least two more of the usual The Deck-players will be at BoM, so it really looks like some of the more unconventional decks may have time to shine. I assume that the coming DTB update w...

I usually try to write my posts when I'm travelling between Oslo and Gothenburg each weekend, but this time sleep took the upper hand of the ride. Currently, I have about 15 topics on my "to write"-list (apart from tournament stuff), but I still aim to update the blog about once a week. I much prefer to have a solid stream of posts throughout the year, than to simply post stuff once a day for a month and then get writers block. Also, posting once a day would be really time consuming ;) Anyway, as I didn't do any brainstorming at the bus (I think this weeks topic were supposed to be about Goblin decks), I will "wing" this post with something completely different, and write about a topic that comes up quite a lot while discussing the Old School format; the name 93/94. People often ask why we don't allow Revised or Fallen Empires, and I'll try to answer this as good as I can. An old Team 0-2 drop t-shirt motive. Always Juzam. In the mid 2000s, I...

That's an obscure title. About 18 years ago, I remember a guy at TV-spelsbörsen pointing at a card on their "Wall of Magic". Tv-spelsbörsen was one of the local gaming stores in Gothenburg in the 90's, and one of the walls in the store was completely covered in color proxies of every magic card ever printed at that point. I remember many days staring at the wall and trying to learn all the cards. I still didn't really know which cards were good, but I do remember this guy talking to a friend of his, and pointing at Time Walk, stating that it was the best Magic card ever printed. I knew he probably had a point, but I didn't really understand why. It felt like Polar Kraken would be a superior win condition. Two years later, I remember a guy approaching me at BSK 1997. He was looking to sell 7 cards, and asked me if I would give him 2000 kr (about $300) for two Moxes, four Underground Sea and a Time Walk; it was a pretty good deal even back then. 14-year old ...

Today we'll look at some amusing bulk. Nostalgic factors makes it easy to forget just how many borderline unplayable cards there are in the early expansions of Magic. The sets are oozing with flavor and have their fair share of extremely powerful cards, but as a whole the average power level of early sets are very, very low. I could easily argue that the power level of Fallen Empires and Homelands are, at average, higher than those of The Dark and Antiquities. Alpha and Arabian Nights both have a high power level and generally playable cards, but after those two first sets, it took up until Alliances before a set which could be considered "good" was printed again. One of the first things that comes players minds when talking about the older sets are the mana fixing and acceleration. Cards like original duals, Black Lotus, Sol Ring, Workshop and the Moxen are still the best mana fixing and acceleration ever printed. At this same time though, Wizards decided to create s...