Showdown in Eudemonia

Last weekend Eudo Games hosted an Old School tournament in Berkeley, CA. Blaine Christiansen, the organizer of the tournament, sent over lots of nice pictures, and explained a little about their take on old school Magic:

"Most of us around here are new to the format, but our first event was very successful.  We have a fairly strong Vintage scene in Northern California, with several players who have been playing Magic since the beginning.  Our approach to Old School Magic is less focused on collecting and more focused on playing with old cards. For this tournament we allowed Fallen Empires, Revised, Chronicles, and foreign cards, just to try to get as many people interested as possible. Future tournaments will experiment with the restricted list and with legal sets."

The first Berkeley tournament hosted 10 players, which is impressive. It took us in Sweden well over a year before we had a tournament with double digit attendees :) 

Esteemed old school players

Adam Telleen noted similarities between this format and modern Vintage: "This format has decisions and interaction reminiscent of modern Vintage, but almost always spread out over many turns rather than often being compressed into just a few. This makes tapping out and baiting a huge deal because there are so many more opportunities to screw it up. Which sounds like Standard or something, but instead it's awesome because mind games, bluffing, and baiting are so important because of the high impact of the swingy cards."

Adam's The Machine (3rd place)

The eventual winner of the tournament was former Vintage world champion and author of The History of Vintage Stephen Menendian. Stephen's deck, called Weissman Tinker, is an interesting new take on blue/white control with Transmute Artifacts.

Smmenen's winning deck

I've posted the top4 decks of the tournament in the Decks to beat section here. I'm keeping this post short though, as there are a lot more decklists, pictures and comments from the tournament at The Mana Drain, I recommend checking it out :)

If I'm not mistaken, the guy with the triple Glooms uses a 1994 Khalsa Brain playmat. Now that's pimp :)