Old School Mtg

I've got some sweet pictures and new decks-to-beat from the tournament at Playoteket in Scania. I'll post them soon, but first, I'd like to give a quick shout out to Jason Jaco from Chicago. Old School Magic have grown quite a bit during the last year, and groups of veteran players have begun to explore the origins of Magic again in different areas scattered across the globe. Yesterday, the first Old School article by Jaco was posted at Eternal Central. The "Chicago house rules" allows unrestricted Strip Mine, and the article is a sweet deck tech about UWG Ehrnamgeddon with 4-off Strips. Check it out! Introducing & Explaining Bantam-Geddon As a side note, it took me about a week before I got annoyed by the ad banners I put up. During that time, I got about $5 from them, but in order to make ads generate any money, apparently you have to make them really intrusive. I removed them again, as I felt ads aren't in the spirit of the blog. If you want to gi...

The best thing with owning full power, is that you own full power. Last week I got the Emerald, which was my final piece of the nine-part puzzle. It was Alex, one of the players I met in Regensburg a year and a half ago, who first told me about the best part of completing the nine. Now that it's finally done, 20 years after I first heard about the cards, I must say his statement rings true. Strange as it may sound, it's actually pretty much of a relief to finally have them. Since I got my first Mox 5 years ago, I knew that I wanted to complete the set. I didn't know if I would be able to though, as my life could easily have taken turns that would have made me unable to afford the luxury of these cards.  So what is Power anyway? Is it the first nine restricted cards? The nine best cards? The most expensive cards today, or the most expensive cards from ABU that didn't get reprinted in 1994? There are lots of different explanations of why these particular c...

A few weeks back, Warcon hosted a 93/94 tournament in Varberg. The previous time Warcon arranged such a tournament was in 2012, when Elof Gottfridsson won with a very aggressive version of The Deck (that list can be seen here ). This year, Elof won the tournament yet again, though this time with a monocolored deck. The monoblue artifacts deck is a pretty new creation, and I haven't actually heard about people playing this kind of deck back in the mid 90's. It's fairly similar to one of the top4 decks from the spring tournament in Eudemonia, though this version is much more controlling. This deck only uses a single Su-Chi and a single Triskelion as beatdown apart from the factories, where the Eudemonia deck was more agressive with full playsets of both Su-Chi and Juggernaut. One of the key cards in the deck is Amnesia. It's often feasible to cast Amnesia as early as turn 3, preferably right after an Unsummon or a Hurkyl's Recall. After that, maintaining control ...

One of the more surprisingly playable cards in old school magic is Electric Eel. It attacks for 3 on turn two if the mana is right, and it will trade with both Factories and Juggernauts. Once in a blue moon, it'll even trade with a Juzam or Erhnam. The winning deck of last n00bcon played the full playset of Eels and really showed off the card's potential.   At its most basic, an Electric Eel deck is a red/blue deck that uses Blood Moon and Energy Flux to punish the more powerful decks. It adds tempo with cheap creatures and lots of burn. It doesn't always play Electric Eel though, as the monetary cost to make it work well is surprisingly high. For most of the decks in 93/94, you can build it reasonably fast, not have to spend lots of money at once, or make it "optimized". You can however only chose two of these three; if someone wants to build an optimized decks in a short amount of time, it will almost surely require a huge amount of money up front. Hence...

During my summer vacation, my girlfriend and I took the time to clean out our storage room. Among the gems I found while cleaning was a signed Beta rule book I got as a gift from Viktor "Oldschool" Peterson during BSK 2011 (it was hidden in a Jet Li DVD case). I flipped through it again, and marvelled at its elegant simplicity. One of the most common questions about the 93/94 format is whether we use old rules or new ones. We use the current rules, mostly due to the fact that old rules are at times pretty confusing (and sometimes contradictory). Today, with some old rule books at hand, we'll take a look at the history of "timing" before the stack came into existence. That Revised rule book was in my sister's first starter pack from 1994 :) The Ice Age rules are identical to the 4th Ed. rules, apart from the additional page on snow lands and cumulative upkeep. The rule books went through some major changes with each core set release during the first f...