Old School Mtg

" We were originally planning to change the card mix in September, but... well... some stuff happened and we didn't. "  - Kathy Ice. Card Collector Confidential, Scrye Magazine, Feb 1995. Imagine if you will. Ireland, a game store in the late summer of 1994. Magic has celebrated its one-year anniversary. Players are cracking boosters from the newly released The Dark, dreaming about opening the legendary Leviathan. A couple of novice mages have just built their first decks from a few packs of "Gathering". Spells like Clone and the flavor of the Oi-Oi Troll capture their imagination, as they are yet to find out about Doppelgangers or Juzams. And Power Sink is an interrupt. At another table in the store, two old sharks who have played the games for many months are slinging with their finely crafted decks. Decks with price tags of tens or hundreds of dollars even at the time. New playmats are used to protect their cards. A similar scenario plays out at their...

Time to round up the n00bcon top8! While UR Eel decks dominated the top tables last year, recently The Deck seems to have reclaimed its place as the prime tier1 Deck to beat. It might be that fewer people are prepared for its raw power, skip a little on the sideboard cards, and instead opt for cards against UR Burn or Monoblack. Whatever the case, The Deck is back in style, and claimed no less than four spots in the Top8 (five if you count Sehl's The Burn Deck, though Sehl would probably have top8'd with any random pile of 75 cards). I actually kind of like that The Deck is a monster in this format when piloted by a skilled player. It wouldn't feel "old school" if it wasn't ;) Top8 players: Jocke, Artelas, Kalle, and MrSinclair. So, yeah, Jocke Almelund. You'll pretty much always see Jocke Almelund here. The latest (and so far only) Pimpvitational winner has top8'd n00bcon five out of six times, only narrowly missing the elimination rounds at n0...

I would never have guessed. If someone had told me a few years back that 93/94 tournaments would attract more players than the national championships in Vintage, or that players would travel multiple time zones to battle for a Giant Shark, it would be hard to not be a sceptic. There are communities around the world these days. There's a thriving scene in Italy, the second double-digit tournament in France was held last weekend, this Sunday I'll be playing in my first tournament in Norway, at the same time as n00bcon there was a Magic '95 tournament in New York, two weeks from now the first tournament in Russia will take place, and a month back I was playing old school in Germany. When we first started to call n00bcon "the world championships" it was mostly as a joke. The first tournament at Gothcon in 2008 had four players, all from Gothenburg. Today, with well over fifty players from different countries, I think that we in good conscience can say that n00bcon i...

The dust has settled from the world championships in 93/94. A record 57 players came to battle for glory, good times and a Giant Shark.  Stories will be told and decks will be shown, but for now lets just look at a few pictures from the event. Stalin, the 2014 World Champion, came to defend his title and drink light beer. Elof, the Varberg Juggernaut, has won pretty much all the different big tournaments in the format and holds three Giant Sharks already. Here he is musing with Erik Sundberg who, yet again, has broken the format (and the dress code). The glorious Shark. Alpha-cut by Danny Friedman :) The pub has a somewhat hidden door to a gymnasium right next to it. As we couldn't fit all the players in the pub, we used the gymnasium as the seating area. Mikael Lindén finds himself confortable in the feature match area. Round one has started! Mahamothi and rad Fellwar Stones vs. Serra. Jokemon found an Easter Egg with a Legends booster. Being a ...

By this time tomorrow, we'll be deep into the world championships in 93/94 Magic. It is my favourite casual Magic event of the year, with so many great players gathering to battle, drink beer, and show off amazing decks. Yesterday, I met up with Constantine Prishvitsin, a Russian 93/94 player who had just arrived to Gothenburg for the tournament. Putting the jetlag aside, we went to my place for some playtesting with Felipe Garcia and Freespace. After seeing the great Fellwar Stone Danny Freidman had made, Constantine had brought a very sweet gift for my deck as well: Russian pimped Fellwar Stone! Constantine grinning like a Juzam after casting a first turn ditto. Russia vs. Spain. Playtesting against Felipe. Sweet turn one from Project M, but I still didn't get to play more than three turns before Felipe transmuted into Time Vault and started recurrig Twiddles. A few players had suggested that we should give a card to each player as a small memorabilia of ...