Old School Mtg

Today I have the pleasure to share a report from the first old school tournament at Card and Board in Archbold, Ohio. Let's give the word to Nicholas Rausch. /Mg McIntosh: Hey Rausch? Me: What’s up? McIntosh: So Mishra’s Factory is the best unrestricted card in ‘94 right? Me: Debatable but yeah probably McIntosh: What happens if you Copy Artifact an animated Mishra’s Factory? Me:..uhm.. And that’s how it started. Well that’s not how it started. Let me rewind about a year. I've always been a cube enthusiast. My powered 720 cube has been an ongoing project for about 5 years running. New sets come out. New cards go in. Old cards go out. Old cards go out. That part hurts. I have fond memories of my foil Japanese Spiritmonger and my English Legends All Hallows Eve, and my Arabian Nights Serendib Djinn and Serendib Efreet. But, for the sake of ever increasing power level and making sure that new cards got their chance to be included, cuts had to be made. It was in di...

Finally getting to play a deck is a pleasure. I started teching on my own take on Monoblack Distress in November last year, and yesterday I finally got the last pieces of the puzzle for a solid 60-card maindeck. Apart from my very first deck - which was a pile of Sea Serpents, Erg Raiders and Phantasmal Terrains - building decks in 93/94 has always been measured in months or years for me. Yeah, it goes faster once you've gathered a few staples, but it's still not a speedy process. Them Sinkholes, Icy Manipulators, Rituals and Demonic Hordes will still be a visible expense. They can actually be pretty hard to find as well; for each one of these there are e.g. more than four Unlimited Lotuses printed. The idea of my latest pile is that of black Distress; make most of your opponent's removal useless, count on them having no more than 4 Disenchants, and bleed them out in the long game with control elements and slow damage. The strategy was first popularized by Daniel ...

This escalated quickly. International tournaments in Italy with 30 players, multiple facebook groups about the format, and a lot of opinions about what people like or dislike about the format. It's often the about same things; the legal sets, how we approach reprints, and the B&R are cause of a lot of discussions. It is fun to see that people share the passion. The guys who are organizing the facebook groups are doing a great job to help players in the community connect. It is more fun to build decks if you actually have someone to play against, and a tournament is usually more fun if you are twelve players than if you are four. Kind of like that a board state is more fun with three Triskelions than one. For me, it's important to keep it on a casual level though. I'll of course keep updating this blog as I've done for the last three years, and I'll keep hosting n00bcon Championships and smaller tournaments as I've done the last seven. But I...

People are really passionate about these things :) I think that we have better data this time than any of the years before. We've had a couple of 40+ player tournaments along with a bunch of smaller ones in Sweden. We've also had a lot of tournaments outside of Scandinavia, some of them with different B&R-lists than the one recommended here, and we've gotten good info from players in other communities. There are a couple of things important to consider regarding B&R updates. One is that everyone won't agree with everything. It's a nostalgic format, and as such players are passionate about being able to play their favorite decks to the greatest extent. There are players arguing for restrictions of cards like Moat, City in a Bottle, Lightning Bolt, Mishra's Factory, Transmute Artifact and Underworld Dreams, which of course would lead to a lot of disappointment in others. This can also been seen when discussing unrestrictions. A card like Fork might be ...

I've realized that I hadn't updated the Gatherings page for a while. It's actually kind of hard to keep up these days. These are a few from the last couple of weeks, or soon to come. Another one coming up soon is a sanctioned 93/94 FNM in a pub i Karlstad May 15. Pretty cool :) The biggest one was the Ovinospring tournament in Milan. I unfortunately couldn't go myself, as I was off to London to run a 12-mile mud race yesterday (yep, my everything hurts today). The Italian scene is very active, and if you know the language or just want to look at some pictures of sweet tech, I recommend checking their facebook page . And you know you want to pick up the first price of that tournament: A goddamn Metal Juzam I've realized that I don't really have the time nor information to update the page properly with all the gatherings around the world, so I'll remove it for now. If you have something going on, like planning a tournament, feel fr...