Day 29: Milestones and BSK Top8

Well I'll be a six-drop in a sligh deck. We've done this:

10,000 'murcan dollars! Well, actually $10,417 by now. You guys are awesome.

What now? We're going into Win-More. Still-had-all-deez mode. Of course we pursue. It's 11 days left, and we keep charging. Every contribution matters, and we have some momentum now. Even WotC is starting to take notice (Helene is the Director of Global Organized Play at Wizards):

So, if anyone from WotC is reading this and wants to get in, feel free to send me a message.

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But now, lets go to some hot tech from the elimination rounds of BSK. I give you the first half of the BSK top8.

Erik Sundberg, Mikael Lindén, Per Algander, and Jocke Almelund.

Erik Sundberg is one of the real champions of exploring what can be done with the 93/94 cardpool. And I'm not just talking about 60-card constructed here. Erik has been hosting a 93/94 Cap Magic circle for some time (oldschoolcapmagic.wordpress.com), where the players "vote out" cards from the card pool after each session to make deck building more and more intricate. He recently hosted a 93/94 Rotisserie draft, a draft where every legal card in the format is layed out on a table, and each player gets to pick in order to draft a deck. A twist was that if you picked a restricted card, you only got one copy, but if you picked a non-restricted you got the full playset. So would you pick one Ancestral over e.g. four Lightning Bolts? Erik has played 93/94 in tournaments for a little over a year now, and is known to show up with some kind of weird home brew declaring that he has "broken the format". This time, he decided not to break the format for once, and instead sleeved up a solid copy of The Deck. With his deep knowledge about the format and the card pool, he was able to pilot it all the way to the top8.

Erik Sundberg's The Deck.

Mikael "Placebo blue" Linden is one of the absolute top Vintage players in Sweden. For more than a decade he has consistently been showing up at the top tables at Eternal tournaments and conventions. A couple of weeks ago he won the 50+ player MKM series Vintage tournament in Prague. He is also a super nice guy and one of the best opponents you could hope for in a tournament (as long as you don't mind losing). Mikael's deck of choice for this showdown was UR Burn, with some pretty cool twists. Mikael stocked up on more counterspells than normal, but in particular he opted for a very techy creature base. Rather than playing cards like Electric Eel and Flying Men, he went all in on Dandan and Kird Ape! Kird Ape is supported by a set of Taigas and Tropical Islands, without him playing any other green spells whatsoever. Solid call.

Mikael Linden's Monkey Burn

This was Per "hattper" Algander first 93/94 tournament. As an old Vintage and Legacy player, he showed that he is no scrub with the oldest cards. His Erhnam Djinns and Serras provided some serious tempo in the swiss, and he was able to take his Geddon-pile all the way to the elimination rounds. I love the super sweet tech with Lord Magnus in the sideboard btw, shutting off the drawback of Erhnam. The Tolaria is very nice as well. Solid tech against Unholy Citadel :)

Hattper's ErhnamGeddon

And finally we have Jocke Almelund. Of course we have Jocke Almelund. I don't know what to write that I didn't write in his top8 profile from BSK last year. Or his n00bcon profile from this year. Or in any of the other tournament where we've had profiles. Dude has top8'd n00bcon five out of six times, and the three times he has played at BSK he has top8'd twice and 3-0 dropped once. He won the first Pimpvitational. He has also played at the Pro Tour btw, I don't think I've mentioned that before. He is most probably the most skilled player in the format not to have won a Giant Shark yet. This time he set his The Deck aside, and took a Power Monolith combo all the way to the finals:

Jocke Almelund's Power Monolith.

We'll get back to the rest of the top8 players soon. Until then, feel pride. We've rasied god damn 10,417 'murcan dollars. You remind me of why I love this community. #MtgForLife.