Old School Mtg

n00bcon 8 and the World Championships of Old School Magic is in the books! It was a great gathering with some awesome people and sweet Magic. People from all over came to battle. It was a pleasure to hang out with aficionados like American old school pioneer Danny Friedman, former Vintage World Champion Marc Lanigra of Germany, and the super friendly David Chambers of San Francisco; people I've had interactions with online but never got the chance to meet in person before. We had people with resumes ranging from decades of nothing but kitchen table play to Pro Tour winners. Even though we don't really care about the number of participants, I must say that it's pretty cool that we filled up the pub to maximum capacity already in December. This is a casual format with a big barrier of entry, and we are fighting for a damn Giant Shark. The 76 players competing this year actually made it necessary to get a lot of extra tables and chairs to the pub to give everyone a place to ...

N00bcon 8 is on its way! Check the stream at twitch.tv/yespair !

Between early 2006 and late 2008 I played various Time Vault combo decks. In the span of these 30-ish months, the card lived with no less than four completely different erratas. Each update changed the card's functionality enough to make me either seriously rebuild or to scrap my deck. Time changes most things, even the seemingly inanimate. In the last decade, in particular since Magic 2010, functional or power level errata have been almost completely absent from the game. It's easy to be nostalgic about how some cards worked a few years, or decades, back. Remember in 2005 when Brass Man still could be untapped as many times as you wanted during upkeep? I used to have a sweet deck built around him with Quicksilver Dagger, with a Mind Over Matter / Dagger combo as eventual wincon. Or in 1999 when you could cast Waylay during the opponent's end step and basically play it as an upgraded white Ball Lightning? It used to be one of the best decks at the Pro Tour. I ...

Let's step right in. Top8 players: Gordon Andersson, Alexander Hasthi, Thomas Nilsen and Mikael Mällroth. Gordon Andersson has dabbled with cards since close to the dawn of Magic. He remembers the days when we didn't want to spend $3 on a Revised booster as the fresh 4th Edition packs just had hit the shelves. In his magic career, he has been very active in the "grown-up Magic" community and helped starting a few initiatives in his home town of Stockholm. For some reason though, it took a while until he crossed paths with the 93/94 community. In the last year the Stockholm scene has grown a lot, and Gordon is one of the main characters in the new arena. This summer he'll start up the first annual 93/94 tournament in the Swedish capital, The Ivory Cup . Join if you have the chance, it looks like a sweet gathering! He played his first old school tournament at Nebraska's War in December last year when he and Berlin travelled down to swing Eternal and show...

We're getting deep into the n00bcon preparations, but for now let's keep the focus on the latest gathering in Arvika. I must say that I really like the tech from the elimination rounds. The eight decks are all very distinct from each other, and combo, control, aggro and tempo are all represented. Winning should not be the top concern when playing this format, but it's still nice to see that we're at a point where no deck is the obvious best one, and that people get the chance to sleeve up a myriad of different strategies and still have a chance to top8. Maybe there's a build of Power Monolith lurking somewhere that will tear the field apart; maybe it's the one that placed second in this tournament. Maybe Deadguy Ale, which was the only deck to 6-0 the swiss, is much stronger than most people give it credit for and could take a real tier1 position in the near future. Or maybe it's all about the players, owning their pet decks from the inside out and just play...