Old School Mtg

In the spring of 1995, I spent a lot of time in my grandparents place out on the countryside. It was a remote scattering of houses by the woods, with only two mail boxes registered in the hamlet. My sister and I filled our days picking berries, playing with the animals and rummaging through wooden chests of old trinkets. In the picture painted by most, it was idyllic. At that point Magic was an endless sea of rare and odd cards. There was no web with easy access to spoilers and the Encyclopedia books were yet to be printed. We had played for a couple of months and it felt like any card could exist. Take an extra turn for a mana or two? That could well be a thing. A 10/10 creature? Seems like a schoolyard urban legend, but sure, it could be possible. We approached the game with odd house rules and a sense of discovery. At first, Dark Ritual was a interpreted as a permanent that tapped for three mana. No effects were "until end of turn". An 'X' in a mana cost was th...

Today we have a treat. Our friend Constantine Prishvitsin from Russia is not only a good guy and an awesome alterer of Fellwar Stones, but he was also the first player to travel multiple time zones to compete in Old School Magic. Since his showing at n00bcon 7 he has been building up, and a few weeks back he was to return to Sweden and compete again, this time with a brother in arms. This is his story. Enjoy! /Mg out I've been attracted to everything oldschool since I realised myself as a person. 80-90s action movies, games, underground and popular music. You name it. No wonder I always felt a bit uncomfortable in modern day magic, even though I am a game store owner and should support wizards' activities all the way. First, there was a video on youtube where Olle Rade defeated Sean Fleischman in the finals of Pro Tour Columbus 1996. I was mesmerized by the whole oldschool feel of the coverage. Not the oldest of kinds of magic, but it seemed like an awesome one! Next there wa...

Let's step right in. Top8 players: Martin Lindström, Morgan Karlsson, Olle Råde, Seb Celia. Martin "Fluffy" Lindström is one of the guys I'm more familiar with outside of the realm of Magic. Martin, myself and another guy spent a lot of time together during the second half of 2011 studying Hilbert spaces and functional analysis. It was a notoriously difficult course in graduate level mathematics, boasting a fail-rate close to 90% at the time. It would be my third try on the exam, and Martin's first. From that experience, I was to deduce that the man is a damn brilliant human being. In the end, we both managed to pass the course and I got to learn a lot from him. I wasn't that active in sanctioned Magic at that time, but Martin's reputation had regardless gotten ahead of him when we started working together. He had been the top performing Eternal player (across multiple formats) at the Bazaar of Moxen earlier that summer; being rewarded the custom Mo...

Of the 9,000 or so page views this blog has had in the last week, how many care about the exact constellation of cards that won? It's not an insignificant number, I'm sure. But I think that for many of the people here, perhaps even for the majority of the players with a small part of their hearts in old school Magic, what's more important is the nostalgia and inspiration. There's a reason why the n00bcon stream showed different sweet decks and players rather than just being a fixed camera on table one. It's not unlikely that there are more players reading this blog who are amused by, say, a blinged out monogreen stompy playing 1-drops into Berserks with 3-of Pendelhaven. So lets start with a Russian built monogreen stompy with Nafs Asp: Nikita Shelest's sweet monogreen stompy. That said, top8ing n00bcon is a god damn feat. Building any deck in this format is hard, expensive, and time consuming. Building a good deck even more so. And optimizing a good deck a...

Note: Like the  post about Homelands two years ago, this was an April Fools joke. We're not going to add errata to play Rukh Egg as (misprintedly) written in AN or unrestrict Power cards. Quite a lot of people was lead to believe this post though, so I add an extra disclaimer here just in case. And it has lead to some good discussions :) The real (potential) B&R update will come in late April to early May. /Mg With n00bcon in the books, it's time for the yearly banned & restricted list update. This is an opportunity to stir up the meta, help support new decks, and keep the most oppressive strategies in check. Last year we unrestricted Mirror Universe and Power Artifact, a decision that created two new tier decks we've seen at the top tables at large tournaments. The year before that we unrestricted Mana Vault, opening the doors for decks like Atog, Monoblue Artifacts and Nether Void, each with at least one tournament win on its belt after the changes. I...