Old School Mtg

2016 showed the highest literacy rate in history, the lowest percentage of people living in extreme poverty every, and it looks like the lowest child mortality rate we've ever seen. People are healthier, more educated and have more opportunities than any time before in history. We also flew a thing to space and had it land back here again . On the flip side, it has been the warmest year since anyone started measuring these things, and much of the political debate is very divided. All in all, I guess I would grade 2016 at 'B-'. Though flawed, a very decent year if we zoom out to the global scheme of thing. But let's zoom in to our community. Looks like a solid 'A'. This is the fourth time I do a retrospective post (click 2013 , 2014 and 2015 if you're interested in revisiting previous ones). Every year I am surprised by the steady growth of the community and how much the players create and bring to the format. Skype Magic is a thing now. There are old...

Things are wrapping up around here and most of the Christmas pottering is done. This year it included a fairly extravagant gift to myself; a rare piece of Magic I've been looking for for some time. I need a few more things before that project is solved, but I'm sure I'll put up a post about it once it's finished. Today though, lets go back to MonoRed. Disco! Three or four months back, I wrote a long post on how to build a Sligh deck using the principles of agile software development . We looked at the "build-measure-learn" loop of Lean processes and ended up with a somewhat solid 75 to show the world. While the deck we built lived up to all the feature requirements, the value I was looking for was to play it with friends and lend it out during tournaments. And after playing with it at a couple of gatherings, I realized that I didn't really enjoy Sligh. I want to play powerful cards and game-changing combinations. I like card advantage and to pu...

Among the Christmas miracles and gingerbread baking, there's another kind of Magic going around in the households. Next year, we'll have the 9th annual n00bcon and the old school World Championship that come with it. As the format has grown a lot and we only have 100 seats available at the venue, qualifier gatherings of different sorts have been popping up around the world to decide whom should represent the different communities at the championships. This the story of the qualifier in Arvika. It's my pleasure to present KungMarkus's witness from Kort i Kubik (translated from Swedish and edited by yours truly) . Enjoy! /Mg out It was with a bittersweet feeling that my dear father and I strolled out to the car last Friday. We were to drive to Kort i Kubik to compete in the local n00bcon qualifier tournament. For my pops, it was mostly about his new deck. He thought he hadn't tested it properly and didn't feel that comfortable with it yet. I had brought a new de...

Jolly Holidays! We're in the storm before the calm, hastily tying bows on the tasks of 2016 before the new year is upon us. But somewhere before the turn we have a few glorious days of sloth, gluttony and lust to enjoy with friends and family. If Christmas also makes you greedy and envious, mise well try to stir up some pride and wrath as well to collect the full seven. "Catching 'em all" has after all been an important chapter of 20016. It's about time to update the Decks to Beat section with some of the tech from the last few months. Macensci's MonoGreen. Seen at the top tables at BSK, but unfortunately missed out on Top8. It's not all news though; I think that 15 of these lists have already been published on the blog in one post or another. Nonetheless, I assume that organizing them may be appreciated by some, and there are a few new inspiring lists (like Danhor's Ernhamgeddon and Sehl's Highlander-96 UR CounterBurn). And we see that The...

Today I have the pleasure to share Joakim "Jocke" Almelund's recantation of the 2016 "Pimpvitational". Jocke has been playing this format for over six years, and has no less than five n00bcon top8's alongside three BSK top8s to his name. The Shark has been alluding him, but among his achievements in old school Magic is winning the first "Pimpvitational" in 2013. I give you a former Pro Tour player with a great interest and skill of old cards. Enjoy! /Mg out My name is Joakim. I'm an oldschool "oldschool" player with a love for The Deck that I hope can bring me a Shark one day. This is my story of pimpvitational 2016. It all started with me getting a late invite for the tournament (as I was #9 in the rankings) and we began to plan everything. Thanks to Mällroth and Kungmarkus we were playing this tournament in Karlstad at Mällroths place. The format ended up with singleton Alpha-Alliances, with the condition that you needed to hav...