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 have 5 cards from each set.
So when we found out what format we were gonna play the brewing began. I was sure about one thing; I will play control. When I first started to browse through all the expansions, I thought I should play blue-white-black control. But something changed when a friend of mine told me about playing a combo deck with Soldevi Digger + Browse + Time Walk and I was sold.
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| Combo. |
As a control player I wanted to use this combo in a control shell, so I looked up all the counterspells I could find and filled up the rest with removals and value cards. This was the end result:
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| Highlander-96 BrowseDigger. |
Next step was to get a hold of all the cards. Thanks to my friend Micke that was easy, as he has at least one of every card. We found some last minute techs as well with Desert from Arabian Nights.
Now we were ready to travel to Mällroth and the guys from Varberg (Sehl, Elof and JummJumm) were to pick up me and Kalle (aka Egget) in Gothenburg before we would travel to Karlstad. But when we arrived to our meeting place in Gothenburg Egget was missing and we could not get a hold of him. If this was a normal tournament, like a PTQ, I would get really stressed right now, but I don't and that's what's really nice with these kind of tournaments. You have all day to play and all of the participating people are chill. So we wait a bit for Egget to wake up, and eventually go to his place to pick him up there instead.
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| Egget. |
When we started our trip we had a nice conversation about how the 93/94 format could be changed up, and we kind of agreed on that restricting Mishra's Factory might be the easy change to make. After a nice roadtrip we arrived at Mällroth's home and we were all ready to start playing, so we all got our playing schedule for the day with a nice bonus of whiskey list for all to try of (sadly I don't drink whiskey).
About the games I don't have that much to say, but I played against these decks:
Round 1 vs Artelas with Red/Blue aggro 2-1
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| Highlander-96 UR |
Round 2 vs JummJumm with Red/Green aggro 1-2
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| Highlander-96 R/G Aggro |
Round 3 MG mono Black Necro 2-0
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| Highlander-96 Monoblack |
Round 4 Kungmarkus Mono White aggro 2-1
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| Highlander-96 WW |
Round 5 Egget 4c Draw-7 Aggro 1-2
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| Highlander-96 Draw-7 |
Round 6 Sehl Blue/Red Burn Control 2-1
Round 7 Mällroth Blue/Black/White Control 2-0.
After the swiss I, Egget and JummJumm ended up with the same result, 5-2. Egget ended up in the finals since he beat both me and JummJumm, so JummJumm and I played a semifinal best of one. As I lost in the swiss to his Red/Green aggro I was a bit afraid of not making it to the finals, but I got a bit lucky with an early Abyss in the game and Millstone ending it fast.
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| Swiss. |
Time for finals vs Egget with his 4c Draw 7 Aggro. We had some tight games in the swiss so I knew this wasn't gonna be some easy games. We had 3 tight games were I ended up winning. The last game ended with me taking infinite turns and stripping all his mana away.
Ending up with a second pimpvitational win I'm really happy I got to do this again! Now I will continue my chase for the Giant Shark.
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| Spoils of victory, 2016 and 2013. |
I would like to thank everybody for a nice tournament and especially thank Mällroth and Kungmarkus for making this year's Pimpvitional happen!
About the games I don't have that much to say, but I played against these decks: 
Ending up with a second pimpvitational win I'm really happy I got to do this again! Now I will continue my chase for the Giant Shark.
93-04 is the best, but playing ICE AGE BLOCK is always cool, there are so many obscure cards you always end up facing cards you never saw before... that "new ice age/alliances stuff" feeling brings me back to 95/96. The sunset of MTG, from these on, there was URZA'S BLOCK and then it all went downhill
SvaraRadera