Old School Mtg

These are magical times. In a few days the tenth Old School Magic World Championship will take place in Gothenburg. But it is always you guys who make this format what it is; you the organizer, you the player, you the content creator. This is a story of a player, organizer and creator gathering the first round table in his town of Hilversum, North Holland. This is Joep Meddens's story. Enjoy! /Mg out. The Dutch old school community has been taking Giant steps lately. The gatherings of the Knights of Thorn have become serious affairs, with the last edition in Deventer boasting 40 players. I had already entertained the idea of organizing a tournament in my hometown of Hilversum. I had even acquired the prize for the first winner: an alpha Hill Giant (for good measure I acquired 5, if it spikes the tournament will be good for the foreseeable future). Playing in Deventer and seeing 40 spellslingers ready to travel to that somewhat remote part of The Netherlands (sorry Mari!) sw...

Every now and then a stroke of abandon land in the twilight between awesomeness and lunacy. From an outside perspective, going full old school and playing a Magic tournament like it was August 1993 is a perplexing idea. Even if you go zero-wincon-full-budget and build a deck with only mixed basic lands, that pile of basics will still have a price tag comparable to the winning eternal deck from the last Modern Pro Tour. A single powerful card in this format may only exist in a few hundred copies in the world, and will probably set you back more than a tier1 UBR deck in Legacy. Still we don't use proper sleeves nor protection for the cards. And right here you can actually play a deck of 20 Black Lotus and 20 Plague Rats. It is the most expensive, broken and confusing Magic format I've seen. It is also one of the sweetest. Snap keep! I don't know how many players we have signed up right now. 50? 60? Somewhere in that ballpark. Over ten countries representing at...

So I actually wrote a post about The Deck this week. My experience with it is mostly from the opposite side of the table. It is in fact possible that I have played against The Deck (with card pool including The Dark but not Ice Age) in more tournament matches than anyone else in the world. Playing 93/94 tournaments with high frequency for eleven years certainly has given me a somewhat informed opinion about its presence in the meta at least. But I am by no means a master wielding it; I haven't remotely put down the hours as a pilot to reach the level of the true mages. I actually only ever played it in a tournament once; two weeks ago in the ~50-player Arvika Festival 4. In the first match in the top8 I faced Emil, and it was an amazing experience. My friends (and former Best Men) Honka and Hardy sat next to me to cheer me on, and even they - in a highly drunken state - were utterly impressed after watching Emil play. Emil plays an average turn with The Deck in about ten seconds wh...