Old School Mtg

Threats beat answers. Maybe a familiar mantra for those who brew. I think it was David Price, "The King of Beatdown", who first coined it in a Magic setting.  Questions beat answers. If an answer is to move your agenda forward, it should do something more than just respond to the question at hand. It could give you card advantage or tempo. Swords to Plowshares and Lightning Bolt would be pretty bad if they cost five mana each. Wrath of God wouldn't be much to look at if it didn't have the ability to X-for-1. Threats are always relevant, answers are specific. The answer must be to the question posed; otherwise we are just sitting with useless information. We can't willy-nilly respond with any random answer. "What's the capital of Kyrgyzstan?" "There are 27 bones in each hand." While building a deck  there are questions that we don't expect to have specific answers for, or just don't take the time to ask. How would m

So I stopped writing " This month in oldschool " posts a few months ago. During the period I wrote them (between August and December last year), the number of happenings went from 'plentiful' to 'vast' surprisingly quickly. In particular regarding upcoming tournaments it became too much to follow for me to maintain a sound work/life/nerd balance. Maybe I should just have scaled it down a little and focused on new content. Like last month, some of the noteworthy updates were the Magic 4 David campaign (still up, go donate a few bucks); Bryan and DFB discussing budget decks on All Tings Considered ; Music City Mtg 's take on monogreen aggro; Stephen Menendian's article on Eternal Central about B&R strategies; Gordon posting all the n00bcon decks at Wak-Wak; Matt Shields finishing up his first all-Alpha 40 on 52-week Beta ; some guy at Wak-Wak discussing lessons from losses; a n00bcon tournament report at the Brothers of Fire blog ; another n00b