Old School Mtg

Ah, dexterity cards. The mechanic to represent the primordial era of Magic unlike any other. These days, most oldschool players are in consensus on how to use Chaos Orb, and its 2012 format errata  (with a small 2013 update  to follow new oracle errata) have been adopted by a majority of the format variants (que exception for the Wizards' Tournament). Chaos Orb is a staple in 93/94 if there ever was one. It joins a tiny handful cards - alongside alumni like Black Lotus, Sol Ring, Strip Mine and Library of Alexandria - where one of the only feasible reasons not to play it is that one doesn't have access to it. Pretty much any deck is stronger with a Chaos Orb in it, and many players also consider it a properly fun card to play. Today is not about Chaos Orb though. Today we give the spotlight to its oft neglected little brother; Falling Star. In the footsteps of giants. Falling Star is the only dexterity card other than Chaos Orb outside the land of silver borders. For ...

On March 23rd 1994 Time Vault was banned from play in sanctioned Magic. It was the first card to be banned for power level reasons in any format. Of course back then there were only a single format, "Magic", so Time Vault was effectively removed from the card pool. It was all due to this particular interaction: My French opponent anted a Time Vault at the start of the duel, but drew a second one to go off. Wizards' Tournament don't adhere to those new-fangled "restrictions". Time Vault, Animate Artifact and Instill Energy. Make the Vault a creature with Animate Artifact, slap on an Instill Energy, and suddenly you have all the turns in the world. If you assembled these three cards in order and the opponent didn't have any removal, the gig was up. Half a year after the initial release, a new three-card combo entered the card pool from the fringes of Arabian Nights and Antiquities: Make Time Vault a creature with Poltergeist, untap with Saddlebag...

I had a few different topics going for this week. For one, I recently played a new 93/94 cube at a local tournament in Oslo. Broke the three-cube winning streak by getting bested by the glorious Thomas Nilsen in the finals. Dude got me with Power Monolith Combo and Earthquake. That's some solid limited tech. I also met up with Hardy some weeks ago for a proper "Dadgic" showdown. That was a new experience. New School in so many ways. And just this Friday I had the pleasure to meet one-on-one with one of Oslo's newest slingers for tech, beer, and some monogreen shenanigans. But, in the spirit of the season here, I figured it was time for me to do some fall cleaning on the blog. It has been a while, and there are a lot of strange things here if one would be inclined to look deep. But for those not having a weekend to sleuth around for tech among the 400 or so pages, I figured it could be nice to have some sort of index page. Sure, the Decks to Beat section c...

Here's random fact: Norway has a tax revenue to GDP ratio of 54.8%. It is second only to East Timor (which surprised me), and is joined in that particular top5 by Denmark, Finland and Sweden (which didn't really surprise me). That is quite a lot of taxes. (But for anyone wondering about living in a socialstic hellscape, Norway also have the lowest Gini index in the world, the highest Human Development Index, and the third highest GDP per capita. So I personally wouldn't argue for lower taxes). Anyways. After living here for the last six years, one subjective observation is that we Norsemen, as a generalized group, are pretty bad at saving money. So instead we kinda get some saved for us. I top out somewhere around 46% income tax most of the year, but each December I only pay half income tax to get the holiday spending well supported, and by the end of June we get the vacation money saved up from last year, pretty much tax free. And at that time, we also get the yearly tax...