Old School Mtg

Some months seems longer than others. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the first half of March took place about half a year ago. A time when I went to the office to work and before my daughter started talking proper words. And in that before-time, I pulled the trigger on getting a card for the Chaos Orb collection that I'd been eyeing for some time. Usually, it takes about a week for a letter to get across the Atlantic. Maybe two. So the month between March 19 and April 20 with zero updates from the tracker in the middle of the journey was a little tense: Also, the month lasted like fourteen weeks. Then, after some more days in SF the letter apparently arrived in Oslo (where I live), and stayed at the airport for a week before it was sent back across the ocean to New York. Then, silence from New York for a week or two. Going on two months since the letter was posted, at this point I was fairly certain that it had got lost in the shuffle somehow. New York in ...

Old School Mtg capture a lot of the nuances from Magic's golden age. The art, the play patterns, the powerful spells, the mediocre creatures and the excitement of getting a new card for the deck are mostly all there. A few "sub-formats" under the Oldschool umbrella - like August-93 and Ante 40K - also implies deck building restrictions in the form of scarcity (or which cards you dare to sleeve up). Scarcity used to be a big deal. One could even argue that formats like Brother's Highlander and other "point-based" systems does a good job in creating a sense of "you don't have every card". But here's the thing: even back in 1994, a few people did. And it was horribly unfair. A small handful Mr. Suitcases in my area back in the mid 90s had access to card pools me and my friends couldn't possibly beat. But it was part of the game.  Unfairness in card access is one of the things we haven't really been able to capture in Oldschool Magic ...