Old School Mtg

Consistency. Wearing my mathematician or developer hat, I'm a big fan. And if I'd put on my engineering hat, I could probably spend an hour writing about subtle yet crucial differences between precision and accuracy. But when it comes to entertainment, consistency isn't always a good thing. One of my go-to examples are Hollywood movies from the years between 1934 and 1958. With the Hays Code in full effect, it's almost impossible to be surprised or provoked by any movie from the "golden age". If you have seen five movies from that era, you've seen them all. That's not to say they're all bad of course; To Kill a Mockingbird, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Great Dictator and Twelve Angry Men are all great entertainment. But as a rule, movies from that era will play out in a certain way and follow a strict formula. It may be a new song occasionally, but it surely is the same band playing.  This is the exception to make the rule. Consistency i...

After last month's adventure with sleeves , I figured it was high time to reconsider how I store cards outside my decks as well. Shoe boxes are fine and all for most trinkets, but when it comes to fancy 93/94 era cardboard, I am a man of binders. Flipping through a binder like a tome of yore comes with far greater pleasure than brutishly shuffling stacks of cards around. Also it is a noble and elegant way to store a gentleman's collectibles. My binder is getting kinda old though. Sometime back in the latter half of the 00s - when I was fresh into building a 93/94 card pool - I placed well at the Legacy tournament at BSK. The prize binder contained mainly newer cards that I only had a passing interest in acquiring, but the binder itself was enticing. The binder that held the prize cards was nothing less than the first official MtG binder, with sweet Pete Venters art on the cover. So I asked the guy behind the counter if I could get the binder as my prize. He looked puzzled, but ...

My plan today was to write about old rules, and how they are weird. It is a pretty fun topic, and one that has a tendency to spark debates. Should tapped artifacts be off? Is mana burn a good thing? If I add a +1/+1 counter to Triskelion with Dwarven Weaponsmith, should the Trisk be able to throw the new counter the same way it can with its original arms? These are sweet. Don't let anyone tell you they look like dicks. I then stumbled on Magic Twitter for a spell, and realized that people were already debating quite a bit. Not about the Damage Prevention Step, or whether or not you should be able to use mana from Basalt Monolith to untap Mana Vault, but more about some new promos and B&R updates in sanctioned Magic. So while the topics in my mind were clearly more interesting, it appears that the internet has had enough MtG think pieces for a few weeks. We all have a limited amount of honks to give after all. So let me instead tell you about my wedding back in 2017. Still he...