Old School Mtg

During the holidays I had the opportunity to visit Erik "Sehl" Larsson's house in Åsa. Eight mages of ill repute had gathered to draft Viktor "Oldschool" Peterson's new 93/94 combo cube. Limited brewing It was a great experience. The cube contained pretty much all the possible combos and tricks in the format, and fairly few creatures in order to make the combos more powerful. I started out trying to build Transmute/Field of Dreams, but didn't get to wheel my Millstones and ended up with UR Transmute Artifact. There were some truly insane decks and matches, but I won't spoil to much in case Viktor wants to write a report about the cube later. I will however say that I unlocked the achievement of pinging an opponent from 20 to zero with a single Prodigal Sorcerer as my only offense. Tim achievement about to be unlocked. But that was not the only event to take place at Casa Sehl during December. A few weeks ago, Sehl hosted the second yearly S...

While my Channel Universe deck had to take a backseat to spending that budget on #MtgForLife, that didn't mean I didn't brew the last few months. The luxury of having collected a bunch of duals and a majority of the restricted list actually makes building a lot of decks in this format somewhat budget friendly. A couple of months ago I lacked 21 cards for this deck, including 11 Antiquities rares and a pair of Arabian Nights rares, and the whole ordeal still cost me less than a box of Battle for Zendikar. Dig it. The plan was the Archaeologist. The digger from Argivia is, like, a super sweet card you guys! Even if we let go of the fact that many of the top decks in the format already play one third artifacts in their decks, the synergies with the card and the broken stuff it can do is just awesome. For two mana, you get back your Lotus. For two mana, you can go inf with Chaos Orb. Two mana nullfies a Disenchant. Repeatable card advantage from a three-drop soun...

Didn't get the chance to update this Friday, so I'll compensate with both a card of the day and a decklist today. To keep the fun at a reasonable level though, let's talk about Stasis. Stasis was a late addition to Alpha, one of the five rare cards added in the last minute "top-down cycle" of the set. The five cards in the cycle were reportedly added to make use of otherwise unused art, and the cards never got playtested before release. The five in question were Island Sanctuary, Stasis, Word of Command, Sedge Troll and Birds of Paradise. Some of these cards worked better than others, and e.g. Word of Command is easily in the top five of "cards-giving-rules-headaches" in Magic. The function of Stasis was inspired by the team working on Ice Age, and gave us a first peek on what would later become Cumulative Upkeep. The art is a story in its own. In contrast to most of the other Magic artist, who were mainly local art school students, Fay Jones was an...

My original plan for this weekend was a trip to Munich for a company conference, but I eventually realized that it wasn't a sustainable plan. My girlfriend is leaving for a six-month mission in a few weeks, and a weekend with a packed schedule in another country didn't feel like the best of timings. A lot to do at work as well, so in the end I opted to stay in Oslo. And it was a good weekend to stay in Norway. Yesterday, the second non-proxy 93/94 tournament was hosted in Moss, about an hours drive away from my home. It was a great tournament. No less than 26 people showed up, making this the second biggest non-shark tournament in Scandinavia yet. The store where we played had its own bar, the tech was plentiful, and the ambience was great. A big group from Arvika joined up, as well as a car from Varberg, and the latest n00bcon winner Kalle from Gothenburg. I started out at 0-2, but eventually picked up some victories for a 3-2 record, missing top8 on my horrible tiebreakers....

Last weekend Jason Jaco and the guys at Eternal Central hosted a major Old School tournament in Philadelphia. 54 players came to battle, including a couple of guys from Norway who visted Philly to sling cards at the Vintage and Legacy championships at Eternal Weekend. The EC players have a few local rules that sets them apart from the current meta in Sweden and most of Europe. Cards like Strip Mine, Black Vise and Fork are free to run as 4-ofs, Fallen Empires is a legal set with the Hymn being unrestricted, Mana Burn is enforced, Power cards are more abundant with the CE/IE proxies legal, and Winter Orb has errata stating that it gets "shut down" when tapped. So which decks would end up on top? One could argue for monoblack. It's a tier1 deck that consistently shows up at the top tables at our larger tournaments , even though it's usually only played by a small part of the field. When adding 4 Hymns, 4 Strip Mines and additional pump knights, it could be a real j...

Let's continue with some more sweet tech from Hans Henrik Rasmussen. If you missed it, you'll find the first part here . Enjoy! /Mg Old School Lands We don’t have a lot of toys for a lands deck, but we have Fastbond which is a lot by itself. Also, this deck includes the coolest win combo I’ve ever discovered: Hazezon Tamar plus Karakas which works in a very odd way. Hazezon Tamar comes into play with a trigger, but a so-called “delayed trigger”, so if you play him and then bounce him with Karakas the trigger is still there and will be resolved during your next upkeep where you get a bunch of sand warriors with no danger of them being removed in one swoop by your opponent removing Hazezon (since he is already gone). When your sand warriors have dwindled in number you can then replay Hazezon and do the trick again to make a new bunch. Old School Lands Sideboard The second advantage of playing a lot of lands is that Nevinyrral’s Disk can be used quite ...

Today we have a special treat! Hans Henrik Rasmussen started playing Magic around Antiquities, and a couple of years ago he was the first Danish player to contact me about 93/94. Since then he has been brewing a lot. His playgroup has a few house rules, but all the decks are legal within "official" 93/94 rules as well. I think they look awesome, and I hope I get the chance to see them in action some day! Enjoy! /Mg So, for the last I don’t know how many months, I’ve thought about sending you some Danish tech – since I, exactly like Elof, make a constant stream of decks that I think others could get some fun out of seeing – and of course when I saw his post on your blog recently, I just had to finally get this thing done (and I’m thinking the more deck lists the merrier!). And with the Danish summer being even more disappointing than usual, I will send you a bunch here while I have the time to do it. Another reason for my wanting to send you this, is also that...

Aah, summer! Summer! A fortnight of vacation has passed. There were some pretty intense resting, and I haven't spent more than two nights in a row at a single place for the last two and a half weeks. My mind has been cleared though, and it actually feels a little relaxing to get back to work again. The Scandinavian summer is awesome btw, the sun is constant and everyone is up for good times. I guess we need it to survive the darkness and cold of the Nordic winters. I've gathered the decklists from the last two tournaments in Norway and Sweden. They are pretty interesting, and may show a small shift in the meta. At Joypad Open, there wasn't a single blue card in the top4. The top4 lists looked like this: Thomas's BRw Tempo Mg's Distress Artelas's Monoblack Hardy's Trick Deck Lots of Khalsa Brain mats. Also, 16 Dark Rituals, 13 Underworld Dreams and 11 Hypnotic Specters in the four decks. Now, to be fair, there were only two decks pla...

Our three-time 93/94 Giant Shark winner and two-time Swedish Eternal King champion Elof "The mighty" Gottfridsson continously works on new sweet tech. A while back, he suggested that he could write monthly "deck techs" about some of his ideas to post on the blog, and of course he was was welcomed with open arms. This is the first of hopefully many techs from one of the premier players of old school magic in the world. Enjoy! /Mg   Welcome to a new segment! Long time reader, first time writer. I've been playing this format for a couple of years, my first tournament with my own cards was noobcon 2012 if I recall corretly. I remember playing a deck similar to UR Burn but with Serendib Djinns and finished 9th on breakers. Since then I have mostly been playing The Deck or blue control, but have tinkered around with other decks; Nether Voids, Disco-Troll and even a Living Plane - Prodigal Sorcerer deck! But for this article, which I hope will be a montly rec...