Old School Mtg

A few months ago I mentioned that a German player had contacted me about old school Mtg. Since I'm currently working in Munich, which is about an hour and a half away from Regensburg where he lived, we decided to meet up. I met Martin at the station and we walked through the beautiful city, passing by Catherdral and the Bridge, chatting about nostalgia and good times. We came home to Martin's place and I met his family, got a beer and had a look at his amazing collections. It hard to explain the feeling properly, and my few pictures are horribly blurry, but among other things a got to see the serra angel statue, pretty munch everything done by Rebecca Guay, and a complete collection of He-Man figures. Moxen! He-Man! After about an hour we went to the local pub to play. The pub was called Die Tankstelle, a place with wooden interior, rock music, beers served at the table and mostly a few regular as customers. It felt very much like Rotary Pub in Gothenburg, definit...

If you get enough old school players and beer in one room, the results will inevitably be Magic: the Charades...

Magic's very first B&R rules simply stated that you could not play with more than one of each artifact, and no more than a total of five artifacts in your deck. That didn't live for long, and in January 1994 (after Arabian Nights, before Antiquities) USENET provided the first ever proper banned/restricted list. The banned cards were the ante cards and Shahrazad; the restricted cards were a pile of power and randoms. Cards like Orcish Oriflame was restricted due to the 2-mana alpha version, Dingus Egg was restricted since it was to good with Armageddon. Cards like Balance, Mind Twist, Channel, Library of Alexandria and Chaos Orb were free to play as 4-offs. Flash forward to the autumn of 94. Three new expansions have been released (Antiquities, Legends and The Dark). The tournament scene has grown, the successful tournament players understand the power of card advantage, and the control decks have evolved to the best decks in the game. This is where we come in, these ar...

Daniel "GaJol" Nilsson has a great love for the spirit of the format. I've never seen him play blue, or with the high end power cards, but he can easily play with a set of Abyss and alpha Scrublands or Bayous in case his decks needs some colour splash. In terms of price, his creations are not averse to compete with cheaper versions of the deck; in terms of awesomeness, he runs them over. I've seen him compete in tournaments with a deck that ran on 16 lands due to the fact that he couldn't find the last 5 basics (that didn't go well btw), I've seen him prox Juzams for Su-Chi in order to test properly, and I've seen him hang out for hours to play and drink beer with other players after he's been out of contention to the top8. Last BSK he ended up in the top4 with one of the strangest decks in the tournament; a mostly black creation that won with Warp Artifact, Haunting Wind and Underworld Dreams. For some reason, maybe due to his very casual and frie...

Kalle Nord wrote this detailed account of the BSK 2012 finals, complete with turn-by-turn actions and lots of pictures. Enjoy! After BSK in November, where we ran out of time to play the final, we have been puzzling hard to find a final date when we both could play (we live in different cities). Finally something happened, and at Saturday the 15th this month, Elof came over to my place to battle it out! My first intention was to film the entire final, but some things just don't add up as you want. Instead I had to film the entire thing with a crappy web cam, which I then could backtrack as notes when I would write the report. But the camera is not the only thing crappy with my computer, so the recording stopped 2 minutes into the second duel, creating a small gap in the match. Trying to do a report in this way is not anything I would recommend, it takes fucking ages! The recordings were blurry, small, mirror reversed and overall hard to decipher. I constantly had ...

Home in Gothenburg and joining some friends for pre-Christmas beer and magic tonight. Life is easy. As an early Christmas present, I present one of the sweetest decks I've ever seen in the format; the Moss Monster deck. The deck is a pile of Aisling Leprechauns, Ifh-Biff Efreets, green circles and green wards. If you've never seen someone play Lifelace on an otherwise match-winning Earthquake in order to survive completely unscathed due to circles and wards, you have something to add to the nerdy part of your bucket list. I'm sorry that I don't have any more complete pictures of the deck (it's all bb and looks beautiful). Per Olofsson is doing it right. CREATURES (10) 1 Moss Monster 3 Aisling Leprechaun 2 Force of Nature 2 Ifh-Biff Efreet 1 Verduran Enchantress 1 Veteran Bodyguard ENCHANTMENTS (13) 1 Gaea’s Touch 1 Cyclone 1 Sylvan Library 4 Green Ward 4 Circle of Protection: Green 2 Spirit Lin...

Dan Holm was one of the first players outside of Gothenburg that joined the old school community. His first tournament was the GP Rotary in 2010, and he followed that up by winning BSK 2010 with a deck that contained big fliers, Moat and Spirit Link. Since he usually is busy during the Easter (and hence n00bcon), the last time we saw him before BSK 2012 was at BSK 2011, were he was defeated in the top8 by eventual winner Robert Schram. This year he played in the BSK top8 for the third consecutive year. The deck was created by n00bcon top4 competitor Nesid, and consists of 4 Erhnam, 4 Mishra, lots of mana acceleration, burn, and lots of restricted cards. His first turn, first game, first match of the tournament was btw Channel, Mind Twist, Chaos Orb. A nice way to start the tournament :) The Erhnam Deck CREATURES (4) 4 Erhnam Djinn ENCHANTMENTS (1) 1 Fastbond SORCERIES (13) 2 Fireball 1 Recall 1 Demonic Tutor 1 Timetwister 1 Time Walk 1 Regr...