Old School Mtg

Five weeks to easter and n00bcon! I'd like to mention a few cards that haven't really seen any play at all yet, but might make a splash this year. Last n00bcon we saw Relic Barrier make a huge impact, and during BSK we saw Haunting Winds take a player to the top4. We also had Petra Sphix and Field of Dreams in the top8 :) 1. Gaea's Avenger Last year's winner played 24 artifacts maindeck, and it's not uncommon for the control decks to play 1/3 or more of the cards in their decks as artifacts. Facing a couple of Moxen and a Sol Ring, this is a 4/4 for 3, and it grows with your opponent's mishras as well. The fact that it's immune to City in a Bottle, and many times can play around lightning bolt, may make this guy fairly playable. The issue is of course that your opponent needs board presence to make him big, but as long as those artifacts are mostly mana I think this guy could make the cut. 2. Hyperion Blacksmith This dude is a reasonable cheap 2/...

The first 93/94 invitational will be held during Easter sunday. The invited are the top8 in the pimpwalker standings, currently these guys: 1. Kalle "egget" Nord  2. Rickard "Pefken" Samuelson  3. Elof Gottfridson 4. Robert Schram  5. Daniel "GaJol" Nilson 6. Magnus "Mg" de Laval 7. Hjalmar "Honka" Backlund 8. Jocke "Troligt att jag är top8" Almelund The invitation list is then in falling order, so if anyone can't join, #9 in the standings will be able to take his spot, and so on. As is customary with invitational tournaments, we will shake up the odds a little by playing the format in an unusal way. After long considerations about how to play the invitational, we ended up with classic 93/94; but with Fallen Empires as a legal 8th set. Will Hymn to Tourach give the black decks the final push, will Goblin Grenade make sligh viable, and would River Merfolk put monoblue at top as a new tempodeck? So, wha...

Easter is coming up, and with that the world championship in Old School mtg! It's a gathering of beer, good friends and awesome magic, and it's the most prestigious tournament in the format. Last year 34 players gathered to cast turn 1 Juzams and tap Howling Mines with Relic Barriers, and anyone who's got a deck should appreciate this competition! What : n00bcon, aka the World Championships in 93/94 magic. This is the fifth n00bcon, and it's traditionally held during Gothcon (Sweden's best gaming convention), adjacent to the main convention site. The first ever tournament in 93/94 was held at the Gothcon site in 2008, since 2009 we've used an adjacent pub as tournament location. Where : Rotary Pub, about 8 minutes walking distance from the Gothcon site (in Gothenburg). We've rented the pub for the duration of the tournament, so only players will be allowed at the site. The pub hosts a very impressive selection of beers from around the world, if that...

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...