Old School Mtg

Today we'll look at some amusing bulk. Nostalgic factors makes it easy to forget just how many borderline unplayable cards there are in the early expansions of Magic. The sets are oozing with flavor and have their fair share of extremely powerful cards, but as a whole the average power level of early sets are very, very low. I could easily argue that the power level of Fallen Empires and Homelands are, at average, higher than those of The Dark and Antiquities. Alpha and Arabian Nights both have a high power level and generally playable cards, but after those two first sets, it took up until Alliances before a set which could be considered "good" was printed again. One of the first things that comes players minds when talking about the older sets are the mana fixing and acceleration. Cards like original duals, Black Lotus, Sol Ring, Workshop and the Moxen are still the best mana fixing and acceleration ever printed. At this same time though, Wizards decided to create s...

Needed to do some procrastination, so I figured I could write a few lines about a sweet burn deck. Direct damage is is a valid, and not insanely expensive, approach to Old School magic. With both Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning legal, players have access to two of the best burn spells ever printed. The restriction is mainly that the future great red creatures, like Jackal Pup and Wildfire Emissary, are still many years away. One approach is to go the road of Electric Eel Aggro, adding blue to the deck to get access to aggressive creatures like Serendib Efreet and Electric Eel. This also gives the player access to Psionic Blast and Energy Flux. Another approach is to add green, for an Erhnam Burn'em deck, with a higher overall curve, but access to Kird Apes and the Channel/Fireball combo. And this play. JummJumm is playing it clean though. He has been playing Old School for a long time, and is a part of the Varberg play group. He is usually playing a monored burn deck w...

About a year ago, Fab Sanglard from Toronto hosted the first old school tournament overseas. Now, another city in Canada has started a vibrant 93/94 community, spearheaded by Mike Borgardius in Nova Scotia. Last week they held a 4-person tournament, battling out for a booster of Revised. The Nova Scotia crew allow Revised as an 8th set in their tournaments; it's a way for people to somewhat easier get into the format, and it was after all released before both Legends and The Dark. The winner got a few pack-fresh staples for his deck and, as is customary in old core set boosters, a lot of basic lands. At least they had removed the four islands from the rare sheet when Revised came along.  Mike's deck is a sweet version of The Deck, optimized against creature heavy decks (e.g. maindeck Moats instead of Scepters). No Revised in Mike's Deck though. The reason for playing Unl here instead of A/B is aesthetic. I appreciate wb cards, as was evident in my old white wee...

Last Saturday I got to play some Magic at the old Rotary Pub again. I don't think I've had the chance to play since I had my Oslo showdown at the central station about a month ago, and playing at Rotary has become even more rare. Good times were had in the closed pub, with trash talk and beer aplenty. I played a few games against Freespace's awesome new deck. At one point I really though I had the game locked, after some sweeping I had stabilzed around 15 with a Forcefield in play, and tapped out for a Mirror Universe. You should never underestimate a single Juzam on the board though. Double Berserk on Juzam is how every game should end. I was as awestruck and shocked as this guy :) Anyway, I was thinking about Berserk, and new tech, and my mind wandered to one of the original Berserk-abusing decks from the way-back time. This deck was played in the World Championships 1994, back when Berserk where restricted as "failure to have a fog should not warrant 80...

After getting a pleasant surprise from the Forcefield / Mox Jet picture, I went back to Alpha to look at the art again. Alpha is a very funny set in some aspects. It is truly amazingly well done, but as you couldn't really have a 200+ page comprehensive rulebook, the rules back then where admittedly open for interpretation (the original rulebook states that you may solve rule disagreements with a coin flip). Considering protection, this is what the rules stated: A creature with protection from one or more colors of magic cannot be affected by any magic of those colors. For example, a creature with protection from blue cannot be blocked by blue creatures, dealt damage by blue creatures, or enchanted, damaged, or otherwise affected by blue cards. One thing that was not uncommon to see people debate about was the interaction between Black Knight and Balance. It was fairly consensual that you really didn't have to sacrifice a Black Knight to the Balance, as it couldn't...

There's yet something akin to summer in the Nordic countries, so the spirit is still high up here. Finding some of the last decklists required some digging btw, but I think they are all correct. Next one on the list was BSK 2011. Here we saw an influx of some old collectors showing up to play; guys that exclusively play 93/94 magic and are mostly unaware of the modern formats. It was really sweet to see guys like Per Olofson and Gunnar for the first time. This was also the first time we had a suite to play in at BSK, and our dedicated scorekeeper Kiddas made the tournament flow well; considering the circumstances. At this point of the format, we didn't have any timing restrictions on the rounds, and the quarter-finals between Robert Schram and Dan Holm took over two and a half hours ;) BSK 2011 Shark. Signed by the 20-25 players. Schram eventually won the tournament after beating Kalle in the finals, getting his redemption after losing to him in the finals ...

Hectic week so far, and I'll update with the last three Shark-winners during the weekend. I got a quick post however, as I recently found an Easter egg from alpha previously unknown to me. I just got a new Forcefield, and lo and behold: Tap my mox to activate forcefield and... Mind. Blown. Turns out Forcefield dude is blocking Mox Jet. I may be the last person ever to notice this, but I really love how I can still find Easter eggs in the early expansions so many years later. Nevinyrral is Larry Niven and all that, but this one was pretty sneaky :)