Old School Mtg

This upcoming Saturday it's finally time for the first Pimpvitational tournament. It was first planned to be held about a year ago, then again last summer, and again in October. Turns out it's pretty hard to schedule an invitational tournament in this format, when most of the regular players have some combination of kids, jobs and spouses. The Pimpvitational is a tournament where the 8 highest ranked players in a seasons pimpwalker standings are invited. These players then compete in a slightly different form of 93/94, where the winner gets a whole lot of glory, and an awesome binder (made by Stalin's girlfriend). Trade in style. The tournament is however, as usual, highly relaxed. There will be beer, sauna and a casual environment. The format this year is 93/94 with Fallen Empires legal, and Hymn to Tourach restricted. My idea was to play something like this: CREATURES (16) 4 Goblin King 4 Goblin Flotilla 4 Goblin Balloon Brigade 4 Goblins of the...

Here's a quick quiz. Look at the picture below for ten seconds. Which card looks highly suspicious? Did you see it? Newer players might miss it, but most old school players and collectors knows that the beta Volcanic Island don't have the small white dot in the lower corner. Almost all beta cards have this dot, but a few cards that changed (or were added) since the Alpha printing lack the dot. Volcanic Island is one of them. The last few weeks there have been something of a mass hysteria in the magic community, as sophisticated new fakes recently hit the market. Chas Andres posted an article at StarCityGames about the new fakes, as did Quiet Speculation and a few other notable sources. I wont go into much details about the new batch of fakes, as you can read the info you need from Chas's article. The issue is that they are very well done and manufactured in a larger scale than previous fakes. The known batch contain 55 different cards, mostly standard and modern st...

I just got the last card to get my deck black bordered. I lack about 8 cards until the deck is complete (oncolor moxen, time twister, a few duals, and possibly Mahamothi Djinn), but it's still a milestone. The last card was a Mana Vault, but in November I also got my hands on a Workshop from Mats Karlsson. This is the state of the deck as we enter 2014: So far on schedule ;) In less than a year from now, the deck will hopefully be complete. On a personal note, 2013 has been a good year for old school magic. It has been the first year I've played the format outside of Sweden; in both Germany and Oslo. There have been a lot of nice guys contacting me via email to tell me about their experiences, in Canada, USA, and France. I've also managed to post in this blog about once a week throughout this year (58 posts, to be exact), which was my goal for the year. 2014 have the potential to be very interesting as well. With Vintage regaining popularity in the world, and in par...

A few months ago, we looked at the worst mana fixers in 93/94. This time we'll look at my personal top5 "worst cycles" from Legends. It is kind of amusing that there are enough weak cycles in the set to make a list like this btw :) Legends is a very large set. For one, it is larger than Beta. It is also larger than the three other legal expansions in 93/94 combined (Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and The Dark). There is a handful of very powerful cards in the set; like Mana Drain, Mirror Universe and The Abyss, but there's also a vast amount of sub-par cards in there. Lets dive into some of the more infamous parts of Legends. 5. Mana Batteries The Mana Batteries aren't as horrible as the other cards on the list here, it's just that their casting cost makes them utterly unplayable in every conceivable format. The cards would be actually good if they costed half as much to cast (two mana for these isn't an unreasonable wish either, they were print...

Christmas coming up! This week we'll take a quick look at a sweet deck in the seasons colors. There are two main approaches to Tax Edge we've seen a the top tables thus far. One is pretty much just an extension of traditional White Weenie, with some Plateaus and a mountain added to support Land's Edge and Lightning Bolt. The other approach is creatureless, and uses cards like Ivory Tower and full sets of Howling Mine. The Thunder Tax Edge is somewhat in between those two. It only supports 6 creatures (4 Thunder Spirit and 2 Serra Angel), but is still much more aggressive than the creatureless version, and have a better late game than the version supporting White Knights and Savannah Lions. This "midrange version" of Tax Edge have not been represented in the last few tournaments, but I think that it has a pretty good matchup against most of the decks that we've seen in the last top8s. It may need some tweaks, but it's nonetheless really fun to play :) ...

Two topics about legality have been discussed vividly since the format started 2007. One was regarding Chaos Orb, and how we could legalize it while both maintaining the flavor of the card and avoiding messy play areas with spread out cards. The other one is regarding the legality of Fallen Empires. The issue with Chaos Orb was solved about two years ago, and we haven't looked back. The topic with Fallen Empires is still being discussed, and was brought up again during last BSK. Ah, the days of scanable boosters :) At its most basic, the arguments against Fallen Empires are the facts that it was easy to obtain as sealed product after 1994, and that it's inherent attainability makes the deck building process much less involved. You can still buy a sealed box with 60 FE boosters for about $150-200, and that very fact makes it less appealing as "true old school". Complex card searching and suboptimal deck building is an important part of the format, and legalizing ...

Ahh, the man that is GaJol. I've written about his tech twice before, once about the old Skull of Orm deck and once about his distress deck . I'm not really sure exactly what he's up to these days, but the word on the street is that he's back in Sweden again for the foreseeable future. GaJol enjoying a good beer and Schram. GaJol teamed up with Viktor "Oldschool" to prepare for BSK. The deck he put together is definitely one of my favorites from the tournament. I'm not really sure what is maindeck and what is sideboard here though. I believe that the cards on the last row are most of the sideboard, except for the fourth Priest of Yawgmoth and the Berserk, and that the two All Hallow's Eve are supposed to be in the board. Lots of shenanigans going on here