Old School Mtg

Last weekend a few players gathered at Freepace and Jenny's apartment to playtest, trade, and drink beer. I got the chance to meet Felipe Garcia for the first time, an old school player from Seville, Spain, who moved to Sweden last winter. Felipe is an architect, and his artistic talent have recently made quite a few of the Swedish old school players go to him for playmat alterations. Before this evening, all I knew about him was from seeing his alters, but I must say it was a real pleasure to meet him. Very nice guy :) One of Felipe's works, this one was recently made for Axelsson. Now this is a really cool mat. Do you spot the card in the design that's not shown among the cards above it? Felipe had been playing Legacy and Vintage in Spain a few years back, but when the tournament attendance declined he opted to trade away a lot of his collection to finish a long time goal; completing his Beta set. This made his collection for deck building in 93/94 pretty interestin...

" This is just an expansion, so I'm not going to worry about balance. People will just play it for flavor, and when they get tired of it, they will stop playing with it ."  -Richard Garfield, Email to Dave Pettey, late 1993 Arabian Nights turned out to be a wonderful expansion; not the least considering it had the shortest development time of any set, a development team of only four people, and a design team of one. There are many gems among the 78 different cards, and the stories are plentiful if you dig a little. Today, we dig. Serendib Efreet is awesome. It is so good it supports strategies on its own, and strong enough that you should look for reasons not to play it in blue decks, rather than look for reasons to play it. The card was actually banned in extended in 1995, as it is a bolt-proof moat-jumper for the cost of a Devouring Deep. It may not be as iconic as Juzam, but then again, what is? The card itself has a colorful history of reprints. The most famo...

And when this land is barren, where will we go? You can already feel it in the air, and see it in the faces of friends. The dark months are approaching, and the Nordic countries are becoming a much different place than just a few weeks ago. In six weeks, the trees will be barren and sunshine will be a rarely seen luxury. In six weeks, we will have All Hallows Eve, and the old school players will gather for BSK. The BSK tournament is traditionally one of the two largest 93/94 tournament each year, occurring around six months after n00bcon. It is named after the convention, Borås Spelkonvent, taking place in the same city at the same time, but is not actually related to the convention in any way. It does however make for some strategic travel arrangements, as BSK holds e.g. the Swedish national Vintage championship that same weekend. For the last four times we've had tournament at the time of BSK, we've used hotel suits to play in (well, actually the hotel bar in 2010). ...

No one used gloves while playing Risk. No one laminated or graded D&D-books. No one used plastic sleeves for their Civilization cards. Magic was one of the first games of its kind, the first of what was called collectible games. And it was literally touch and go for a while. Even in The Duelist, it was suggested that you could tape your cards to a wall to battle Chaos Orb. If you didn't use sleeves for your "Draw 4s" in Uno, why would you use it for your "Draw 3" in Magic? The early cards got sticky and beat up by being roughly played on dirty tables in bars, schools, and kitchens. Today, almost everyone plays with some protective measures to avoid marking the cards and to expand their lifespan. What we all see as a natural part of the game today, started on a dirty table in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Between the 2-16 August 1993, WotC founder Peter Adkinson and his wife travelled through the western US to run demos of Magic in a few local game stor...

New 93/94 groups seems to be popping up around the world. The second old school tournament in Northern California will take place this weekend, the first article from Chicago was posted at Eternal Central last week, two weeks ago the first tournament in Scania took place at Playoteket, and I hear whispers from players in France. I thought about having a section on this page with e-mails to representatives of play groups (or people who just want to play) in the different cities in order to facilitate connecting the local communities. If you're looking for local players in your area, please send me an e-mail at delaval@gmail.com with some basic info about where you play and if you use some local rules (e.g. different B/R list than the suggestion found here), and I'll try to compile a list :) Today is about the Scania players though. Before this summer, 93/94 in Scania have mostly been represented by the player Axelsson. Axelsson have been travelling north to participate at BSK...

I've got some sweet pictures and new decks-to-beat from the tournament at Playoteket in Scania. I'll post them soon, but first, I'd like to give a quick shout out to Jason Jaco from Chicago. Old School Magic have grown quite a bit during the last year, and groups of veteran players have begun to explore the origins of Magic again in different areas scattered across the globe. Yesterday, the first Old School article by Jaco was posted at Eternal Central. The "Chicago house rules" allows unrestricted Strip Mine, and the article is a sweet deck tech about UWG Ehrnamgeddon with 4-off Strips. Check it out! Introducing & Explaining Bantam-Geddon As a side note, it took me about a week before I got annoyed by the ad banners I put up. During that time, I got about $5 from them, but in order to make ads generate any money, apparently you have to make them really intrusive. I removed them again, as I felt ads aren't in the spirit of the blog. If you want to gi...

The best thing with owning full power, is that you own full power. Last week I got the Emerald, which was my final piece of the nine-part puzzle. It was Alex, one of the players I met in Regensburg a year and a half ago, who first told me about the best part of completing the nine. Now that it's finally done, 20 years after I first heard about the cards, I must say his statement rings true. Strange as it may sound, it's actually pretty much of a relief to finally have them. Since I got my first Mox 5 years ago, I knew that I wanted to complete the set. I didn't know if I would be able to though, as my life could easily have taken turns that would have made me unable to afford the luxury of these cards.  So what is Power anyway? Is it the first nine restricted cards? The nine best cards? The most expensive cards today, or the most expensive cards from ABU that didn't get reprinted in 1994? There are lots of different explanations of why these particular c...