Happy New Year!

May your Timetwisters always bring you the cards you need in 2018.

Today is new years eve and therefore we at Wak-Wak want to take a moment to thank all of you who have followed us through the year. And of course we hope that you will continue to enjoy our content during 2018 too, because there is a lot of things planned.

Let’s do a small recap from the year that have passed and a sneak peak at what is coming next year, when we are back from our holiday break.

The Site

This site is actually not even one year old. Gordon started working on it in the summer of 2016 with the mission to publish a comprehensive list of different old school archetypes and decks. The idea came from wanting to be able to tell people it is a very wide format and to help newcomers to find out about all the fun decks they could build.

On the 11th of March Magnus “mg” De Laval published a small introduction I wrote on the original old school blog so let’s just say that was our launch date. That probably mean we need to do something cool this year on the 11th, doesn’t it? Since then the site has evolved quite a bit and now incorporates both a blog and a deck gallery. We hope you enjoy these parts of the site and we have some nice blog posts planned for 2018. A couple of teasers are a series about brewing mono brown, some game play videos and in the second half of January a tournament report from Lucia Legends with a small old school quiz for you guys.

old school artifact creatures

Artifact smash!

What more content on the site would you like? Please comment below!

The Instagram Account

Actually the Instagram is “older” than the site and our first post was published the 8th of February. We don’t publish very much there but try to keep it flowing with some fun content for all you old school lovers out there. Here you can see the nine most liked posts from 2017.

Of course a crazy guy taking a bite of his Beta Lotus got the most likes...

Of course a crazy guy taking a bite of his Beta Lotus got the most likes...

What more would you like to see on our Instagram? Please comment below!

And if you aren't already following us, why not?

The Podcast

In March Gordon tweeted that he was thinking about starting a podcast about old school and was wondering what people thought about that. One of the first persons to answer was Grant Casleton and it didn’t take long until the first episode of Flippin’ Orbs was released. It was actually on the 18th of April and since then we have released eleven episodes of varying quality and length. Many of them with Seb Celia who joined us after a couple of episodes to bring the number of hosts to three.

Right now we are on a small break but we have recorded three amazing interviews for the next season. We have talked to Titus Chalk about his book “Generation Decks, Randy Buehler about making magic and last but not least Sean O’brien about the real old school days and mana denial strategies, or in other words; the O’Brien School of Magic.

The Wrap Up

So, that’s a small recap to remind ourselves that we haven’t been doing this for so long and also some teasers about what will happen during the first part of 2018. Thank you so much for reading and listening to our content and as said, we have much more to come!

Also, if you like what we do, please consider supporting us on Patreon so we can do even more content.

 
 

 

Thank you again, and have an amazing new years eve and also a wonderful 2018. May the flips be with you!

/All the folks at Wak-Wak!

Happy Holidays from the Beasts of the Bay

Today we have a small guest post from the amazing folk over in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hope you guys enjoy it and if you have something you want to say to the old school community, we are more than happy to do more guest posts. /Wak-Wak

The San Francisco Bay Area Old School Club would like to wish all old school players around the world, and their loved ones, joyful holidays and a triumphant new year.

Old school is a format for the winter holidays. This season is a time when we reflect on tradition. Before embarking on a new year, with its new challenges, we take time to entertain the timeless. The holidays are a time of joy, in which we recall the sights and sounds and smells and feelings of our wonderstuck childhoods, and share those experiences with a new generation. 

Our club in the Bay Area is just over a year old now, and it has been a good year. We built a great group of dedicated players--guys with a fun sense of humor and a love of the old cards. In 2017, we had over twenty fantastic meetups, with almost every deck imaginable represented. We are looking forward as a club to a new year with bigger blowouts, sillier decks and spicier new tech.

The Beasts of the Bay had over 20 meetups in 2017.

We are very fortunate to have our game and its community. This year, the Beasts decided to share some of that good fortune and collect toy donations for the season's less-fortunate children. Chicago's Lords of the Pit set a good example in 2016 by running a holiday toy drive and we wanted to follow that example. Charity, camaraderie and good will should be central to the old school ethos.

Beast of the Bay toy donations this season.


We hope we get a chance to sit down and flip orbs with as many of you as we can in 2018.

Peace, love and goodwill toward all,
The Guardian Beasts

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Going to the library

Sylvan Library is a card that many players love, one of them is fellow Flippin’ Orbs host Grant Casleton. So i decided to write a couple of words about my thoughts about the card.

First of all I’m going to say that I’m not a big fan of just putting in Sylvan in every deck that has green mana. Because if you don’t have a specific plan for it, I actually don’t think it’s good enough. Let’s start by breaking down what the card actually does.

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Card breakdown

It costs you two mana and it doesn’t do anything when you cast it, you first need to wait a whole turn until it does something. If it survives though, it will let you see two more cards that turn and it lets you choose the best out of three cards. That’s pretty good, but is it worth going down a card to do so? Also, Natural Selection does the same thing except it cost one mana less, you can cast it at instant speed and it also lets you reshuffle if you don’t like the top three cards.

After the first draw however, Sylvan Library let’s you see one new card every turn and choose that one instead of the two remaining cards so it effectively can remove two bad draws which absolutely can be nice. So both cards have upsides compared to the other.

But back to Sylvan Library. After the first turn you only see one new card every turn, so if you didn’t like the other two it’s exactly as drawing one card every turn and the Library doesn’t actually do anything anymore. So to recap, it lets you rearrange three cards and negate two bad draws for two mana. I’m not sure that is actually worth spending a card on most of the time.

So when could that effect be good enough to spend a card on? I would say it’s good in a combo deck, as those decks usually just want to find a couple of specific cards and do not care about card advantage as much. This is why the ability to “dig” two cards deeper is good in a deck like that.

And then one last thing, the card is horrible in multiples so a deck can’t contain too many of them.

Life as a resource

But Sylvan has one more ability that we haven't touched on yet and that is that you can pay 4 life to draw a card. So for 4 life the card replaces itself and you get the other effects for "free". Now we’re talking! But 4 life can be a lot in some matchups so it’s not always a choice you can make. Against some decks though, you can draw even more cards and that’s when Sylvan Library really shines. The question is if it's worth a slot in every green deck just because it can be good sometimes against some decks?

After reviewing the card like this I do not think of it as a card good enough to be worth a slot in most decks. If you are looking for a specific card or want to use it in the sideboard against control to outdraw them for the win, then maybe.

Every day I’m shuffling, shuffling...

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There are of course a couple of other situations where Sylvan Library can be good and that is in combination with other cards. In other formats like Legacy and Vintage Sylvan Library is a lot better than in old school and the reason for that is the fetch lands which lets you shuffle your library. Because if you can shuffle your library you can see three new cards after you’ve drawn the best out of three the turn before. Of course this principle is also true in old school, we just need to find other ways of shuffling the library. A few examples are Demonic Tutor, Timetwister, Transmute Artifact, Land Tax and Untamed Wilds. If you play a couple of them than Sylvan can absolutely be a good card.

Another cool combo is to pair it with Millstone. That way you can take the best card out of three, mill away the other two and then see three new cards next turn. So for two mana each turn you can dig through your library quite quick to look for the cards you need.

The last couple of cards that interacts with Sylvan in a really good way are Sindbad and Petra Sphinx. These cards let you draw additional cards each turn as long as you are lucky and just happens to have the right card on top of your library. But if you pair them with Sylvan Library you can skip the luck part as you will always know what's on top of your library. It will probably be a land if you have Sindbad in play.

Edit: No actually, one more thing. I did forget that Sylvan Library also of course combos very well with Mirror Universe as you can get back all the life. It's so good it even has it's own deck. Also other life gain cards like Ivory Tower and Diamond Valley is quite good with Sylvan as it then lets you convert the life into card draw.

Conclusion

That was some random thoughts from me and I probably missed something or said something  stupid, hehe. My meaning of this blog post wasn't to say Sylvan Library is bad and you should stop playing it, I just want you to think twice before putting it in a deck. What do you think about Sylvan Library and in what decks do you think it's great in? Use the comments below to share your decks and thought.

And to wrap this up, here are a couple of decks I've built that utilises Sylvan Library in different ways. One new Guardian Beast combo deck that I haven't published before.

Ivory Cup 2

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Game on!

So, this is a report that I should have written many many moons ago but as we say here in Sweden, “den som väntar på något gott väntar aldrig för länge”. And for you international readers the literal translation reads “one who waits for something good never waits to long”. Therefore, I now give you a short report on organising and playing the Ivory Cup 2017 in Stockholm earlier this summer.

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Let’s start with a short throwback and backstory. 93/94 may have originated in Sweden, but that was on the west coast, while Stockholm is on the east coast of the country. Historically Stockholm haven’t had as big of an old school community as the west of the country so last year’s Ivory Cup was actually the first dedicated 93/94 tournament being held in the capital. Then we had 29 players and considered it a big success, so of course we organised another Cup this year.

This year the tournament was held in the suburbs of Gubbängen in Stockholm as I was able to get an empty venue for free there. The “for free” part gave us an opportunity to give away some more expensive prices than we otherwise could have which was really nice. Other than that, we did as we usually do, buy a lot of nice beer and set up our own bar where they players could get anything from a simple lager to oak aged sour beer. One new thing was that we also invited the store Mindstage to come and set up a popup store with only old school cards.

The tournament got 35 players from all around the country and some special guests from Norway. That meant that we played six rounds of magic and then cut to top 8. As we are not much for giving out expensive prices to the winners we had a special price structure set up for giving away all the cool stuff we had. First of all, every player that had pre-paid the tournament got to pick a random card from a Legends lottery with only playable cards. The big prices where a Mirror Universe, Land’s Edge and a Sol’kanar the Swamp King. The fixed prices were an altered Alpha Ivory Cup for the winner and a green Duelist Abacus Life Counter still in the blister for second place. We also awarded 9th place with a signed Abomination on which Mark Tedin has written “9th place isn’t that bad”.

Then we did two different lotteries, one for all the players who didn’t top 8 and one for the ones who did. Kalle Nord donated the price for those who didn’t top 8 and that was a one of a kind test print of this year’s n00bcon playmat. The price in the top 8 lottery was a rare Black Lotus playmat with the original Black Lotus art.

And now to the top 8!

First of all, here are the decks and players who made it through the swiss:

 

When the dust settled after the though quarterfinals Jonas Lefvert, Paddan, Micke Thai and Kalle Nord where the ones left standing. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the time to keep track of the matches very well so I can’t give you any details of how they played out. But I can at least tell you the ones who made it to the finals which was Kalle Nord on “restricted cards+four drops” against Paddan with his 4c Deadguy Ale, two strange, but amazing brews. It really was the battle of the four drops but after quite a quick final Kalle Nord stood as this year’s champion. He was actually so happy that he took a bite of his own Black Lotus(!). Ok, maybe not a bite, but almost! He is one crazy dude.

This isn’t the most comprehensive of tournament reports but it was mostly written to have a reason to show you guys the nice decks people brought to this tournament. So, I hope you can forgive me for that.

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But at least I have one more thing to say about the tournament and that is the amazing match for last place! We always give out a price (a Rag Man) to the player who comes in last but as we had two people with the same points we let them battle it out. In the pot was the Rag Man for the looser and an invite to next year’s World Championship of 93/94, n00bcon. Now that is a match with high stakes! The match was between the Norton Fantenberg and Joakim Askenbäck and we are happy to say that Norton now is one of the amazing Stockholm Rag Men and Joakim Askenbäck will be able to compete with players from all around the world next year.

Here the plan was to have a small report on how I did and some words about my deck but I'll leave that deck tech for later.

Here are some more pictures from the event:

/Gordon

Brewing the CandleFactroy

I promised you guys a small post about my brew CandleFactory so here it is. I’ll go through the idea I had, my testing and what I found works and not.

(You can find the tournament report and introduction to the deck here.)

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So many fun interactions

The Idea

So, the idea for the deck is quite simple and it started with me liking Candelabra of Tawnos and buying a second one. The plan was to build something with Mana Flare but I began having fun with a stupid Lands deck instead. That didn’t work out and I put aside the Candelabras and instead focused on re-brewing my Field of Dreams deck (Kevin Costner.dec) and while brewing on that one I dug up my seldom used Copy Artifacts. That’s when it hit me, one of my favorite things to do with Copy Artifact is to copy an activated Mishra’s Factory (you then end up with an UN-activated Mishra’s Factory that is an Land Enchantment) and as Factory is good with Candle that might be something worth playing.

version 0.1

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The idea struck me about an hour before my friend Johan Råberg was going to come over for a couple of games so I just put together something rough to test against him in that hour. As Factories, Copy Artifacts and Candelabras is far from a complete deck I quickly decided to also put in my absolut favorite combo in the format Guardian Beast + Chaos Orb. And if you want that combo you should probably have some Transmute Artifact to be able to find the restricted Orb. And if you have Transmute and Guardian Beast you should also play some fun artifacts to get and protect so I added Icy Manipulator, Jayemdae Tome, Su-Chi, Triskelion and some junk I don’t remember. Of course I also added a couple of Maze of Ith as they are amazing with Candelabra. Add a bunch of mana and restricted cards and you have my first version.

After some goldfishing though I felt it was a little boring to use the Candelabra for only Factory and Library of Alexandria (now, that’s a thing of beauty!) so I actually added 2 Fireball and 1 Mana Flare just for the sake of it.

After Johan came and we played some magic the deck actually worked better than expected and I got to win against Johan both with Mana Flare, Candle+Factory, copying Su-Chi/Triskelions and Beast combo. The problem was however that it was super vulnerable to Armageddon so I wanted counterspells. That’s how the red package went out. It was mostly just cute anyway.

The week after

I didn’t think much about the deck after that until Johan once again came over for some games the day before the tournament Alphaspelen 3. Then I actually tried some new builds and decided to play it at the tournament. The reason however, was mostly because when he went home I went to sleep so I didn’t have the time to build a new deck. I actually didn’t even build a sideboard and just took 15 good cards right before leaving for the tournament.

But let’s rewind to the day before the tournament. As said before I had removed the red Mana Flare package for Couterspells and that was what I tried this evening to much success. The last thing I changed was to remove red completely and instead put in white. The reason I still had red was to have Red Elemental Blast against Energy Flux. But I decided white was better because of being able to also Disenchant Underworld Dreams, this is a slow deck after all.

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Which one should I choose?

tournament findings

As I’ve already done a tournament report that is not what I’m going to do here. Instead I’m going to write about a couple of findings from playing the deck.

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  1. Copying one of my three threats was something I did more than I expected and it was great having that choice to be able to win quickly when needed. This also protected the Guardian Beasts for a late game combo, as the opponent used removal on my other threats. Don’t know what the right number of threats are though.
  2. The Reconstruction is nice but sometimes it just get stuck in your hand. Don’t know if I should cut it or not (I probably should, but I love it!).
  3. Having more than one Candle in play can be amazing but the deck becomes real mana hungry when you want to activate a couple of Factories and also untap them a couple of times. I now own a third one but I think two is the right number with Transmute and Copy Artifact.
  4. Copying Icy Manipulator was fun and I quite often did it and won by using Icy as mana denial. I would love to play more Icy Manipulators to actually have this is one of the main plans.
  5. Two Guardian Beast seemed like the right number, sometimes they block small critters, sometimes they allow you to combo and sometimes they just protect stuff as they were designed to do.
  6. It’s always nice with a counterspell in hand to protect the combo or against Armageddon but as the deck mostly plays out like a tap out control deck I think three is enough.
  7. The split between Mana Vault and Fellwar Stone is something I’m not sure about. Mana Vault is amazing as we play a lot of 4-drops and with Transmute you can get rid of it as well. Therefore, I would like more. But as Factory and Candle is so mana intensive we also need a steady source of mana, like Fellwar. I’ll probably continue to play a split.

 

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sideboard findings

  1. I liked being able to board in more Beasts, maybe I even would want one more. Mostly against creature decks with Swords to Plowshares. Against those decks my creature plan is so much worse than theirs so it’s really good to be able to combo in the late game. It also gives us two more good blockers.

  2. The Disrupting Scepter was just there because I had no idea what to put in the sideboard.

  3. The Ivory Towers should probably be cut as we are a tap out control deck and want to play our cards instead of keeping them i our hand as you can do with Swords and Counterspell.

  4. A COP: Red should be a good inclusion because sometimes you can get in control but still have a long way to go before you can kill the opponent. If he or she plays burn that is a big problem with only three counterspells.

  5. Against control decks, and maybe also combo decks, one more counterspell would be nice to have access to in the sideboard.

  6. Sure, we play Guardian Beast but one City in a Bottle could be nice as a Transmute target against Arabian aggro and more.

 

 

Brewing

Actually I haven’t played much more with the deck so I don’t have many more findings to write about. I have however brewed and thought about it a bit to see what different directions you could go with the deck.

I’ve narrowed my ideas down to four main builds but keep in mind these are all just rough sketches.

CandleBeast

This is the version I played at the tournament. Skipping the red, skipping going aggro, and playing the Guardian Beast combo. There is however a couple of ways to build this as well. I’ve looked into playing the beast in the sideboard and The Abyss main, or the other way around. Mostly to have different game plans depending on the matchup. But I haven’t gotten this to work yet. But sure, with The Abyss main you become really good against creature decks and against control I think the combo is the best.

The Abyss Aggro

This build skips the beats and instead plays The Abyss, as it is amazing with Maze of Ith. It also adds a couple of more artifact creatures to go with the Abyss and it’s probably the best version. It is however also the most boring build as you more often than not loose track of the main idea, copying factories and using Candelabra. And you also loose the beast combo. In this build I've also decided to cut Counterspell and Transmute Artifact as there is no combo to tutor for or protect. Lastly I also switched to playing 4 Mana Vault instead of a split between Fellwars and Vaults as this deck wants to ramp out a creature quick and copy it.

The Abyss Control

You can do the same as in the above build but instead of more creatures add more Icy Manipulator to become more of a tap out control. In this build the copy factory plan is still valid and good. I like this quite a bit as it does everything I want, except comboing with Guardian Beast. I also added more books and cut a Transmute Artifact as I don’t need to find the combo.

Light the Candle 

This is the first version I tried, the one that splashes red for Mana Flare and a couple of Fireballs. I don’t think this will be even close to as good as the other builds but it’s absolutely the version that will give you the most varied game play, as you have so many different game plans in the same deck. It makes the Candles even better but without a Fireball in hand you don’t want to play Mana Flare so it’s a bit clunky. That’s why I only play one. The cards to cut is harder though. You want Counterspell to protect one of your two combos but there isn’t much else to cut. Maybe the artifact creatures, but then you really need to draw a factory for your Copy Artifacts to do anything.

That’s all my thoughts for now. I will continue to brew on this for a while and test different things, but I wanted to share my initial thoughts about the deck. I lean towards playing either the Icy control with The Abyss or a more opted version of what I played last time. The Abyss version is probably the one which is most true to my initial idea of copying Factory and hitting hard with Candelabra of Tawnos. But then again, the beast combo is just so fun.

/Gordon