The golden domes of frustration

Library of alexandria old school mtg

But it's just a land?

“Keep.”

“Keep.”

Smiles all around.

“Good luck.” Or something in that manner.

You sit there with your opening hand, the game hasn’t really started yet but it starts to progress in your mind. “First I’ll play that card, then my opponent might do this or that … land, pass … land.”

But wait! It’s not an ordinary land no, no. It’s Library of Alexandria. So it goes … and maybe you will have your hopes up for that single Strip Mine in your deck on top of your library. But no luck. You could’ve drawn Tutor to go fetch it even but all this … hoping is just a big ol’ bag of shitty mistake to begin with.

The only three cards that most decks play that can destroy that nasty rebel base with the golden domes.

More smiles. My smile is a bit grumpy at this point though. Maybe we see a shrug from my opponent. A shrug that states that this is a game, and I might not like winning this way but it could very well have been you that did this to me. We have both agreed upon terms, time and place for this to go down. I keep looking at my opponent, trying to point out, without words how unfair it is. He keeps his gentle smile. This, it says, this here- my beautiful white marbled library with perfectly illustrated golden domes, domes that just point up at the rather nice weather that the people walking the stairs seem to be having. Not too hot, not too cold! This, this is a part of all the crap we’ve decided on. And sometimes it’s good crap, sometimes it’s bad crap. You know, as a kid, I have always dreamed of owning this little paper card, and here we are. We are in understanding about the situation we got going. And then you look down at your hand, your bleak future. You can’t keep up with two cards a turn when all you do is trading resources. But then you tell yourself that this is just a silly game, it doesn’t matter in the big scope of things. It’s all about spending time with some nice people and having a good time … But I’m not having a good time!

Sometimes, Magic is a bit like a game of Monopoly. It’s all laughs and shit- a great time with your family. Someone farts or make a joke on your expense and everyone points and you and they laugh. You just take it because it’s all good, we’re all good. But then the dice lands you on some crazy fucking expensive residential street that you don’t own. That’s when the farts and jokes ain’t funny no more. This is when shit gets real and you go Christian Bale ballistic and totally freak out.

“Hey! Calm down, it’s just a game. I will lend you the money.”

“I do not want your fucking money.”

“It’s all good. We’re just having a good time here.”

“Well, I AM NOT HAVING A GOOD TIME.

But this is fun to isn't it?

But this is fun to isn't it?

People that play magic just for the fun of it lies. Yes, yes they do. They might not care as much as the next person about losing though, and that’s all mighty fine. That person is the better person in all this, no doubt. But if we all go about this like we are playing fucking UNO or Ludo- well, hey we’re not five year olds. We are here to play a respectable card game. A game where every game is a new adventure! And ANYTHING can happen, almost. And look at the art man. Do that with your UNO.

So we play another game, and it’s all good.

“Land, go.”

“Land, Lotus, Mana Vault, Mox, Mind twist.”

SMILES AND SHRUGS.

/Seb Celia

Fun times for everyone! Or maybe not?

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

BotB-jackets.jpg

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