Video: Playing Field of Dreams

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the deck Field of Dreams. It’s one of my favorites and I always come back to playing it every now and then. Therefore, I tried making some videos for those of you who wants to see how it plays. So here we have a couple of videos (completely unedited as I didn’t have the time) where I play against local player Johan Råberg and his Eureka and UWB Aggro decks.

If I may say so myself the best game is absolutely game 4 against Eureka which took so long we needed to split it in two.

Here are the list I played:

All the streams from the Fishliver Oil Cup!

Fishliveroilcup stream

So last weekend Gordon flew to Italy to do some streaming, to be exact a whoopin’ 3 streams in 3 days(!). Now, the result didn’t really end up like that, due to… some “small” internet issues. But we did manage to stream at least the swiss from both the main event and the first ever European Championship in Premodern. The main event is split into two different videos due to a blackout (yep, everything is stable over there hehe) in the middle of the tournament. The players did however continue their games during the blackout thanks to the flashlights in people’s phones. That was amazing to see!


but without further ado, here are the matches that were caught on camera!

Fishliver Oil Cup Main Event - Part 1

Fishliver Oil Cup Main Event - Part 2

Fishliver Oil Cup European Championship in Premodern

Fishliver Oil Cup - 3 days & 3 streams!

Fishliveroilcup stream

Hi all!

Here are some amazing news! At least we think so!

One of the worlds biggest and most amazing old school events is the Fishliver Oil Cup and as last year, Wak-Wak will be there to set up a stream. That means that if your aren’t lucky enough to be able to attend you will at least be able to tune in and watch some Juzams being cast on Twitch.

The event features three different very special tournaments and the plan is to stream them all. Also, at least two of the three will have full time commentary! Isn’t that great?

The schedule is as follows:

October 26th - Columbus Friday Night

This tournament will probably be the largest old school tournament with Eternal Central rules ever organized in Europe, taking the record from last years event. Right now there are 88 players registered, and that is also the limit of the event that will be held in the worlds oldest lighthouse(!), talk about a special venue.

The stream will start at around 5pm CET and probably not have a commentator.

October 27th - The Main Event

The main event will be played with Italian rules in Swedish style, and if we are lucky this could become the worlds biggest old school tournament ever(!). Just because of this our own Gordon will do commentary instead of playing and he will probably become drunker and drunker through the event for that real old school feel.

The stream will start at around 1pm CET.

October 28th - European Premodern Championship

The last tournament of the weekend will be the first European Premodern Championship, which also will be the biggest Premodern tournament held to date. To celebrate this we have gotten the founding father of Premodern, Martin Berlin, to do commentary throughout the event!

The stream will start around 11am CET.

You can tune in to watch the streams at Twitch.tv/wakwakmtg and please see the above times as approximate hehe.

Any questions, or suggestions for the stream? Just leave a comment!

Sindbad and the story about the Wak-Wak tree

An original art by Jesper Holm

One day Sindbad met a thin old man in the corner of a street that he usually found empty. As he thought that was kind of strange he walked up to the man and asked him who he was. The old man started to tell Sindbad the story about his life as an explorer and how he now was too old to continue on the adventure of his life. When Sindbad asked him what that was the old man started to tell an unbelievable story about an island far, far away. The island was called Wak-Wak and had always been the old man’s goal as it was said that the island had a very special tree that could grant unlimited power to the one who plucked its fruit. The sad part was that the man actually had a pretty good idea on where this island was, he was just too old to go there.

The story intrigued the young Sindbad so much so he decided to find the island and its fruit, for the man (and himself of course). He packed his equipment, gathered his crew and set sail.

Exactly where to, he did not know, but he was sure he would find the island if he just followed the old man’s description. After 3 years at sea and many adventures we can tell at another time Sindbad almost gave up on finding the peculiar fruit of the island of Wak-Wak. He started to think that the old man had lied to him but that is when an island matching the old man’s descriptions suddenly emerged over the horizon.

Now Sindbad was more excited than ever, what could this peculiar fruit be? How could it grant you power? He made it to shore and started to search the island for the tree. It didn’t take long at all until Sindbad found a mysterious place with no life at all, except for one single tree in the middle of the dead field. He found the barren ground very strange as there was no sign of what could deprive the otherwise lively land of life. He was however sure, that was the tree and he was going to pick its fruit. One thing was strange though, the tree just stood there in the open, why hadn’t anyone else already picked it?

Soon Sindbad would get his answer as he started to approach the tree. Because suddenly a fruit dropped from the tree. The fruit started to spin around as it left its tree branch and Sindbad could see a grinning smile on it as it fell. It then hit the ground with an ear deafening bang that made the earth shake so violently that Sindbad fell to the ground. When he stood up again and looked at where the fruit had landed a big chunk of the ground was missing and all that was left was a smoldering crater.

This was when Sindbad realized it, the peculiar fruit of the Wak-Wak tree was actually the origin of the mythical Chaos Orb.


And with that story you know how Wak-Wak and Flippin’ Orbs are related and why our new "logo" looks the way it does.

Right now, Gordon is looking into where he can order some nice-looking pins with this new amazing looking orb fruit on. Because the plan is to send a Flippin’ Wak-Wak Orbs pin to everyone that supports our site and podcast in one way or another. If you like the pin and want to be part of the ones who will get one of the first batch made the easiest way is to support us by becoming a Patreon.  But there are of course many other ways you can support us as well, for example of course Bonnie Myrbacka will get one as he has helped us by editing Flippin’ Orbs and Magnus “Mg” De Laval for letting us stream n00bcon X.

The original is a painting made by the super talented Jesper Holm and the plan is to give it away to a supporter in the future, so if you like it, stay tuned!

And one last thing, would anyone want a playmat with this motif?

Playmat?

Gordon's Old School Archetype Cube

A couple of cards in the cube... and one Lord of the Pit, don't know why he is there.

A while back we had a tournament in Stockholm that was a bit special. The tournament was an invitational where all players that had placed last in an earlier tournament were invited, the Stockholm Rag Men.

The price for the tournament was an invite for this years n00bcon and as that was a pretty sought-after price I was afraid that some players may become to competitive for my liking. Therefore, I decided that we would do a cube draft, that way people wouldn’t build UR Counterburn, The Deck and more just to compete. Then there was the question of how to build the cube as I didn’t want it to be just another Old School Cube, we already have one of those in Stockholm.

Then I came up with the idea idea of an archetype cube. What I mean with an archetype cube is a cube built on old school deck archetypes where you not only draft the best cards, but instead need to try to draft an existing deck archetype in the format. Decks like Sligh, PowerMonolith, Eureka, White Weenie and more.

As the old school card pool is quite small this wasn't possible if you did it in the standard highlander way of building a cube. It's pretty hard to build PowerMonolith in a cube with only one Power Artifact and one Basalt Monolith.

Building the cube

So I started by listing a bunch of archetypes I wanted to support and then added the important cards for those archetypes. The next step was then to change at least some of the cards to less played alternatives. Like changing a Counterspell to a Power Sink, and things like that.

Then I cut some of the archetypes that used too many narrow cards, one example is Atog, that needs a lot of cheap artifacts to work.

Last but not least, I tried to trim and correct the specific numbers of each card. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to have 4 of each dual to make it easy to splash and play multiple colors. I also wanted to have 4 of each widely played staple as their would probably be more than one player at the table who wanted to draft those. A couple of examples are cards like Lightning Bolt, Swords to Plowshares and Serendib Efreet. Then we had cards like Millstone, that isn't a staple but can be played in very many decks. It is a great wincon for control decks, it is a must in Field of Dreams combo and Sylvan Library players would probably also want one. Therefore I needed more of them than I first thought.

The plan after that was to have 3 of each card that was important for an archetype, and 2 of each good card that neither was super important or a staple. The cards that only got one copy each were the fun offs, cards that don't really see much constructed plan but are cool and fun old school cards that should be in the cube. A few examples are Dragon Whelp, Royal Assassin, and Desert Twister.

I also decided to only have one of all the restricted cards, except for Chaos Orb. The reason for that one in particular was that some decks need answers to things like Moat, and also because it probably is the most old school card there is. Also, as Guardian Beast is in the cube I wanted it to be possible for people to get that combo.

And talking about Moat, there are some evil cards like that one, that many decks almost can't beat. So I decided to only have one of each in the cube. For example, you will only find one The Abyss and one Ali from Cairo.

This was the first plan at least, but it didn't really end up like that after I started to cut down the cube to 360 cards. After the cuts there weren't many cards that had 4 copies of them in the cube. I just didn't have room. The staples that got 4 copies each were Counterspell, Swords to Plowshares, Disenchant, Birds of Paradise, Sinkhole, Lightning Bolt and Fellwar Stone. I also needed to keep 4 copies of Savannah Lions and White Knight as white just has to few good creatures without Fallen Empires. 

The archetypes that I ended up supporting in the cube were the following: 

  1. Field of Dreams Combo
  2. Reanimator
  3. Eureka
  4. UR Aggro
  5. Sligh
  6. White Weenie
  7. Green Ramp
  8. Machine Head
  9. Ponza
  10. Guardian Beast/Transmute Toolbox
  11. Parfait
  12. Trick Deck (Underworld Dreams)
  13. Zoo/Erhnam Burn'em
  14. UG Berserk
  15. UW Control
  16. Artifact Aggro
  17. PowerMonolith
  18. CandleFlare
  19. Deadguy Ale
  20. Erhnamgeddon

You can find the cube list here. That is how it was at the time for the tournament.

How it played out

I wont write a tournament report but here are at least some pictures from the gathering and also 7/8 of the decks that were drafted. I'm pretty happy with the turnout and think the cube worked as I wanted with clear archetypes like Zoo, White Weenie, Ponza and Field of Dreams/CandleFlare (yes, that was mine) being played. 

The decks

Some pictures from the tournament

 

 

So, that is the story about the first version of the cube and how the first draft ended up. There are probably a lot of things that should be changed, and I have some ideas already, but I will keep them for myself for future blog post. Except for a couple of things: 

  1. TaxEdge probably should be an archetype in the cube.
  2. Some combo cards may need to be cut to 2 instead of 3.
  3. Maybe 4 Strip Mines, 4 Sinkholes and 3 Ice Storms are a bit borring according to some people (you can see what Seb thinks about that in the pictures hehe).

 

Do you have any ideas or suggestions for the cube, or just want to say what you think about it, please comment below.

Here is a link to the cube as it was for the tournament.

And if you want to do a test draft, you can do it here.