Tournament is a big word for a 4 person-online-event that wasn’t even structured to ensure a clear winner. But I’ve only (re)booted this format a few weeks ago, so I start small, and in fact gathering 4 players online ended up being quite difficult (the demographic so far isn’t exactly 15 years-old wankers teenagers with nothing but time on their hands, but more like men with jobs if not kids on their hands).

The tournament is structured such that we play online on webcam, preferably on appear.in, and since we’re four that gives us three match to play if everybody plays everybody. No tiebreakers, hopefully we don’t have more than two persons tied so we can either declare a winner or have two finalists.

Anyways, here’s how it went.

I’m in a bit of a pickle when playing in this format competitively. One of my main interest in this format is that there’s nothing to “netdeck”, that you’re on your own when it comes to deckbuilding, that not only the format is unsolved, it is uncharted territory (save for the facts that the cards are not new of course). But bringing innovation kind of goes against that goal. Also, I’ve tested the format quite a lot and have more than an unfair leg up. I guess ideally I shouldn’t play in tournaments for a while, waiting for some kind of metagame to be established, judging and streaming while providing assistance to those who want to try playing with the historical rules. But I don’t have that luxury this time as the fifth player I thought I had from the oldschool reddit was actually a player who had already enrolled under another pseudonym on facebook ! Learn from your mistakes, trial and errors, baby steps and all that, I guess 🙂 Now of course, this “pristine” state of the format cannot last long and in fact it ends now. No way to freeze a format if people are playing it. The idea isn’t to congeal a format but that if you like both oldschool and unsolved formats, you timewalk to another oldschool format once you’ve solved the current one. We’re far from that though and we’ll still be after posting the decklists from this tourney, nothing to worry about. Not only you can only find three archetypes here, but also they’re not optimized.

Anyways I chose a strong but sort of “self-evident” deck, a monoblack deck with only one non-obvious choice which I already talked about on this blog : Derelor.

The Rack I guess would be a more classical choice, and one that costs much less. But a) I want to play Bad Moon, probably because I don’t remember ever playing it and I’ve chosen a pure black version so I’ll press stubbornly on the black theme and twelve creatures wouldn’t justify playing it I think b) I like to have more than one way to use an early Dark Ritual for profit : a turn two 4/4 is quite excellent for this format.

The Orbs are for control decks, the piles aren’t necessarily for white weenies as I have the Glooms, but they’re quite versatile and I gave them precedence over terrors as I don’t fear much big creatures (they tend to get discarded before coming into play).

A few days before the event I find myself playing with Dave Firth Bard. I suddenly realize that since he won’t be able to play three matches on the tourney’s day, it’s actually a good idea to play our match right then (eureka!). You can click on the matches to watch the recorded streams (and find the matches I didn’t play too).

Match 1 vs. Dave Firth Bard – MonoBlack vs. UW Control

He seems to be aiming for UU+WW for Counterspells+Wrath of Gods & Serra Angels. Unfortunately with only Tundra as your multi-land it’s not doable in a reliable way and he doesn’t even have those. This ends up being the recurring theme of our matches, him having Wrathes in hand and not being able to play them before I make him discard them away. My deck beats his 4-0, though I only streamed 2 of those. The “funny” part : if this were a serious, sanctioned and big event, people in the twitch chat would have screamed for my banishment. In game one I have a Derelor in play and manage to mangle the math and announce a Mind Twist for five when really I wanted to float a sneaky black mana since I knew his only way out of it was a power sink for three, and that in that case I’d need to have two black available to cast my Dark Ritual. I generally like Derelor, but when Dark Ritual costs two, much less so, also it is surprising how hard it is to remember its impediment. Things go even wronger when -it went too fast at the time for me to realize- Dave actually discards 6 cards, probably not hearing well my “five” (which should have been a 4!) and forgetting about Derelor’s (dis)ability -and those included a Braingeyser ! I only thought of it later and checked on the recorded stream afterwards. I’d feel quite bad and would offer a rematch, but we did play two more games which brought the tally to 4-0 so we basically did that already. Game two I play two consecutive Derelors who get countered and exiled only to topdeck a third Derelor the following turn ! This deck is indeed stubborn. 1-0

Finally it is tournament day and games will be played in the allocated time ! I “assist” Dave and Bjorn in their match, but really you can see that playing with the old rules isn’t that hard as I’m mostly idling around letting the players play, rarely having to inform the players of a potential rule interaction with a card (I already knew Bjorn’s deck as he had posted it on twitter and had offered a few suggestions so there was no benefit for me to scoot -not that people seemed to care anyways).

Match 2 vs. Didier de Kall – MonoBlack vs. MonoBlack

The first game against Didier is the biggest kill I ever got in Magic. I killed Didier so bad, he lost all colors. And then he disappeared ! Don’t believe me ? Look.



Game 2 is not particularly nicer to Didier since not only does he mulligan to five, I also have the ideal turn 1 Sol Ring, turn 2 Dark Ritual into Mind Twist for .. 5. And that was pretty much it. 5 minutes top of gaming after a 20 minutes break because Didier’s computer had to recover from my Drain Life for 11 🙂 2-0

Match 3 vs. Bjørn Einar Bjartnes – MonoBlack vs. Goblins

I know it’s not an easy matchup for my deck and things don’t start too well for me. He’s won the die roll and while I keep, it’s not an easy keep as I’m struggling on the mana front. Anyways I’m logically overrun. Game 2 I’m the lucky one with two good Hymn to Touraches (also a good example of why Black Vise isn’t that big of a deal). Game three is the more balanced game, though I don’t play around Bjorn’s Safe Haven correctly. Firstly because I should have killed the Orcish Artillery when he didn’t have the mana to put it in the haven, secondly because I don’t look at the card text, convinced of knowing it. Safe Haven is in fact quite safe, as it is played as an interrupt (we play this game with the historical rules), but we both ignore that and I end up using two cards to finally get rid of the Artillery. Then I played not too well and he topdecks the critical Ball Lightning right in time to finish me.

Despite the mistakes on both sides, great match as it’s very close, and the goblin deck puts you on the edge quite fast especially considering that there’s always the threat of a big grenade or Ball Lightning play to finish things off. 2-1

At the end the day Dave wasn’t able to play a second match so we had Bjørn and I tied at 2-1, with Dave at 1-1 and Didier at 0-2 still having their match to play. They didn’t manage to play it in the two additional weeks I gave them so I considered that match a draw and took a big bold mental note not to ever put myself in that position again : I just should have handed the unavailable player a loss on the spot, simply like it happens in every tourney. I thought having things happening online would give enough margin of maneuver, but that was not to be in that case..

Since Bjørn and I were tied but he had already beaten me, here’s your first Original Type II winner, Bjørn Einar Bjartnes from Oslo !

My impressions from the tournament are :

1) on the strategical side of things, despite the limited number of games, the results do replicate my findings in exploring the format. Control is a bad matchup for goblins, goblins a difficult one for BB which is a bad one for control. That does not mean that this is your rock-paper-scissor for t2t1st.

2) an online webcam event doesn’t always make sense. People aren’t in the same room unless they play against one another, won’t cross ways, can’t trade cards etc. As for streaming it, there’s obviously not much of an audience so far, and they who want to watch those games can suscribe to my youtube channel and may then decide to be informed by email whenever some oldschool games get streamed or uploaded there (although there’s no absolute guarantee that I’d be available to stream each and every game, of course). So I don’t know where to go from there but I ‘m not sure the way forward is the traditional tournament structure. We’re too early in the format’s existence, too small for that to go smoothly. Online games can be so convenient. If you remove the time constraint -within reason- people should be able to find themselves and then report their match result.

The question then is : why do tournaments at all ? What do you think ? Shouldn’t we just do a league for now, with the top player being the one with the highest winning percentage ? (of course those aren’t exclusive) EDIT ; since draw exist, it would have to be average points per match.