When I first saw the announcement of the Old School World Cup in London, I knew I wanted to go. Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, but I didn’t let that prevent me from brewing. For those of you unaware, the format was Unified 93/94, meaning that you play as a three-people team, and all the decks have to consist of a legal 93/94 deck when put on top of one another.

What does this mean for deck building?

First, there’s way less power around, so games are slower, non-artifact mana acceleration (elves, birds) is more important, creatures and creature removal is better, land destruction or denial is better.

Second, there are way fewer Mishra’s Factories running around, making smaller creatures better.

Third, there are way less Disenchants, making combos and weird decks very much better. Less counterspells means the same.

Fourth, there are less multicolor decks, making Blood Moon less potent.

After thinking about the format for a while, I concluded there are some basic strategies to approach it. Level one is to split the colors, which means two 2-color decks and one monocolor one. Mono blue and mono green are underpowered, mono white gobbles up the excellent white removal spells which are more powerful in a two-color shell, so I firmly believe the mono-colored deck should be either black or red. This leaves a couple of options: either mono-black, GW Erhnam-Geddon, UR aggro, or mono-red, UW control, BG midrange. Or possibly UW control, mono-B, RG aggro. All of these are fine setups, I think. If you have UW control, I’d probably put all the moxen in that deck, as it makes the books that much better. Any green deck has access to accelerating creatures.

Level two is to maximize the good decks, very likely eliminating the mono-colored options. I’m particularly scared of playing mono-red against CoP: Red. There are good clusters of cards which have no home in the level 1 setup, like the prison shell of Winter Orb, Icy Manipulator, Copy Artifact, potentially Armageddon, maybe artifact creatures like Su-Chi and Triskelion and The Abyss, likely at least some number of Transmute Artifact. Not playing that is leaving a bunch of power unused, especially considering how powerful that would be against unpowered (or almost unpowered) decks. There’s also of course the temptation to start with an almost-fully powered The Deck and try to find two other decks to compliment that, as The Deck almost never should lose against suboptimal decks.

This leads to setups like The Deck, red aggro splashing blue for serendibs, psiblasts, and timetwister, and some black deck, likely monoblack. Or even the above, but with the third deck being Ub artifact prison control, a setup allowing for three blue decks and not a single green card being played other than Regrowth. This is what I’m leaning towards as the most powerful lineup, which I really would have liked to test. There’s also a case for Erhnam-Geddon, UR burn, and some Br underworld dreams combo deck which should be better than mono-black in a vacuum.

So what happened? Go check out Christopher Cooper’s excellent report from the event. My analysis turned out to be quite correct on a lower level. However, there were a lot more sweet stuff around that I’d have expected. Especially the German team’s lineup of 5c MirrorBall, URB Troll Disco, and Mono-Blue Stasis is a thing of pure madness. And they made it to the finals! With a 3-3 record in total, but still. Very sweet. Nobody got into my Ux artifact prison thing, though. I still think that is a very strong thing to be doing. The winners played Rx artifact aggro, GWu Erhnam-Geddon, UW control. Splitting Disenchants and Swords to Plowshares seems like madness to me, but apparently it worked. Hopefully I’ll see those guys at N00bCon this spring. Well played!