Ancient April 21st

After our Oldschool event in februari, it was time for some Ancient action again. Some of the people from the Oldschool group Knights of Thorn showed up to see how Ancient compares to Oldschool and from what I heard to also liked this format. It always nice to have some crossover between the groups :)

Some of the action during the day:

First turn Serra with a lotus. Nice!

Oh yes, this format has THAT card..  Moxen are just a little les awesome in Ancient.

Sometimes, life just isn't fair.. al that against just one lonely plateauu..

Well, that's an unusual use of a control magic :)

Monkey, May I? deck (which eventually won the day) against black pox

Some of the other plays of the day:

In the end, the winning deck was the classic monkey, may I deck which was somewhat succesful in the 1996 era for a short time. Usually we don't publish full decklists here to keep some of the mystery, but since this deck can be found on the net with a little effort, here's the decklist:

Mario Robaina's Monkey May I deck, version as played by Bjorn in this Ancient

There is something to be said for this deck in Oldschool too, but then it would miss what I experienced are pretty key cards: the merchant scrolls. I've used them for the Ancestral Recall mostly, of course, but also to get the mana drain or a psionic blast at some moments where I really needed them. I really think this deck would me much less effective without them.

Draconian Cylix I: Oldschool in Eindhoven

We had been talking about having another oldschool/ancient event for some time, and decided to go for an Oldschool event to see if other oldschool players would join. Ever since we first played oldschool with the ancient group, we've been using the French rules, so the event would be run by those rules. I myself have always cared more for playing with the feel of an early magic game than from what set the cards are actually from, so I don't really care if your Serra Angel is from Alpha or revised, as long as it looks like the original thing. 

In my chats with others about the event, I've found that the other oldschool players I've met either fall into one of two categories. One really wants to stick to the old cards, so they only want to play with and against cards that are old, so no revised cards for them. Some seem to have very strong feelings about this :) The other group just wants to play the game like in the old days and don't really mind if someone plays newer cards. I have played with people who have a "Swedisch" legal deck who told me that they really didn't mind playing against newer cards because it was all about the game for them. Anyway, I would like as many people as possible having access to the format and Arno, who organizes these events with me, feels the same way, so the French rules it was. We posted the event in some fora and a chatgroup, and then I needed to make a deck. I wanted to test a deck beforehand to see if would not get completely crushed, but in the end there was not a lot of testing. A played a couple games against my friend Peter, got annihilated about half of the time by his R/G/U Agro deck, changed two cards in my deck, and that was it. So I didn't have that much confidence I would but up a decent fight, but decided to try it anyway. 

I usually don't play decks with a lot of black, but I wanted to play with the 3 Juzam Djinns I have who rarely got out of the binder (though they had seen some action when I lent them out to someone for the last Knights of Thorn event and he won with them), so I went for it. Because black is  horrible against enchantments and artifacts and I hate the feeling of not being able to do anything, I mixed in some white for disenchants and swords to playshares, and decided to play Serra Angel because I felt it would give me some defence against pro-black creatures or a COP black, should it stay in play. I added armageddon to get rid of libraries, islands of wakwak and mazes. And because I figured people would not expect it so armageddon might win me a game or two. That did not happen, by the way. Because I had some cities of Brass in the deck I felt 2 blue cards should work, so I finished off the decklist with time walk and ancestral recall and added two underground seas. Not 4, because of blood moon. I wanted enough basic lands in the deck. And then played the before mentioned games against Peter and felt the deck was reasonably good, but not top score material. Since I don't really mind losing as long as I put up a fight, I went for it. 

We had about 20 interested people, 15 would come, and 13 showed up in the end. I usually wake up Peter by calling him before picking him up, but somehow could not reach him the morning of the tournament, so I went without him.  I heard afterwards he had accidentally left his phone while visiting his parents the day before, so he overslept because I couldn't wake him. 

The night before I had tried to enter the people that had mailed me with their entry into Wizards Event reporter, but the latest update of that horrible piece of crap software had made that impossible. I actually couldn't enter any new players. I mean, really, did no one test that software before releasing it? Anyway, I found a lot of rants about Event Reporter on the internet, and one guy on Reddit said he used a web app to replace WER. I decided to give it a go and it worked really well. It is very simple and there are no undo options so you have to be careful while using it, but it performed nicely. You can find it at https://tiebreaker.kraken.at/ in case you're interested. 

After filling in the players, I made the first round of pairings and found the program had very helpfully given me a bye, which gave me some time to buy some cards to give away for the top 4 and talk to the store owner about future oldschool events. After the first round had ended and I had spotted a "the deck" player from Belgium who seemed to play it very well, I figured he would probably win the day. I've played the deck once (the original decklist from '94) on the Ancient series and it won all it's matches. It is just so good in the hands of a played who knows how to play it well. 

In the second round I got paired against a mono black deck that had won it's previous match 2-0. It turned out that me having Swords to plowshares as creature elimination against his mostly unusable terrors was key to winning the game. I won this one 2-0.

In round 3 I played against a Zoo, which is usually bad news because my hippies, orders (French rules allow playing FE) and mishra's factories are not that happy with the bolts and chain lightnings. I expected to have a hard time with this deck. As expected, my hippie and order were blasted off the table. Fortunately I got out a Djinn in one game and a Vampire in another and the both managed to stay in play. In one of the games I stripmined an early taiga to keep his kird apes small, after which he did not draw another forest for a couple of turns. I think it would not have mattered in the end, but the result would have been a lot closer. Also, me sideboarding in a COP red did not help him very much, so I managed to pull of another 2-0. 

By now, I was feeling pretty good about my black/white creation, it had done better than I expected after the couple of games against Peter's two decks. But, as I had expected, I was then paired against Johan, who had come from Belgium with a very solid the deck and I pretty much expected to lose that game, or at least have a very hard time winning. To my advantage, I have played the deck and the keeper in 1995-1996 a lot in vintage tournaments, so though it was a long time ago, I still understand how the deck works pretty well.  Maybe that would give me some advantage during play. That did not matter the first game though.

The first game there was some pretty  broken opening from his side, playing Tundra, Mox emerald, time walk, ancestral recall, black lotus and mind twisting me in the first two turns. I managed to get out an order, which started to eat away at his life. Then I managed to keep a hypnotic specter for a couple of turns before it got swords to plowshared. Then he drew braingeyser, and it went downhill from there. He got 7 new cards, activated library of Alexandria and then bolted my order. He was at 4 life, so decided not to scoop and keep trying, even though in the next couple of turns I got mind twisted again, and Johan played braingeyser again. I got in a couple of creatures, but they were destroyed. I tried eating away at his life with a mishra's factory, but that did not work either. I just could not keep up against the massive card advantage. 0-1. 

The second game I did better, getting a second turn hymn to tourach, and a hypnotic specter, followed up by an order. He destroyed some of my creatures, but new ones just kept coming. 1-1. 

In the last game, I got an early ancestral recall and I kept pulling cards with hymn and specter. He put up a serra as defence, but I managed to swords to plowshare that with my second Stp. Without blockers and an order who did 2 or 3 damage every turn, it ended in 2-1. 

So, time for a top 4! In the top 4 there were 2 the deck variants, played by Simon and Johan. Marco had earned his spot with a U/R infinite monolith deck with extra mana vaults. And me, playing the only black deck in the top4, even though there were 4 more mostly black decks around. 

The top 4 showdown

The software paired me against Marco first, so Johan and Simon would be fighting over who had the best "the deck" variant of the day. Marco opened with Mishra's workshop, basalt monolith. I had to beat this fast, or lose quickly. Fortune had brought me a mox Jet and a Dark ritual, so I opened with land, mox, ritual, Juzam Djinn. Marco played another basalt monolith and a volcanic island. The Juzam did 5 damage to Marco and one to me, after which I played an order of Leitbur and passed the turn. Marco played a mountain and a sol ring. I attacked a with the Juzam and the order for 8, and played mishra's factory. Marco played wheel of fortune, two extra mana vaults and could not get to 17 damage, although it was close. The next turn I attacked again. 1-0.

The next game opened with a broken opening from my side. I played underground sea, black lotus, dark ritual, sacked to lotus for blue and played ancestral recall and mind twisted Marco for 4. After that I played a mishra's factory and started beating. I had sideboarded in an extra disenchant and 2 drain life, and after two turns a drew the disenchant. Not a lot of creatures though, but I did have a mishra's factory and had drawn chaos orb in the meantime. Which I had to use quickly because Marco had gotten a blood moon out and I had no basic lands. My orb flipping is pretty bad because I never practise it and I had missed a full flip against Johan earlier. 

Orb flipping action pic! Thanks to Arno.

But I did manage to hit the blood moon and it went away quickly. When Marco finally got his combo, I had drawn a scrublands and disenchanted the monolith before the power artifact could land. 2-0. 

the deck vs the deck showdown

  So, it would all come down to my W/B against The deck in the finals. Johan had won the match-up of the decks, and I would play the toughest of my match-ups of the day again. 

The Finals

Johan got an early library and timewalk, and bolted away  my order. This was not looking good. I got out a Sengir Vampire with dark ritual, figuring out I would play my Juzam djinn the turn after that. Johan then mind twisted me, and swords to plowshared the Vampire after that. He got out a Sylvan Library, and drew some extra cards. I had not drawn a lot or threats, but figured I would play the armageddon i had drawn, which would shut down his library of Alexandria and maybe cripple him long enough for me to get out another cheap creature and win. I played armageddon, it got through and played the scrublands I had kept. Johan proceded to play lots of mana artifacts and lands, while I drew mostly expensive creatures. And then Johan strip mined my land, the turn before I drew my second land. That pretty much sealed game 1. 

The next games I sided in underworld dreams and an extra disenchant.

The second game I did better, with an early hymn, followed up by and order and an hypnotic specter. There were bolts and swords to plowshares, but not enough to keep up. 1-1.  

So, it would come down to the third game. I our previous  match in the swiss, Johan had strip mined my first land, gambling that maybe would end up in me being mana screwed. That did not do much then, but I still had that situation in my head when I looked at my opening hand in game 3. I played my basic swamp first, in stead of my scrublands or library of Alexandria, to see what would happen. He strip mined it. The gamble had worked, I then continued with the library, got up to 7 and got it working. Two turns after that I had my 2 black mana, and played hymn after he had played a mishra's factory. Best hymn of the day:

maybe the best hymn ever..

Turns out he had kept a hand with two colorless lands, figuring he would draw a U land quickly enough before my deck got out of hand. My deck got to the hymn quicker. After that I played several turns without drawing any creatures. He figured he could get me without my creatures, but I swords to plowshared his Serra Angel and finally drew some of my big hitters.

That, with the extra 5 (or 6) cards I drew with the library, finished it in my favor. 2-1. I managed to end first after two matches against a good version of the deck with a good player behind it. It was a tough match, but my deck followed trough after my gamble with the first turn swamp had worked out. I'm not sure how it would have ended without that. I won the Urza's chalice we had picked for the winners cup (after we came to the conclusion that none of us, including the Gameforce shop we were in, had the Draconian Cylix we had wanted to use for first prize) and the UL serra Angel. 

The winning deck:

We always like to take some pictures during the day, so here they are. I would like to start with some of the more momentous situations.

First off, kudo's to Steven, who showed up with a really cool reanimator deck:

 
He managed to get Nicol Bolas into play several times that way. I enjoyed watching it being played very much, although some of his opponents where less enthousiastic when I enthusiastically called out Nicol Bolas would come into play :P

 Just kidding, everything went in good spirits, the entire day. Next off, kudo's to some guys who played card you don't see every day. 

Marco, who slowed my hippy down:

 

 And Arno, who offed Johan's Serra Angel in a way I had not seen before:

And oh, by the way, he also played this:

Other oldschool moments during the day:

Thanks to everyone who showed up to play! Everyone I played was really nice and the entire tournament was in good spirits. Most people left before the finals were over, but did let us know that they had enjoyed themselves so we'll be doing this again in the near future. Maybe the next time, I will actually show up with a deck that has been tested. Well, maybe not. It worked out fine this time :)

Ancient on december the 16th

We had to reschedule our latest Ancient event of the year, due to the gathering of the knights of the thorn, which was planned on the same day we had originally planned our ancient gathering and some of our players would like to attend the other event as well. To not make them choose, we rescheduled to the 16th. That was a bit too close to Christmas for some, so the gathering was a little smaller than intended, but it was fun none the less. 

Because this was the last time we could play mirage (we decided to end the mirage experiment by the end of the year because most in the core player group think it does not add that much to the gameplay), I decided to go pretty much all in on mirage, making the core of my deck out of mirage cards. When you think about it, you probably don't think there are that many interesting cards in mirage. The 93/94 players all shouted: "fetch lands!!" so I decided to give that a try at first, even though I haven't been a real fan of the mirage fetches in anything resembling a serious deck. I went with a UWG deck with some brainstorms to make the fetchlands worthwhile. After being utterly crushed (I think it was about 10-2 in playtesting) by Peters deck with blood moons in it, I was even less convinced. Back to the drawing board. 

So, fetch simply to slow for this format. Even when I didn't get crushed by the blood moon, most of the time the fact they end up in play tapped makes them pretty bad in this format. There are some pretty fast decks out there, and winter orb is also played pretty regularly. So what would I play that is very mirage?

I made a list of cards I had played in serious decks long, long ago and had some fond feelings about:

Dwarven miner
Tutors
Frenetic Efreet
Diamonds
Foratog (okay, this was not in a serious deck, but I tried :))
Forsaken wastes
Forbidden Crypt
Goblin tinkerer
Granger Guildmage
Hall of Gemstone
Hammer of Bogardan
Infernal Contract
Jolraels centaur
Maro
Mist Dragon
Phyrexian Dreadnaught
Political Trickery
Preferred selection
Rampant growth
Sacred mesa
Savage twister
Shallow grave
Sirocco
Skulking ghost
Spirit of the night
Suqata firewalker
Tombstone stairwell
Waiting in the weeds
Wall of roots
Wildfire emissary

I decided I wanted to play frenetic efreet, because I still have some good feelings about a nationals qualifier I ended up winning because of the efreet. It has a 50% chance of surviving a creature elimination spell and boy, did it defy statistics that day. I remember one game in which my opponent wasted 3 terrors on the efreet, and it still lived. My opponent was going almost insane when he didn't kill it with the 3rd one :) I ended up winning that game. So, the efreet it was. What else? Not wanting to be crushed by a blood moon again, I decided to go 2 color this time. So, blue and red it was. I added Wildfire emissary, which cannot be killed by bolt or swords to plowshares  and went from there. A couple of dwarven minders, some incinerates (technically bolts would be better most of the time, but I wanted to play mirage, so maybe I would get lucky and play a troll disco. I didn't, by the way, but who cares :)) a tutor, a political trickery (would be great if I got to take a library with that, which I didn't. But i did get a kjeldoran outpost, which was also nice) and a hammer of bogarden. And a mist dragon and a dream cache. Not the best of cards, but not so bad I did not want to add them to this mirage nostalgia. The dragon and the efreets would do well with disks, so I added those and ended up with this:

with mirage mountains and islands, of course. And no moxen, as they would not combine well with the disks. A nice core of mirage cards, and hopefully not so bad that it would fail miserably. Yes, I could have made a better deck in the format, but saying goodbye to mirage in a good way was worth something.

So how did it play out? Well, I got to destroy somem non-basic lands with my miners, phasing out my efreets when some of my opponents wanted to kill them and played some dream caches, which weren't too bad for the games I was in. I never played the mist dragon (the format is a bit too fast for that) or got to get my hammer from the graveyard. But I did tutor for a anarchy and made some problems for Arno's mono white deck with the wildfire efreets, so all in all it was a worthwhile goodbye to mirage. Oh, I didn't win, of course. The deck does seem to have a knack for drawing (a lot) more mountains than islands, even though there are 4 islands more in the deck. One game, I had all of my mountains, but none of my islands :) And it does not do well against first turn big creatures, as it turnes out. Marco's first turn Serendib efreet ended up killing me because he put an unstable mutation on it before I could get to enough lands to fireball it, so I ended up just above average. Not a bad performance for a deck like this, I think. As always, the games where in good spirits with nice people. Thanks for all who came!

Here's some pictures of the day:

 something my deck also was not very good against: fairies with protection from red.. :)

When it's not so bad ifhyppies attack you :)

Ancient Constructed on october 2nd

After our sidestep with 93/94, it was time for a normal ancient constructed event, which we played a couple of weeks ago. As always, I play a different deck every time and I love the inspiration on the internet now that oldschool has become more popular. I went with an Arboria/Millstone deck. This had worked somewhat during a couple of playtest rounds. It wasn´t very good, but it was better than the Enchantress I had tried a couple of months back, and anyway, I don´t play Ancient to win anyway. I just like to feel of gameplay and the people we play with. 

Because we´ve been contemplating removing Mirage from the sets you can play to get back to the original idea of Ancient, Arno decided to grasp this last chance to play with his elephant graveyards. 

In the game above I managed to get out a moat, but most of the games that was disenchanted along with the Arboria. Or tranquility took care of them both, and that happened multiple times. Maybe I should run counterspells next time. 

Peter played a horrible U/B deck running main deck glooms and dystopia´s with sleight of mind. And it was horrible against most of the decks played, but not against the mono black deck Roy had brought. Roy is building this deck to play other oldschool formats, and it worked very well. He ended up winning this day. 

One of the times I actually managed to keep an enchantment in play against a W/G deck, which is quite hard. And there is always something really satisfying about playing an avoid fate. I lost the match anyway, but I had this nice moment :)

And there you thought playing dark ritual, hippy was a powerful play. And then your opponent does this :)

Banding was used several times, but unfortunately it did not do much against the black decks. 

The hippies that were played this day were not very lucky. Here an island of wakwak is played immediately after the hippie. 

Racks! sure, why not? We just don´t see them that often. 

Here I actually have the combo in play as it was intended. I did wonder why I had bought 2 AQ millstones for this deck though, because the only one I kept getting was the revised one.. 

I noticed that the arboria deck is really vulnerable, because I lost every match. If it wasn´t against disenchants or tranquilities, it was against disks, glooms, dystopias or something else. Anyway, the matches were in a good atmosphere as always, and we had a lot of fun. I must admit it would have been nice to win one match, but it was not meant to be. Which I figured when I faced two glooms and a dystopia by turn 6 against Peter :) Oh well, maybe I´ll try to improve on this idea. It did not seem that bad to begin with and I like the idea. 

Trying the Enchantress in Ancient

I wrote this article somewhere during the summer, but I never got around to writing the last paragraph. Now that the weather is not nice enough to go outside, I´ve finished it so here goes:

I've always been a fan of the Enchantress. Right up to this day, It's been one of my pet decks, along with a mostly black landdestruction deck that I've been playing since 1994. So when we started to play Ancient, I wanted to play an Enchantress deck as well. But I've never been able to make it work sort of effectively of with a moderate win rate. It mostly loses, but I never lost the love for it. 

When I was browsing some idea's I ran into the fastbond/mirror deck some people play in 93/94 and I decided to give this a try in Ancient. Unfortunately for this deck, we use the banned and restricted list just like then, so I can't play four fastbonds in Ancient. We could of course change the list, but we want to make the gameplay feel like then, with the good and the bad on the banned and restricted list just like it was back then, so we´re keeping it mostly the same and have not changed it since 2011. 

Considering the Enchantress deck does not seem to be that good in 93/94 I should have seen it coming it would be even worse in Ancient, but I decided to try it anyway. 

I tried compensating for that loss with the use of enlightened tutors but that did not work out so well. I tried mostly against Peter's Ernham/Geddon deck which has been quite succesfull in Ancient. 

The picture above is one of the rare occasions during playing when there are actually two or more enchantresses in play. The opposing deck does run 4 swords to plowshares maindeck, and there are not that many targets in the enchantress deck I built.. 

Here it does seem to work, but that was just one in many games. I ended up winning this one because somehow the deck managed to keep the enchantresses in play while not being killed by the onslaught on the other side. The winning was different than planned though. 

I held out for some turns with the dark heart of the wood to prevent myself from dying. That seemed to be a recurring theme during the many games we played. I usually ended up with no land and no creatures and no life. Not in this game though. But in the end, it wasn't the intended channel fireball that did Peter in, it was just a plain old fireball with lots of mana. He had disenchanted my dark heart of the wood by then, so a channel wouldn't have been much good anyway. Decks with 4 swords to plowshares and 3 disenchants are not that uncommon in Ancient, so if I decided to play it, the situation would likely repeat over and over again. 

In the end, I won a few games and I still feel I really like the deck. I like playing the enchantresses just as much as I did 20 years ago. Though I never tried this build way back when, the experience was much the same as in 1994-1996. It is really cute when it does work and do it´s tricks, but it just does not work consistently without plenty of cheap enchantments. I tried different variations and numbers, but the tutors (no matter how many or how few) cannot compensate for that. I also tried playing it against a mono red deck and there it also lost most of the games, even with COP red. The COP did not protect the enchantresses from dying, and they died a lot against the many bolts and chain lightnings. 

One of the builds I tried playing during the days of trying to make it work. In the end, I decided not to take one of the builds to a tournament because I don´t mind losing, as long as I have a feeling I´m not being completely and utterly slaughtered during the games. Playtesting left me with a quite bad 10% win rate, and about half of the 90% I did lose, I never had the feeling I even stood a chance. I´ll give it a go in a 93/94 somewhere. I´ll probably still lose a lot, but not as much as with this deck :)