A bitter perspective on Old School Mtg

November-February is some of the slowest months in old school. Events are few and it's basically three months without any live tournaments. The start of the old school year has been the Arvika Festival for many years and the crew have been putting up some solid events. That I was very excited for this event is an understatement. The shark swam back to Arvika I visited Arvika for the first time the autumn of the 2018 and I managed to win that one and got a shark that time, I haven't missed a tournament in Arvika since then. I have started to love the Arvika community; the small city is very similar to Mariehamn on Åland where I grew up. I guess this city has the highest concentration of old school players per capita in the World. Traditionally all tournaments have been arranged in a small place outside of the city but this time they settled for the Scandic conference area. This time the start time was also settled for noon instead of 5 PM, which is great as the tournaments tend

Welcome to the new year everyone. I haven't been writing much lately but I will eventually when I start going to live tournaments again (Arvika, n00bfest, Raging Bull, Lobstercon, Tron Wars, Winc0n, Uthden Troll Cup and The Plague are what I'm looking at at the moment). Until then I will just post some deck lists from our small gathering of friends. We got 9 people this time which is decent from my small invite list. As Tolaria f*cked up and wanted to give Matt Harper a bye every round even though he already got one we don't have the real standings. Jordan Boyle ended up winning with his deck "Boyleing Blue", the deck that he managed to top 8 n00bcon 2019 with. 1st place - Jordan Boyle (4-1) 2nd place - Anton Glans (3-1-1) 2nd place - Ole Rustad (3-1-1) 4th place - Micke Thai (3-2) 4th place - Åland (3-2) 4th place - Greg T (3-2) 7th place - Charles Klein (2-3) 7th place - HW MTG (2-3) 9th place - Matt Harper (1-4) Missed the time by 6 hours - I am Säb (0-0)

So, it's finally time, the last real event of the year. The travel fatigue is real and I'm aiming to take a break until Arvika in February. Also, going to try to stay away as much as possible from alcohol. It's for sure been a great year and I'm already started planning what tournaments I'm gonna visit next year. I'm most definitely going back to Uthden Troll Cup! As I have implied there is going to be more of these [Redacted] events coming up as the popularity of Old School really has boomed during covid and the years before that. There are of course going to be big tournaments like n00bcon, Arvika Festival, Lobstercon and Winc0n but these smaller gatherings certainly have their charm. This time we ended up with 14 wizards located in a house somewhere (the house had everything, so some people never even left the house during the whole weekend). The only thing that was scheduled was the tournament that (almost) no one cared about on Saturday. Other than that, th

This weekend was a tough one. I had to arrange the OS tournament at BSK in Sweden and be at Uthden Troll Cup in Leeuwarden, Netherlands at the same time. But in the end, I enjoyed both tournaments and I will focus on BSK as I guess a lot more people will cover UTC. The OS tournament at BSK has been declining since it lost its shark and I think last year was the least amount of players in many year. I covered that one on this blog as well. It's a weird one, it's arranged in a school building with other Magic tournaments, card games, role playing games, board games and general nerd stuff. It's quite sober as you are not to allowed to drink inside (school building, underage kids and beer don't go together in the Swedish society). But with that said, it's a tournament where you meet people you don't otherwise meet, and no drinking (except outside between rounds) makes the tournament unique in a way. I like it. First and second place prizes at BSK, no trophies or an