Life got in the way and we never wrote up the last few tournaments we played. We are all perfectly clear that the little cards are the most important thing in the world, but sometimes you have to meet obligations outside the five colours: the kids, the partner, work… Society is badly designed, and at this stage of civilisation it is going to be hard to fix, so here is one big catch-up on everything that happened over the autumn.
LCOS Premodern, October 2023
October was a hot month for Premodern. We started on the 8th with a tournament for 21 players at Bar Olympia, the bar where we play Old School and Premodern in Barcelona. Eight different archetypes in the top and two tier 2 decks in the final, Pit Rack and Gro-a-tog, with the latter taking it in the hands of Fermín García. Well played!
The Mundungu Mystery Booster is as close as you will get to opening a pack from more than two decades ago. Fifteen cards handpicked by Mundungu himself, and you can expect anything in there, from good cards to outstanding ones. Here is this month’s Mystery Booster opening.
Premodern Autumn Evening @ El Nucli
Only six days later we spent an evening in the best Magic shop in Barcelona doing our final testing for the Nationals, which were the following week. The top two decks were both Goblins; Yuse and Telm went down to Valencia for the Spanish championship thoroughly tested. Worth noting: the first woman to play in one of our Premodern tournaments. We hope she is not the last…
Premodern Nationals 2023
On 21 and 22 October, Gremio de Dragones in Valencia hosted the fourth Spanish Premodern championship. 124 players, 9 of them regulars from our league. The top 15 made it through to day two, and four of our players (Edu Castro, Telm Fàbregas, Narcís Gil and Carlos Orellana) were among them. Here is the top 8 match between Edu Castro and Antonio Padial: intense, entertaining and full of interesting decisions.
The Nationals final was Burn vs Landstill, a classic. As Raul Roso put it the other day: all that deck study, all that metagame evolution, and in the end the deck that wins is the same old pile of lightning bolts.
LCOS Premodern, November 2023
Back to the Olympia for the last regular tournament of the year (December is Mishra’s Day — an article on that shortly). 27 players, and a final between two of the most reliable regulars we have: David Figuerola, founding father of LCOS Premodern, playing the winning list from the Nationals, against Antonio Manrique, who has now played 23 out of 23 LCOS Premodern tournaments and who — without once playing the card everyone loves to hate — took the win with a by-now classic Monoblue Stiflenought, all in gold border, as Manrique tends to do.
Looking at the tops of those four tournaments, some interesting numbers come out. Allowing for the different sizes of each event, there are 4 different winning archetypes: Gro-a-tog, Burn, Goblins and Stiflenought. And across the 40 decks that made the tops, there are 22 different archetypes. I do not know other formats in any depth, but I am fairly certain Premodern is one of the richest there is, with the most varied metagame and the best chance of competing with whatever archetype you like. Nobody is solving this format any time soon, so LONG LIVE PREMODERN!