American Old School clubs have been upping the ante on get-togethers since the beginning. Even the first Eternal Weekend Old School tournament, held at the DoubleTree Philadelphia in 2014, was a significant upgrade over the standard halogen-lit convention center, where your only solace from a bad loss was a stale-bunned $27 hotdog. At least at the DoubleTree, the twelve magicians in attendance could bring their own booze and order room service.

As attendance of OS events grew, the venues became less intimate. Just five years after the inaugural event, the EW OS tournament turnout had swelled to 196 combatants. The only place that could house so many nerds (and had not yet banned us from returning) was an Elks Lodge, which, like ye olde convention center, could only feed us chicken tenders and nachos, but at a cheaper price and alongside some Yuenglings and an amazing atmosphere.

Bigger wasn’t always better, some in the community decided. A little magic had been lost when this rogue format built in barrooms had ballooned into an eight-round grindfest, complete with tourists net-decking mono_black_hymn.dec. What if, instead of growing larger, the events shrank, but became more extravagant for those who were invited?

No club has executed this vision better than the Beasts of the Bay, who just closed the books on their third annual Urza’s Chalice event, an international invitational retreat weekend that has set the blueprints for similar events, like Lords’ Haus. If Lords’ Haus is a Chicago old-schooler’s weekend getaway at a crazy uncle’s lake house, then Urza’s Chalice is a brief summer camp for the most well-connected man-boys of the Old School Magic community.

Set in the redwood forests of San Mateo County, this year’s Urza’s Chalice took place on the grounds of what is normally a Christian summer camp. Attendees spent most of their time in a two-story conference center, complete with over twenty rooms for lodging, a main conference room on the first floor, and a smaller hangout room on the lower floor. The room on the lower floor had the most character and gave off some strong basement den vibes: an old TV with a built-in VHS deck, mounted in the top corner of the room, which played classics like Aliens and Terminator all weekend long; two other TVs set on tables, hooked up to an N64 and SNES, controllers and cartridges piled neatly around; a whiteboard that was converted into a GoldenEye leaderboard and had scrawled on it in big letters, "NO ODDJOB"; and a few tables at the back of the room, covered in dozens of Costco-sized bags of junk food.

To add to the summer camp feel, most of our meals took place in a separate mess hall a minute’s walk away, and the staff would literally ring a bell when it was ready. The best meals were the two lunches made by the Beasts, who worked their asses off to feed everyone. My personal favorite was the Philly cheesesteak: thin beef slices grilled fresh on a flat top, doused in ghost pepper cheese sauce, topped with a few grilled red and green bell peppers, nestled in a toasted hoagie roll. The Beasts also made hot late-night snacks for those with the munchies: Pizza Rolls, dumplings, and lumpia.

After we arrived on Friday evening, most of the 52 attendees met in the conference room for an orientation on the weekend ahead of us. Just like at summer camp, there would be plenty of activities to keep us busy.

The first, and arguably best, was “Urza’s Ante.” We were each given a large random “pack” of cards sealed in heavy plastic. The packs were proxies of mostly Old School cards, with a few newer old-border cards like Memory Lapse and Lotus Petal peppered in. The initial event was three rounds played from the sealed pool of cards; there was no drafting or trading.

Afterwards, the real, weekend-long Urza's Ante game began. You could trade as much as you liked. From these traded cards, you could build a much more powerful 40-card deck, and then you were supposed to play others for ante in one-game matches. The loser signed the card before handing it over. Once or twice a day, a new booster pack would be distributed to each player, which slowly increased the power level of the decks and gave everyone more trade fodder.

Urza's Ante was a Rorschach test for players. Because the cards weren’t real and there was no money and few prizes at stake, all the decisions a player made were based solely on his values, beliefs, and motivations. For example, there were a number of people, myself included, who couldn’t stomach the idea of losing our precious (and completely fake and worthless) cards, so we averted risk by playing for no stakes, or we’d wager known cards from our trade chaff. Many played for ante, though, and lived with all the ups and downs that accompanied it, like one guy who won a Black Lotus off a game, only to have it ante’d away from him a few hours later.

How people traded also revealed their personalities. Some were friendly and laid back about it, while others were cutthroat and disagreeable. Any card’s “value” was completely up in the air, partly because no one knew what the rarity of each card was; dual lands were so plentiful that they appeared to be uncommons, while the entire card pool had very few copies of removal spells like Disenchant and Swords to Plowshares. Those with a taste for quibbling used this lack of information to argue that reasonable trades weren't actually reasonable due to differences in the apparent rarity of the cards.

Although I did not have a haggler's obsession with maximizing EV from every transaction, I spent probably eight hours trading throughout the weekend, four of which took place in a flurry of activity on Friday night. Every time I was about to get up from my table, someone new would wander by, we’d lock eyes and say to each other, “Trades? Trades!” I had forgotten that trading could be so addicting, even if it was just for an Elvish Archers that wasn’t even a real Magic card. I needed that Elvish Archers, and someone with an Elvish Archers needed a Dragon Whelp. These little trades were satisfying enough to keep me hooked. Occasionally, I’d get a big dopamine hit when I found and traded for a bomb in my colors, like Psionic Blast or Tracker.

The trades added up. A Llanowar Elves here, an Unstable Mutation there, and before long I had a functional U/G tempo deck. I think I only played six games with the deck the entire weekend, but for me, playing was beside the point. I just wanted to trade and make a beautiful list.

As the weekend progressed, some players got more and more desperate to finish their decks. Lord Semmens tried to build an Underworld Dreams combo deck that needed an impossible number of rare cards: many Underground Seas, multiple Dreams, multiple Timetwisters, multiple Black Lotuses. Late on Saturday night, I was involved in a three-way trade where I had a Mana Crypt, another guy had a Lotus Petal, and Semmens had a Fellwar Stone. Semmens wanted the Petal, the guy wanted the Crypt, and I wanted a Fellwar Stone so I could use it as a proxy in my Eternal Chaos deck. But the Crypt was worth more than the Petal, and the Petal was worth more than the Stone. Semmens told me, "I will go to my room right now and get you a real Fellwar Stone, if you get me that Petal." So I said, "Done."

We were both a bit drunk when we made the trade. The next day I felt bad that I sharked him, even at his own insistence, and I told him I'd give him back the Stone, for a proxy one. He told me to keep it, but whenever I used it, to "remember what this game does to people."

It occurred to me that weekend that any serious Magic player is a hair's breadth away from being a degenerate gambler. We're always chasing the high that the game brings us, whether it's cracking a bomb rare from a pack, trading for a card we need, building a new deck, arbitraging, winning a tournament, altering-out a deck, getting signatures, or completing a set. The list goes on, ad infinitum, since we can always set some preposterous new goal for ourselves or create a new game to keep ourselves on the edge of our seats, crashing our own skill and control against the random chance of what's in a pack, what's on top of our deck, or what's for sale and at what price.

A prime example of this compulsive gaming behavior was a midnight eight-man Operation Desert Storm money draft: a game was created to "draft the best deck" from Pro Set's 1991 Operation Desert Storm trading cards, and the buy-in was $20. Basically, some players created a game from cards in which there was no intended game, and then gambled on the outcome. It was all in good fun, the laughs were probably worth the price of admission for the losing team, and it certainly wasn't the most money being lost over the course of the weekend (there were real ante games going on). However, it took a specific kind of person to create such a game or decide to buy in on it.

It took another kind of person to attempt the trial of the Chaos Orb patch. I saw a lot of shaky hands and sweaty brows that weekend, but I’m proud to report that roughly half a dozen dudes earned their patches, and I’m even prouder to report that none of them had more liquor than they could handle.

The OS main event was on Saturday. It was the least interesting thing that happened over the weekend; by now, if you've seen one Old School tournament, you've seen them all. The Deck won the day, returning the great metagame wheel of Old School back to the beginning of its rotation, bringing with it some minor mutations, like the second-place Atog + Savannah Lions deck that played one Jalum Tome, and the third-place Atog deck that replaced the usual Ankhs of Mishra with Relic Barriers.

Sunday was a day of recovery and had the two summer-campiest activities: a nature hike and an arts and crafts event. Dom, a Beasts/Lords dual citizen, led the hiking trip. Eighteen of us piled into two white passenger vans at 8:30 in the morning, many of us hungover. When we arrived at the state park, Dom played the camp counselor, stressing the importance of maps and making us buddy up so as not to lose anyone. Within ten minutes, one buddy was lost, not to be seen again until we returned to the parking lot a couple hours later. Half of the group went home after that, while the other half of us continued hiking for a couple more hours, basking in nature's beauty and chatting mostly about Magic.

The arts and crafts event was Sunday afternoon. Jeff Menges, the illustrator of Old School classics like Swords to Plowshares, Black Knight, and Urza's Chalice, taught a thorough class on how to paint Moat. I gave it the old college try for about an hour, but my hangover and the six-mile hike caught up with me, so I conceded the match.

Jeff had a table set up all weekend, selling art, playmats, test cards, tokens, signatures, and made-to-order alters. It might sound strange having just one booth for an event, but it was perfect for the size of the gathering. Jeff was a super friendly guy and was treated as an honored guest. He socialized with us, ate meals with us, and even went on our hiking trip.

The last event took place on Sunday evening. Everyone gathered together for one last time in the conference room. Prizes were handed out to the top six of the OS event, to most creative decks, and for a couple categories in Urza's Ante, like most signed cards collected and most copies of a single card collected. There were about ten separate raffle prizes, with all proceeds going to charity. I got lucky and won an altered Fireball that I had only put one ticket in for.

Sunday night, some players stayed up late, eking out the last bit of fun from the weekend. I headed to bed early, since the home office of my remote job was in San Francisco, and I had promised to stop in and meet my colleagues in person for the first time. A Beast shuttled me and a few others to SFO on Monday morning.

On the train into SF, I thought about trying to explain Urza's Chalice to my work colleagues, and all of the layers of context that would be needed: that a bunch of middle-aged adults played a children's card game; that we were nostalgic for the first few years of the game, when the power levels of the cards fluctuated wildly, the art was "better" (but sometimes poorly scaled and amateurish), and the frames of the cards were… slightly superior than they ended up being in the later printings; that the format had become completely unaffordable to all but the wealthiest players or those who had been holding their cards for a decade; that insular, city-based clubs had formed organically all over the country in support of this format; that each club gave itself a goofy name based on a card and had an unofficial uniform, like a patched-up biker vest or a branded bowling shirt; that Urza's Chalice was an invite-only summer camp for the movers and shakers of these clubs; and that at this event we played this card game for three days, rarely talking or thinking about anything else. Instead of explaining all that, I just told them I played a few board games with some buddies and went on a hike in the redwoods. Much like the Maze of Ith, Old School Magic is an esoteric labyrinth that the uninitiated can find impossible to penetrate.

COVID-19 note: Because of travel restrictions due to COVID-19, most international invitees had to cancel, which left opportunities for second-stringers like me to snag an invite. The Beasts took some basic precautions by requiring proof of vaccination and a recent negative test result prior to arrival. Before we left at the end of the weekend, they handed out rapid tests to prevent our going back to our communities infected. This cautiousness paid off. It has been about two weeks since the event, and there have been no known cases of COVID as a result of Urza’s Chalice.

Lords Elleman, Petray & Moss play catch-up on Summer '21.

A Moss Man investigative report on the subterranean subculture of OS alters.

Lords Dotterer, Friedman, Moss & Petray catch-up on spring '21 OS action.

Long time reader, first time poster. You may know of me from my collected works on the merits of including Ancestral Recall in your 93/94 deck list, as well as my pioneering works on the positive effects of moving immediately to the second main phase. At any rate, I’d like to thank you for reading.

This spring, the Lords organized March Radness to keep our degenerates satiated in spite of the global pandemic. Eighteen participants raised $417 to benefit the Chicago Restaurant Workers Relief Fund via Southern Smoke. The formats were Classic and Middle School MTG, two formats I know very little about.

My first exposure to Magic was in 1994, but I was not actively playing between 1995 and 2004. When I got back in during college, I wanted to play a format where I could play both Sol Ring and dual lands. Thus, I started with Type 1 (Vintage). Aside from a limited amount of Legacy, I knew very few cards from the card pool outside of Type 1. So, as you can imagine, without having played during the Classic and Middle School eras of MTG and never having played Extended, these two formats are pretty far outside of my comfort zone.

Middle School (which seems to be extremely similar to Premodern, but with some key card differences, like Force of Will) has an extremely wide card pool and many viable decks. I’ve avoided the format, largely because I was happy enough with other throwback formats, and I didn’t want to dive into a new card pool. But sometimes in life, if one is extremely fortunate, he or she will encounter selfless individuals who just want to bring everyone together:

So with most of a Middle School Stasis deck in my hands as a result of Shane’s kindness, I ended up playing in March Radness. I threw together a Goblin Welder control deck with a bunch of blue draw spells for Classic, hoping to live the dream and weld Tetravites for Triskelion (spoiler alert, it DID NOT happen).

On March 4th, a small gathering of Lords and select associates kicked off March Radness with a virtual happy hour. I’ve been living in Dallas, TX over the last three years, and having the opportunity to play virtually has been a great way to stay in touch with the club. I’ve been grateful to my fellow Lords for hosting all of these virtual events over the past few years.

The event started with Classic, and contained a healthy mix of different decks—Stifle Nought, High Tide, Price of Progress Cam Special™️, Goblin Welder control from yours truly, Food Chain Goblins, Deadguy Ale, Storm Combo, Gro-A-Tog, UR Morphling Control, Devourer Combo, Pox, Goblins, Burn, Zoo Sligh, and Dragon Combo.

I understand very little about this format, but it is very broken. My Goblin Welder deck was fun to play but had absolutely no chance against both of the Strom decks that easily 2-0’d me. Welder was coincidentally amazing against Lorien’s Dreadnoughts (it helped that they never made an appearance G1). Shane’s Devourer Combo deck was new tech to me – I got lucky and won this match, but the deck was clearly better than mine.

Long time friend of the club, Cam from PDX, and I had a fun set of side games. I had always heard Cam was awesome from Moss and just about anyone who had met him. Unfortunately, neither of us had ever hung out at an event. A few years back, I was visiting Portland on vacation. I texted Moss for Cam’s phone number to see if we could find an opportunity for beers. We got a chance to hang, and I cannot wait to visit again – he’s one of the best dudes.

These games were the only time I got Goblin Welder + Tetravus going and it was glorious. Mana Drain proved to be pretty good against Price of Progress + Fork, and I’m looking forward to the next battle.

Classic is relatively unexplored. There are some obvious historical decks—Storm, Gro, Goblins, etc, but I am guessing there is some unknown coolness out there that we’re all missing. This format is also really exciting because the internet is not loaded with deck lists. This makes for a great opportunity to play some interesting games if you can convince your friends to build something other than Type 1 net decks from 2003.

As anyone would have guessed, Storm dominated. This deck benefits from playing most of the restricted list and paving the way with Duress. Playing against this gave me Type 1 PTSD (well done Dom & Punts).

On to Middle School – this format is incredibly wide and really requires expert knowledge of the card pool. As a first-time player who has seen many of these cards in the past, I still had almost no idea what was going on as my opponents ran me over. Mossman dropped after a disgraceful performance with Stiflenought in Classic... Just kidding — he was busy moving (congrats on the new place!!!)—and Standstill expert Greg tagged right in.

The Stasis deck I played was really cool, and Forsaken City is some incredible technology. That said, it’s pretty hard to win with Black Vise when your opponent has Manabond in play. This was a new one for me. Stasis was also terrible against Rajah’s Enchantress, but it was cool to see his deck play out. Very very broken. Same can be said about my match against Baran’s Madness deck. Tim played it very well, and there wasn’t a single turn where I was ahead in our two short games. Bob did some charity work and went easy enough on me to give me a win against his Coco Pebbles deck. I did almost lose this one as well, given that he necro-locked himself with 3 cards in hand. And with this, I’d deck out before he did, and could never kill him with Vise. Double Chain of Vapor gave me the win in one of the weirdest games of Magic I’ve played in a long time.

Middle School was a ton of fun, and I’d like to give it another shot, though I think I need to read up on the card pool more before next time. Again, would never have ended up playing without Shane’s generosity.

To no one’s surprise, the combo stars of Classic also dominated Middle School with Braun beating Dotterer on breakers (though a mis-entered match result initially gave Dom the win, Moss crushed him with the final, corrected results). Congrats to both of them for slaying us all. Big thanks to Moss for running yet another excellent event despite being in the middle of a move. I’m looking forward to next time.

Classic Gallery

Middle School Gallery

Four dudes in the mood to discuss Winterlude.

As our calendars mercifully flipped from 2020 to 2021, we found ourselves in need of a way to keep virtual hearths stoked and the Gathering strong. Enter Winterlude ‘21, a two-batch challenge featuring Old School Alpha-Alliances in Batch 1 and Middle School in Batch 2. Fourteen Lords & Co. met in icy, windswept, digital battlefields to test their mettle against winter’s might.

Batch 1: Alpha to Alliances

For those curious, the Music City Old School crew have a fine primer explaining this OS variant and for Winterlude we tweaked it by restricting Strip Mine. Our own Politburo decided to push the envelope with broken lands and, sure enough, Bazaar of Baghdad, Glacial Chasm and Kjeldoran Outpost all featured prominently among winning lists. Our field saw several classic and interesting archetypes such as Necro (burn & combo variants), Stormbind Aggro, Reanimator (strengthened by Krovikan Horror), Storm Cauldron Combo and Diminishing Returns Combo. Both Force of Will and Gorilla Shaman were in bountiful supply.

Batch 2: Middle School

It’d been a while since we rocked a Lords Middle School event, so Batch 2 served to scratch that itch. Green was unleashed over the four rounds with The Rock, Oath, Survival/Opposition and Secret Force taking the top four slots in dominating fashion. The field also included Trix, Firestorm/Mogg Maniac combo, Zombies, Pox and 5C Survival, among others. In the end it was our own Carter “W” Petray that beat back the interlopers, defending tha club with a sterling 8-0 record and continuing his reign of terror within the Digital Realm.

Until next time, stay warm & safe and take care of each other out there.

Alpha-Alliances Gallery

Middle School Gallery

Last December, I remember looking back fondly on my year of Old School: all of the meetups across the Lords’ local haunts, connecting with friends from across the country over Players Ball weekend, and our year-end blowout at the Party of the Pit Lords. Though none of us expected Lords Haüs to be the end of our in-person tournament season in 2020, it would provide a lasting reminder of the club’s values as so perfectly described by our humble T.O., Lord Agra: it’s not about the Magic, it’s about the Gathering.

This year, Lords Punts & Moss worked tirelessly to keep the spirit of the club alive through Quarantine Cups, one-day “family-only” meetups, and special format variations that encouraged the Lords & Friends to return to the drawing board and brew up their gnarliest stews. The Beef Bash first took place in June 2017 at Lord Jaco’s Westside headquarters, back when Lord Petray still had some of his luscious locks and, for the most part, the crew was all in attendance. This was just a short couple of months ahead of the first Player’s Ball, an event that would become one of the most anticipated annual events for OS players across the country.

It would be another year before I first met the Lords (outside of some chance encounters playing Legacy in Columbus, OH uncovered through a deep dive of tournament results leading up to the dissolution of the DCI), but you could say I’ve been preparing for this tournament since I first found OS. In my short two and a half years of playing OS, Berserk has quickly become my calling card. Where my decks may have been missing a handful of the format’s blue restricted staples, I instead chose to overrun my opponents with good old-fashioned combat tricks and the sheer girth of big green creatures.

This year’s culminating tournament, aptly titled Christmas Beef, came with its own set of rules: every deck must contain at least 40 total power at the start of each game In addition to EC’s standard bans and restrictions, The Abyss, City in a Bottle and Moat were banned, and Maze of Ith and Mishra’s Workshop were additionally restricted. To encourage players to stuff their decks with even more Djinns, Elementals, Lords, and in select cases, Leviathans, prizes were awarded to the Beefiest Deck (highest total base power in the 75) and Beefiest Boardstate (highest total power in a single screenshot during a tournament match). In this sense, victory was not just about having a winning record, it was about being the meatiest mage among us.

The Christmas Beef event brought together 22 Lords and friends from across the country for eight rounds of batch play carried out over webcams. The group raised $531 for the Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization whose work includes the support and legal aid of marginalized communities, research for criminal justice reform, and re-entry assistance to the formerly incarcerated. Throughout the month of December, our Beefy brethren carried out their matches over Whereby and Discord, often taking to the virtual homes of various Lords’ haunts, where at any moment another player could drop in to spectate and, in the spirit of the Beef, add to the trash talk. On the first Thursday of the tournament, after Lord Moss delivered me a quick and brutal beating at the hands of giant robots, Atogs, and Shivan Dragons, we bar-hopped across the Discord to heckle Lord Agra and Cam Wall as they slammed Dragons into each other until Bob’s reanimated (and hardcast) Yawgmoth Demons bested our West Coast friend. In this sense, we were able to preserve one of the most important aspects of our in-person tournaments: wandering the tables after your match, talking shit whenever possible.

Naturally, the former math tutor in me also wanted to examine the correlation between Beef count and record, and really I was just itching to make a spreadsheet anyway! With that in-mind, I took each player’s total Beef and multiplied it by their overall match win percentage to generate their Beef Score.

In standard form for me, I opted to bring a plethora of green creatures and the classic Giant Growth/Berserk combo, featuring such quadruple-green behemoths as Craw Giant and Force of Nature, while swapping out my old friend Ernie for Juggernauts and including some select Beef enhancers and accelerators like Lure and Channel. In the end, Beefy Berserk ended up in the middle of the pack in both a Beef count of 78 and in record at 3-5, awarding me a Beef Score of 29.25.

Even batting just shy of .500, I still managed to walk away from the tournament with some new friends and exciting battle stories. Within the first half of the tournament, I had already Channeled my way into double Juggernaut on T2, been brought to near-lethal with a double Berserking Juzam Djinn (after a lucky spin of the Wheel of Fortune), and had my own Juggernauts granted multiple Spirit Links by my opponent. My own Beefiest moment (and the Beefiest Boardstate of the second batch) came through during a match with one of the Midwest’s spiciest red mages, Robert Vincent, where a 44-power, Rampaging and Berserking Craw Giant came crashing across the battlefield and over an Uthden Troll and a Wall of Earth (46 total power).

With the club’s favorite heel, Lord Petray, absent from this tournament, there was a vacancy for the champion's throne in our virtual realm. Wasting no time, Lord Friedman pulled together his Walls Combo deck that topped our Beef count (168 power) and finished at 7-1, giving him the highest Beef Score among players of 147. Danny explained to me that his goal was to not “play any creatures that appear in competitive/tiered 93/94 decks,” and even extended this to the dominant OS removal spells: no Bolts, Swords, or Disenchants, only Chaos Orb and Balance. As a result, Danny chose a plethora of powerful walls that he could Beef up with Glyph of Destruction before sacrificing to a mighty Sword of the Ages. In addition, the combo of Pestilence and Ivory Tower allowed Danny to wipe out his opponent’s creatures, bring down their life totals, and keep himself afloat between Towers and Diamond Valley.

The bulk of Danny’s Beef total came from his sideboard; 15 of the Beefiest creatures of the format, each purposed to fight off anything from common removal and Blood Moons to the wall’s worst enemy, Juggernaut. In this sense, Danny’s reactive plans would help him maintain the Beefy spirit of the event throughout, and most importantly, play spicy cards and have fun playing Magic.

While the gap between Danny and the second highest Beef Score was large, I want to highlight some of the other flavorful and Beefy decks across the tournament, starting with friend of the club Nick Viau and his 113-beef count Monoblue list with a Beef Score of 84.75. Nick truly dropped the elbow with his nWo-altered Motis at the top end alongside Water Elementals, Juggernauts and Trikes (two of the most popular robots of the tournament). Nick posted a strong 6-2 record while doing exactly what the tournament called for: turning big creatures sideways and occasionally blowing out opposing Beef with a timely Unsummon.

It would be hard to miss Lord Agra’s powerful 86-lb Beefy Reanimator, bringing powerhouses like Shivan Dragon, Yawgmoth Demon, Nicol Bolas, and Deep Spawn back to the field to absolutely pummel his opponents. Bob ended his run with a 5-3 record and a very respectable Beef Score of 53.75. As Bob displayed across the tournament, a creature that can profitably block a Shivan Dragon is a force to be reckoned with.

The only undefeated player in the tournament was our newly-minted Lord Tim Baran, playing a 51-power Charred Beef (With a Side of Cheese), featuring full playsets of Ball Lightning and Erhnam Djinn alongside tournament favorites Shivan Dragon and Berserk. His aggressive threats paired well with some handy Bolts and Chain Lightnings and propelled him through eight rounds relatively unscathed.

Playing Eureka in a format centered around playing the biggest creatures takes an absolutely fearless pilot, and we were graced with the presence of two players doing just that! Lord Semmens approached this archetype with his 84-power Lords & Associates deck. While Shane’s mostly singleton cast of characters alongside a set of Lords of the Pit did not win too many matches, he embodied the spirit of the tournament wholeheartedly by encouraging Beefy boardstates on both sides. Matching Semmens in record and gameplan, friend of the club and OS stalwart Rajah James brewed his own 94-power take on Eurkea, including the powerful Juxtapose to give himself an upgrade courtesy of his opponents and possibly hand off Force of Nature along with a free eight damage straight to the dome.

On the other end of the spectrum of Beef, Lord Blank in his truest form, brought Lean Beef, a 43-power BU deck featuring sixteen of his favorite two-power creatures and only four creatures at four power. Combining combat hosers like Imprison and Darkness with Meekstone, Ian was able to take his army of low-power creatures to a strong 6-2 finish. When asked about his feelings on creatures, Blank said he thinks “creatures are fine, but (he) prefers playing spells like Enchantments.”

In the end, Christmas Beef provided a brief vacation from OS’s famed archetypes, even with restricted staples still in major attendance. While I don’t imagine I’ll see too many copies of Force of Nature hit the battlefield for a while, there is something special about fearlessly slamming big, Beefy creatures into play game after game. Even with Workshop restricted, artifact creatures still found their way out quickly via a plethora of Mana Vaults and occasionally Dark Ritual across the entire tournament, demonstrating as always the power of robots. In speaking with Danny, one thing he had wished for was to see more “firsts” throughout the tournament; casting oddball creatures like Yawgmoth Demon, using Lure to wipe out a Tetravus and its Tetravites with a Juggernaut, just cool card interactions that might not happen all the time in other tournaments.

This raises the ultimate question, how do we truly show Beef? To put it in the words of the great Notorious B.I.G., Beef should be “when you roll no less than 30 (in this case, 40) deep, when I see you, guaranteed to be in I-C-U.” Beef is about confidently staring your opponents down with the biggest, dumbest creature you pulled out of the back of your binder, and absolutely wreaking havoc.

Sometimes it is hard to find the positives in a year like 2020, where so much of our normal has been disrupted, or to put it more bluntly, added to the constantly growing flames of the dumpster fire that has been this past year. Where my year started with some of my favorite people in the world, slinging cards at Der Rathskeller and trekking to Essen Haüs on a cold Madison evening, I’m happy to say it ended in a very similar fashion, even with a computer screen between us all. With 2020 almost in our rearview mirrors, we can hope that 2021 will bring us back to the places that the Lords have called our homes away from home across Chicago.

Cattle Call

A USDA certified prime panel (Petray, Agra, Blank, Velasco & Moss) weigh in on the LOTP Christmas Beef.