Calling All Gamers!

It’s official. There will be a Vintage tournament in Sandusky, Ohio in a little over two months. Mark your calendars, clear your schedules, and synchronize your watches.

Here’s the lowdown as it stands right now:

The format will be Vintage Constructed with unlimited proxies using the DCI Vintage Banned and Restricted List.

The Gamers Lounge (formerly known as The Hero Zone)
127 E. Market St.
Sandusky, OH 44870
(419) 621-0282

Entry will be $15. Deck registration starts at noon; first pairings go up at 1p.m.

First place gets a playset of Revised Volcanic Islands!

Second place gets a playset of Steam Vents from Guildpact!

There will be prizes for third and fourth place as well!

All prizes are guaranteed regardless of turnout, and since this is scheduled to coincide with grand re-opening of The Gamers Lounge (nee The Hero Zone) there will be door prizes and fun and cetera all day long.

Plus, this will be a great time to get a foot in the door in Vintage. You don’t need to own any cards, let alone the Power Nine, to get involved. Feel free to play anything you want.

Like the drawing power of Bazaar of Baghdad? Play Uba Stax or Ichorid to make your opponent cry.

Want to counter everything that gets in your way until you can start swinging with a huge indestructible dude? Proxy up Gifts and go to town.

Desire the command of a powerful force of scantily clad, hasty women? Put one of the many builds of Oath together.

Don’t really want to put a lot of effort into this? Proxy up the Power Nine and put them into UR Tron, you dumb loser. Jeez. We’re giving you a great opportunity here to play some of the most powerful cards in the game at a good price for solid prizes. Don’t waste it.

Noob.

Okay, really, you can put together anything you want, but all the cool kids will be playing Vintage decks with proxies and power and possible first turn kills with Duress backup. If you want to research the Vintage format, I recommend checking out

www.TheManaDrain.com – This website is the message board for all things Vintage. Look through messages and decklists here, see what people are saying and what fits your play style, put it together and test it out.

and

www.StarCityGames.com/pages/decks.php­ – The biggest and best tournaments in the US Vintage circuit are held by Star City, and every deck that’s been played in them ever is held in this database. You can search by name, date, even card. Go to it.

The floor rules for this tournament are going to be the Duelists Convocation International standard rules available here and here, so go there if you have any questions about what’s going on.

The only exception to those rules is, obviously, the use of proxy cards. This tournament will not be sanctioned by the DCI, but proxy cards will be sanctioned by this tournament. You can proxy as many as you want. The only restrictions are as follows:

1. The name of the proxied card must be legible to the average reader.
2. The full, up-to-date Oracle text (including all costs, super- and sub-types) of the card must also be clearly written. The only exception to this will be Moxen. If you want to proxy a Mox Ruby on a 9th Edition Mountain and leave the big mana symbol in the text box as the only representation of function, that’s okay. Just make sure that your Mox Ruby won’t consistently be mistaken for a basic Mountain by opponents.
3. Proxy cards on lands or cards of the appropriate color. Black cards are really, really hard to proxy on, I know, so if you need to make up Yawgmoth’s Bargain, do it on a Swamp or something. Don’t try to make the writing of a blue ball-point pen show up on a 4th Edition Fear.
4. You can get away with pretty much anything as long as nobody complains.

Personally, I have all of my proxies done up with little pictures and things so that they’re unique and fun. If you want to do that, awesome. Have fun. Just make sure all relevant game text is visible and clear to people who don’t know that your Black Lotus is scrawled on top of a basic Swamp.

You can see some of my proxies within this entry.

I use Sharpie markers for the art and text. I was using a fine-line green marker for most of the lettering (you can see that) until I got a fine tipped black permanent marker.

Sharpies have the nice property of smearing a little bit right before they dry. My two favorite proxies are the sunrise Ancestral Recall and the Wasteland, both of which I think have really nice coloring in the sky.

Usually I try to find a nice, open picture box with an illustration that I can alter into one of my own choosing. Lands are nice, but often there’s not a lot to work with. Things like Jump and Unsummon are pretty good (see where I turned Jump into Ancestral Recall), but some can surprise you, like the Skyshaper I transformed into Karn carrying a Black Lotus.

Erasing text boxes can be done with one of those gray-black ink erasers that come on the other end of a PaperMate Union eraser. That’s what happened on the Polluted Delta and Bazaar of Baghdad. It takes a while to do a whole text box, but one line of text on an old land is pretty easy to do. I highly recommend that for maximum clarity, but it’s not always necessary as long as old text is covered.

That’s the most important thing, the text. Star City Games has a pretty good example of a bare-bones card, and if that’s what you want or have time for, go for it.

There will be more announcements and information on this tournament forthcoming, including what the third and fourth place prizes will be.

We’ll be using this as a gauge of future tournaments as well, so if we get 20 or 30 participants, hopefully next time we can play for something really special, like a Mox or a playset of Mana Drains or something. So tell your friends, look up a deck that’s fun and powerful, and get ready to win a playset of original Dual Lands to brag about to your friends.

Good luck!

PS: There is one proxy I have pictured that isn’t technically legal. The Berserk is still a Land and not an Instant in the type line. Also, the Mox Emerald should probably be done on a non-colored card like an artifact or land, and the Vampiric Tutor could be argued is difficult to read (purple writing on black).