For whatever reason, these travel stories always seem to begin at the neighborhood pub. This one starts at good old Moogy’s in Boston, where everybody knows your name.
It’s a quiet night in mid-February, dark and dreary outside, but the fireplace in our cozy back room is lit. I’ve pulled together my tournament deck – mono-green aggro, very light black splash for Terror and a couple restricted cards – for the weekend ahead, and I’m really just looking to knock off some rust, having not played with it much since Genoa, other than at a random NEOS monthly in the fall that I was trying to spike. I fully expected to roll into Moogy’s and wreck face, but my friends had other plans.
David Jorgensen is one of the true purveyors of mono-black in our crew – the current steward of Markus Lundqvist’s rebacked Jet – and in our first game he just casually plunks down a card I absolutely can’t beat: Royal Assassin. Good lord. My only maindeck out is Chaos Orb, and the situation only barely gets better post-board: the four Dervishes come in, and that’s literally the most we can do. I’m fidgeting in my seat, I lose both of our games, but overall I’m dismissive of this experience. I tell Jorgensen very matter-of-factly that there’s no way I’m going to see a Royal Assassin on the tables in Arvika. He’s still pretty new to Old School, you see, and he doesn’t know much of the international metagame. “Nobody plays that card,” I calmly explain. It just isn’t seen anywhere in the format. My deck is tuned for the actual meta of top-tier decks. Nothing to worry about here.
Thirty hours later I’m in Reykjavik, 6am, and Danny Friedman makes it abundantly clear that he’s already been going hard. The cocktails were free in the airport lounge in Seattle, so he drank five of them in an attempt to knock himself out for his seven hour flight to Iceland. (Not for the first or last time, I try to sell him on taking melatonin instead. I’ve become sort of a melatonin evangelist at this point: gets the job done, quickly re-aligns your circadian rhythm, easy to wake up the next morning, non-habit forming.) Given that we’re at 64 degrees north latitude, the obvious beer to drink is Gull. And, for no reason in particular, the beers in the airport are “buy one, get one free.” A consummate slave to value, Danny is powerless to resist.
Gardermoen, noon, and we’ve picked up the car, a Volkswagen Tiguan plug-in hybrid. Shane (Lords of the Pit) and Mari (Knights of Thorn) meet us out there, and the fierce bro hugs commence. We’ve got a full tank of gas, a playlist full of 90s bangers, and it’s 150 km to Arvika. Hit it.
There’s something special about the road trip that just hits different when compared to trips that only involve flying and/or mostly solo transit. It always feels like you and your buddies are getting away with something. And it touches a deep vein of nostalgia. At times on the road heading east from Oslo towards the border with Sweden, I could have sworn I was in my native upstate New York, rambling across the rolling hills above the Mohawk River between Albany and Utica, looking out over snow-covered farmland, wind turbines on the horizons.
Studying the map in the days before the trip, I had the town of Kongsvinger sort of mentally circled as a natural place to take a break, more or less halfway between Gardermoen and Arvika. The key attraction here is a 17th century hilltop fortress and its views of the Glomma river, Norway’s longest. Crossing over a little bridge into town, we make a beeline for the high place, Mari and me sniffing out the best route spontaneously, because we’re both allergic to onboard navigation. At the top, we shuffle around a bit in the snow past cannons and rampart walls, and for the first (but definitely not the last) time, Danny realizes that his footwear choices for the weekend – a pair of Birkenstock sandals and some essentially zero-traction Chuck Taylors – are not exactly the most practical for these Nordic climes in the middle of February. Mari promptly cracks open a bottle of Kraken rum and inducts Shane into the society, shots all around. From there, we descend the hill and explore the area a bit more by car, passing by an enormous timber yard and crossing a few other bridges, finally settling on a place for a good lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river.
After lunch in Kongsvinger we cross the border into Sweden, only another hour or so to go. Snow-covered pines press more closely against the highway. From time to time through the trees, we get glimpses of some stunning lakes and hills and valleys… “ack Värmland, du sköna,” indeed. Every Swedish Old School player we had talked to made it sound like Arvika and Värmland in general were largely pointless, and not a destination for tourists, but I think I have to disagree. Arvika is cute as a button. 15,000 inhabitants, right on the shores of a lake, adorable town square, train station straight out of a Wes Anderson film, the picture of a quaint but plainly functional place.
Arriving at the Scandic, we check in, stow the car, I take a shower and put on fresh clothes to shake off the yuck from the red-eye flights. Guys are arriving at the hotel in waves, and the bro hugs are now flowing fast and furious in the lobby. So many old friends, and so many names from the internet finally getting matched with friendly faces. We assemble a crew for dinner — top-notch guys. Of course, after traveling halfway around the world and consulting the hotel staff about dinner reservations, the one restaurant we’re able to get a big table at is a Boston-themed sports bar: O’Learys Arvika. There’s truly nowhere to hide.
We crush beers and bar food. There’s a six-lane bowling alley here, so fuck it, Dude, let’s go bowling. Mari, Jonnie Myrbacka, and I throw down for ten quick frames, and then we’re joined by Stebbo and Jonas (Brothers of Fire), and Mats Furby (Stockholm in a Bottle). Jonnie announces that it’s time to make things more interesting, so we agree to bowl again… for ante. Everyone puts up a Beta basic land for the winner, so whoever ends with the highest score gets, whatever, five or six Beta basics. Mats is the darkest horse here, having arrived on the scene essentially out of nowhere, and he naturally bowls a 122. Hats off.
Back at the Scandic, it’s time for a little bit of side format action. There are a bunch of guys firing a Premodern cube. My shingle is out for 7pt Singleton and 40K Ante. Mats challenges me to a game for ante, so we sit down and I unroll my playmat for the weekend’s first actual Magic. As we’re shuffling up, Mats asks me how many times I’ve played 40K Ante. “Oh I don’t know,” I say, dithering a bit, “a few times. Chalice, Lobstercon, uh, London, Switzerland, just locally in Boston sometimes, New Hampshire… oh, in Stockholm last year… Genoa?” “So, a lot, then.” “Yeah, I guess a lot.”
Spice is mostly in the eye of the beholder, and best judged by others when it comes down to it, but I’m going to go ahead and say that my 40K deck is far more spice than spike right now. Yawgmoth Priest, Mana Vault. Sacrifice, Su-Chi. Yawgmoth Demon, Drain Life. Big payoffs.
I win the die roll. On the play, I open Factory, Vault; he goes Mountain, Vise. The turn passes back to me, and I draw my first card: Mind Twist. Oooof… sorry, Mats. “Scrubland, Twist you for 4.” I hit both of his lands, next turn he bricks, then I rip Strip Mine and it’s over from there, I run him over with a couple Su-Chis.
We flip over his ante card.
The beat is bad, and the pathos is visible.
I try to explain to him that, of all people, I know exactly what he’s feeling, because this literally happened to me, the night before Lobstercon in 2021. And, as Nicky Scars aptly observed upon losing a Badlands his first night out jamming 40K in New Hampshire: “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” We have to take these things in stride. Sitting there, just sort of in shock, Mats doesn’t even know what he wants to do with the card. I provide him with my Posca paint pens in an effort to be helpful. He writes “Arvika 23” and signs his name, unsure of what else to do and clearly in no mood to create art.
Simon Christie (Houston Falling Stars) is up next. We both Bird up pretty quickly. He’s on WWgb, and starts jamming weenie creatures. Savannah Lions hits the table, and something immediately looks off. “Uhm dude, is that Fourth Edition?” He laughs and says it’s a placeholder, his Swedish-legal Lions are in his tournament deck. He grabs the deck from his bag and fishes out a Summer Lion. Thing looks so weird. They say that White Weenie isn’t a deck in Swedish, and that’s probably right, but in 40K it’s just fine; I’ve played plenty of it myself, splashing Hurricane off Pendelhavens and Savannahs and Contract and probably Tutor off of Scrubs. Simon quickly runs me over and wins his first Bird ever.
It’s midnight and they’re closing up the event room for the night, so everyone heads downstairs for a bit more action. Will Magrann is here, also on his maiden voyage in 40K, and he’s in the process of absolutely shaking down Jonnie, winning two cards in a single game.
At this point I’m fading, having run for something like 18 hours after basically no sleep on two consecutive red-eye segments, plus the word is that we can’t be hanging out in the lounge after 1am anyway. This would later prove not to be true at all, but it’s reason enough for me to invest in tomorrow’s experience by packing it in.
After a somewhat reasonable amount of sleep, it’s Saturday morning and I’m up and foraging for breakfast. The hotel breakfast actually seems pretty darn good, but with only a couple of hours before the tournament, I want to get myself out into the sunshine and breathe in some of that crisp Arctic air. In Arvika’s town square there is a bakery with a pretty good crowd of people waiting for their numbers to be called — this must be the place to be. I’m looking around for a good kanelbulle or cardamom roll, but then I see entire trays of buns with tops that have been cut off and placed on a cloud of whipped cream and a generous layer of almond paste. Holy smokes, I forgot! Ash Wednesday was just this past week! It’s officially semla season in Sweden.
So that’s a windmill slam P1P1 in the pastry draft for the weekend, and for a few minutes I get to drink my coffee and crush this pastry while chatting a bit with Drew Tucker, mostly about life and home-buying and our favorite towns along the Maine coast. (We both love Belfast; Drew or anyone else, let me know if you need a good lobster pound recommendation.) Honestly, if the trip ended right then and there, it would have been worth the ocean crossing.
But, as it happens, there’s an actual 93/94 tournament happening today. After a short walk with Will to take in the lakefront and a few more moments of sunlight, I head back to the Scandic to get situated. I scope out the artist tables, introducing myself to Anders Schmidt, and peeping at what he’s working on for a bit: a sweet Atog alter where the ‘Tog is wearing a Trike head for a hat. Mats Furby is here, in the line of guys waiting for Drew Tucker sigs. He’s had a full night to sleep off the ante game, and asks if I’d be okay with Drew Tucker putting our City of Brass into a Bottle with a quick little alter. Uhm, yes, I’d be more than okay. Drew gets it done:
With just a few minutes remaining before they fire the first round, I’m wandering around the venue and discover that there’s an entire extra conference room that’s been set up for the tournament matches. We’re all going to have plenty of breathing room and space to mill about, which is fantastic. It’s starting to become clear that this is among the best venues for an Old School tournament I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting, and this is a title I don’t bestow lightly.
Right, so the matches themselves. I did play seven Swiss rounds of proper Old School Magic. My deck for the day was my usual trusty sidearm:
Not much has changed in the build since Winc0n last year. I’ve moved one of the Bottles to the sideboard, since both in Genoa and Buffalo I had felt a little underwhelmed by them. Bottle-as-Ice Storm is generally good, of course, but the meta hasn’t seemed conducive to getting many true game 1 blowouts with it lately, and I’m absolutely never afraid of Serendib Efreet with this deck. I also cut the Mox Jet this time. I can really go either way on it; I know Simon Christie doesn’t like it based on his experience with the deck, so I wanted to try it out to see how it felt. Cutting the Jet makes Mind Twist a little worse, and very slightly reduces the chance of slamming a turn 2 Ice Storm, but it also makes room for the fourth Factory to sneak back into the maindeck here. (I think 15 green sources, 20 total sources is more or less gospel at this point, especially if we’re reaching for the full complement of Dervishes postboard). I found space for the third Slug to move from the sideboard to the maindeck as well here, and this build also has a Timber Wolves and a third Relic Barrier sneaking into the side. Right on the outside of the bubble (cards 76-80ish) are a third Maze, the Jet, a third Tranquility for truly robot-heavy metas, the fourth Scryb Sprites, and maybe a Tracker or something like that.
Pairings are up, and I sit down across from Morgan Karlsson from Gothenburg. Right out of the gates, he opens Lotus, Ruby, Island, crack Lotus for black, Tutor, Timetwister, Sapphire, go. He follows this up with a Library on his second turn; my next turn, I cast Bottle, but he has Island Sapphire up and, of course, the Counterspell, and he rides LoA and a continued avalanche of restricted cards all the way from there. I joke that he should probably just pack it up for the day, since he won’t have a better start for the rest of the tournament; he laughs and adds that he probably won’t have a better start for the rest of his life. In our second game, he has a Lotus in his opener again to enable a first-turn Abyss, I can’t establish a board presence in that kind of headwind, and just like that, we’re done. Welcome to Sweden. (0-1)
Round two I’m paired with Johan Råberg, a true baller and gentleman from the Stockholm area who I’ve chatted with here and there over the past several years. In our first game I’m on the play, I open land, Elf, go; he plays Mox, blue dual, Birds of Paradise. On my next turn I cast and activate Chaos Orb, choosing his dual land; he says “wow, aggressive.” He’s right, of course, but I explain that I have a bias for land destruction. On his second turn he plays another land and casts Timetwister, which sets up me up with a hand chock-full of various forms of mana denial: a Crumble for his Mox, a Terror for his Birds, an Ice Storm, and then I quickly draw into another Ice Storm. All of this is exactly what I want to be doing, and I’ve quickly picked up my first game win on the day.
Råberg’s deck is insanely sweet, absolutely gorgeous collection, fully black-bordered, all five colors, lots of spicy one- and two-ofs, Doppelganger, random legends, Old Man of the Sea, a couple Sengir Vampires, Preacher, Disintegrate. We go to sideboard, and a few turns into our second game, another spicy number hits the board: Royal Assassin. Can’t make this stuff up.
I chuckle to myself, and feel that familiar fidgeting in my seat that I laughed off at Moogy’s only a few nights ago, recognizing that I’m effectively locked out of winning this game. He quickly smashes me with a Serra Angel, another truly tough card for me to deal with, and we’re on to game three.
In this final game with Råberg, I’ve got the upper hand on board and he’s chipping himself down gradually with two City of Brass, but then he damn near stabilizes with a Sengir Vampire and a Moat. (“Moat? Really? How many different cards are in this deck?”) He had taken himself down from five life to three in order to cast the Moat, though, using the Cities to make double white, and I absolutely lucksack into topping Hurricane for the win while he’s tapped out. So, the variance gods take away, but they also give. They truly do provide. (1-1)
The pairings for round three set me up for another match with Mats Furby, who had speculated last night that he might have a chance during the tournament to exact revenge for his lost ante card. This turned out to be prophetic. He’s on a version of BR Rukh/Diamond Valley, which can be a pretty tough out for me. Our matches end up revolving around the Mana Vaults he’s using as a key feature of his build. In the first game, I manage to lock him out under his own tapped Mana Vault by dealing with the initial threat and then cutting him off his lands. Having seen the Mana Vault, I immediately board in Relic Barriers. Our second game is a long one, mid-game Mind Twists on both sides, with my Twist hitting the Blood Moon he had tutored for, and his Twist hitting a Terror that I would have needed to kill his Rukh that ended up sealing the game. In our third game I think he just keeps an iffy hand, it ends up being sort of a non-game that I can reinforce with a little bit of mana denial. I joke to Mats that I’ve probably become a bit of a boogeyman for him this weekend, with the blue chip won in ante and a prophecy derailed. (2-1)
The fourth round has me back in the room with the lower table numbers for a match against Erik Henriksen, who I haven’t met in-person before, but I recognize from the online community as “elfvalleymtg” through his advocacy of the Norwegian variant of the AB4K format, which is mostly just an excuse to play Magic with only beautiful cards, as far as I can tell. And his cards are indeed beautiful – he’s on mono-black, fully black-bordered, DS Matte Ivory sleeves if I’m not mistaken; entirely easy on the eyes. Our first game ends up being a Library of Alexandria game unfortunately, I get buried pretty quickly despite having eight or nine outs to Library pre-board.
I immediately clutch at the playset of Dervishes in my sideboard and shuffle up. My initial seven for game 2 doesn’t do a whole lot, so I mull to six in search of something a little faster, ideally including at least one Dervish. My six includes a couple of land destruction effects, and I’m on the play, so good enough. His turn 1: Swamp. His turn 2: Maze. I smell blood in the water and instinctively huck an Ice Storm at the Swamp, figuring I can keep him off of double black for a long time and can mostly ignore the Maze if he has no board presence. His next turn he plays a Swamp and passes, I follow up by killing it on sight. I only have a limited amount of pressure on board, and his Maze is mitigating at least one or two damage per turn. On each of his next three consecutive turns he plays Swamp, Swamp, Swamp and gets himself online, while I’m not seeing any additional threats at all. He ends up winning this game after maybe fifteen turns, and I’ve drawn exactly zero Whirling Dervishes by the end of it. In our post-game chat, he reveals that he had four Swamps in his opening hand – absolutely pro move by him to bait me by playing the Maze on turn 2. Well done. (2-2)
By now it’s around 5:30pm, and they’ve announced a dinner break for the next hour and a half. I was very impressed with the hotel’s ability to feed about 120 hungry dudes within the allotted time. The buffet meal was straightforward and effective: literally meat and potatoes, dinner rolls, and a salad that for some reason included pineapple, a curveball but not a dealbreaker.
At the dinner table, I finally get to meet Bjørn Einar Bjartnes in person, a former co-worker of Mg’s from the Oslo scene, and one of the earliest webcam Old School players from early 2016. Quickly doing the math, I realized that I’ve known this guy for seven years now… wow. Mg and Kalle have joined the table as well, and everyone quickly observes that Magnus has his dinner plate piled rather high. He explains that he eats only one major meal per day, essentially, and this launches a discussion about the merits of intermittent fasting, among other contrasting approaches to sustenance. By the end of the meal, we’re all just laughing and I note that we’re surrounded by British guys wearing “FREE SHAHRAZAD” t-shirts: Simon at our table, and Brothers Stebbo and Jonas at the table directly behind Mg. From there, the liberation campaign shifts immediately into overdrive. Shameless lobbying all around. The perils of being Mg.
The fifth round of Swiss starts around 7pm, and my opponent is Mällroth from Karlstad. This guy is so rad: epic tangly beard, long pleated kilt, absolutely hammered. “I was on the test panel for spirits,” he explains – apparently I missed a gin tasting after dinner. He has a sweet hand-drawn Birds of Paradise playmat. “I have about one hundred and seventy Birds of Paradise,” he says with the passion of a man who just came from the test panel for spirits.
I couldn’t tell you a damned thing about our games, other than that in game 2, we were at an absolute stalemate, he’s got a Su-Chi on board that I can hold off but not attack through, and then I topdeck the one Timber Wolves in my 75 that I had boarded in, giving me exactly what I needed to break the board stall. Timber Wolves, man. I’m a believer. (3-2)
It was at this juncture, between rounds five and six, when Tolaria absolutely imploded. David Strandberg is hunched over his laptop with a furrowed brow, messaging Slanfan on every conceivable platform, and trying to get him on the phone over a span of perhaps thirty increasingly frustrating minutes. Looking over Strandberg’s shoulder at the event management interface, it appears as though Tolaria flat-out nuked the results from the most recent round, and when he tried a few things to get everything un-stuck, the event state started reverting back towards round three. I sit down with Strandberg at this point and we quickly copy the event log into a text file so that, if nothing else, we have the records of all match results to that point backed up in a format that we can use to rebuild if necessary. Not knowing whether or not we’ll get the event into a workable state in Tolaria, Stebbo and I begin a very intensive process of manually entering all of the player names and pairings into an alternate platform. Gordon helpfully brings us the equipment we’ll need: an additional laptop and some whiskey.
After maybe another half an hour, as we’re rebuilding the pairings manually for round one of a seven-round, 121-player Shark tournament, I commiserate with Strandberg. I recount my own recurring nightmares, that is, actual dreams that I have had – continue to have – about the hypothetical mid-tournament crisis: the printer goes down, or I didn’t bring the printer at all, or somehow I forgot to make match slips, or for some reason I need to work out all of the pairings by hand, with 100 or more people just waiting around for me to do the work. These are the thoughts that very literally keep me up at night, and all I want to do is to be the best possible host, respect the hell out of other people’s time, and do everything I can to make sure everyone goes home happy.
Strandberg eventually gets Slanfan on the phone, and after a bit, Slanfan is able to get the event state in Tolaria back to where it was as of the end of round four. But this leaves us with a solid forty-five minutes of manual entry – first to rebuild the round five pairings exactly as they were, and then to re-enter the results for all fifty-five or however many matches there were in that round, double-checking the drops in Tolaria to make sure to account for the guys who had fully dropped from the tournament in order to fire up the Premodern cube during the long delay. Stebbo does absolute yeoman’s work, reading off player names while I set up the pairings as quickly as I can, and then Strandberg jumps in to do the entry for the round five match results.
So, after a nearly two hour standstill, we’re finally back in the saddle for round six, and my opponent is another Norwegian on mono-black: Daniel Ewald, repping NOSMTG. He wins the first game, I board in my Dervishes. Flashing back to round four against Daniel’s countryman Erik, I mull away a slow-ish seven, hoping to hit a Dervish in my hand of six. No luck, again, but at least some action here. I open with Pendelhaven, Scryb Sprite, go. His first turn? Swamp, Dark Ritual, Royal Assassin. Man, these guys are out to get me today. David Jorgensen’s Assassin truly was a portent, and I can’t draw a Whirling Dervish to save my life. (3-3)
Having fallen short of my vague ambitions to end the day 5-2 or better, I wander back toward the bottom tables in hopes that I might see something interesting. And I do, immediately, at the table where the Drain Life Crew is hanging out. Here is Eztrigan – Rasmus Larsen Olsen – rocking our textbook green-and-black, while his opponent, Joakim Sørmo, is on some SPICY green-and-black. He has everything: Marsh Vipers, Tawnos’s Wand. Thicket Basilisk. Infernal Medusa. But the sweetest combo of all is something I haven’t seen before: Lure + The Wretched + Maze of Ith. Remember, Maze does not remove the attacking creature from combat, it just untaps it and prevents all damage in or out. This is so exciting. I want to do it someday. Seems perfect for Moogy’s.
I’m hanging back behind Eztrigan watching as the match unfolds, and then something happens that I truly wasn’t prepared for: Rasmus casts Demonic Tutor, and goes to pull up a Crumble from his library. Hang on – that Crumble – has my own handwriting on it? Looking closer, I realize that it’s the “Best Unpowered” prize from Havenwood 3. I have to admit, seeing that thing in Rasmus’ hands really hit me in the feels. Here was a card that I put out there in the world as a prize for a random webcam tournament, and the player who won that prize card, a guy I’ve never met in real life, he has it in his deck, he’s using it in a big tournament. He’s Tutoring for it, even. The random emotional force of this catches me off guard. It’s gratifying, and it’s humbling. I can’t help but smile.
It’s just about 11pm, and the seventh and final round of Swiss is here. I make the acquaintance of a very inebriated Stian Lindqvist, who’s running a Berserk Atog list. Audun was the best man at his wedding, he tells me, and Audun also happens to be sitting here next to us, making for a delightful time. Our first game is sloppy as hell, he’s missing triggers left and right, I’m doing the best I can to help him through, making sure I’m taking damage from his Vises and Ankhs or whatever. Audun is laughing at the spectacle, and says that this is exactly how Old School Magic should be. Stian makes it to a critical turn where he decides to go all-in, saccing all of his artifacts to the Atog and casting Berserk, except he maybe misjudged the math, and at the end of combat I have two or three life remaining, instead of being dead like he planned. Classic. Good lord, this match was a glorious mess. (4-3)
So, my tournament ends here, with all of my losses coming in the “top tables” room, and all of my wins coming in the “bottom tables” room. I won against some cool brews, and lost once to a pile of restricted cards and twice to Norwegians on mono-black. Every single one of my opponents was from either Sweden or Norway, which was really enjoyable, because I always prefer playing against local opponents at these events rather than getting paired with the usual suspects from the international crew of frequent flyers.
It’s now well after midnight, and after another technical mishap they’re finally able to announce the Top 8: Perennial end boss Olle Råde, Åland’s buddy Viktor “Vigo” Olsson, Thomas Nilsen on an insanely sweet Chains of Mephistopheles brew, Danny Friedman on his usual Twiddlevault shenanigans, Svante Landgraf, Felipe García, Will Magrann, and X-point ringer David Lilleøren on some kind of white-based control pile. There are a few off-beat lists here, but make no mistake: this is a field of stone-cold killers, every single one deserving to be exactly where they are.
The hours during the Top 8 are quite honestly a blur. Shane offers me some Bäska Droppar (that’s malört by another name, for the Chicago crowd), and naturally, I accept. Will is locked in super-serious mortal combat against Vigo, and then against Felipe. Shahrazad is reportedly getting liberated with grand pronouncements on the Wak-Wak stream. Farmstead guy Odd Anders lets me know that there’s a kebab place down the street that’s open very late, so I duck out for some meatballs and lingonberry jam.
I sit down next to Danny and Svante in the streaming room in an attempt to take in the finals. Jonnie and Simon are playing increasingly loopy games of no-Bird 40K. Drew Tucker is still up and chatting with Mg. I find myself giving Gordon Andersson a few deeply conciliatory hugs.
When booking my flights some months earlier, I had decided to take an extra day off in order to avoid having to head for the airport untenably early on Sunday morning, and to actually see something of Oslo, having never visited Norway at all prior to this trip. As the evening’s activities rage past 4am (or maybe even 5am), I’m feeling like I definitely made the correct play.
After maybe four hours of decent sleep, I’m up and packed, and the sun is shining brightly over Arvika once again. I set about grabbing some coffee for the road, and bring the car around. None other than Magnus de Laval has joined our traveling party, which means we are five men for the ride back, making for a somewhat too cozy situation in the back seat. The one this impacts the most, by far, is Shane, who is plainly in rough shape, having left it all out on the court last night in some degenerate ritual called the “Duel of Chaos” with Mari.
The ride back toward Oslo is pleasant enough, with great weather and plenty to talk about, but as we’re approaching Kongsvinger, Shane is looking green around the gills and it’s clear we need to stop for a second. Out of familiarity and convenience, I pull the car into the same little parking lot by the river where we had stopped for lunch on Friday. Shane heads promptly for the nearest snowbank, and the rest of us stretch it out and get some air.
On our way out of town, we pass through what I had assumed was a toll gantry, but Mg explains that it’s actually a set of traffic cameras, or what we would probably call a “speed trap” in the States. This leads to a robust conversation about laws and norms, crime and infraction, Norway’s stiff penalties for moving violations, and overall personal attitudes and cultural differences around these matters. We all learn a little something; leave it to Mg to elevate the level of discourse among learned gentlemen on the post-tournament car ride.
We say goodbye to Mari at Gardermoen, and then take one of the back roads into Oslo proper, in order to avoid perhaps ten miles or more of dead standstill traffic on the main highway. Shane and Mg are both in need of some recuperating time, so Danny and I are left to figure out how to spend about six or seven hours in downtown Oslo. The walk along the harbor offers some old-meets-new views of the city, with a downright breathtaking opera house and the brand new Munch Museum together with 19th century architecture and floating sauna huts along the water’s edge. It’s the middle of February, probably in the low 30s, and there are dozens of people out in their bathing suits, emerging from the saunas here and there to plunge straight into the icy water of the harbor, then back up and into the saunas to warm up again.
If I remember one thing about Oslo it will probably be the incredible smell of wood smoke in the air, wafting up from the fire pits at the saunas, right there on the harbor in the heart of downtown. The juxtaposition of such a warm and primal sensation with the almost otherworldly contemporary architecture is striking.
These are the real perks of traveling to play this game. We walk past the Akershus fortress, see the home of the Nobel Peace Prize, crush some oysters and mussels and drinks along the harbor walk. The Munch Museum is open late, so we’re able to work our way through an incredible postwar abstract art exhibit and a gallery full of works by Edvard Munch himself, including The Scream. Shane re-joins us for dinner, having sufficiently recovered, and afterwards he brings us to an incredible 200-year-old beer cellar: Schouskjelleren Mikrobryggeri, constructed entirely of arching brickwork, dimly lit by candles and a wood fire. It’s a quiet Sunday night here, and we more or less close the place down, watching the last few logs in the fireplace burn down to embers.
Danny and I cap off the night at Mg’s new digs, up on a ridge overlooking the Oslo area. We do a quick tour of his man cave filled with various nerdly treasures, a trove of Magic memorabilia and a stockpile of sealed product ready for a lifetime of drafting, and then we take in our final wood fire of the day, which Mg graciously sets up for us in the stove in his living room. It’s late, but there’s time enough to really reflect on these friendships I’ve made over the last several years, and how much richer my life is for knowing people I would never have met in my regular day-to-day: guys from different countries, guys from very different backgrounds and cultures, guys with wholly different jobs and situations, but all of us with this one rather specific interest in common. I think a lot about the doors that have opened for me – quite often literally, the doors to friends’ homes – as a result of how much I’ve invested – how much so many of us have invested – in the Old School community over many years now. And it makes me smile. And I don’t take it for granted.
So, that’s the weekend, mischief managed once again. Hats off to our hosts, David Strandberg and KungMarkus, for throwing one hell of a party, and especially for securing one of the most perfect venues for an Old School event that I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending, truly. We all had plenty of room to circulate, the food was convenient and plentiful, the staff were super-welcoming and tolerant of our shenanigans, and holding everything at a hotel meant that the beds and private storage were right on site. Old School event organizers take note: the one-stop shop is the way to go, if you can possibly swing it. These guys have established a tiny town in Värmland as a global force in the Old School Magic scene over the last ten years or so, and having spent only a couple of days with them, it’s easy to see how.
The very last thing I’ll say here is that traveling to Sweden to play 93/94 really does hit different. There’s nothing else like it. A lot of this has to do with the hospitality and the traditions, sure, but part of it truly does have to do with the actual cards on the table. At so many moments over the course of the event on Saturday, I caught myself thinking, “good lord, the cards are so beautiful here.” The collections of so many of these guys are just so impressive. Black borders all over the place, and obviously all English printings, no second copyright lines, overall such a consistent and damn near sacred aesthetic. At one point, Daniel Ewald played an Unlimited Disk in our match, and it was actually jarring. During another one of my games, some guy next to me went on an absolute soapbox rant about how the high price of entry to a room like this is actually a good thing, because it ensures that everyone taking part in this experience, that’s building this scene together, has bought in, literally and figuratively, in a very substantial and demonstrable way. We all have so much skin in the game, and that fosters stronger relationships and a community where we’re that much more inclined to take care of each other. I think there’s some truth in all of that, and the longer I do this, the less I mind a bit of well-measured gatekeeping. The Swedish reprint regime takes its lumps in the U.S. especially, but when you come here, the effect is dramatic and undeniable. At the end of the day, it’s all about keeping the vibe alive, and I can attest that the vibe is alive and well in Arvika, Sweden.
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