Emerald City Trolls: Seattle Old School MtG

Recap: The Brothers' War Showdown

By stsully

June 26, 2019

On Saturday, June 22, at 5PM in Seattle, 23 mages gathered in an attempt to end what had been decades-long conflict between rival brothers and artificers, Mishra and Urza. After ravaging the lands beyond all hope of life ever returning, their conflict would be settled once and for all by their various lieutenant mages, who armed themselves with their Master's magical tools and even marshalled the last remaining natural forces of Terisiare to aid in their cause.

Long did they battle and heartily did they struggle, with mages on each side seeking to demonstrate their strength and earn the chance to face the mightiest mages the other had to offer. Out of the wake of destruction and defeated foes emerged victorious the forces of Mishra, led by the now-anointed Conqueror-Mage Stephen Hines, Scion of Yawgmoth and Duke of Phyrexia! Woe unto all of Terisiare, for none now stand to oppose the armies of Phyrexia in their quest to turn all of the living into an army of mechanical undead! (Maybe someone should have brought the Golgothian Sylex...)

[/fin flavorful intro; here's a great summary of the lore]

In seriousness, the Emerald City Trolls had a great time hosting fellow mages from crews such as the South Sound Bolters, The Horde, the Beasts of the Bay, and the Desert Twisters (message us if we missed anyone!) in a unique tournament. Many prizes were won. Delicious beers and non-alcoholic drinks both were imbibed. Pizza was eaten. Artifacts were blasted. And most importantly, money was raised. A total of $660 went to Mary's Place out of entry fees, raffle ticket, and slap wrap sales. (PS - there may or may not be about 100 people walking around the San Francisco Bay Area with moxen wristbands and/or Richard Garfield slap koozie/gauntlets now. Thanks for your generosity guys!)

The Brothers' War Showdown was governed by a set of rules designed with a few goals in mind:

1. Since it was starting at 5PM after one of the days of MagicFest Seattle, it had to take something in the 4-5 hour range to complete
2. It had to stay engaging for everyone who was coming the whole time. A short event where you're knocked out quickly is no fun
3. We wanted to encourage some unique deckbuilding aspects to make a shorter event still an attractive choice

We will get more into the how's and the why's of the rules at the end of this article for those who are interested. For now, here's a quick recap of the rules to set up the all-important Reporting of the Deck Lists.

Deck Construction

Before the tournament, players chose to be on Team Mishra or Team Urza. Their choice of Team implied certain deck construction incentives and limitations. A set of thematic cards for each Team was chosen based on card flavor. For example, cards named after Urza or his apprentice Tawnos were on Team Urza, and cards named after Mishra or his apprentice Ashnod were on Team Mshra. Some cards having to do with both of their childhoods and cards related to their teacher Tocasia, such Su-chi and Grapeshot Catapult, plus cards having to do with the place where their final battle was happening (namely Argoth) were assigned to both Teams.

Players had to construct a deck without using cards from the opposing Brother's list. Additionally, players received a "multiplier" bonus for including many cards from their Team's list. That comes into play when players score points as described below.

Tournament Structure

The Main Event of the tournament was a single-elimination bracket, one-hour max per match. One side of the bracket included all the Urza players, and the other side included all the Mishra players. With the field capped at 32, that meant we'd expect the whole bracket completed in about five hours, provided the bracket was reasonably balanced, and only up to one extra hour if they were horribly out of balance.

Once players were eliminated from the Main Event, there was also a Team Event that provided a reason for them to keep playing. Every time a player won a game with their Brothers' War deck, whether in the Main Event or after being eliminated, they scored a point for themselves. Additionally, if they were playing someone from the other Team, they scored a point for their Team. All points scored by a player were multiplied by their multiplier, so a very flavorful deck could score points rapidly with just a few wins.

A player's multiplier was also used as the first tiebreaker in instances where that was needed. For example, when a bye was needed to balance a bracket, byes were awarded first by descending multiplier, then by the traditional consideration of player record followed by opponent record.

Prizes were awarded based on Main Event performance as well as points scored, with most of the prizes weighted towards scoring points over winning in the bracket. Also, the Team with the most points was declared the winner of the overall Brothers' War Showdown and all Team members received a special prize.

Oh, and possibly the best prize of all, each Team's most creative deckbuilder (chosen by applause for representing creativity in the use of the lore) won a special prize including a completely awesome Ken & Ryu alter by Anschutz Alters, plus a copy of The Brothers' War book.

Sweet Deckz!!!

Phew. I promise that was as succinct a summary of the key points of the rules as I could manage to help set up the format players were brewing in. If you want details, check out the full rules. Suffice it to say that the rules rewarded people for brewing up cool decks with lots of Antiquities cards you don't normally see.

And now, without further ado, here are (most of) the decks! (Players: if you want me to add your deck here, send the pic to emeraldcitytrolls@gmail.com!)

TEAM URZA

• Charlie Peterson (Beasts of the Bay) - 4TH POINTS
• Eric Ridgeway (ang3lfyr3) (Emerald City Trolls)
• James Burge (South Sound Bolters)
• Jeremy Chien (Beasts of the Bay) - RUNNER UP, MOST CREATIVE
• Joseph Horen (Desert Twisters)
• Kevin Moorehead (Emerald City Trolls)
• Mox Emerald Scott (Emerald City Trolls)
• Quinn Maurmann (Emerald City Trolls) - 2ND POINTS
• Randy Buehler (Emerald City Trolls) - MOST POINTS; MOST CREATIVE
• Ryan Grodzinski (Beasts of the Bay) - URZA BRACKET WINNER

TEAM MISHRA

• Ethan Schwager (South Sound Bolters)
• Geoff Willard (Beasts of the Bay) - 2ND POINTS
• Jason Styles (Emerald City Trolls)
• Jeff Mendoza (Emerald City Trolls) - 4TH POINTS
• Jesse Olson (The Horde)
• Kevin Elliott (Beasts of the Bay) - MOST POINTS
• Matt Degrate (Emerald City Trolls)
• Matt Randall (Beasts of the Bay)
• Shawn Sullivan (Emerald City Trolls)
• Stephen Hines (Beasts of the Bay) - MAIN EVENT CHAMP; MISHRA BRACKET WINNER; 3RD POINTS
• Trevor Freutel (South Sound Bolters) - MOST CREATIVE

TEAM URZA

We're giving each deck which placed in the creativity prize a little extra note. Jeremy's Urza deck included Tron, natch, as well as a whole bunch of wonderful things to do with all that mana. Among the top plays of the entire day, he managed to cast Eureka and put not one but two Colossus of Sardia's (Colossi of Sardia?) into play!

Here's more on Randy's deck in his own words:

Mechanically the deck is mostly an Urzatron deck plus the interactivity that comes from Disenchants and Plows, but it's all the small touches that I think put it over the top creatively/flavorfully. I made an effort to use as many different artifacts as possible - I think there's 28 different artifacts in the deck and 35 total (some of which are pretty bad, but I did manage to win a game attacking with Clay Statue!). People seemed to enjoy my life total cards. Also note Urza's Severed Head (the "Headmaster" card), which spent games guarding my sideboard. Plus the Tolaria with no blue spells anywhere in the 75 and Rod of Ruin (which did WORK against Argothian Pixies and should have won me the Urza bracket versus the Flying Man/Citanul Druids deck but I punted game 3 by responding incorrectly to Hurkyl's recall #2). I also made a small effort to role-play while battling (never touching an evil Weakstone, denouncing Mishra players as cowardly, proposing to build an Academy on Tolaria, quoting flavor text as I played cards, etc.).

The deck played better than I was expecting and I believe my only losses were to green-based 1x decks whose flavorful cards were actually just anti-artifact cards (and/or functionally anti-me cards like Ankh of Mishra).

TEAM MISHRA

In true Mishra fashion, Trevor's deck was all about extracting power from the land in order to fuel his beastly minions. Trevor used Living Lands to turn all the Forests of Argoth into fuel for his Fallen Angels, blasting his enemies at the expense of the natural world.

Sweet Playz!!!

A tournament like this cannot go down without there being some really unusual, sweet interactions we don't usually get to see. And of course, a big part of the reason we get together is to meet great people and make some memories together.

Without further ado, here are some great moments captured in photos! And big thanks to fellow Troll Mox Emerald Scott for many of these pics!

The Brothers' War Showdown players gathered for battle!

The event was held at TeKu Tavern, a favorite Troll hangout. They sell dozens of delicious microbrews AND sell Magic cards, though only of the new booster variety.

Main Event play.
Near table: Ryan Grodzinski (Urza), left, vs. Jeremy Chien (Urza), right
Far table: Ethan Schwager (Mishra), left, vs. Geoff Willard (Mishra), right

Team game play.
Near table: Ethan Schwager (Mishra), left, vs. Quinn Maurmann (Urza), right
Mid table: James Burge (Urza), left, vs. Matt Degrate (Mishra), right
Far table: Mox Emerald Scott (Urza), left, vs. Matt Randall (Mishra), right

James Burge's amazing Game of Thrones Moxen and Lotus. Alters by the incomparable Dustin Brossard.

Kevin Elliott with the classic Lotus - Mox - Workshop - Chaos Orb - Battering Ram - Dragon Engine opener. Such firepower should not be entrusted to the public. Or at least people in fedoras.

One of many times Tron was assembled on the day, and this time with multiples. A trio of Winter Mishra's Factory's makes for an imposing if beautiful adversary, with Tawnos' Coffin and a regeneration-ready Clay Statue creating challenging lines of play to calculate for both players.

A very stacked board from a back and foth matchup following a Eureka being cast. With decks full of brown and green cards, the ol' E=mc^2 moment produced several games in which it became a battle of who could follow up with enough firepower to break through the opponent's heavy wall of permanents. Also note the graded ATQ Ivory Tower coaster, very nice.

On the opposing side, multiple Rods of Ruin not only help keep a board clean, but also represent a bonus flavor boost because they replicate the special ability the Urza Vanguard card offers its player.

Here's a great one from a game between Matt Degrate, piloting a Mishra take on Atogs, vs. Charlie Peterson, commanding some angry Argothians for Urza. In Matt's words:

Charlie and I were on Game 4, both low on life and top decking
Played a risky Wheel to dig for a Bolt to get in for the final 3 points
Used Ashnod's Transmogrant on Right Atog to get the +1/+1 then fed it The Rack to get in for lethal, he went to Crumble the Atog because it was an artifact and I fed it to Left Atog to take the W

Weakstone putting in some work holding back a horde of goblins. Weakstone is not a very good card, unless your opponents are also playing not-very-good cards. Also note that the opposing Blood Moon turns Workshop into a source of pump for a Dragon Engine to attack through the Weakstone.

Normally awkward at best, Obelisk of Undoing was an interesting option in this format to recur creatures like Triskelion and Tetravus, while also providing utility to thwart widespread opposing artifact removal.

Randy with his Urza swag, including the Urza Vanguard card, Urza planeswalker from Unglued, and Urza cards Blind Seer, Urza's Guilt, and Urza's Bauble, used to keep track of his life total.

And now, the final stages of the Main Event's championship match between Ryan Grodzinski (Urza) top, and Stephen Hines (Mishra), bottom! With the first two games split 1-1, both players are low on life in the deciding game 3. About to begin his turn, Ryan is facing down a lethal attack on Stephen's next turn if he can't find an answer.

Miracle! Ryan finds Control Magic to steal Stephen's Llanowar Elf! It's not a complete answer, but it buys time and hopefully another turn to look for a way to win. He's got Bolts and Blood Moons in his deck to offer good ways to deal with Mishra's Factory (Argothian Pixies and Gaea's Avenger may or may not have been boarded out, but those would be reasonable answers as well if available).

Stephen rips Disenchant off the top to get his Elf back and clear the way for Mishra's Factory to crack in for lethal! Ryan gives him a hearty shake after an incredibly fun, close final game.

Ryan is the first to bow to our new evil overlord Stephen, whose saucy Mishra and Argoth build not only captured the Main Event for him, but also won the 10 bonus Team Points that led Team Mishra to a 62-54 victory over Team Urza in the Team Event. Oh, it also tore open the portal to Phyrexia and, contradicting canon, doomed Dominia to an eternity of mechanical undeath. That was a helluva Disenchant rip!

Sweet Prizes!!!

Many sweet prizes were handed out at the event!

Top, prizes for results in the Main Event, creativity prizes, and for the top 4 Points scorers from each Team. Bottom, the donated cards (and an Urza's Tower playmat from Ethan!) for drafting at the end of the tournament. We'll get more signatures on them next time, promise!

The raffle prize pool, featuring 2 Su-chi's (awarded separately), a playset of ATQ Ornithopters, a playset of ATQ Argothian Pixies, and a playset of ATQ Atogs. On the left, four cards donated by Mark Brothers of the Alamo City Old School group, including a sweet Hurkyl's Recall alter with yo-yo added. Beneath, a playmat donated by Aaron Rehfield of the Horde, featuring the custom Serendib Efreet art Anson Maddocks did for their Battle of the Sound event in May. Thanks to all who donated to this incredible prize pool! (Note: the Armageddon alter and Dragon Engine were for the prize pool for drafting, and were just chilling on this part of the table when the photo was taken).

The Team Event prize, awarded to every member of Team Mishra. The 1995 Antiquities War comic, issue 1 of 4, plus an Onulet and Grapeshot Catapult, two artifacts from Urza and Mishra's time studying under Tocasia. Some of you left before I remembered to hand these out, so Team Mishra members, contact Shawn if you didn't receive yours!

Door prizes included a stamped Weakstone and Mightstone to have opponents sign, plus a three-pack of 90's nostalgia cards.

Stephen Hines with his prizes for winning the Mishra Bracket, 3rd most points for Mishra, and the overall Main Event. Note the Richard Garfield gauntlet on his right wrist, to prevent it from being destroyed in the event of an errant Chaos Orb flip. Smart.

Ryan Grodzinski with his prizes for winning the Urza Bracket.

Randy Buehler with his prizes for Most Creative Urza Deck.

Trevor Freutel with his prizes for Most Creative Mishra Deck.

Creativity prizes Ryu Weakstone and Ken Mightstone, together one last time as a united powerstone before going their separate ways into the world. Alters created and generously donated by Anschutz Alterations. Hadoken!

Eric Ridgeway, aka ang3lfir3, won the "Lucky Find" prize, an ATQ Ivory Tower. One random door prize Weakstone had an upside-down stamp, indicating that player made a lucky find at the archeology dig!

Kevin Elliott with his raffle win, Mark Brothers' altered Hurkyl's Recall. Note the yo-yo descending from Hurkyl's hand (I guess she would be Hurkyl?).

Jesse Olson with his raffle win, a playset of ATQ Atogs.

Patrick Wilson with his raffle win, a Su-chi.

Top hits from a stacked pack of 90's Super Stars MusiCards, opened by yours truly.

The Nitty Gritty, For All You Rules/Event Nerds

If you're curious for more detail about the process of how this event came together, here's a little more detail for you.

As I mentioned before, the overarching motivation was to make a fun, short-ish event during MagicFest Seattle, planned by Old School players, for Old School players. We wanted it to be more than just a casual meetup, but knew we'd probably have trouble attracting too many people during the middle of the day while MagicFest was going on, so a full tournament with Swiss and a cut to Top 4/Top 8 would have been tough. This was also our first event where we invited the Old School community at large, and we wanted to do something a little unique and also small enough we felt comfortable handling it. Meanwhile, a Brothers' War themed event was an idea we'd already kicked around a bit, and I had drafted a very rough set of rules for a single-elimination tournament with a team-based side event. The lore of The Brothers' War is also awesome and iconic, so we decided to try it out.

Myself and fellow Trolls Quinn Maurmann, Mox Emerald Scott, and Jeff Mendoza all pitched in to help get the rules into a fair, coherent body from the initial draft rule set. A labyrinthine set of Flavor rules based on card names and flavor text was discarded and replaced with a clean list of cards composing each Team's flavor list. Players choosing their own Team was made mandatory, instead of merely having players opt into one if they wanted to and randomly assigning the rest. Points multipliers were added to encourage playing many theme cards, and points scored per match was standardized to make the side Theme games just as important as the Main Event. A complicated prize awarding structure was replaced with prizes for points scoring and a standard reverse-order-of-finish prize pool (thanks to the players for preventing a tired me from awarding prizes in forwards-order during the tourney too ;) ).

We were after a couple different goals with our rule set: to make everyone playing feel like their games mattered, both for themselves and their Team, and to incentivize playing funky brews involving some of the quirkier cards from Antiquities. These aspects essentially cast the tournament itself as a game, and whether or not that tourney-game was fun would depend on whether or not we were able to design it well.

In my opinion, games that are interesting have a few common characteristics: very complex decision spaces, ambiguous ways to identify the optimal path to victory, and conflicting incentives which force a player to make tough choices/tradeoffs. Humans are actually really great at solving these kinds of problems, especially in groups, so with that in mind we simply set out to create an environment where players would be confronted with several new choices they may not have seen before, and some additional incentives beyond simply doing well in the Main Event.

Roughly, here the thought process behind the structure we ended up landing on. Coming to this chain of logic wasn't this linear in real life, but this is a pretty good description of where we ended up. I leave this here in case it helps anyone else trying to come up with a wonky format in the future.

With a goal of completing the tourney in about five hours, a single-elimination Main Event bracket is the most straightforward tournament structure, although granted single-elimination is not a great player experience. But it's not a foreign kind of tournament, and people would understand how that part would work.

A major drawback of a single elimination tournament is that every round, about half the players lose their entire stake in the tournament. We added the Team Event to make sure everyone had a reason to keep playing meaningful games after being eliminated from the Main Event. We didn't want someone to come all this way to lose two games and be told "that's it for you." Plus, humans often naturally like Teams, and the aspect of being part of a larger whole trying to defeat some adversary turns on the caveperson part of our brains that make us get emotionally involved.

We decided to set up the Main Event a specific way because of the existence of the Team Event. Namely, we separated the players in the Main Event's bracket by Team. This had several important consequences:

• A final battle in the Main Event between Team Urza and Team Mishra was assured.
  • This was important because it was suspected that Team Mishra had much stronger cards than Team Urza. I think we can now see though that the teams are more balanced than we thought, in no small part due to the strength of Argoth's cards.
• Until the final battle, no games played in the Main Event scored any Team points.
  • That meant players eliminated from the Main Event were the primary players contributing to their Team's efforts to win! Instead of scrubbing out, players eliminated early were likely to determine which Team won the overall Showdown, and one could even imagine someone designing a deck to go down this aspect instead! This seemed like a really cool incentive structure - would someone create a deck designed to score lots of points in games against the other Team, even if it made them more likely to lose in the Main Event?
• It was likely that brackets would be unbalanced, leading to byes.
  • This was important because it gave us a great way to incentivize a high multiplier: byes go to highest multiplier first. This small advantage might go unnoticed by some players, but other players could see it and factor it into their calculus about what to play. Randy Buehler, in fact, received a bye in both the second and third rounds of the Urza bracket, going straight from winning his first round match to the Urza Bracket finals, because his deck had a 3x multiplier, highest for all of Urza. He used the intervening time to win 5-6 games and score a boatload of points for both himself and his Team.

The lore components were added to strengthen the sense of the Teams being an important feature of the tournament. Many of the cards Antiquities revolve around the Urza/Mishra lore, so centering the Teams on a list of cards that were "theirs" was a natural way to bring the lore into the event (not to mention encouraged a role-playing element, which actually happened a little bit!). Here's the list of cards and the Teams they were assigned to:

We wanted the Team card lists to be important, and to encourage people to have lots of theme cards in their decks, which led to the creation of the points system for giving bonuses to players who used their chosen theme well. We probably spent the most time refining the Team card lists and especially the thresholds for the different multipliers.

As an example of a change we made to the Team card lists, we eventually moved Triskelion from not being affiliated with either Team flavor list to being a part of the Urza list. This made sense both from a flavor and a Team power balance list. Flavor-wise, Triskelion was invented by Tawnos, but the initial way we chose cards for the team lists (a keyword search) left it out of the Urza list. There was also concern Urza might be too underpowered compared to Mishra, so giving Triskelion, arguably the best artifact creature in Antiquities, to Urza seemed like a helpful change. Also, Su-chi was already on the Both Team flavor list, and there was concern about a rather stock Workshops deck roflstomping the field. Taking Triskelion out of that deck helps tune it way down.

The points multiplier thresholds ended up changing several times before we found what felt like the right calibration: 12 cards per multiplier level. We looked at 10 cards per level for a while, but it was too easy to get into higher multipliers with standard decks. For example, 4x Factory, Strip Mine, and Ankh would count as a 1x multiplier Mishra deck and is basically the start of a Tier 1 Atog deck. We wanted to see Atogs in the field, but with more creativity than just that core plus a bunch of non-theme cards. On the other end of the spectrum, we also looked at 15 cards per level. That was too hard, and it felt like there was too little incentive to go past a 1x multiplier. Going from 16 flavor cards all the way to 31 meant building a completely different deck, not to mention cutting a lot of good cards for weird Antiquities ones along the way. At 12 cards per level, it feels like stopping at 13 for a 1x multiplier leaves a lot on the table, and you often actually end up with 15 or 16 flavor cards anyway because you often play four-ofs. Once you have that many, it doesn't feel so hard to find some cuts and get to 25 flavor cards for a 2x multiplier. And once you're there, suddenly 37 cards for a 3x multiplier doesn't seem so far away...

These numbers also seemed to be the right size for people to feel pulled into playing more than 60 cards - a major spiciness win - in order to hit a flavor threshold and get a higher multiplier. In practice, that proved true, and many people had 60-something cards in order to crack that 3x multiplier mark. There was even a 75-card deck (get down with your bad self Kevin) and a 90-card deck (hai), both of which grew so large to achieve 4x multipliers. Another player, Quinn, realized he should just play more than 60 cards when the 61st card, which he cut from his 2x multiplier list to get down to 60, was Balance. You know, a mediocre card.

Because most of the flavor cards are simply not as good as many other Old School cards, the incentives for including them had to be worth it. To some extent, we hoped people would just get into the spirit of the thing and bring a cool, flavorful brew. But also, it never hurts to have prize incentives, so we weighted much of the prize support to the personal and Team points. In the Main Event, only the bracket champs plus the overall winner got prizes for their performance. However, the top 4 points scorers from each Team, plus the entire Team with the most Team points, got prizes. Since prize distribution was announced along with the rules, we hoped people would follow the clues and build a flavorful deck, or at least choose their plan of attack for the tournament knowing what the prize distribution was incentivizing.

To really emphasize this point, the best (IMO) prizes at the tournament were given for deck creativity, one for each Team. The amazing full-art Ken & Ryu Mightstone/Weakstone alters from Dan were a big incentive, plus a physical copy of The Brothers' War, which has become hard to find, were intended to make sure people knew what we wanted the event to be about.

We also were comfortable with the fact that players could field almost any deck they wanted, if they just chose one of the Theme lists and didn't worry about their multiplier. That could even mean having a 0x multiplier if they wanted to play a different deck than a pile of Antiquities jank, and if they were having fun, then cool, more power to them. While we would have been disappointed if our rules weren't interesting enough to inspire people to try other things (fortunately they were), it is totally understandable that someone would want to try and play some other deck in the Main Event and not worry about the other components.

There were many more little decisions but I'm sitting at over 6 million words already, so I'll stop there. But at its core, in designing this event we wanted to create complex, overlapping incentive structures that forced players to decide what was important to them about the event, and to make choices that required them to make tradeoffs they thought would best enable them to hit their goals. We refined the rules and incentive structures to try and keep things fun and balanced, and offered a variety of ways to win prizes that made sure everyone could find a goal to pursue even if they got knocked out of the Main Event. Others who actually played* in the event may be sharing more in other writeups, and hopefully they have new insights I haven't thought of yet, but from the standpoint of designing a set of new rules, this is what we were thinking about.

Till next time friends, may your artifacts never be blasted!

*: PS - I sat out of the tournament to do scoring and stuff, but I did get to play my 90-card 4x multiplier mono-black Mishra deck against Jay, from Cards First, the entire tournament when I was free. Jay didn't know about the event ahead of time and came over with some Beasts, packing his stack of mono-colored Legacy-legal Old School decks. Since those were also decks containing a bunch of "suboptimal" cards like my deck, they made for some great matchups. Jay was totally cool with just slinging spells with me during down moments in the tournament. We jammed games and chewed the fat for like five or six hours that day, and it was awesome. I managed to kill him once using a couple Drain Lifes combined with Priest of Yawgmoth shenanigans (which made my deck completely worth it!), and I think he killed me every single other game. Then he took some of my cards I'd been unable to have Mark Poole sign at the GP and got them signed for me the next day. Thanks so much Jay, you're an awesome dude and I'm so happy to have you as a new friend!