Old School MTG: Old School 40 - Singleton

I've organized a 40 card Old School format tournament for a small group of friends a few times over the past few years, mostly to make the entry into Old School more forgiving and accessible. We change the rules up a bit each time, but basically it's 40 card decks using OS cards.

Earlier this year, I started thinking about building a 40 card singleton OS deck for each color with the intention of playing the decks against each other. Of course, there's still a global pandemic so this is all theoretical. I built decks for Red, Blue, and Black. Keep scrolling for deck selfies.

I played a few "games" of one deck vs. the other. They games play out a lot like the Alpha 40 games, which isn't too surprising. There is almost no deck manipulation or draw, so top decks matter a lot! Drawing lands for a few turns in a row when you need action is a problem if the other deck has pressure on the board. Classic stuff.

Getting the chance to test these decks out enough to tune them will be challenging until we can get together in person again, but it was still fun to put these decks together. I'm always struck by how darkly colorful and saturated the Alpha/Beta cards are compared to other prints/sets. It really jumps out in a side-by-side comparison with a set like Legends. Arabian Nights is in the ballpark, too.

Right now, I'm running Alpha - Fallen Empires. FE could be easily cut. The decks might work better as Alpha/Beta/Unlimited. Since the decks are so small, even with the singleton deck construction limit, it turns into running most of the most obvious cards for each color/slot with a few surprises.

The goal was to have something "ready to play" and simple enough for quick games. After putting these together, the better approach might be a mini-Battle Box designed for 2 players using OS cards. There's a great example of this using Revised cards at MTGBattleBox. We have a Battle Box using bulk cards that is a crowd favorite, so an OS Battle Box could be a good entry point for the OS format. The best part about Battle Box is that card combinations you wouldn't otherwise see come up all the time. It's a way to get surprising mileage out of the cards you've been playing for 25+ years.

Red

Blue

Black