By ‘ Nethershadow’ Juriaan Feberwee

I started my magic the gathering adventure just after revised was over and fourth edition and ice age where available in the stores. After quitting magic the gathering in 96 with the Alliances Expansion I kept brewing old school decks from time to time in mtg vault or a piece of paper. The reason I quit back then was that the cool old cards where too expensive for me back then and they came with new sets every few months that didn’t appeal to me and where too expensive for me to collect as well at the time.

At some point I found the swedish9394 blog ( https://oldschool-mtg.blogspot.com/?m=1 ) and started following their awesome tournament top decks and blogs. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet.

At some point a few years back I decided I would like to make one deck for swedish9394 legal and I came up with a green black deck. It would have been one thousand euro’s to create and have a Living Plane, Mirror Universe, Sylvan Library four Triskelion and all kind of sweet stuff. I ordered three hundred euros of cards at Card Kingdom and forgot about my little project focusing more on collecting Warhammer and painting miniatures. Then when I wanted to finish the deck I found that to complete it then, it would cost another six thousand euro’s to finish the deck instead of the seven hundred euro it was before. That was when I gave up on the idea as I figured it was not in store for me anymore to enjoy this old school magic that I loved ever since I first learned about it in 1995.

Then something changed. At 24th of April 2020 i had a cerebral infarction and found out there was an opening between the left and right side of my heart that caused it. So 2020 was the year that they closed that hole and I had to focus on my rehabilitation. Then early 2021 I found the XptOs coming along on Facebook, and I thought this is interesting, and when I read about the reprint policy I figured this was my chance to get into old school magic again. And the tough time from the past year made me really want to get back into what I enjoy allot and so I started to finish my deck. Without the Living Plane, and without the Mirror Universe, because those where still way too expensive to put in, but I really like the deck allot. At XptOS#3 I started my first magic the gathering old school tournament ever. And I was hooked ever since.

I tried to buy new cards and brew new decks every month and so far it has been an awesome journey. I started altering my Bog Wraiths and got into an conversation with Louie (LOEKIE MTG) about altering a price card for the winner of the XpointOldschool monthly tournaments. I happily agreed Loving the idea of giving something back to this community that made me feel so welcome. A community with kind people, great conversations and awesome magic.

I love to brew something special every month and got rewarded twice by a spice price Wild Growth for which I am very grateful. This community is so kind and great hearted.

I truly believe I got some friends for life here among you fellow wizards.

My XptOS Decks for 2021 Monthly Tournament:

XptOS #3 Incarnatron

Here is the link to the Timmy Talks where this deck is competing with Roelf’s Counter Burn:
https://youtu.be/mPXdI5skf6Y

This was my first deck to play with since 96/97. It was really fun to play and has a lot of synergies going on. Looking back the match on Timmy Talks really showed that I was just getting back into the game after years. Made some mistakes against my opponent’s Power Sink’s, being able to pay the extra mana with my Elves of Deep Shadow and not seeing it.

XptOS #4 Relic Sanctuary
(spice price winner)

During XptOS 3 the Hymn to Tourach was lowered to 1 point, this caused allot of players to play black Aggro discard decks. I brew this list to counter Aggro and ended up with only one opponent with mono black which got two Storm Seeker for 24 damage to the face. The other 4 opponent’s played similar control list as mine and I lost all those games. This deck had allot of really close matches It was so much fun to play.

XptOS #5 Gaea’s Path

This was such a fun process to build. First inspired by the spice price winning deck from Nicolas Stael at XptOS #3. I started looking into this Thallid stuff and the Thelonite Monk made me consider Gaea’s Liege, and that let to Gaea’s Touch combined with Dark Heart of the Wood and Land tax being able to potentially draw and play and sacrifice three forests for 9 live in one turn, using Feldon’s Cane to get the lands back in the deck again. The goal of this deck became to create a forest at my opponent, and then use the Thelonite Druid to create a lot of 2/3 forest creatures that can attack with forest walk over the opponent’s newly made forest because of playing the Hidden Path. Considering that I didn’t want to tap 6 forest to play Hidden path, three Gaea’s Touch should have to be sacrificed for the six mana to play it. I met my goal once and won a game by achieving exactly that goal. It was a close 2-1 victory that took around four hours and it was awesome. Thank you Oyvind for that memorable game, I will never forget it. Hope to see that recording you made at some point:)

XptOS #6 Incarnatron Revised Edition
(spice price winner)

Not much to say about this one, my card pile was still limited and I decided to try improve my Incarnatron brew. It did improve in consistency but at allot of games I drew the short straw.

XptOS #7 Incarnatron III

Here I combined the Incarnatron list with the Thallid’s. Less big creatures and more smaller. It didn’t really work well meeting some big creatures.

XptOS #8 Nether’s Disco

This was fun, Greed with Simulacrum and Nether Shadow. The goal was simple, recover faster than your opponent after Nevinyrral’s Disk, Pestilence or Wrath of God, with Nether Shadows and Mishra’s Factories.
A few times it worked like a charm and was great fun to play overall.

XptOS #9 U-Art (Blue Artifacts)

Really like this deck. One playset didn’t arrive yet and that really made this deck to slow. Didn’t perform well at all at this tournament, but the improved version I still have had had its moments in some practice games

XptOS #10 Electric Atog
(Tournament Winner)

To me this format is the chance to Brew sweet decks and play old school magic again after 25ish years. And meet and play with great people. I feel this deck can win against anything, but it’s never a given. Many games went 1-2 or 2-1, and many games where really close till the last life or the need for one more turn. I made this with the thought of reaching the top 16 for a change. Never did I imagine it would go the whole way. “The wheel of Fortune” was with me on this road it seems. Playing this aggressive deck really was great fun, and there is way more to the decision making in these type of deck than I presumed.

XptOS #11 Nether’s Orcish Mill Disco
(Millstone challenge participant)

Really liked this deck. It got shot down really hard by some of the other Millstone challenge decks with a more controlling brew. But it had its moments.

I want to thank everyone that made this fantastic year possible, the players that
joined this format every month and Louis for organizing the whole thing.

– Juriaan “Nethershadow” Feberwee