So, many people here on TMD remember the heady days of the early 90's, where Magic was Magic, Ancestral Recall was just an interesting blue card you got and Contract From Below saved you from losing your SWEET Lord of the Pit.
Nostalgia (mawkishness?) has bred Old School, which seems to be bringing back these pre-Internet era feelings to some degree. BUT. It has also had me itching for a reboot of one of my favorite casual formats: Star.
If you aren't familiar, Star is a multiplayer variant for 5 players, where players next to you are allies and players across from you are enemies. You can only attack enemies, but can target ally permanents with spells and effects. Spells or effects that target opponents cannot target allies. Also, often times players use a variant where allies can intercede or block during combat between two (adjacent) enemies, allowing them to keep one alive and strategically prevent one or the other from winning.
In a very popular extension of this format, the 5 players used mono-color decks, each based on one of the 5 colors. Whether artifacts are allowed or not was usually up to house rules, but generally they were okay as long as they didn't make up the bulk of the deck.
In any case. I want to revive this format with friends, a couple of which are novice players, but in a nod to Vintage and the growing Old School community, would like to build some decks that give players a taste of the fun and elegance, and okay, sometimes sheer winsome clunkiness, of early MtG.
That said, I would love to get some ideas from all you folks on what you would consider your favorite "Old School" mono-colored lists, maybe with the following considerations:
- No cards printed after...let's say Fallen Empires...take that, AUTUMN WILLOW!
- Using the current restricted list insofar as it applies, but probably excluding the P9 unless you think Timetwister is just too much fun for words or whathaveyou.
- Current rules (i.e. no mana burn, vault works like today, use the stack, etc)
- Decks should be the factory showroom floor for that color in the olden days. Which is to say, there are fun combos, but the deck shouldn't revolve around a particular combo to win.
Anyway, I look forward to pulling together some of these decks and can't wait to hear what everyone thinks, if anyone thinks this is a worthwhile pursuit at all!