I hope you’re enjoying your holidays—here’s a short public service announcement by Ron Taylor. Cheers! / Martin

Hello again to my fellow old cardboard lovers! If you’re anything like me, you’re always hoping to find more people to play Premodern. Where I live in Florida, the playgroup is quite small locally for Premodern, so it can be tough to find a game. The answer to this problem, obviously, is to expand the player pool.

Luckily, there is a great group on Facebook that gathers players from all around the world, called Premodern Online Play. In this group, you can connect with other players for pickup games or join the monthly online tournaments. These online tournaments are my favorite part of the group for several reasons. 

I have been playing the Premodern online monthly tournament for most of this year (see also my previous report from one of these tournaments, part 1 and part 2). I have been able to play with multiple opponents from all around the world and meet new, great people every month. The fact that there is a big pool of creative, innovative competitors looking to get an advantage over their opponents for the next month has led to some incredibly inventive decks. All of the players that make the top 8 of these tournaments each month post a photo decklist so that everyone can enjoy the developments. A lot of top the top 8 decks have also been posted here.

These tournaments have generated many hours of streaming Premodern content. One of the main organizers of these tournaments, Andrew Walker, has a Twitch channel where he streams many of the feature matches and top 8 matches. Several European players have commented that they look forward to waking up and watching some Premodern matches from the tournament with their breakfast and coffee (ou cafe et petit dejuner, s’il vous plait).

The preferred setup for this tournament is webcam games. I promise it’s not as difficult as it sounds. I have the technological capabilities of a chimpanzee wearing a sport coat, and I have been able to use my phone as a webcam that connects over wifi to my laptop. I suspend my phone from an old camcorder tripod directly over the top of my play mat and it provides a great view. Some players simply set their laptop on top of a stack of books and angle the built in camera down to view their play area. A few players do have more sophisticated setups, but it’s definitely not necessary. Playing this way preserves the face-to-face aspect of our beloved format and allows you to meet new awesome people much better than Cockatrice or MTGO would.

Me and my tripod 🙂

All of these are great reasons to hop into the tournament, but how about the best reason? I get to play my favorite format every month with other Premodern enthusiasts. I don’t have to worry about whether or not anyone is going to bring a deck to the local shop. There are always games to be played.

So come join us over in the Premodern Online Play Facebook group, where the registration for the January edition of the online monthly has just opened. And make sure to tune into Andrew Walker’s twitch channel Mise Well Watch for the live streams, or his YouTube channel with the same name for the recorded matches.

Until next time!

– Ron