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Martin Berlin||

This article is co-written by Anton Glans and Martin Berlin.

Last Sunday, on Easter Day as tradition has it, we organized this year’s edition of the Premodern Easter Championship. Normally, this tournament is held at the gaming convention GothCon in Gothenburg, Sweden, but because of reasons, it was run as a one-day online webcam tournament this time, thus also opening up for international competition. The tournament was run on tolaria.app, and 57 players participated. The prize? A Shoreline Raider—mandatory to include in the 75 should the winner ever attend another Easter Championship in the future. The whole thing was streamed with live-commentary by Wak-Wak and friends and you can find the full recording here.

The field

We categorized the 57 decks as follows (I’ve described the broad archetypes previously, in this post).

  • 15 Combo: 4 Stifle-Nought, 2 FEB, 2 Life, 2 Turbo-Oath 1 Balancing Tings, 1 Lich, 1 Loop-the-Whale, 1 Replenish, 1 Turtle Splash
  • 14 Aggro: 7 Sligh, 3 Goblins, 2 Elves, 1 EnSlightened Tutor, 1 Stompy
  • 14 Midrange: 3 The Rock, 3 UWG Threshold/Midrange, 3 UG(x) Madness, 2 The Solution, 1 Clerics, 1 Terra-Geddon, 1 Merfolk
  • 9 Control: 5 UW Standstill, 1 Psychatog, 1 Mono Blue Tron, 1 UB Bösium Strip Control, 1 GW Enlightened Tutor Control
  • 5 Prison: 1 Blood Moon Ponza, 1 MUD Prison, 1 UG Squirrel Opposition, 1 Pox-less Pox, 1 Mono Blue Ankh-Tide-Vise

The specific deck archetypes are more or less homogenous. Among the Stifle-Nought decks, e.g., there were both UB or UBW builds, as well as a Trix hybrid (!) also including Illusions of Grandeur and Donate. And speaking of hybrid decks, we also have EnSlightened Tutor (pardon the name), which is a Sligh deck sort of, but with Mox Diamond, splashing for Enlightened Tutor and a suite of silver bullets to fetch, such as Seal of Cleansing. There are also minor tweaks in established builds, such as Urza’s Bauble in Aaron Dicks winning Sligh deck.

As usual, there were also some borderline cases that didn’t clearly fall into one of the five broad archetypes. UG Madness, e.g., is in many respects an aggro deck, but we classify it as a midrange deck as it includes some disruption/interaction, and it’s typically slower than Sligh and tribal aggro decks.

Another thing to note is that both of the Elves decks, including the build of runner-up Jens Jaeger, run Survival of the Fittest, thus opting for some resilience and flexibility, compared to more explosive builds with Biorhythm and Overrun. Survival Elves has been putting up some solid results lately, including wins by Robert Cuellari and Frank Roelofs in the December and February Online Monthly tournaments, respectively. It’s always fun to see different takes on established archetypes, and we’re really excited to try this version out more!

There is always a fair amount of randomness in what decks show up at a given tournament, but for what it’s worth, this is a healthy mix. We don’t have any data to back it up, but we’re guessing that fast aggro decks may be somewhat more represented than control and prison, as  it can be a bit draining to play slow and grindy decks in a one-day tournament like this, compared to e.g. the Online Monthlies, where the matches are spaced out across several days.

The top 8 decks

The top 8 consisted of eight distinct decks, with 1 Sligh, 1 Elves, 1 EnSlightened Tutor 1, UG Madness, 1 UW Standstill, 1 Replenish, 1 The Solution and 1 The Rock. Here are the top 8 decks (I recommended that you enjoy them in picture view on a desktop browser).

Easter Champs 2021: Aaron Dicks, 1st
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Easter Champs 2021: Jens Jaeger, 2nd
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Easter Champs 2021: Jürgen Stephan, 3–4th
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Easter Champs 2021: Markus Ekström, 3–4th
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Easter Champs 2021: James Smits, 5–8th
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Easter Champs 2021: Manos Kokkinis, 5–8th
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Easter Champs 2021: Patrick Pichette, 5–8th
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Easter Champs 2021: Martin Lindström, 5–8th
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Well played, and congratulations to Aaron Dicks who took it down with his Bauble Sligh deck! 🙂

Bonus deck: Turtle Splash

Let’s have a quick look at one of the more innovative decks in this tournament, Turtle Splash by Conor Brown (who was in the first feature match of the stream).

Easter Champs 2021: Conor Brown
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This piece of art is reminiscent of the Dementia Drake deck, but we leave it as an exercise for you readers to figure out exactly how this deck works! 🙂

Thanks

Organizing a one-day tournament online does require some work.  But our web wizard Mattias “slanfan” Berggren has made it much easier than one would think, thanks to his amazing webcam tournament platform tolaria.app. Hats off, man. This is where all future webcam play will most likely play out. 

We want to send a huge thank you to Wak-Wak for putting on a 11 h+ stream. Gordon Andersson, you are a beast. To all the commentators: Seb, Micke Magnusson, Jokemon, Selene Bergers, Flint Espil and Michael James Heup—you guys are awesome! It was super fun to pair people around the globe to have you talk and share format knowledge. Lastly, huge thanks to our two judges Selene Bergers and Jesper Berntsson (we might owe them a beer or two) who assisted the players whenever any difficulties occurred. And yes, Humility interactions came up.

We’ll see what the future holds. If the pandemic continues to restrict IRL play, we might organize another online spectacle in the autumn.

Until next time!

– Anton and Martin