I have a lot of nostalgia for my early days of Magic. As a teenager I spend my days in ‘95 playing mostly with Fourth Edition cards and a couple of faded ash-gray ones from Revised. Black was without a doubt my favourite color, it still is. I always dreamed about building a deck with a playset of Juzam Djinns. A dream that was out of reach, until recently. 

Fame and fortune

Back in 2019 I was launched into minor Magic fame and, indeed, some fortune, by opening the most famous misprint deck in the history of Magic the Gathering. It changed my life. I decided to enjoy my new relatively financial freedom and go on an adventure. The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams, so I used some of my gaining’s to build an old frame card collection. I took it relatively slow because I loved collecting them, since they instantly transported me back to when I was a child. 

Timmy Talks!

Gideon told me all about the local Old School community and how amazing the scene is. Gideon really got me excited about the Old School format. After I lost the match, he invited me to join the Dutch Old School Guild group. I gladly accepted! 

Morning Wood

At that time physical games were out of the question because of the pandemic. With no clear end in sight the Dutch Old School Guild started the Online Dutch Oldschool League; ODOL for short. A series of recurring online webcam tournaments for the Dutch and Belgian Old School Community. The fact that odol happens to be a Dutch slang term for nocturnal penile tumescence is just a happy coincidence. Excited for some odol I signed-up. The first month I entered the format was x-points. Against all odds I ended up in the finals, playing once again against Gideon. It was an epic final, but Gideon beat me once again. 

Arabian Tempo

The second month was Swedish. I decided to transform my Ernham Burn’em deck into a, slightly, more consistent version of Arabian Tempo. The deck was reasonably successful, hitting top 8 on multiple occasions. It was eventually was featured on Timmy Talks. Meanwhile, I was focused on expanding my Old School card pool. A couple of months ago I finally completed my collection (although a wiseman once told me; “it is never finished”). The final piece of my collection was a playset of Juzam Djinns. Time to start living the dream and brew with the mighty Juzam. 

Machine Head

This presented a problem because outside Deadguy Ale or Composition-A there isn’t really a good deck to run a playset of Juzam Djinns, and those decks aren’t that interesting to me. Looking at my current list though, there was one obvious choice: Machine Head! It’s somewhat less vulnerable to City in a Bottle then Arabian Tempo but still fits my midrange playstyle. My first build got me to the ODOL-finals once again, but I lost spectacular against a deck running three Mazes of Ith. My biggest take away was that Dark Ritual is often a dead card and that I desperately need more land destruction but above everything else I learned that I love Machine Head!

I´m going on an adventure!

I love Machine Head so much that I decided to stick with it until the list is perfected and it wins a big international tournament. With the pandemic on the withdrawal, the tournament scene is gearing up again. I will run as much tournaments as possible with Machine Head and will report on all the results. Until then, this is my current build!