MCOS Sylvan Showdown 2025 Highlights

– or – How I Learned to Stop Checking Magic Spoilers and Flip a Chaos Orb

 Prologue: All I know about getting into Old School Magic is this.

 One minute you’re at a bar in Philly in winter with a bag of Legacy and cEDH decks. You are:

• Not sure what to play that weekend at the convention center

• Stressing over your last two sideboard slots and how you’ll answer an overcooked new keyword called Initiative

• Wondering why your friend who brought you here—or anyone, really—would pay five whole mana to cast Serra Angel

 …And now a stranger who maybe even showered that day is asking you to kindly sign an old piece of cardboard that cost more than your car’s tires.

 Then time passes, and the next minute you’re at a giant cabin full of sweet weirdos in the woods of Tennessee. It’s summer, and you’re sitting in the shade outside. Water trickles down the rocks and the bugs are loud. Beverages and lore have been flowing freely, and you’ve somehow just assembled the Channel+Fireball combo two games in a row to thus win a bounty for a dope artist-signed playmat. There are four rounds left to play before the cookout, but in your heart you have already won what you came to win…

Above: A pleasant place to do this thing below for the first time 👇

So let’s unpack that scene at the cabin. 

Some twenty dingbats gathered on the Cumberland Plateau in August 2025 for Music City Old School’s third Sylvan Showdown. 

 The “official” (ho ho ho) formats played this year were Middle School and 2Pac-style Old School. Unofficial formats included Alpha to Alliances Ante (AAA), Classic Vintage, something called Classic Legacy, which is apparently a thing in Barcelona, and plus also a vague idea we’ve termed Old-Frame EDH. 

What follows is just one relative newcomer’s impressions and highlight reel, along with some pics of decks and my weird new uncles. For a more comprehensive overview of what the hell happened that weekend, consult your doctor or this here bingo card I made:

👆 Before / After 👇

Sylvan Showdown III formats and decks

Middle School – Friday

Apparently Premodern wasn’t niche enough for these maniacs so they wound up with a format that’s kinda similar except Land Tax, Force of Will, Necropotence, and Sea Drake are all legal and somehow Dark Ritual is not. “That doesn’t sound that similar at all,” you might say, and as someone who first got into Premodern because Swamp Ritual Hippie was a valid turn-one play, I have to agree, but why get huffy about banlists when you can just play Magic instead.

An aside: I struggled with what to run in this format. I wanted to jam some of the busted cards that make Middle School unique, but my Land Tax+Scroll Rack+Mogg Maniac+Firestorm brew felt awful clunky at the brewery the weekend prior, and people with a better read on the expected vibe urged against slowly FOW’ing the night away with Landstill in a loud cabin full of loud idiots and delicious curry. So I wound up playing a trusty PM deck with one key swerve: Cut vanilla Earthquake for the upgrade from Portal Three Kingdoms, Rolling Earthquake. (Get balled and learn to ride a horse, fliers.)

This proved fun as hell. Perhaps not taking home the heftiest of prizes with a plan that hinges on resolving Armadillo Cloak, but to the extent these old-man formats can be therapy and atonement for past lives sweating tiebreakers, going 3-2 with this pile scratched an important itch.

A neat feature of Gemstone Mine I unlocked is zero’ing it can offline an opponent’s midgame Land Tax, and this was totally worth some mana burn in a couple games. Also, I wished the SB Plagues were Pyroclasms to kill the first Elvish Champion dead and plus to deal with Glowrider on less mana. We learned.

Some other decks people played that evening:

Q, 4-1.

Singer, 3-2.

Sonny, 3-2.

Josh B., 3-2.

Charles, but the Dark Rituals are actually Cabal Therapies, bc Dark Rit has bad synergy with the format –

Cayce:

Mailman:

Snyder:

JJ, 2-3. Spice award, possibly?

So wait, where are the standings? What’s even good in this format? I still have no idea. I lost a match to my opponent (JJ, above) casting Donate and making me read Transcendance. Figure it out, nerds.

“But Daniel, prithee, how doth this even win ?“ Listen, the lesson here, if there is one, might be to stop tryharding:

He also 5-0’d the rest of us the next day in Old School. Is luck less of a deciding factor in this game than mere mortals might prefer to imagine? Is skill real? True to Dick Garfield’s intent, I try not overthink it. “Games with high luck and high skill satisfy such a broad range of players—everybody can play them,” he once said, almost definitely with some guys from Tennessee squarely in mind.

2Pac Old School – Saturday

The Nashville club tends toward Eternal Central-style Old School alongside our local brew, Alpha to Alliances (A2A), but for reasons obscure even to us, at this event we opted for 2Pac. Was that good or bad? Well, I drove to the woods to sleep on camping gear in a laundry room and quote Dracula Flow, so why would you trust my value judgment about a complex array of subjective aesthetics and combinatorial math, where success is measured mainly in ancient drawn-on cardboard? The format is fine. The format is probably better than Swedish.

[Editor's note: The format is definitely better than Swedish. -Cayce]

I already spoiled a highlight of what I played, but the deck in full is below; it also went 3-2.

A lowlight was getting two Ernies Control Magic’d by Cayce after I neglected to board in Red Blast, but this grim fate was perhaps foretold when I gave the bingo card the square “a player dies to their own creature.” 

👆 I deserved this, probably.

Here are some other decks that were played…

Sonny, 3-2 + spice award:

Singer, 3-2.

Josh B., 3-2.

Pratt, 3-2:

John K., 2-3:

Q:

Cayce:

Snyder:

Jordan:

Mailman:

Charles:

“DANIEL, THE 5-0 PLEASE.” Fine, you ghouls:

Evergreen now even truer than it was two events ago:

…And the latest addition to said drawer:

Unofficial formats

Classic Legacy

I’m not sure how Music City Old School got on this subject a few months ago but some of us geriatrics were nostalgic for a certain time just this side of Skullclamp and that side of Delver of Secrets, when Wild Nacatl might actually get there and the scariest thing Reanimator could pull out was probably Iona. 

Next thing you know these curmudgeons (it me, I am the curmudgeons) are looking at this website from a club in Barcelona that’s decided it’s summer of 2010 forever, Infect and Delver do not yet exist, and Vengevine has paid for its own sins by eating a ban rather than Survival of the Fittest, which remains legal in this timeline. In this glorious format, Stoneforge Mystic is a toolbox card that gets you Jitte rather than living weapons, Terminus isn’t real and can’t hurt me, and Dark Confidant balls hard. Some decks:

Though not a main or “sanctioned” (😆) part of the events, jamming Classic Legacy was one of my purest joys on the weekend.

Retro-frame EDH

The idea here is this is Commander, but only with cards printed or reprinted in the original frame. This lets in some contemporary staples like Command Tower and Arcane Signet, and some interesting deck options, like Slimefoot, the Stowaway… but it also keeps out Transformers and the kids from Stranger Things, and constrains the card pool considerably, which is kind of a mercy, as I think some 30+ thousand cards are legal in vanilla commander, and they’re only getting wordier. 

To my knowledge, we played precisely one actual game of this format we’ve been talking about for months, and I might be the only person who got to enjoy it on a molecular level. Mike played someone’s Talrand deck, Cayce played a 5c Slivers brew packed with “gamechangers,” and I played an unassuming “bracket 3” (😹) Niv Mizzet the Firemind build:

I couldn’t recount the game in full, but for flavor:

• Gilded Drake, which is somehow not a “gamechanger,” stole Mike’s Talrand, which is very much a card my deck full of instants and sorceries can put to use.

• Thieving Magpie was every bit the lurid little value hero that people who played standard ~27 years ago remember.

• Yes, one Niv Mizzet is the commander, but an even meaner one is in the 99 and showed up right on time, along with Swiftfoot Boots on Etali (yes, it exists with a retro frame) to steal a Merchant Scroll and with it any surviving traces of hope for my opponents. Fun times!

Long story short I didn’t need to combo off to win, I just turned large creatures sideways the way Sheldon Menery intended. 

👆Cayce’s proxied-up retro-frames-only Sliver pile.

Other formats

Listen I haven’t been at this long enough to get into the ante thing; that’s a “y’all” problem. Apparently Orcish Lumberjack is capable of putting in work in AAA ?

I also brought actual factual Legacy but it stayed in the bag all weekend because instead every chance I got to slam Ninja of the Deep Hours in Classic Legacy was a good one. Champagne problems.

If you liked it then you shoulda put some stank on it.

A proxy-friendly club that doesn’t concern itself with the secondary-market value of the SpongeBob version of Counterspell is free to do whatever it wants with cardboard.

Cayce:

Chris, tribute to the aforementioned curry:

JJ:

Quail:

☝️ Before, after 👇

For my old-frame EDH:

To again invoke Dracula Flow: Hey man, this shit ain’t nothin’ to me.

Non-gaming activities and etc.

First of all, haters could not step to the MCOS swag game at this event:

Economics professors are still trying to figure out how one bold entrepreneur found this many fish in the same barrel. 

 A non-exhaustive list of other extracurriculars might include:

• An old-timey VCR was set up and screened Predator, Spinal Tap, and a buncha other dope movies

• Tasting notes were discussed and note to self, Penelope Architect is a seriously decent bottle.

• “Let me see you show your grill,” rapper E-40 implored in his 2006 platinum single, “Tell Me When to Go.” Alan heeded the call.

• Basically a daylong Steve Albini-appreciation class over the speakers.

• Solid hang with the founding fathers, who all demonstrated deft penmanship.

• Yelling. So much yelling. 

Ye aulde props and slops list:

• Props: Everyone who provided food, sweetened the prize pool, brought supplies and sick Magic swag, played Magic, told stories, and took the pictures that helped bring this writeup to life. Pratt for dodging jury duty and cooking delicious Indian food, Chris for veggie skewers, other Chris and Sherry for the top-notch setup, Cayce for grabbing me a toothbrush, Sonny for the playmat, Quentin for triumphing through circumstances, etc etc. 

• Slops: Josh, probably? I get the impression he prefers it this way, and I respect his wishes? But srsly thanks for doing a buncha the lifting to put on this event. My brain needed it, as did many others.

Miscellaneous pics

That is Old Kentucky Shark and he has BEEN there.

Let’s be honest the first time a buncha weaklings saw this vest they just quit and I am one of them.

One of god’s own prototypes, never seriously considered for mass production.

Sample loot. Got a buncha cards stamped and signed, + wheeled, dealed, and my prize-pool grabs included this bottle I have yet to open and an awesome Magic comic from 1995ish featuring the adventures of Nightmare the horse and artwork that is 🤘 af.

And with that, I’m positive this post failed to capture the full scope of radness that was Sylvan Showdown 3, but it’ll have to do, and I’ll see you at Bootleggers Ball for A2A in December.

Until then, no masters but Zombie Masters.

TLDR: Two years ago I woulda looked at this and been like “why?” but now I’m all “hell yeah brotherrr get in there.” Yep.