What is Old School EDH?
Old School EDH.
.
Old School EDH
This is a fun casual format. It plays with all the same rules as traditional (100 card singleton decks, Legendary creature in the command zone, color identity, 21 commander damage, commander tax, etc.) but is played with the Old School 93-94 card pool. Any of the gold Legendary creatures from Legends can be chosen as the General (not just the dragons).
Legal Cards:
Cards from the following sets are allowed:
Alpha/Beta/Unlimited
Revised
Fourth Edition
Arabian Nights
Antiquities
Legends
The Dark
Fallen Empires
Chronicles
First wave book promos (Sewers/Arena/Dragon)
Also any reprints of any of the above cared (non-foil, original art, original frame ) that appear elsewhere (Anthologies, Fifth Edition, Sixth Edition, Beatdown, Time Shifted, etc.)
Cards from non-English sets are fine as well.
Use, CE cards, or Gold Boarded, or Artist proofs, really whatever. We are here to have fun.
Proxies are fine especially of the expensive cards that are so prevalent in the format. Please do not bring counterfeit cards into the game. If you don’t know the difference between a proxy and a counterfeit please ask someone.
Banned Cards:
No cards are banned. If you are not playing for ante then the ante cards should not be included in your deck. (That is literally on the text of the cards through, so it doesn’t really feel like a ban)
Philosophy of (not) banning cards: OS-EDH is a fun casual format, the point of which is to play with cool old cards. Regular Commander banns cards for price/accessibility reasons. We are not doing that because high prices and lowavailability are sorta baked into the whole Old School experience. Regular Commander also bans cards for being over powerful and/or distorting the format. We do not see any cards for which this is the case. In a format with bad mana, few tutors, and little card selection broken things are hard to pull off. The few broken combos that do exist are three cards spread across multiple colors.
Individual card notes:
Moxen/Lotus: These cards do give players a mana advantage, however they are not significantly better then Sol Ring or Mana Vault. Playing these powerful mana rocks is part of the charm of the format.
Ancestral Recall/Time Walk: These are both powerful cards, and a main reason to be in blue. Without these (and Braingyser) blue has none of the card draw it is normally famous for.
Karakas: In Regular Commander this card is banned for shutting down commanders. In OS-EDH it is mostly just another Maze of Ith. Still a good card, and an easy include in any white deck, but hardly broken.
Sharazad: Go for it. You only live once!
Ring of Muruf: Go ahead and grab any card that is not in your deck (I don’t even care if it is legal in the format or even a Magic card) or in your exile zone. Live it up.
Card Errata:
We use the Eternal Central Rules for Chaos Orb.
We use the Beast of the Bay Rules for Falling Star (now adopted by Eternal Central I believe)
Mana burn? – Does this really matter as much as people seem to think it does. Nope, it barely makes a difference. Are we going to use it anyway? You better believe it!