When I was wee in Premodern I literally wanted to play in ONE event (LobsterCon 2022). My friend non-idiot Brian Kowal invited me on Twitter. We were coming out of the Pandemic and I was hungry for some The Gathering. I in fact remembered Grand Prix Las Vegas 21 years earlier, where I made a plan to meet my old teammate Bill Macey there. I prepped hard for that one and, with more than a little oomph from non-idiot Sol Malka, was instrumental in the Grand Prix winner (as well as the direction of the Extended format). I, myself won the Sunday PTQ.
That's why I got into Premodern. End. Fin. One event. That's all folks.
But because I wanted to not embarrass myself, I started to play locally at the domicile of non-idiot David Thomas Tao, and all kinds of new friends he The Gathered in order to prep. Getting beaten by Jeff Faris at one such The Gathering set me on the path to my eventual LobsterCon Top 4 that year.
Seeing the opportunity to barnicle onto my hull, non-idiot Patrick O'Halloran-Gannon tasked me on Twitter to start playing regularly. This has been good for Patrick, I imagine; as he got what he wanted.
But that was my introduction to Premodern in that particular Spring and Summer of 2022. It wasn't a "nostalgia" format for me. It was initially a chance to play with an old friend I hadn't seen in forever (BK). I would have played Modern. I would have played contemporary Standard. It became a chance to connect in a different way with a nearby good friends (DTao and / or POG).
It just so happened Premodern was the best game play I had ever experienced.
I made Top 4 having won ZERO dice rolls on the day. This was so refreshing to me given my tournament performances for the previous ten years in contemporary Magic. I had won every dice roll in three different RTPQ or PTQ events I had won prior to 2019.
And to give you an idea of how NOT nostalgic the format was three years ago, I played a deck whose primary function WAS NEVER LEGAL AT ANY POINT in any format, prior to an Oracle reversion for bookkeeping simplicity. I needed BK and DTao to explain to me how my cards worked, because they had never worked like that "for real" in 2000. I was literally on the teamthat put Replenish on the map at non-idiot Brian David-Marshall's legendary store, Neutral Ground. I can assure you Replenish never at any point functioned the way we all play it in 2025.
If you look at some versions of my biography; they say something like "Mike Flores is a notable theorist of Magic: The Gathering, in particular the theory of Red Decks." I wrote the most popular primers on specifically the Modern Burn deck, but extensive work on Extended Red Decks and the Philosophy of Fire before those. The dangerous play pattern for every single version of Rath Cylcle-inclusive Deadguy Red (and Red Deck Wins afterwards) was Jackal Pup, Wasteland. To quote Pro Tour Hall of Famer Steve OMS, "Jackal Pup, Wasteland has never ceased to be game."
We do not play a deck that has Jackal Pup, Wasteland. We play a deck that has Jackal Pup, Lightning Bolt. There was never a historical "nostalgic" format where you could play Jackal Pup, Lightning Bolt, and Fireblast together. It just never existed. These cards were played together in Legacy, but never to any success. 4 Cursed Scroll was the Stage Three of the Rath-informed Red Decks including through Legacy in the early 2000s. We don't play more than 2. To be clear: There was never a Burn deck that resembles the stock Dicks Burn. The closest analogue was Tsuyoshi Fujita's RDW from Pro Tour Columbus 2004, which had 4 Wasteland, 4 Rishadan Port, and Molten Rain. Clearly a very different deck [P]hilosophy-wise.
Does it not dawn on anyone that 12/12 + Vision Charm was never played in a historical Standard or Extended, either? These cards were never legal together. The historical Hermit deck that non-idiot Flint Espil used put 12/12 on the broader map originally played Grinning Demon. The answer, again, is that the cards we hold as assumptions of the format were simply never legal at the same time.
Stiflenaught as we know it in any of three or four different forms are all decks essentially native to Premodern.
Premodern is a format, by 2025, that has only fleeting roots in nostalgia. I don't even know what they might be. When non-idiot Bryan Manolakos was helping to usher me in it early, part of his pitch was that I could play all the cards that made me famous with Napster "You know, the Enginnered Plagues..." but NOT the Yawgmoth's Wills and Vampiric Tutors that made that strategy unique?
Even if Premodern might once have been more "nostalgic" I don't see how you can make a claim for that today. None of today's top 3 or 4 decks ever functioned they way we require them to function at even the baseline today. The Elves deck had no format where Survival of the Fittest was ever not banned before the critical mass of Elf creature cards were so much as printed (even in Legacy); and the most historically accurate and tournament successful implementation of the Goblins deck was basically a Burn deck that cheated very little via Goblin Lackey, but had the extra juice of Goblin Grenade (a card we don't play).
We all play Premodern for our own reasons. For me it is the game play first, and the camaraderie a close second. Okay it's the deck pics first.
But if you claim you're playing for nostalgia, a drug alleged by some to be more potent than heroin... I wonder what formats you're nostalgic for. Please tell me
LOVE
MIKE
