Last week, Trick added a poll to the article to see where this series should go, or if the series should even continue. I'm quite happy to say that the responses were greatly in favor of continuing to develop Throwback! The winning choice was for us to create a tournament and smash the decks against one another to see both what would be victorious, and what needs to be banned to keep the format healthy.

I have selected the field and begun to proxy up the lists. I tried to keep a reasonable rock-paper-scissors situation with combo, control, and aggro approximately equally represented. I will set the tournament up in a Final Four–type bracket, with the winner of the East playing the winner of the West for the title of champion! Random seedings will be assigned to each list, and I will try to make the bracket as clear as possible. The winner of a round will be decided by playing five complete matches, with the best of five being the victor. This should take away random mana screw and, I hope, minimize other variance. I've opted for sixteen decks to make the tournament actually manageable, and I should be able to report on two matches per week.

Due to time constraints, the tournament will be single-elimination instead of Swiss; however, if demand proves to be great enough, and help ample enough, I would not be against running a Swiss event. For now, the pilots of the decks are going to be me, John Bolt (an Armada regular and fellow combo enthusiast), Aaron and Michael Fortino (the godfather of the Florida judge program and a Level 2 judge), and anyone else in Armada Games who is more than willing to participate.

The pairings for each bracket look like the following. Scroll right to see the second bracket.

One quick note. After testing this format, it's come to my attention that Skullclamp is quite unfair. Of all the cards allowed in this design space, I feel that any card that has been banned in essentially every format needs to be kept in check. The only card that is banned going into this event will be Skullclamp. Everything else is open territory! That being said, it would not surprise me to see Disciple and Desire getting the axe, but I digress! I look forward to seeing what this format can bring to the table, and hearing how you would have changed the decks in the event. Until next time, thanks for reading, and head on over to http://www.mtgcatalyst.com/overextended/index.php, where you will find a dedicated group running their own tournaments using essentially the same format rules. Keep up the great work, guys!