I happen to be somewhere between old and new school in Magic. I started when the Dark, which is widely considered the last "Old School" set had just been phased out in favor of Fallen Empires.

There is no dispute that "old school" cards are a lot more powerful than many of their "new school" counterparts. We will never see another card as mighty as the Maze of Ith, or as useful as dual lands. Even the commons back then were more powerful. (More on that later)

New players have only limited access to old school cards, since they're mostly out of print. Good, out-of-print rares are all being hoarded by their owners, so trading is limited. Bringing up Mazes of Ith aain, trading on MOTL, it took me NEARLY 2 YEARS to acquire 4.

New players have the Type 2 environment to play in, but the environment is restricting. In Type 1 you can see any number of things that are impossible in Type 2. The whole game is changed. How can new school Magic players compete in the much better Type 1?

THE BLATANTLY OBVIOUS: Get old cards.
Sure, but how?

1- MOTL. It may take a while, but it is an outlet for OOP rares, and OOP commons and uncommons can be found in stacks.

2- Frequent LARGE cardstores. My area (Montreal suburbs) don't house large cardstores. To get to one I'd have to drag myself downtown and since my parents won't give me lifts for anything Magic-related, it's not good for me. For all the rest of you, though:

Large cardstores have large stocks, including large boxes stuffed with commons and uncommons. A great many out-of-print. Large cardstores also have OOP rares in their display cases.

A person you all may want to speak to about cardstores is Adam Sutherland, whose MOTL tag is "argoth" though I haven't heard from him in a good long while. He was working in a large cardstore that was at a time liquidating several Berserks. He can probably give you very good information on tracking down OOP rares, and possibly cards in trade as well. His e-mail address is:

palidor@pacificcoast.net

3- Attend tournaments, Pre-Releases, and Card shows.

At these events, many a player knows there are going to be players looking for OOP rares, and you'd be amazed at what you see in those binders.

__________________
•·.÷.·•- ----•[ im tha masta]•---- -•·.÷.·•

To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target

I have rarely used old school cards and it hasn't hurt my decks one bit. The best way to make a deck is to invent one. It is easy to copy a deck and then change it, but it is much more difficult to make a one-of-a-kind deck. That is what i try to do. And it works very well if i do say so myself.

I'm not flagrantly suggesting that old cards will dominate new cards flat out. It all depends on a number of factors like player intelligence and so on. But, old cards are cards that new players may well never see, and are damn good. If Dark Ritual doesn't get re-printed in the next basic set, new players are screwed for speedy black decks, for example.

I happen to partially agree with your last statement:

Sure, you're a success with new-school. So am I. Sure a lot of people copy old school decks when they have old school cards. BUT the same will happen regardless because you'll get idiots who just go to thedojo.com to get type 2 decks and copy them out entirely.

What I'm saying, basically is that there is a huge disproportion of good vs. crap cards between old and new school.

As Noth and I examined, among new school sets Exodus has the best good-crap ratio: 45%
I believe old school can hit MUCH higher ratios.

Old School may have broken cards like P9 but new school has Yawgmoth's Will, Stroke of Genius, Tradewind Rider, Abeyance, etc. Make a deck out of both and you will win hands down. Just look at this Type 1 LD deck:

Note: OS - Old School, NS- New School

5C Land Destruction

1x Black Vise OS
1x Gorilla Shaman NS
1x Yawgmoths Will NS
1x Serra Angel OS
2x Swords to plowshares
2x Disenchants
1x Regrowth OS
3x Wall of Blossoms NS
3x Fireball
1x Braingeyser OS (but NS has stroke so...)
3x Tradewind Riders NS
1x Soul Feast NS
1x Demonic Tutor OS
4x Stone Rains
3x Avalanche Riders NS
4x Pillage NS
4x Sinkhole OS
1x Ice Storm OS
2x Rain of Tears NS

All OS:

1x Sol Ring
1x Mox Diamond (except this one - NS)
1x Mox Sapphire
1x Mox Jet
1x Mox Pearl
1x Mox Ruby
1x Mox Emerald
1x Black Lotus

2x Volcanic Island OS
2x Reflecting Pools NS
2x Bayou OS
1x Savannah OS
2x Badlands OS
3x Wastelands NS
2x Plateau OS

Outside of the P9 it is about even...11 OS, 10 NS (the numbers switch when the Braingeyser gets changed for Stroke)...

So my point is, why bicker about which school is better when clearly its the card not the school that dominates.

I also STRONGLY agree that decks don't need to be packed with rares to be really good. Infact I try to keep rares to a minimum in most of my decks. This is the reason I think "Old School" is better since it has powerful commons and uncommons. As for "New School" it has better combo cards, etc.