Editor’s note: the author of this writeup did not get to attend the Festival. If you find this report either inaccurate or just shitty, that’s why.

Last year’s Festival of Friendship was such a good time that we wanted to kick off the 2025 season the same way! The Festival’s combination of Old School and Vintage gets at the heart of what we’re trying to do with Romancing the Stones: have fun and play competitively.

Saturday: Old School

We started the weekend easy with Old School. This was our third event using the Boreal ruleset, which we’ll likely keep using moving forward. We’re firmly in the 4 Strip Mine camp, and have found that Boreal’s permissive approach to its B&R list has opened up deckbuilding possibilities without warping the format – as you’ll see from the results, Recall and Time Vault strategies didn’t exactly dominate.

At previous Old School events we’ve run charity raffles. This time, we opted for charity silent auctions instead. While auctions are perhaps a bit less democratic, they’re significantly less tedious to run than raffles. We were incredibly fortunate to have lots of amazing items donated to the auction pool by our players, from graded cards to alters to wine to Lego sets, and all told raised just under $900 for the Central Texas Food Bank!

The tournament itself was great. We had 37 players, which meant 6 rounds of Swiss. To no one’s surprise Simon Christie won the event on Naya Zoo; you can read his writeup here. Our top 8 was:

  1. Simon Christie

  2. Billy Palmer

  3. John Britton

  4. Jeff DeMario

  5. Matthew Mitchell

  6. Brian Tweedy

  7. Eric Miller

  8. John Thomas

Sunday: Vintage

As can happen in January, Sunday saw temperature plummet across Austin. If you’re from the area, you’ll know that Texas is absolutely unprepared for the cold, so this was a big deal. Now, this got compounded by the fact that we got a record turnout for Vintage: at 41 players, the Festival was our biggest Vintage event ever! That’s a wonderful accomplishment for us – we love everyone for coming out to play, and we love our friend Justin Gennari for the promo – but the timing could have been better, as many players were forced to play their matches outside in the freezing weather. Thank you all for your perseverance and determination to play Vintage!

For our Vintage trophies this season, we have so much faith in Bobby’s design work that we’re letting him go wild and have some fun exploring different themes. He’ll be returning to some old styles (Lo-Fi, Texas pop culture, etc) and playing with new ones. That said, we’re also trying something new: playsets! This season, the winner of each event will get a full 4 copies of their trophy card, rather than just the singleton. So to kick that off, for the Festival we had a playset of these amazing Austin Wastelands:

41 players meant 6 rounds of Swiss followed by a cut to Top 8 – a long day! After those rounds, our Top 8 had some familiar faces and some new ones:

  1. Caleb Ray – Dredge
  2. Tri Nguyen - Atraxa Oath
  3. Andrew Webb - Kitten Combo
  4. Dylan Pique - Esper Lurrus
  5. Sean Soderman - Jewel Shops
  6. Tanner Hogan - Mono-White Initiative
  7. Liz Garcia - Combo Dredge
  8. Riley Griffin - BUG Lurrus

As noted it was a long day, so Tri and Caleb decided to split the finals: Caleb got the invite, while Tri got the Wastelands.

Shoutout to Brian Tweedy for running both these tournaments, and for all the community members who helped him out throughout the weekend. Another successful Festival of Friendship!