Premodern Unchained TO Report

Hello! It’s been a minute since I’ve written up a tournament report but the Unchained side event was incredibly fun to run, and many players shared how much they enjoyed the event, so it feels appropriate to write one up.

The Rochester Royals were welcomed back to LOBSTERCON to run our favorite Premodern variant: Premodern Unchained! Premodern Unchained allows for players to select one, non-ante, card from the Premodern ban list and play up to four copies of it in their decks. Cards like Force of Will, Necropotence, Strip Mine, and Balance become available resulting in powered-up existing decks and novel decks battling it out!

Finally, we had members of the Top 32 not claim their prizes. Please reach out to Alex C. on the Premodern discord to make arrangements.

Structure

We had 121 players register for Unchained; nearly tripling the attendance of Unchained from LOBSTERCON 2025! The tournament was 7 rounds of Swiss with a cut to Top 8. The Top 8 was untimed, which led to the finals match ending near midnight. Thank you to everyone who stayed with us for the entire event!

Prizing was made available for:

• Top 8
• Ninth Place
• Top 16
• Top 32
• Highest Placing, Non Force of Will Using Deck

As has become tradition: the Duress Crew and Rochester Royals forgot to check in with each other on prizing and doubled the pool for Top 8.

Expectations

2025

Thanks to DxC’s Jay we were able to generate a meta breakdown of the 2025 Unchained side event. Please remember that Unchained 2025 did not allow proxy/playtest cards.

We can see that mono black strategies were the most played decks in 2025. These decks tended to leverage Strip Mine or Necropotence as their banned cards. This was followed by Balance and Dreadnought decks. Over 1/3 of the event to be represented by these strategies. TO’s note: we strongly suspected the decks we saw registered for Unchained 2025 were highly influenced by the no proxy/playtest policy at PM LOBSTERCON 2025, and also by the side events being on Day One.

You can find last year’s decklists here.

Also congratulations to SWB for his victory in Unchained 2025 and thank you to all of our Unchained 2025 participants! Our apologies for not posting a write up of last year’s Unchained event.

2026

Going into Unchained 2026, the vocal sentiment was that Force of Will Dreadnought dominate the event. Given that the finals in 2025 was Dreadnought mirror, and the power of the deck in regular Premodern, that seemed like a safe bet. Leading up to the event, we saw calls for cards to be banned from Unchained and/or adding Dreadnought to the list of banned cards leading up to the event. Ultimately, it was decided to make no changes for Unchained 2026 due to two factors:

• Proxy/Playtest cards for the banned cards were being provided for Unchained
• Unchained would occur on Day 2

Allowing proxies of the banned cards means folks should be able to brew around whichever card they wanted, and having the side event on Day 2 should give us a larger pool of players. This felt like a good opportunity to see how Unchained would play out.

The Event

We had 121 players battle it out over the course of the day! Congratulations to our Unchained Champion Bryson Bonham for taking it down on Super Wayfarer !

All decklists available here.

Top 8

Rad Lists From Top 32

These are lists I think are Rad

Unchained 2026 Analysis

Force of Will is a helluva magic card.

Dreadnought and Mono Black as the bulk, identified archetypes were expected: people love Necropotence and Force of Will. We are very excited by the Rogues Gallery (Other archetype) making up 27% of the field! We have more breakdowns of the deck archetypes and a banned card breakdown below.

Archetypes

Banned Cards

Gratitude

Thank you to our friends in the Duress Crew for their tireless efforts in the Premodern scene. We were overjoyed when you welcomed us back to run Unchained again.

Thank you to our friends, and fellow New Yorkers, in the Order of the Sacred Torch for running the 10 Fetch side event.

Thank you to Jay and SWB for both providing deck classification data which made the creation of the graphics throughout this report possible.

Thank you everyone who played Unchained this year. It is a pleasure to run this event and to support such a worthy cause. We hope to see you all again next year.

Closing Thoughts

Unchained is an incredibly fun departure from regular Premodern with plenty of room for spikes and brewers looking to take on new challenges. We hope that proxy/playtest cards will continue to be the norm for Unchained events in the future (at LOBSTERCON and elsewhere). We feel it improved the Unchained event both in quality and accessibility; two pillars of Royals events.

We hope that more folks will play Unchained and share with us their experiences. To that end if you run Unchained and would like prize support for an event please feel free to contact Alex C. either on Discord or by email alex.cavaliere @ rocroyals . org.

Finally keep an eye out for our annual Unchained event in Rochester, NY sometime in the late fall this year. We’d love to have you jam with us!

Deck Photos

Feast your eyes!