Winner: 2005 Ghazi-Glare
2nd place: 2003 Reanimator
tied for 3rd: 2002 Psychatog & 1999 Red Sligh

Decks that were invited (decks from 1996-2005):

1996 Pro Tour NY collector set decks. Each deck was required to contain at least five cards from each of the legal expansions. I chose the winning deck (Millstone), a deck that had Necropotence in it (but is not a normal Necropotence deck) and a deck with Winter Orb (3 decks).

2001 “Deckmasters – Jon Finkel” which is not even a real Standard deck – it was from a special box set based on a special event, a challenge between Jon Finkel and Richard Garfield.

A bunch of gold-border World Championship decks. I didn’t own any of the 1997 decks at this time, and didn’t have a complete set (4 decks) for some of the other years. I used what I had: 4 decks from 1998, 3 decks from 1999, 4 decks from 2000, 4 decks from 2001, 2 decks from 2002, 4 decks from 2003, 3 decks from 2004 (not including Affinity!).

4 Proxy decks I made based on decks from the World Championship 2005. (The gold-border decks were discontinued after 2004.)

Conclusions:

I was just messing around at the time and was totally unaware of the history of Standard. I hadn’t even heard of Academy or Memory Jar, and didn’t know what a real Necro deck looked like. I knew about the Affinity deck that had been banned, but apparently it didn’t occur to me to proxy it, even though I used proxy decks for 2005. So, yeah, not much of a methodology here, but… this is how it all started!