Still doing single-elim, but now best-of 5, with sideboarding starting game 3. This is also the beginning of my new approach to seeds and challengers: I research decklists and put together a queue of decks from different years, so that there will almost always be a deck for each past year of magic entering the first round. (I couldn’t make up my mind on a few decks so I added a preliminary round as well.) Round one matches were randomly assigned, with the exception of not allowing any decks within a year of each other to battle. Then they moved on to the seeded decks. So, it’s random and unfair who those decks play in round two – could be the top seed, could be the 16th seed – but the idea is we have no way of ranking these new challengers, so we don’t. We just throw them to the wolves.

The third seed was Bargain, which lost to the discard spells of Solar Flare. Solar Flare, Angelfire, and Temur Marvel were the big surprises of the tournament, making it to the quarterfinals.

Winner: 2012 Delver
Runner-Up: 2011 CawBlade

Delver gets retired to the Hall of Fame now that it has won TWO tournaments that I participated in.

A return to single-elim, but this was my last best-of-three tournament. Winner: 2011 Shrine MonoRed
Runner-Up: 2011 CawBlade

This time Randy Buehler ran another Standard tournament but without Academy, Memory Jar, OR Bargain. This was the first time a non-combo deck won a standard Gauntlet of Greatness. It was Atarka Red.

Randy Buehler ran another Standard Gauntlet in 2015, this time excluding Memory Jar and Academy. ANOTHER Urza’s block combo deck won the whole thing.

This time, a normal double elimination tournament.
Winner: 2015 Red Aggro (Monastery Swiftspear, Abbot, etc.)
2nd place: 2004 Cranial Affinity (no skullclamp)

This was Randy Buehler’s first season of the Gauntlet of Greatness. He used a World Cup soccer style tournament, with a group stage and a knockout stage, and he didn’t bother playing out meaningless group stage matches.
He included Academy and Memory Jar (one last time), two decks I had already basically banned. You can watch the matches on youtube.
Winner: 1999 Memory Jar
2nd place: 1996 Necro

Played this tournament at PAX Prime with the help of Randy Buehler, after connecting with him thanks to BDM, and even got some other famous names to contribute. I recall Sam Pardee played a match or two. Aaron Forsythe battled his very own Angry Hermit deck against Mike Turian who crushed him with Faeries. In the semis, Memory Jar whiffed and helped Mythic put an Obstinate Baloth into play to seal its own doom, which was quite unexpected. Buehler went on to create the Gauntlet of Greatness.