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rec.games.card.elemenstor

The famously short-lived newsgroup rec.games.card.elemenstor was for three weeks the best place for discussing Wizbits Elemenstor Battle, its strategy and the lively tournament scene. Frequented by the greatest players of the time and two incredibly helpful members of the Wizbit rules team. rec.games.card.elemenstor was of course the only place where the errata for the Three Critical Errors was ever published.

Finally receiving approval after one of the most torturous newsgroup creation processes in Usenet history, because of delays in propagation most people do not consider the official founding date of the 13th of March 1999 as the "true" founding. General consensus places the founding date as Wednesday the 24th of March 1999 when the first ever reply to a post was made. The text to the post was "Me too", plus a 60 line signature.

The Wizbit rules team who posted were both unfailingly polite, knowledgeable and totally contradictory, often correcting each other over the most basic rules issues. Furthermore, their names ElemenstorI and Elemenstor1 caused great confusion and their effect on tournament rules debates are felt to this day. Many tournaments stipulate which rules team member's answers are legal.

Receiving over 1,000 posts a day rec.games.card.elemenstor was full of colourful characters and the cross pollination of ideas created an explosion in competitive deck construction. The Ergo Trap, Full Chest Slam and the infamous Reverse Semi-Octopus Pillar Assault (a deck that made use of the power of Gangster Octopus (Card) without actually using the card) were the most well known collaborative deck designs produced on the newsgroup.

Amazingly, this all came to an end three weeks later on the 14th of April 1999 when group delete message were propagated from an unknown host and rec.games.card.elemenstor was deleted from all new servers. No-one knows the identity of the news admin who instigated the deletion, although wild rumours abound.

A replacement group in the alt hierarchy alt.elemenstor.card has been created but it appears on very few servers and traffic is low.