gigaseifer

[gigaseifer]

In the Ice Age novels, it says the J is pronounced like a Y, though?

So Jhoira is pronounced JOY-ra, but what about Jaya? YA-ya?

JIE - ya.

[gigaseifer]

Basically me in a nutshell.

(Help! How’d I get into this bloody nutshell!?)

[gigaseifer]

Standard Manabases

Originally, I wasn’t very exited for the upcoming Battle for Zendikar set. I started playing competitively back in the original Zendikar set, and the release of Rise of the Eldrazi was where I really started to get hooked on Magic. So you’d think I would be. 

And sure, with the announcement there was some hype. But I only have so much hype to have and without seeing anything of the set, the name alone wasn’t enough to get excited.

Then I saw the full set, and I have to say, I was pretty disappointed. I won’t go into too much detail, but there’s only one card I’m really looking forward to playing. The best way to sum up my feelings is the line we’ve been using at the local game store: 

“Battle for Zendikar is a set of ‘strictly worse’s that cost one too much... So I’ll take what I can get.”

But there is one thing I’m very excited for. That is the manabases.

I’ve been doing some playtesting with the new cards & brewing some lists, spending my evenings trying out all sorts of things.

This morning, I cracked it. I saw the matrix of deckbuilding and I plucked the apple of Eden and tasted its succulent juices.

So I was brewing a list around Smothering Abomination, with a little bit of Zulaport Cutthroat. This morning I looked at From Beyond and I really noticed the third line, about sacrificing it to tutor for an Eldrazi. I took a look around and brewed up a Sultai Toolbox list, if only because it can’t hurt to try a bunch of different Eldrazi in situations where they should be useful. Suffice it to say the deck wasn’t very good, but one very amazing thing came out of it.

So I went to build the manabase. I looked at my Polluted Deltas and got sad that they couldn’t fetch a green source. Now, I’ve been playing almost exclusively 5-colour since, like... Scars/Innistrad standard, so it’s been a while since I had to make a 3-colour base, so I needed to take a minute to think this through. 

One of my earlier lists had been Jund, but it was only playing red for Kolaghan’s Command. When I changed it out to Golgari, I lazily kept the Red Tangolands in the list. I ended up being pleasantly surprised that it allowed me to tutor up green with Bloodstained Mire & black with Wooded Foothills.

So I got to thinking. Is there a way I can make Polluted Delta grab green? I’ll save you the headache, this isn’t one of those puzzles we’re all missing from Duels games. The answer is no. With only allied Tangos, we can’t make Delta grab green.

BUT...

If instead of Polluted Delta, we use Flooded Strand and Bloodstained Mire, then we can tutor for the Green Tangos. On top of this, both these lands grab Sunken Hollow, our on-colour Tango. They also both grab one of our basics.

I didn’t think too hard about it at the time, and just sleeved proxies up and figured, “I’ll take what I can get” because that’s the feeling of the set.

But as I was playing, I found it to be the most amazing thing ever. I could make my fetches grab any colour I wanted whenever I needed to!

So after talking about with some pals after some playtesting today, I started to get really exited. 

We’d figure out that if you’re in a wedge, all you have to do is follow the same logic, and you can run 8 fetches that grab everyone of your colours. If you’re in a shard, you don’t have to do this whole song and dance, just run the 8 on-colour fetches, and they can grab both your on-colour tangos. Additionally, it’s VERY easy to get all 5 on board.

Now, maybe I was a little deceptive earlier. There are two cards I wanted to cast from BFZ. The one I mentioned earlier, Smothering Abomination, wasn’t the one I was referring to earlier when I said there was only one card. I mostly wanted to try Smothering Abomination because I had this really amazing Demonic-Taskmaster-All-The-Value deck and I only see Smothering Abomination in relation to Taskmaster.

The one I was referring to, was Bring to Light.

So here I am, explaining to my pal how to play Jeskai, making your fetches grab all the colours and allowing you to splash Den Protector and Kolaghan’s Command (things he wanted to do) without any problems. Then it hits us.

If anybody wants to make their Wedge deck grab the opposite colour, they just follow the above formula, and it “accidentally” puts you in five colours. If you’re in a shard, you can get into 5 by playing a couple extra tangos or fetches (esper can play all the tangos except Cinder Glade and then their on-colour fetches grab everything [Flooded Strand can grab green from Canopy Vista but not red; Polluted Delta can grab Smoldering Marsh for red, but not green][if you really want, you could play a couple Wooded Foothills, which would give you access to everything but your “on-colour” tangos, though I wouldn’t recommend it, really].

So we started thinking. If there’s virtually no cost to splashing extra colours, Bring to Light seems like an AMAZING card. 

Why wouldn’t every deck dip into all 5, so that you can play Bring to Light. Or anything else? In Jund? Splash white for Siege Rhino and blue for Jace! Esper control would like Den Protector, I bet.

And so I have to admit. Being able to play 5 colour toolbox so easily, seems like my jam. I got pretty excited during PAX when we saw the Tangos spoiled, but I never really realized the ramifications and the extent to which I can do what I’ve always done a thousand times easier now.

Thanks Wizards. Fetches+Tangos standard is looking to be the greatest thing ever. Even if I don’t care for much of the standard pool, at least I get to just play the best of it without restriction.

[gigaseifer]

Wow, really surprised to wake up and see so much of a response to some random musings I had. Let me respond to some of the points raised, starting with yxoque’s first reply.

How is that a bad thing? Stories require change.

I didn’t say it was a bad thing, necessarily. I meant it as a point that a lot of the time, basing Magic settings off of established cultures/ideas results in a lack of material because they’ve “covered” everything. MaRo touched on this at PAX in his Live to Work, that the plan was to leave Zendikar in the third block, because they couldn’t support “adventure land” long enough. Sure, he was talking about issues of card design space, but I feel the sentiment applies to creative as well. He also recently mentioned it in regards to Theros. He seemed to imply that the enchantment sub-theme was added because they needed something more than, as you put it:

Theros is basically what you’d expect about when someone says “Magic: The Gathering meets Greek Mythology.” All it does is hitting trope after trope, without adding anything new or unexpected.

And I agree with you. As someone who really enjoys Greek mythology, I was felt disappointed in Theros because that’s really all it was, Greek Magic. I felt like there was a lot more that could have been done with Theros as a world besides just being Greek.

Mirrodin is boring as hell, but its problem isn’t being “the Metal Plane” (no, I don’t mean the music genre, but how cool would that be?), it’s that the core concept is done as safe and boring as you could possible imagine. That doesn’t mean that the idea of making a “Metal Plane” is fundamentally flawed. It just means that making a good plane includes transcending the obvious.

First, I agree, a Brutal Legend-esque setting would be amazing. I don’t think that a “Metal Plane” was a bad idea in, on the contrary, I even said it was a really interesting concept. Unfortunately, that’s all it really was, a concept. The execution was just like stormingtheivory said:

the settings were all designed White Location, Blue Location, Black Location, Red Location, Green Location. Enemy color locations hate each other. Human culture for each location. Fantasy species for each location. So these weird worlds all felt kinda samey

Mirrodin was an interesting world, but once you really looked at, it was plain and boring. Just alien.

Returns are a major way to progress the story. As long as the stories are tied to planes (and they probably should be), Returns dictate the speed of the story and most players really enjoy them. Do note that starting with Battle for Zendikar, the story speed will double.

I can see that, but from around the Weatherlight Saga onwards, up until a couple years ago with Scars of Mirrodin, they gave us new and (at least conceptually) interesting worlds almost every year (Sure, Otaria was just “somewhere else on Dominaria” & Rath was just “Dark Dominaria,” but after MIrrodin, things started to progress and change pretty jarringly. Like Planeswalking should feel). I have nothing inherently against returns, but my worry is their recent frequency. It comes off as feeling like “we’ve run out of fresh ideas, so let’s revisit an old concept.” There’s nothing wrong with it, but I’m worried it’s happening too much. Especially with the two-block paradigm shift, it’s going to feel a little too repetitive. I really like that Magic goes to different places every year, and don’t want to lose that magic (pun, sorry). 

We’re dealing with characters who can travel through worlds. I want to see them progress the story utilizing that unique characteristic more. I understand the creative load inherent, but I would absolutely loved to have seen a three-set block that involved moving across worlds as the story progressed. And I know this a sentiment I’ve seen echoed elsewhere among fans.

Is it possible to agree with an overall point and disagree with 95% of an argument? Because that just happened with the OP.

Absolutely, especially when the argument is my semi-lucid thoughts vomitted into the internet a half-hour before I fall asleep. I know my “argument” wasn’t presented amazingly.

Mirrodin, incidentally, I think is a really interesting case study for how people actually react to Magic settings. Mirrodin was a vast departure from standard fantasy settings … or any fantasy settings, for that matter. It’s a truly alien landscape where the topsoil is metal shavings, the mountains are hunks of oxidized iron, and organisms grow forged steel as easily as they grow fingernails. It’s a hollow world where the core is made of magic and it’s ruled by nigh-omnipotent spider-machine organism that sees everything on the entire world. The ecosystem is surreal, bizarre, and alien (the creative team commissioned a couple dozen pieces of artwork instructing the artists to go as weird as possible, only applying them to cards later).

And yet, without a hook beyond “metal world” and without a resonant visual identity, yxoque can say that the setting was boring and playing the concept safe, and in fact that is a common refrain among Vorthoses. It’s one I even agree with. Mirrodin was boring as fuck.

Repeating myself for clarity’s sake. I agree with this. It’s great to see such a unique and interesting world. I just wish that once we’d started to experience a little closer it was more than just a “metallic” world.

Ravnica basically vastly increased the interested by merely DOUBLING AND RECOMBINING THE FIVE THINGS.

I think it might play more into how much the setting was uniquely Magic. They decided they wanted to do a set around the ten colour pairs and then came up with a setting that would accommodate ten different philosophies and lifestyles, a city. They put a lot of work into how interactions between, not just characters, but massive chunks of population interact with each other. It’s not just how does Kamahl feel about his centaur friend. It’s how do people who think this way about things see the people who think differently. Who leans towards different guilds, and why? How does this change the dynamic of the setting. Ravnica feels like a lot more work was put into it as living and breathing world. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Wizards’ creative team was significantly larger during Ravnica than it was Kamigawa, because it certainly feels that way.

There’s a lot of other points I’d like to address, but I need to get ready for FNM, so it’ll have to wait for another time. Again, I’m really pleased to see the discussion going, and glad to see others think about this stuff too. Thanks for the replies, guys.

Ranting about Settings in M:tG

Earlier today (or yesterday, depending on how long it takes me to write this) Mark Rosewater asked of the Magic community two questions through his social media outlets:

#1) What type of world we’ve never visited would you most like to visit?

#2) What worlds that we’ve visited, do you want to return to? You can name multiples but list in order of preference.

I quickly gave my input through Twitter. My favorite worlds were Dominaria (not for the setting, but for the story and characters; the most important part of a revisit), Mercadia (because I feel it was never really explored), Rath (because the whole planar overlay thing seemed cool) and Lorwyn (because the grim folklore feel was really interesting and unique in Magic worlds, and the art was less overtly CG gross).

But when it came to “type of world” I ran into a roadblock.

Why? Because I don’t feel that that way of thinking results in good world design. Think of Magic’s settings. Dominaria is just generic high-magic fantasy setting. Rabia is 1001 Nights to the letter (bet Wizards is glad that that’s basically all Public Domain). Legends was just the designers’ D&D game. Otaria was just other-Dominaria. 

Then we moved off Dominaria into the “type of world” thinking. Mirrodin is “metal world”. Which, while very interesting as a setting to be in, was merely a conceptual interest, not actually a compelling and interesting world. Kamigawa was “authentic japanese mythology world” and we all know how well that went over. Alara & Tarkir, when you think about it, are just “boiling pot” worlds. Think about it, the clans of Tarkir are boiled down pretty simply as follows:

Mardu - Stereotypical Fighty-Killy-Conquery Mongolia

Abzan - Stereotypical Spirit-ancestor worshipping asian culture

Sultai - Stereotypical ideas of Indian opulence and decadence

Temur - stereotypical norwegian (possibly northern Canadian/aboriginal) culture. Cold & Nature/Animal-focused.

Jeskai - Stereotypical kung fu china

They’re all just five stereotypical “fantasied” cultures thrown into one place. (What if Genghis Khan was an Orc? Oooh…). Alara is a very similar boat. I’ll let you guys figure out what each shard is.

Innistrad is just “gothic horror” world. Theros is just “greek myth” world. You’ll also notice that in basically instance, they all went through a sort of “third act shift” in setting. Mirrodin became New Phyrexia, Alara came together, Tarkir changed to Dragonlan, Zendikar unleashed the Eldrazi, Innistrad was overrun with Angels & Demons, I know this stems from the basics of creative writing, but at the same time, it often comes across as feeling like they just couldn’t support that setting for a whole year without changing everything up.

As I said before, I think that that way of world design doesn’t bode well for Magic. I took a look at some of the suggestions, and they’re things like “steampunk world,” “wild-west world” (which would, honestly, be pretty sweet), “Norse,” “underwater,” & “Egyptian.”

I’ve got nothing against those world ideas. Honestly, though, I’d rather see more original world ideas.

Take Ravnica for instance. Sure, it’s “city world.” But it’s so much more than that. It’s philosophical ideas based on colour-pairings and their interactions. It’s way more relatable and interesting and unique. I can guarantee to you that twenty or thirty years from now, I’ll still remember the names and ideologies and character of the ten guilds. Within the next two years, I’ll have forgotten all about Tarkir’s clans. I barely remember the Shards of Alara. But Ravnica resonated with people a lot more because it wasn’t about designing a world to fit a stereotype, it was about designing a world that could fit ten clashing ideologies and philosophies.

Another really good one is Lorwyn. Yes, it’s “folklore/fairy tale world” but it’s also all about different and alien things. The elves aren’t the elves we’re used to from Tolkien. The fairies aren’t your regular faeries. Everything is different and original.

So I find myself unable to answer the first question, because I feel like it’s too suggestive of a poor way to go about world-building. I want to see original, interesting settings. Ones that I won’t see anywhere else. Ones that make use of Magic’s unique methods of storytelling and the benefits its medium affords it.

Also, I want to revisit worlds less frequently. We’re going back to Zendikar, what?, 3 years after we went back to Ravnica? Could we not have gotten a couple more new worlds between revisits first?

[gigaseifer]

Ranting about Settings in M:tG

Earlier today (or yesterday, depending on how long it takes me to write this) Mark Rosewater asked of the Magic community two questions through his social media outlets:

#1) What type of world we've never visited would you most like to visit?

#2) What worlds that we've visited, do you want to return to? You can name multiples but list in order of preference.

I quickly gave my input through Twitter. My favorite worlds were Dominaria (not for the setting, but for the story and characters; the most important part of a revisit), Mercadia (because I feel it was never really explored), Rath (because the whole planar overlay thing seemed cool) and Lorwyn (because the grim folklore feel was really interesting and unique in Magic worlds, and the art was less overtly CG gross).

But when it came to “type of world” I ran into a roadblock.

Why? Because I don’t feel that that way of thinking results in good world design. Think of Magic’s settings. Dominaria is just generic high-magic fantasy setting. Rabia is 1001 Nights to the letter (bet Wizards is glad that that’s basically all Public Domain). Legends was just the designers’ D&D game. Otaria was just other-Dominaria. 

Then we moved off Dominaria into the “type of world” thinking. Mirrodin is “metal world”. Which, while very interesting as a setting to be in, was merely a conceptual interest, not actually a compelling and interesting world. Kamigawa was “authentic japanese mythology world” and we all know how well that went over. Alara & Tarkir, when you think about it, are just “boiling pot” worlds. Think about it, the clans of Tarkir are boiled down pretty simply as follows:

Mardu - Stereotypical Fighty-Killy-Conquery Mongolia

Abzan - Stereotypical Spirit-ancestor worshipping asian culture

Sultai - Stereotypical ideas of Indian opulence and decadence

Temur - stereotypical norwegian (possibly northern Canadian/aboriginal) culture. Cold & Nature/Animal-focused.

Jeskai - Stereotypical kung fu china

They’re all just five stereotypical “fantasied” cultures thrown into one place. (What if Genghis Khan was an Orc? Oooh...). Alara is a very similar boat. I’ll let you guys figure out what each shard is.

Innistrad is just “gothic horror” world. Theros is just “greek myth” world. You’ll also notice that in basically instance, they all went through a sort of “third act shift” in setting. Mirrodin became New Phyrexia, Alara came together, Tarkir changed to Dragonlan, Zendikar unleashed the Eldrazi, Innistrad was overrun with Angels & Demons, I know this stems from the basics of creative writing, but at the same time, it often comes across as feeling like they just couldn’t support that setting for a whole year without changing everything up.

As I said before, I think that that way of world design doesn’t bode well for Magic. I took a look at some of the suggestions, and they’re things like “steampunk world,” “wild-west world” (which would, honestly, be pretty sweet), “Norse,” “underwater,” & “Egyptian.”

I’ve got nothing against those world ideas. Honestly, though, I’d rather see more original world ideas.

Take Ravnica for instance. Sure, it’s “city world.” But it’s so much more than that. It’s philosophical ideas based on colour-pairings and their interactions. It’s way more relatable and interesting and unique. I can guarantee to you that twenty or thirty years from now, I’ll still remember the names and ideologies and character of the ten guilds. Within the next two years, I’ll have forgotten all about Tarkir’s clans. I barely remember the Shards of Alara. But Ravnica resonated with people a lot more because it wasn’t about designing a world to fit a stereotype, it was about designing a world that could fit ten clashing ideologies and philosophies.

Another really good one is Lorwyn. Yes, it’s “folklore/fairy tale world” but it’s also all about different and alien things. The elves aren’t the elves we’re used to from Tolkien. The fairies aren’t your regular faeries. Everything is different and original.

So I find myself unable to answer the first question, because I feel like it’s too suggestive of a poor way to go about world-building. I want to see original, interesting settings. Ones that I won’t see anywhere else. Ones that make use of Magic’s unique methods of storytelling and the benefits its medium affords it.

Also, I want to revisit worlds less frequently. We’re going back to Zendikar, what?, 3 years after we went back to Ravnica? Could we not have gotten a couple more new worlds between revisits first?

[gigaseifer]

Super Duper Best Friends - A Standard Deck

I talked about it before, so in an effort to post more things to Tumblr, I thought I’d post an update on the standard rotation and what I’m playing.

A year ago, I was playing a deck with one of every Planeswalker in standard at the time, because that’s how I roll (you can check out a previous post for a better explanation). I still use the mat that was made with that rotation of ‘walkers drawn on it.

Then Khans came out and Villainous Wealth was the coolest thing, so I ran a 5-colour ramp deck that ended up actually being a Chord of Calling toolbox deck that used Villainous Wealth as a finisher if the Chromanticores and other creatures couldn’t close a game.

When Fate Reforged came out, I HAD to go all in on Chromantiflayer, and you better believe I did. Dragons didn’t add a whole lot. Den Protector/Deathmist combo helped in games against control, but aggro was the majority of my meta, so they weren’t super relevant.

Then we got Origins. Believe me, I tried to play Chromantiflayer. I even tried to go above and beyond the meta and maindeck Feed the Clans and Circle of Flames. It just wasn’t working out. Despite the ability to assemble a creature that only a handful of cards in the rotation could even deal with, I still was losing more than I liked.

So I switched to 5-Colour Rally. Abzan rally is in a pretty terrible spot with Hangarback Walker (the best Walker in origins) right now. A single dead HBW means Abzan Rally can’t win. On top of that, Rally is too inconsistent a strategy. I loved the idea of an edict-oriented deck, plus a dredge deck, but it wasn’t good. With Jace and Liliana, the deck got a lot more consistent, but it needed a way to win without combat. Purphuros was the perfect fit, so 5-colour was the way to go. Unfortunately, Now we’ve made the deck more inconsistent by spreading out strategies and I couldn’t afford playsets of the ‘walkers needed to fix things, so I’ve shelved it for now.

Instead, I decided to go with the tried-and-true (kinda) One-of-Every-Planeswalker-in-Standard deck.

There are 21 right now (M15 had 6). Additionally, you can’t run a list like this without The Chain Veil, so we slap that in. Since we’re in five-colour, we need to play a playset of Sylvan Caryatid. Looking at mana costs makes me lean towards a 26 land build, so I really only have 8 cards left. Since the meta is still primarily aggro, I opted for the following list:

21 Planeswalkers

1 The Chain Veil

4 Sylvan Caryatid

4 Arashin Cleric

2 Anger of the Gods

2 Crackling Doom

As far as lands, we’re working with the following:

1 Haven of the Spirit Dragon

1 Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth

4 Mana Confluence

5 different Khans tri-lands

3 Temples (R/W, W/G & R/G)

4 Fetchlands (one of each, except Polluted Delta, since U/B are small splashes)

2 Plains

1 Island

1 Swamp

2 Mountain

2 Forest

Sideboard looks something like this:

2 more Anger of the Gods

1 End Hostilities

3 Siege Rhino

3 Circle of Flame

2 Hero’s Downfall

1 of each of the Charms from Khans (except Temur Charm)

I’m enjoying the list a lot. It leaves you with a lot of options as to play avenues, and makes it incredibly difficult for your opponent to play around what you have, since there’s so much you can do. It’s kind of like playing Mythic Pile in constructed. Your top-decks are almost always better, so control players get frustrated that you’re constantly drawing gas of some variety. Aggro players are put in a tough spot when the maindeck and a lot of the sideboard is devoted to stopping them and they have to constantly rethink combats to account for the planeswalkers’ influence.

There’s a lot of times where you just can’t do anything, and you’re praying you draw the one walker who can actually help your boardstate (usually Elspeth) only to see the one walker who can’t help any board state (Jace, the Living Garbage)

Regardless, it’s a lot of fun, and I might consider just playing this forever now that rotations are going to be more frequent and constant.

[gigaseifer]

Rise from the Grave - A Status update and some notes on my YouTube channel

I know I haven’t Tumbl’d anything in a long time. On the one hand, it’s because I haven’t really had anything to say that I felt was Tumblr-worthy. Also, I’ve been busy with other things.

I’m doing daily uploads of videos on YouTube. Makai Kingdom has come and gone and Legend of Mana is poised to finish this week. Once it’s done I’ll have a new series going up immediately. I’m going to keep up with the whole series on “a classic game that I really enjoyed and want to share” with an episode daily at noon. I don’t see it stopping anytime soon since I really enjoy it.

I am also doing reviews when I get my hands on review codes. Those will go up as soon as embargoes lift and I can share them. Don’t expect them to be regular, but I’ll try to do them more frequently. If I get something for myself that I really want to talk about, I might do videos for them as well, but I feel the timeliness of the video is an important quality of it.

I’m also going to start a second series going up simultaneously with with the “classic” LP series, where I LP “newer” releases. The game I’m looking at doing releases tomorrow and so expect the first episode to go up either late tomorrow, or early on Wednesday.

I’ve also started working on writing a novel, which is tough. Nothing is more intimidating than a blank page, except maybe when the page is blank and you know what you want to write, but for some reason that words just won’t work the way you want them.

I’m also still trying to find a stable source of income. Job hunting isn’t easy.

I’ll try to post to tumblr more frequently. Maybe a once-a-week thing? We’ll see.

[gigaseifer]

Must be the work of a Stand, “Rob The President”

of all the things in jojo, a senator actually paying his taxes is what i find to be the most unrealistic. 

[gigaseifer]

The “Super-Duper-Best-Friends” Cube

So, I’ve talked about my affinity for Planeswalkers on here before. I told the story of how I constantly play 5-colour super-friends decks in standard. I don’t know if I ever mentioned the Planeswalker EDH deck I have (had) that was one of every (of the 59) walkers printed, 35 or so land and a handful of cards that go really well with walkers.

Well, I was constantly being hassled about the inevitable crash of the deck, where it would become solely walkers and land (and maybe doubling season and chain veil), and eventually just a pile of walkers, that would no longer be playable (at least not EDH legal).

One solution was to merely choose one of subtype of Walker. So only play Jace, the Mind Sculptor, but not Beleren, Architect, Memory Adept or Living Garbage. This was a decent idea, but not a permanent fix.

Instead, I opted to entirely kill the deck and create a cube. This cube is (currently) 360 cards (enough to draft with 8 people). It focuses on archetypes centred around Planeswalker cards. So white plays around tokens for Elspeth and Ajani. Blue focuses on control like Jace is want to do. Black cares about Swamps and removal to appeal to Liliana. Red wants mountains for Koth, but also likes to burn for Chandra. Green likes to play creatures to please Garruk, but cares about Elves and Forests for Nissa.

There’s also a large focus on multicolour decks. 3-colour is almost a minimum, but you could probably get away with 2-colour. There is definitely support for 5-colour. Mono-colour would be difficult, though.

If you’re interested in checking it out, you can take a look on CubeTutor here. You can see the list, or do a draft-sim yourself (I don’t think the conspiracy robots work though).

By all means, take a look and maybe even draft it yourself. I’d love to see some decks from people drafting it. If anyone has any ideas for things I should work in, let me know.

[gigaseifer]

Uh-Oh-Audio

So, it’s come to my attention that the audio during cut-scenes in my new Makai Kingdom LP is just straight up garbage.

I’ve tried fixing it, but the videos that are up would require me playing through again to recapture the cut-scenes and splicing them in & then re-uploading the videos and that’s a whole mess of crap I’m not up to doing. So the first 11 parts are bad. The audio’s still there, but it looks like my levels messed up from when I was testing audio and all the videos have terrible audio throughout.

It’s really only evident when I shut up to let cut-scenes play though.

I’ll have the problem fixed and the videos’ audio will be good from parts 12 onwards.

I’m really sorry about this. I didn’t do my due diligence before uploading (or even before continuing to record). I apologize & will have it fixed.

[gigaseifer]

I’m Doing YouTube Again!

After a long time of inactivity on the LPing front, I’ve decided to take the plunge and try to regularly upload YouTube videos again.

I’ll be starting with Makai Kingdom: Chronicles of the Sacred Tome by Nippon Ichi Software for the PlayStation 2. New episodes will be uploaded daily at noon (Pacific Standard Time).

If things go well, I might start a post-commentary series on Legend of Mana by SquareSoft for the PlayStation (one).

You can watch the first episode here.

[gigaseifer]

New Magic: The Gathering Format - ClusterF@#$

Well, I’m late, but whatever. I said I’d post something every week and I’m damn well not going to stop yet. I also said I’d share ClusterF@#% with you, so here we go.

So what is ClusterF&!$ and how do I play the greatest and worst Magic: The Gathering format ever?

Remember when Wizards announced that they were changing all the rules and you could now sanction ANYTHING for FNM? Remember that one little line in there that read “all of the above?” That’s ClusterF$@( in a nutshell.

I came up with ClusterF#*! a few months before that announcement. I was playing EDH and we were also playing with Planechase, using a communal deck of one of every plane card, you know, the one every group has and uses for planechase instead of the way Wizards’s little inserts tell you to play it?

Well, we often also used a communal Scheme deck. This deck had two of every Archenemy scheme printed, and instead of playing a 2+V1 game of archenemy, we would often just play 1V1 EDH, with both of us drawing the top card from the scheme deck and both of us using the same planar deck.

So there we were, playing an already complicated format made more needlessly complicated and I asked: “why don’t we include the schemes?” I was told it made an already needlessly complicated format unbearably complicated. To which I replied, “You want an unplayable format, I’ll give you an unplayable format.”

And thus was ClusterF$*@ born.

So how do you play it?

This is what you need:

Many players, the more the better. I would say three is minimum, but you’re already playing this thing, so you might as well go balls deep and play one-on-one if you really want to, who’s going to stop you?

A planar deck. Ideally, this will contain one of each of the 74 Plane Cards.

A scheme deck. Ideally, this will contain two of each of the 45 Scheme Cards. 

The Vanguard Deck. Ideally, this will contain one of each of the 32 (if I counted right) Vanguard cards that have actually seen print. If you want to mock up versions of the MTGO Vanguard cards and bring the pool up to 106, Go for it. They can be found here if you want to see them all.

The Hero Deck. Ideally this will contain all the Hero cards that were given out at events during the Theros block a little over a year ago. There were over twenty of these, and things get complicated with the equipments, since there were those stickers. Hope you thought ahead and stuck those to sleeves and snagged extras of the equips! I don’t have a link for these, you’ll just have to find them. Ask around your local store or try Googling it.

The Challenge Decks. Remember the other part of Theros block? The Hydra, the Minotaur Horde, and Xenagos? These were little automaton decks similar to the horde format that you could purchase. You’re going to want all of these.

Your favourite M:tG Format. While ClusterF%@# was designed with EDH in mind, you could play casual legacy or any other decks you want. Don’t cry to me when things explode in your face, though.

Optionally, Conspiracy cards are a thing and should be worked in to the best of your ability.

Now, the first thing you need to understand is that this is a cutthroat multiplayer format.

There are 3 Teams, labelled A, B & C.

Team A: The Archenemy. This is the guy in your group that either everybody hates, that has the best deck, that has the most expensive deck (with beta duals, foil shocks, judge promos [and he’s not a judge]) or whoever won the last game (if you’re all sadistic enough to subject yourself to this more than once).

Team B: The Team Whose Name Doesn’t Fit Their Letter (Or “Everyone Else”). This is every human at the table who isn’t on Team A.

Team C: The Challenge Decks. That’s right. There is one team that is all three of the Theros block challenge decks. That means Polukranos, Xenagos and every minotaur under Mogis’s hoof band together to beat you.

Everybody on Team B starts with 40 life (or whatever your format dictates). Team A starts with 40 life, plus 20 life for each member on Team B past the first (if B=2, A starts at 60. B=3, A is 80. B=4, A is 100. And so on).

Before play begins, Team A sits at one side of the table (hope it’s long). Team B sits at the other. Team C is placed somewhere on the side where you can actually have someone perform the necessary functions.

Give the entire (ideally 90 card) Scheme Deck to Team A.

Give each player one Vanguard card. Randomly. Or pick your favourite waifu. Whatever. You should probably also split the pile of conspiracies you can get a hold of between all players, too.

Give each member of Team B one random Hero card. Maybe two. I never really intended for this to be balanced. You’re the heroes, you need something in exchange for the bad guy’s schemes.

Put the Planar deck in the centre of the table where everyone can mess with it. Make sure that at the very least, everyone can roll their planar die.

First mulligans are free, you draw at the beginning of the first draw step, all the other multiplayer variant rules. ALL OF THEM! After resolving mulligans, reveal the top card of the planar deck.

Team A plays first. At the beginning of their upkeep, they reveal the top card of their scheme deck. Then their turn progresses as normal.

Team B plays second. All players play simultaneously.

Team C plays next. Resolve each in turn that they were beat up at Game Days around the world. That means THE HYDRA plays first, then THE MINOTAUR HORDE, then XENAGOS, GOD OF THE PARTY. For simplicity’s sake (or maybe the opposite), the challenge decks are immune to each other.

The winner is the last team standing. You’ll find that you may not be able to crush the archenemy quickly enough, since you’ll need their help to fight the three monsters. You may also feel that, as the archenemy, you don’t want the monsters dead before you finish off the B Team. If Team B wins, you may want to go all-in on Conspiracy and keep going until only one of you stands.

Remember the spirit of ClusterF^#(. That is, the more times you have to call for a judge, the better the game is.

[gigaseifer]

Chroma Squad - Review

When I heard about a game that was a sentai-themed TRPG/SRPG being released, I knew there would be nothing else to look forward to this year. So, I checked out Chroma Squad by Behold Studios.

I play a lot of isometric (S/T)RPGs. So any excuse to play a new one, regardless of it’s dressing gets me excited.

I also grew up on Power Rangers, Beetleborgs, Kamen Rider and all the other toku shows I could get a hold of. 

And it is one hell of a sweet game. I just wish I liked it more.

The set up is pretty unique. You run a team of stuntmen who worked on the hit show “Super Rangers.” They get fed up with their director’s orders and decided to start their own studio.

You then get to customize your team of five. There’s a decent stock of characters to choose from, each with their own statistical uniqueness that makes them better suited to certain roles, without preventing them from being in other ones. Most importantly, you get to choose every ranger’s colour, from a nicely sized palette.

You also get to customize some of the dialogue in the game, by changing the name of your studio, your team, your transforming catchphrase, your get-in-the-damn-robot catchphrase and other stuff.

Every fight is an “episode” of your new show where you start by beating up the mooks until you fill the audience meter enough to transform, then draw out the boss and finish him off. There’s some small variance int he missions, but since most episodes of Power Rangers and the like follow this formula, the game does as well. A lot of the episodes also involve the monster growing, your team getting in their giant robot and the game changing to a turn-based beat-’em-up as you punch the giant monster to death between cardboard cut-outs of a cityscape.

It all feels very Power Rangers-inspired. You can tell Behold put a lot of effort into getting that to come across. Chroma Squad feels like a “love-letter to all sentai shows” video game like Samurai Flamenco was a “love-letter to all toku shows” in anime form.

The problem is that a lot of the mechanical aspects of the game are really disappointing at best, and outright detracting at worst.

You need to spend money on new equipment all the time (or use an even more out-of-place crafting system). I get that they’re trying to go for an “indie rangers” theme where you start off with cardboard helmets and track pants and slowly build your way up to flashy vinyl suits. Unfortunately, I feel that the execution of this idea wasn’t well done and just adds too much micromanagement to a game that’s supposed to be about big dumb flashy poses. The crafting system is extra awful, since you can’t get older materials after certain points without just purchasing them, drops aren’t guaranteed and stats on crafted equipment is randomized. This all results in a lot of resetting until you get what you want, sometimes doing the same mission over and over again until luck works out. Because you can’t replay older episodes, you can’t just grind for things you need (and I’m not arguing for this, that would probably just end up being another complaint). Even worse is that upgrading your robot can only be done with crafting, so you’re a lot less inclined to craft ranger equipment in case you need it for the robot. But then, you don’t use the robot every episode, like you do the rangers, so you end up second-guessing yourself and the whole thing doesn’t need to be there in the first place, so why bother?

Then you have your base. It’s a small warehouse at first, but there are studio upgrades that let you expand it for a large sum, while giving you overarching benefits. This entire studio upgrade mechanic feels out of place, too. Again, Behold is clearly going for an “indie rangers who start small and are suddenyl the greatest studio” thing, but it just adds a bunch of stuff that doesn’t need to be there.

Director's objectives are yet another thing that feels out of place. The tutorial sets up the narrative so that there is no director anymore, so why are we still getting commands every episode? Worse, the director’s mandates force you to play the battle in a linear fashion, without the room for the creative tactical ingenuity that TRPGs are so good for.

The game is full of a ton of stats and mechanics that range from poorly to not at all explained. Skills refreshing, Fan/Income conversion rate, stats for the mecha and all sorts of other things are all over the place, filling the game with numbers that you don’t understand. There’s so much micro-upgrading that needs to be done between episodes and you barely know what half of it is.

Chroma Squad is like a Power Rangers-themed X-Com, but the entire base stuff feels like it shouldn’t be there.

The worse offence will come to those who enjoy tactical/strategy RPGs for their combat’s depth of thought and chess-like complexity. Chroma Squad is severely lacking there. Maybe that’s why I get so bent out of shape about all this base micro. If the actual episodes were fun and interesting to play through, it might not bother me so much. But all the fights devolve to moving towards the closest enemy, hitting them and then moving the next guy to do the same. The director’s stuff plays with this a little bit, and maybe that’s why it’s there, to give a faux sense of depth to the combat, but it doesn’t really help. There’s no statistical customization of the individual rangers, that’s done with equipment. There’s little skill customization. Depending on which of the five roles your ranger is (and you can’t have a team of multiples of a single role, and shirk others, you’re forced into one of each of the five), you get a choice of one skill per season you’re on in the narrative. Often, there isn’t actually a choice, and the ranger is forced to choose from one skill for that season’s slot.

If you like SRPGs a lot and are into toku/sentai. You’ll probably be disappointed in the SRPG part of the game and force yourself through it for the narrative flavour. If you like sentai and could care less about the game’s genre, you just want to play a game where you can customize a Power Rangers team, then you’ll probably enjoy Chroma Squad, because there’s a lot of minute customization for you.

The problem lies in the narrative. Now, I’ve been encountering a lot of hard crashing when some bosses use certain moves (I’ve been getting around it by just shirking things like director orders and farming mooks for crafting drops and just trying to one-shot the boss before he crashes the game), so I’m not as far through the game as I would have liked by the time I write this. However, the narrative isn’t that well written, either.

I’m not talking about the apparently contentious SJW scene where one of your team members insists you can’t rescue a damsel in distress because that would be sexist. It’s one short scene with no relevance to the narrative or game as a whole and there are plenty of other flaws to complain about. I will say that the scene probably wouldn’t offend so many people if it had been written better. As is, the entire scene focuses itself upon the meta-implications and I think that’s what pisses people off. It comes off as preachy and message-shoving, like a Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness who won’t take no for an answer and keeps offering you pamphlets on your way to work every day. If the scene had just been you saving a man without a long-winded drawing of attention to itself, I don’t think anyone would have cared. Whether or not that’s actually a better situation is an entire other discussion to be having.

The rest of the narrative is equally fourth-wall breaking and full of obnoxious jokes that don’t make sense out-of-context, and sound even worse when shoehorned into a story that doesn’t need them. It’s difficult to tell when the squad is acting as their characters, when they’re not and when the game is stepping outside of itself. This makes nearly every scene read like a mess. There’s ton of memes and inside jokes that were maybe funny to some people back when the game was in development and the joke was fresh, but by now are just annoying to hear. If they were one-and-dones it wouldn’t be so bad, but a lot of them get re-used over-and-over. There’s a reason people still shit over Burch for his writing. It’s not funny, it’s just annoying.

I like Chroma Squad, don’t get me wrong. I criticize it because I like it. I love the concept and I want the execution of the concept to be well done. There’s just so many things that I wish weren’t there, and so many more that I wish were. If you’re a fan of the inspiring materials, you’ll certainly be able to enjoy the game. Just not to the extent you could if a little more thought had been put into the game.

If you want to purchase Chroma Squad, you can do so through Steam here.

[gigaseifer]

New MTG Format - Mythic Pile

For this week’s post, I wanted to share a new format me and a couple friends came up with. But first, the story behind it.

So after Game Day a couple of weeks ago, we brought a couple of the players from the local store over to kill time before the second Game Day tournament started. One of them only had a booster box full of miscellaneous cards on him (his standard deck was in there). So I’m sitting on the couch, two are play-testing on the other couch, the other two are sitting on the floor, looking over their decklists. Box-guy starts going through his box to find something to change a card in his deck, and suddenly he remarks: “Man, every card I have on me is a mythic. Look at this. Mythic. Mythic. Mythic.” He proceeds to show off that his booster box is actually just full of mythic rares and dual lands, and the Thunderbreak Regent promo from his top 8 placement earlier. I then said something to the effect of, “pile them together and let’s play Tower with just mythics.” He said okay and we did.

So let me present a new format, Mythic Pile:

In Mythic Pile, you take your entire collection of mythic rare cards, shuffle them into a single deck. Any number of players may play Mythic Pile, but at least 3 is preferred. At the start of the first turn, that player draws a single card and then adds an infinite amount of mana of every colour to their mana pool. This mana doesn’t empty as steps and phases end. All players begin with 30 life. If a card would go to a player’s graveyard, it is instead placed in a communal graveyard from which all players are considered to control. If you wish to cast a card with Delve, or otherwise interact with a card in a graveyard, you may use any legal target in the communal graveyard. Legend and Planeswalker rules still apply. If a card would be exiled from anywhere except the communal graveyard, instead send it to the communal graveyard.

Boom. That’s it. Some cards become crazy good. Some become crazy bad. Usually they stay about the same, since they’re all good, because they’re all mythics.

As an addendum, we added a rule that whenever a card made tokens, they were all Thunderbreak Regents, because we had a bunch of them lying around, but no tokens.

If I were to do it over again, I’d either handle tokens as normal, or get one of every token, and every time you make one, you draw a random token from a pile. So that 3/3 Green Beast that Garruk just made might actually be a 1/0 Blue Elemental, or a Land Mine, or a 9/9 Blue Karken.

Obviously, cards that have mana sinks or otherwise repeatable abilities are broken to all hell and back. Griselbrand especially. (The life totals were 40 until someone drew the Griselbrand).

One thing that might be interesting to do is make a “cube” of all the mythics ever printed (and other mythic-level cards... So basically a typical powered cube) and instead of drafting, just play tower. But call it Mythic Pile. That’s half the fun, after all.

Maybe next week, I’ll share another, much more interesting variant format: ClusterF&$#.

[gigaseifer]

Titan Souls - Review

I’m a little late on getting this out, but better late than never!Titan Souls is finally out. If you follow indie games, you’ve certainly heard of it. You’ve likely seen the trailer and maybe even played a demo of it. Hell, by now you’re probably playing it yourself. In case you’re not, let me lay down exactly what it is. It’s Shadow of the Colossus downgraded. You play a young adventurer with one arrow. you travel the land killing bosses with this one arrow and your dodge roll. You have a magnet or something that can recall the arrow to you. beat the boss and unlock more bosses until you’e beat them all. All in that retro, severely toned-down graphics-style that’s all the rage. Maybe that came off a little harsh. I like Titan Souls. Conceptually, the game takes some really interesting design choices and plays into them. For instance, you and bosses both die in one hit. There’s no RPG leveling thrown in to appeal to people with a fetish for big numbers, just pure mechanical skill. You need to learn boss patterns (literally, they’re all patterns) while solving the puzzle of the boss fight, while timing when to actually throw your arrow, all while not getting hit yourself. The idea that you only have the one arrow is interesting. You have the power to pull it towards you, but that leaves you vulnerable, so you have to learn to play better, both in learning timing for attacking, and timing for recovering from failure. The zelda-esque puzzles of boss fights gets repetitive and kind of grating. That the game is only a boss rush gets even more repetitive and grating. With Shadow of the Colossus, the appeal was not only in fighitng boss after boss with all the fluff cut out. The world looked stunning. The bosses looked stunning. The game made you traverse the world and experience things. Titan Souls doesn’t look interesting. The world isn’t interesting. the boss fights are the first time, and maybe stay nice for the next two fights or so, but then they’ve overstayed their welcome and you want some sense of progress. It’s got that “Soulsian” feeling of adrenaline rush during a fight that cuts to a dopamine overload the second you beat a boss you’ve been fighting all day as you thrust your arms up in the air and shout at the top of your lungs about how you’re the king of the world. But then you lower your arms and Titan Souls is still there, wanting more from you without giving you enough to really warrant it. It’s a great game, with some unique, applaudable design choices. I just wish there was either less of it, or more to it.

You should definetly check it out if you’re a fan of that sort of thing, though.

Titan Souls is available on Steam for $15 here.

[gigaseifer]

A small update on things

You may have noticed that I failed to post anything Friday. It might be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I did expect that if I reduced my schedule I’d lose motivation to post anything. It’s also partly that I just have nothing ot talk about. I’ve done nothing but papers and play Wakfu.

I also have a lot of minis to paint from Reaper still. Which led me to thinking about running another D&D/Pathfinder game with my group. So I’ve been doing some writing there, and that means nothing when it comes to tumbling.

I might (read: probably) post some flavour stuff here. I’ll strive for one every week. If something I really want to talk about comes up, I might make a second post in the week.

[gigaseifer]

So, a new Magic: Origins spoiler was shown by Nathan Holt on his twitter today, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it. I don’t know if Nathan found it elsewhere, and like a good journalist, I’m going ot make no effort to check acts.

So without further ado:

Well, ladies and gentlement, we have our Jace!

And boy is this one a doozie.

First, it’s a 2/1 for 1U. That’s okay.

Then it’s got this flashbacking ETB. unfortunately, with all the delve flying around from KTK & FRF, I don’t think it’ll be very good. I mean, do you actually want to pay 1U+6UU for Dig Through Time!?

Then he’s got this flip effect, a la delver. Unfortunately, that effect worked for delver, becuase it turned a 1/1 into an evasive 3/1 - a 7 turn clock. This turns from an aggresive creature into planeswalker, so now you’re not winning anymore because you’re not doing damage. Additionally, I don’t know how you’ll even trigger this, since it meas you play more spells and less DRAGONS!

As for Young Jace, He starts at 12, so I guess he’ll at least survive for one turn, unless your opponent is in a position to hit you with a really big fireball or something. I feel like I’ve seen all these abilities before, though.

Fateseal 1 doesn’t seem very good. You could hit yourself, but what if the next card down costs you the game!? Likewise, you might tuck an opponent’s good card, but then their next card could win them the game. Seems bad.

His 0 is Brainstorm. There’s a reason WotC hasn’t reprinted Brainstorm, and that’s cause it’s bad. That’s why it’s priced at 0, probably. I mean, you have to put two back, so you kinda lock yourself into bad draws, which means you’ll need to keep using his 0 to get yourself out of it, and that just seems awful.

His -1 is unsummon. Also not a very good card. It’s always in standard, but never sees any play. Obviously, not very good. I mean, bouncing Siege Rhino!? Way to throw the game.

-12. Geez, that means you can come in and crack him immediately, but you don’t even win the game, they still have like 7 turns to draw out. And since they were cards they’re holding, they must be really good, so you’re basically forcing your opponent to draw steam, which seems terrible.

All in all, I think the new Jace isn’t going to see type 2 play. Maybe some fringe modern deck will play it, but that’s a terrible format that no one should play, so whatever.

I give it a 2/10. Or a 1U/10. Whatever. Total Garbage. Worse than Living Guildpact out of sucks hard.

On a serious note. I’m coming to the realization that I don’t have things to talk about. You might have noticed how I posted nothing yesterday. I decided I’m going to go from posting every weekday, to just Mon-Wed-Fri. Hopefully I don’t completely drop off the face of the world and manage to at least keep that up.

Thoughts on the Newest Spoiler