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E3 mood

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heisei generations

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ok im losing it over Ex-Aid actors jojo-posing

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At first I was like

But then I was like

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GAMES I PLAYED 2016 (#2) Dwarf Fortress

(Image Source)

So in this series of reviews and reflections, I don’t want to talk just about games that came out in the year in question, just games that I’ve played that year. Dwarf Fortress has been around for an eternity, and all of my friends groaned as soon as I mentioned I was playing it but none of them could really tell me what it was.

Everyone just knows that it is a pain.

Frankly, I didn’t know much about it until this year, aside from that I knew that one day I would play it and I would love it.

So where do you even begin?

Dwarf Fortress is more or less a fantasy world simulator to the minutest degree. And I mean minutest. You (more or less) control a group of dwarves that have been shipped out into the wilderness to dig a hole, get some loot, and grow into a city.

Frankly Dwarf Metropolis might have been a better title.

The detail on the game’s mechanics and controls are honestly kind of mind blowing. Every dwarf you have in your city has their own opinions. Things that make them happy, things that make them sad, things they like to do. Kind of like people.

Their entire family tree is processed in detail, as is each and every one of their organs.

Minutest. Details.

So the game is open ended in what its goal is, but you more or less have to appease these dwarves in order to feel good about having a big city. There is just one problem. Anything and everything will kill your dwarves.

Turns out nature isn’t kind to a race that has no resources.

So a game of building also becomes a game of survival.

That pretty much covers the ideas of the game, but I haven’t even scratched the complexity of the game. I mean, all of this sounds super simple, yet this game is the most complex video game I’ve ever touched.

You see all of my friends groaned when I brought up the game because it is a well-known fact that Dwarf Fortress has a high bar for entry. A learning curve that is cold and unforgiving. If you aren’t decked out in the swaggest of threads Dwarf Fortress will not let your ass in to the theoretical dwarf club.

It starts with the graphics. The game looks like someone grabbed a bunch of fridge magnets and puked all over them. That is to say that it uses (mostly) ASCII characters that are painted one of 16 colors. An H is a human, a lowercase e is an elf, a > is a downward staircase, and a T is a titan that can shoot fire and incinerate your dwarves. We’ll get to that titan later.

Point is, if you don’t know what you’re getting into, Dwarf Fortress’ graphics can be a huge hurdle.

Fortunate for me, one of my favorite games to play in high school was Nethack, another ASCII game. Hours spent dying in that game have prepared me for understanding Dwarf Fortress’ mish-mash of letters.

Frankly though, I don’t think that graphics really change much for this hurdle. A friend of mine tried it with a decent graphics mod, and what the huge problem really is is the scale of shit you have to take in. There’s just so much going on at once and if you don’t know there is a pause button then there are no breaks on the death train.

And that’s one of the things about Dwarf Fortress that creates its steep learning curve. In a normal game, say the very first Mario Bros, you can learn the interactions of everything really quickly. If I run my plumber into a goomba and he dies, I instantly know 40 percent of what there is to know about goombas. Another 40 percent is that they die when you jump on them, and the last 20 percent is whether or not they fall off a platform when they keep walking.

You can find out all of those things by more or less interacting with a goomba as player. The controls of Mario are designed to allow you to easily jump on a goomba, die to a goomba, and observe a goomba.

In Dwarf Fortress, you aren’t really a player, you’re an observer. You can tell your Dwarves to do things, you can try and dig a hole, but in reality you don’t have much control, and you can’t interact with a lot of things in a way that lets you understand them.

Lemme give you an example.

Cutting down trees. Let’s use a game inspired by Dwarf Fortress as an example. Minecraft. In Minecraft if I am running around having no idea what the fuck I’m doing, I’m probably eventually going to end up breaking a dirt or sand block and realizing I can pick up and place blocks. I, through experimentation, will probably eventually end up punching a tree, and end up with a block of wood.

I then know I can get wood.

In Dwarf Fortress, you have to designate an area that trees can be chopped down. Then one of your dwarves has to have an axe to cut down those trees. But to do that the dwarf with the axe has to have their labors set to tree chopping. They then have to not be sad, bored, tired, hungry, or whatever, and then go chop down those trees.

All of these things are hidden behind menus within menus that a starting player doesn’t really have a full grasp on yet. It is really hard to stumble your ass into all of these things, which creates Dwarf Fortress’ learning curve.

But it doesn’t stop there. I made an army because my fort was getting a bit sizeable. The people in the army started taking my axes and not chopping down any trees, resulting in a wood shortage in my fort.

And I had no idea why I was running out of wood.

Other games give you some sort of feedback, but in Dwarf Fortress, things just keep moving regardless of what you think is happening. This inability to interact like you can in other games leads to Dwarf Fortress’ next big wall to new players.

The menus.

So almost every letter on your keyboard does something different, and that thing is given a one word explanation. D is Designation.

Z is Status.

Things like that. And what happens when you press that button? It brings up another menu of a bunch of words you don’t really understand. And what happens when you click one of those? Knock knock motherfuckers it’s another fucking menu.

There are so many menus and so many actions you can instruct to your dwarves that just by starting up the game with no knowledge you’ll probably find it difficult to even comprehend what you CAN do. Without guidance I wouldn’t think that there would be a difference between digging a channel for water and mining a hole into a wall. Those are the same things in most games.

I wouldn’t think that I could build drawbridges and place furniture in the same menu.

This is where I transition into the things I love about this game.

For those huge negative things I’ve said about Dwarf Fortress, the beauty of it is what you can do and how detailed it is. I cannot stress the detail of this game enough.

Getting past the controls, the graphics, all of these are terrible mistakes that make me certain that not everyone can or should play Dwarf Fortress, but as someone who can, I feel like Dwarf Fortress is one of the best games I’ve ever played in my life.

Building your fortress, trying to make it as neat and orderly and protected as possible, each little individual quirk of all of your individual dwarves, the tragedies, the triumphs, the feeling of satisfaction when you get something to work, all of it just combines into a game that is just. MmM. Good fucking shit. Let me tell you a story. This is the story of two Nishes.

So my first fortress failed, and I moved onto my second (and still currently going) fort. So my city is slowly growing, after a water crisis in the winter, a wave of new immigrants show up.

One of them is a woman named Nish. Shortly after Nish arrived, one of my dwarves entered what is called a mood. You see, dwarf society values creativity and crafts highly, so eventually your normal dwarves will try to become artists. During this time they will lock themselves in a room and try and build something incredible.

But your dwarves are picky with their supplies, and if you cannot appease them they will go crazy and die.

The dwarf that entered this mood was Nish. Nish created Dosim Thak, the “Wisdom of Locking,” after months of slaving away, and only finished the object after a last minute trade with some elves. It is a rock throne made wish parses, pig iron, and schist. It is covered in spikes of cave toad bone. On it is a carving of the dwarf Datan Bronzeheld becoming queen of The Constructive Sabre in the first year of existence. On it is a carving of itself.

Any dwarf who comes out of most moods will become proficient in that stat. So Nish was deemed Legendary Mason McGoodboy.

After this happens, tragedy strikes; a new wave of immigrants have brought a new terror. A vampire. Vampires will suck sleeping dwarves dry of blood, killing them. Aside from this, they are undetectable and have the same sprites and mechanics of any other dwarf. So I set a new immigrant, a different Nish, to patrol the area as a militia.

Several weeks later and another body is found; but the murder is witnessed. The mayor’s wife notices the very Nish I had set to protect my dwarves draining one of the founders of their blood. The second Nish is renamed The real Dracula, and imprisoned casket of Amantialo style.

So things return to normal. Locking up a vampire has benefits to your society; they never go hungry or thirsty, so they can kind of chill around and keep your society to be immortal since they can’t be damaged.

But then something strange happens.

Election season is upon us, and because I never convicted The real Dracula Nish through the games justice system (which is something you have to do by the way), he wasn’t considered by the townspeople to be a criminal.

You see, vampires are very smooth talkers, and the games politics is more or less based on how many people like you. Well, The Real Dracula Nish was liked enough by one person, the husband of the Legendary Mason McGoodboy Nish, that The Real Dracula Nish was elected mayor of my fort

The new Dracula Mayor Nish quickly puts something into order; he wants three gauntlets made. See, much like real people of authority, in Dwarf Fortress your higher ups will demand nice things as a reward for the stress of running a fort of idiots.

But for Dracula Mayor Nish, we have a problem. My starting area has no metal. None. It is impossible for me to make gauntlets. I did not know that the game has a mechanic for melting down your old armor and items to make new objects, like you could normally.

So Dracula Mayor Nish gets mad. He orders a craftsdwarf to be hit with a hammer 2 times.

The unfortunate craftsdwarf is none other than Legendary Mason McGoodboy, Nish. Nish goes peacefully with the jailor, and is hit twice with a hammer.

A week goes by and I get a notification; Legendary Mason McGoodboy Nish has been missing for a week.

Nish is dead in her cell.

I like to think that Dracula Nish, who’s only true friend was Mason Nish’s wife had an eye out for Mason Nish’s husband. So with Mason Nish dead, there was nothing but a rock wall between Dracula Nish and his beloved.

But things are hard on Mason Nish’s husband. His wife, a renowned person in their culture, is dead, and he is having difficulty coping with it. He’s not working hard anymore. He can’t bare the grief.

Then it happens.

A disaster unpredicted. A titan by the name of Cacame Rosycanyons the Autumn of Rawness appears on my map. The game informs me to beware its breath of fire.

I send my army after it.

Within seconds my entire map is lagging due to the amount of fire being processed. My dwarves are in cinders, and trees keep collapsing due to burning down. (Elves later come and yell at me for not protecting my forest from the forest fire)

The titan has made it into my fort. Here we find Nish’s husband. He sees the titan and makes one desperate charge.

He is shot with a fireball, and nothing but ashes remain.

After reducing my fort of 200 dwarves to a fort of 90, the titan is eventually defeated. This tragedy would come to be known as The Rampage of the desert titan Cacame Rosycanyons the Autumn of Rawness in Catchlens in the year 176.

Mason Nish’s husband, The Real Dracula’s one true friend, has finally reunited with Mason Nish in heaven or hell.

The game informs me that most of my dwarves have gone missing, because without corpses to be identified, my city, reduced to ash, does not know what has happened to most of the victims of this attack.

The Real Dracula is re-elected for a second term. And a third term. He is declared a baron. But the only thought running through his head is this.

Nish is distracted from being away from friends for too long.

This is what I love about Dwarf Fortress. All of its interlocking mechanics, generated pasts, terrible deaths, and detailed artworks create stories.

Stories that can tell better tales than several story-centered games I’ve played, despite having nothing but RNG at work.

Playing Dwarf Fortress has made me feel like I’m playing someone’s magnum opus. The scale of detail creates these magnificent tales that are unique. Nothing feels better about telling that story is that even though it may have happened to someone else, this one was mine. My story. For my dwarves.

All of this is set to one 8 minute song that loops forever. And it is perfect.

Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world simulator. And it does that so well.

And the games not even finished.

If you think you can get passed Dwarf Fortress’ short comings, I please urge you to give this FREE game a try.

I learned by watching the following streams by aravingloon. I didn’t watch that closely, and this is by no means a tutorial series of videos. Loon explains a few things from time to time, but watching him play and asking myself the question “Okay, I saw him doing this, how do I do that?” and playing with the controls myself really helped me get into the game. As mentioned, my second fortress managed to get to 200 population, with a generally happy populous. I am by no means good at the game, but I think that’s pretty good for two tries.

Dwarf Fortress was a surprise hit for me, and the first time in a long time I’ve sunk hours into a game. Recently I can only play an hour or two of a video game before having an urge to do something else, or just wanting to take a break.

That didn’t happen for Dwarf Fortress. I started up the game, looked down, and by the time I looked back up 4 hours had passed.

Dwarf Fortress is a game with shortcomings, but I think proof that not every game needs to be perfect to BE perfect.

The fuck does that even mean.

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GAMES I PLAYED 2016 (#1) Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice SPOILER WARNING

So this is a series I want to start up on my blog where I reflect on the games I’ve played in a year, based on something I saw on this tumblr. In recent years I’ve wondered how I feel about games, so writing it in text would help me reflect and see how my opinions have changed and what hasn’t years later. So Ace Attorney Spirit of Justice is the most recent game I’ve played. I finished it TODAY, October 30th. I’ve been a fan of the Ace Attorney games since I was a freshman in college, where a friend of mine lent me a copy of the first game. I had always wanted to play them since I first heard of the game not too long after the second one came out. I played through 3 the next year, then 2, then Apollo Justice, then I played the 5th one the night it came out. I was a little late to Spirit of Justice, but that’s not the point. So how do I feel about this game? While I have an overall positive opinion of the game, I would not call it perfect, and there are some things I strongly dislike about it. So as I’ve tagged this thing to hell and back, there WILL BE SPOILERS IN THIS REFLECTION. While I won’t do spoilers in all of these, to discuss my opinions on this game I need the freedom to spoil stuff. So you HAVE been warned. So where to start off? First things first, I’d like to talk about the things I don’t like to get it out of the way. So this game introduces a new mechanic to the game, Divination Sequences. They function much like videos did in previous Ace Attorney games, such as the bonus case of the first game. But they have an added twist! In addition to just visual effects involving the senses of the (mostly) recently departed. Sounds cool right?  Yes. It is. Each game since the 3rd has added an extra layer to the gameplay to make it more engaging that the normal visual novel effects of the original trilogy. Each starts off with an animated dance sequence that is thankfully skip able. Not that the animation is bad, and I love the song but it is the same animation over 5 times. Being able to skip that is a nice touch. So if I’m singing its praises, why is this the first thing on my I don’t like it post? Because they’re confusing as fuck. The Ace Attorney games have had a long stretching problem, where you might be thinking 2 steps ahead of where the game is at right now, and that leads to many a save scumming. Unlike Athena’s therapy session from the previous game and Apollo’s creep stare, the game penalizes you. And unlike in every game except the first, instead of a health bar, you have 5 hit points like in the first game. So constantly fucking up the divination sequences because you’re either not clicking the exactly right thing or you’re too far ahead is such a headache. I love the idea of the sequences, but the thing about contradictions with other evidence is that they usually contain multiple word descriptions against multiple word testimonies. Now you’re posting up Rayfa’s usually kind of poorly worded statements against single words and hazy visual cues. It just doesn’t work as well as videos did in the past due to the added layers. I admit to looking up most answers to the divination sequences. I never had to look anything else up for this game. They’re that annoying. This leads into my next point. No Phoenix Wright game has had me more annoyed with how to present evidence in the right spot. I have been on the right track with every time I was stuck, but I often found myself barred by the game. All games have had this problem except for 5. Because 5 did not have it, the game felt way too easy. But I’ll get back to that later. This game is the worst offender. One that sticks to my recent mind is in case 5 day 1. You need to point out that Dr. Buff is not the person with the orb by saying he went out to hide it away. Instead of presenting the evidence that he went out (the raincoat or the moss in his boot) you have to present the orb itself, which is annoying. Why not have all 3 pieces of evidence that are very clearly pointing to one thing. Why not have them all work, but you have to link them together? Clicking on the raincoat would give you a hint to presenting the orb instead or something. I just feel like after being the 6th game in the main series, they could figure out how to have multiple branching evidence submissions. Going back to the 5 being too easy, this feels like a step too far back to increase the games difficulty. Next on the list is Case 1. I thought it was long, boring, and the pay off was weak. It just took too long to get where it needed to. They’re really hammering in the WE HATE LAWYERS IN THIS COUNTRY thing, and hinting at Dhurke, but man. It just makes the game really unappealing at first glance. So that leads me into the next thing. The hammering of religion in the games beginning. It feels just SO heavy handed. I get that they need to make the player feel like a foreigner, and that things are different here except for you know, the judge looking the same and acting the same. But come on. Give the player some credit. You can ease off a bit. The final grievance I have with the game is prosecutor Sahdmadhi. At the end of this game, after his twists and turns have been revealed, I actually like this character a lot. But that’s the problem. All of Sahdmadhi’s character focus happens in the last part of the 5th and final trial of the game. Before that he just doesn’t stand out at all. His deal is religion. While that can be an engaging character gimmick, he just doesn’t appeal to me at all until much later. He isn’t as hubris filled like Edgeworth, meaning it’s not as funny when he fails, his punishments are nowhere near as interesting as Franziska being able to carry around a fucking whip, and his calm cool and collected personality doesn’t compare at all to Godot. He isn’t as lively as Klavier, nor as interesting as Blackquill. All we know about him until the end is that he is religious and he has changed since Apollo knew him. And that being his sole character from chapter 2 to 4 makes him feel so shoe horned into both case 2 and 4 in “America”. Like, he’s there in case 2 so that Apollo can know he’s around. He’s in case 4, a totally unrelated case so he can go against Athena??? Like, why not pit her against Edgeworth, or hey, whats been going on in Franziska’s life now that she’s not an actual fucking child. Klavier! Where have you been my good friend? Since this case was TOTALLY UNRELATED, I feel like it could have been ANYONE ELSE. So let’s take this into what I liked. I liked how the game as a whole is a parallel to the first game of the series in a lot of ways. This leads into why I like Sahdmadhi’s character towards the very end. Here’s how it goes. Apollo, in the course of meeting and facing against someone he was once good friends with who after getting fucked up by some crazy prosecutor has decided to become a prosecutor and become cold and distant from his emotions. Apollo’s mentor (Dhurke to Mia) winds up murdered, and is spirit channeled by Maya Fey to help them move towards owning their own law business trying to fight against the corrupt legal system. That’s great. I love Apollo. I think the game does a great job of showing how he can handle his own since his game. He’s matured after the 5th game, and he’s going to someday be great. I love that, and I’m glad Ace Attorney is taking the time to focus on the characters that AREN’T Phoenix. Which leads me to another bad point real quick. This game is a mess with focus. It sticks to the 5 case format. But I just feel like it really suffers from trying to focus on Phoenix meeting with Maya AND Apollo’s past. They needed Phoenix to go to the country of I’m not gonna bother trying to spell it, so that he could meet Maya and get her involved (As Apollo does not know her personally) but after that I find myself jarred at how Wright spends his time developing a relationship with the country instead of Apollo, considering this game is supposed to be about Apollo’s growing. Phoenix interacts with the tsundere 15 year old, not Apollo. Phoenix takes the spotlight of the country, not Apollo. Switching this would certainly make some cases (Case 5 day 1 in specific) not work at all, but it just feels like it doesn’t know what to do with so many characters, which is probably why Apollo is getting put on a bus. Also, poor Athena. She gets a 1 day case and she doesn’t participate in the final case at all. While I liked having Blackquill on your side in Case 4, it was just a brief case, and it really makes it hard for me to swallow that Athena can handle herself when Blackquill could have taken it himself probably. Okay back to good stuff. Mayas back. Yay. I could go on about how I am upset that we didn’t get like, a reunion hug shot of her and Phoenix, but whatever. She’s great. Pearl also shows up, and even though it’s for a short amount of time, it’s cool to see her be funny and you know, 18. Emas back. Yay. I know some people might not be happy with Ema getting a shitty future like Phoenix did in Game 4, but I think that it helped her grow as a character. It separates her from Maya a lot, which is nice because the two were very similar in the first game. She also seems forced in the non-”america” parts, but whatever, I’m just glad she’s back. I also find it weird that she never goes “thanks for helping out my sister from you know all that shit” to Phoenix but whatever. For all the callbacks in this game, it just seems weird that they never seem to address things like this, or emotional reunions. New Characters. This game has some of the best characters of the series, and I am a huge fan of MANY of them. So Rayfa. I think Rayfa is very well written and interesting. While I labeled her a tsundere earlier, I don’t mean it in a negative context. The Ace Attorney Series has always been good at taking characters that seem 2 dimensional and giving them depth. Edgeworth, the Feys, most of the murders, the judge. Rayfa is no exception. When shitty things happen to Rayfa, she reacts like a person, and I am a huge fan of that. She hesitates. She grows. I hope to see more of her in the future. Datz. He’s pretty funny. I dig him. Dhurke. Going in on that parallelism to Mia earlier, I find Dhurke just a really cool guy. I figured he was gonna be a villain, but I guess that’s the point of the early game propaganda. He’s just an all around perfect snowflake, and you know what, I’m okay with that. It’s cool to see him interact with pretty much anyone, and I find him to be a great character. So now for one minor character that I can’t get over my strong appreciation for. Sarge/Armie Buff. When I was talking to Sarge’s character as the helicopter before the reveal, I already knew Sarge was going to be one of my favorite characters. The switch between happy kind of playful soldier talk and the whiplash to sad and you know, this kid sure is locking themselves up in their room and not in good emotional state is a marvelously done switch. It shows character depth beyond just ARMY JOKES. Also I would love to read a book about her mother and father. Her mother sounds like a badass and her dad sounds like a doofus. Then the reveal happened. As soon as I saw the wheel chair I verbally said “oh no.” Real tug at the heartstrings. Really good character. Another thing I liked; the breakdowns in this game were the best of the series. All of them (except the first) felt very satisfying. One thing I really liked about it is that they introduced more hallucinations than before. Really show us how fucked up the mind of a killer can be if we see things like that. The Magician one and the Politician one really stand out in my mind as being really trippy but also really poignant. The framing and everything in those two scenes (The mask showing up in the former and the TV screen effect in the latter) just really put them over the top making them incredible. Music is good. Still Ace Attorney, still on the ball with the sick tracks. The writing is good. Not the best, as I’ve made clear my opinions on, but I find most of it to range from tolerable to funny. VERDICT The game is good, don’t get me wrong, but you have to get past the first case to really get into it. I didn’t get hooked until case 3, which even previous games have had me hooked from just the first case. There are plenty of good and plenty of bad. If you’ve played this far in the series, I wouldn’t tell you not to play this one. While I don’t think I’ll ever be as itching to play it again unless I want a refresher for the story for the next game that comes out eventually (that sequel bait). I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I look forward to playing more games.

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Reblog for TEAM CALLIE!

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Reblog this post if you are Team Mystic (Blue)!

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Me, right now.

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See me lying on the floor, looking like garbage as Napstablook

I took many more photos of cosplayers at this year’s Youmacon than most years, prolly cuz I got Undertale on the brain ovo;;;

1: Myself! (Meefling) 2: Frisk (???) 3: Myself again as Walter Fawn, and my brother as Dipper! (he has no tumblr) 4: Temmie (???) 5: Spitfire (@ohpierre) 6: The Beast (???) 7: Frisk (???) 8: Napstablook (???) 9: Garry (???) 10: Papyrus (???)

If you see yourselves here, please tag yourself so I can add your URL/name!!

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I was the napstablooks in this set!

Today was amazing and these were only Undertale cosplays! If any of these were you please tell me so i can properly credit you!

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Priorities in Magic

Hello Tumblr, I haven’t talked about magic in a long time, but I think I need to talk about my Battle for Zendikar prerelease. So, to start things off, I got top eight. At the place I went to, that means I got one whole box of Battle for Zendikar. Sounds great right?  But there’s one problem with it. One player I played in round two no less, more or less ruined the whole thing for me.

This isn’t going to be about priorities in magic in the usual terms, it’s in the priorities players should have.

So, to start off my store, I wore a robe I bought from a renaissance festival as a joke. My friends and I were going to the prerelease with full intentions of scrubbing out and going home early. So, I jokingly dressed as a wizard.

I gave the staff members my wand for inspection, I played the bit, it was fun. Round one, I went up against someone I kind of knew. They were nice, we had a great time playing, even though I steam rolled her. She was more interested in learning from her mistakes, and having fun. The kind of person I go to these prereleases for. Then round two happened. Game one I get mana screwed. I was playing blue black white, and I had a hand of five black cards and no black mana. And I won. I was able to answer my opponent's early game and play the mythic I pulled. Gideon. Now I won’t make the argument that Gideon was fair in the limited format, but that’s what happens in limited. Gideon was answered perfectly twice out of the four or five time I played, him, and honestly, that’s what bombs should be doing. But my opponent was not happy about that. And I understand. I got a lucky pull. Game two happened. I had gideon in my hand early, but no white mana. And I still won, without getting to play gideon. Without getting to play any of my white cards. My one white removal spell took two white mana, so I couldn’t cast it. My opponent got up, calling me trash repeatedly, wondering how in 2015, a guy in a wizard robe is beating him at magic. He ran off to his friends to complain. I understand that losing never feels good, but it was only round two, one loss can get you into top 8. But the thing is, his friends were the store managers. The regulars.  Now, the next guy I played, one of the guys he complained to, was upset at his deck, upset at gideon, but he at least was trying to be nice to me after losing. The one time I played gideon, he beat me. Then came round 4. Another guy he complained to. Our games were super close. I made several misplays, which even after saying “dead” as he named a spell, knowing something was going to die, he wouldnt let me regenerate it after my mind processed the target. He called me on a lot of my plays, and I still beat him without dropping a game (although they were very close).  So what priorities would I like to discuss? Prizes and the desire to win them.

Zendikar is a money set. Not because it has good cards, no, the cards are miserable. Most of the set is absolute trash. But those 200 dollar lands? People want those. People want them so badly that that is what they want the most out of their prerelease. But that’s just it. Players get to the point where prizes are the only reason they go to prereleases, and that just makes them toxic to play against for the idiot who decided to show up in a wizard costume.

I don’t want to keep playing if someone is going to call me trash for beating them. Out of the five people I played, three of them were decent people to me, one was nice, but certainly not any fun to play against, and then one person will drown out the three people who were nice to me.  There was a kid there. There were several kids there. One kid sat by me and my friends to talk because he was so excited about magic. He kept hanging out with us all the time. Some people I talked to had just started playing magic. Some people hadn’t played it in years. But the group of like, 10 odd regulars/store workers were so dead set on winning that they kind of ruin the experience. 

People are so focused on that box that they forget, hey, the 12 year old might not know that if you sacrifice something that you blocked with the damage doesn’t go through. The 30 year old might not know that. I love playing magic, I love prereleases, but I remember my first prerelease; how even though I went like, 1-4, I had fun. People were nice to me. Then I had to switch venues for my prereleases. The prices were higher, and the prizes were better, but it does stuff to the players. People who are usually nice take it out on themselves, or worse, other player.

And I’ve gotten salty once. I was so bad. But I looked back on that one time, and realized I can never get that way. It just makes me a terrible person to play, and be around.

So if you’re going to a prerelease, Magic’s self claimed introduction to a competitive scene, please keep this in mind. Try to have your priority be on having fun.  Cause playing that first game, joking about being a wizard, was a far better feeling than winning.

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Perceived Vs. Actual

With a title like that, you’d be expecting something deep, but no, I’m going to talk about Magic: The Gathering some more! I’m going to assume you at least know what a draft is in Magic. I was drafting at my local Friday Night Magic last night, doing Dragons of Tarkir, Dragons of Tarkir, Fates Reforged, and I looked at my first pack. Nothing outstanding; but I grabbed Arashin Foremost. A decent card, but certainly not the best rare I could pull in limited. Then the person to my right past me the best rare I could pull in draft. Sunscorch Regent. I asked him about it after the draft. The conversation went like this. Me: What did you pick over Sunscorch Regent? Him: Anything else. And I was blasted. I asked him why, and he laid down each card he drafted that could kill it. Mostly red damage spells.  This guy made the mistake of Perceived Value versus Actual Value, the terms I’ll be talking about. He’s right. Almost all of his spells he mentioned would kill the four/three dragon.  So Perceived Value is the face value the card creates. It’s four/three flying body for five is playable in any other draft format except for here. There are more fliers than you can shake a stick at, most of which will trade favorably. Trading a common creature for a rare always feels good, and this thing dies to some pretty simple commons. It gains counters if they cast spells, and you gain one life, but that’s pretty negligible if they kill it right after you play it. And under those circumstances, I can understand why he’d pick something else. Actual Value, which is probably a bad term for it, is how the card will perform in a game. One of the things people that want to draft need to learn is that cards can do better in limited than they can in other formats. A great example for a card with bad perceived value and incredible actual value is Feral Krushok. A boring common. It’s a 5/4 for 5. It doesn’t even pass the vanilla test. In dragons there is Stampeding Elk Herd, which has better stats, and an ability. I’m glad it is impossible for me to choose between the two due to them being in different sets, but Feral Krushok does work. Why? On a perceived value the card is bad. It has less than optimal stats, and has no extra abilities. But what it actually does is incredible. Any competitive game is more than just having the best things and doing it until it works. When I say strategy, people think I mean cards that work together. But it goes past that. Cards like Feral Krushok do one thing; make them answer you. In games, you always want to have the upper hand. Feral Krushok, a common, no abilities creature, can give this to you. First off; it can stop them from attacking you. If they do make the mistake of attacking you, you simply take out one or two creatures and take damage. I could give a whole separate speech on taking damage based on the draft I did last night (I went down to less than 6 health nearly every game. I got first by the way). But that’s not here nor there. Playing a card like Feral Krushok or Stampeding Elk Heard or Sunscorcher Regent, cards that have really good Actual Limited Value, puts you in charge.  They are cards that say “Answer me, waste a card/cards on me, or I will win the game.” Five damage is hard to deal with. Good lifegain is hard to find. There are three cards that were gaining me life to the point where they allowed me to take more than five damage a turn, but for a standard player, you can’t deal with it. So what can you do? You can block it with small creatures, hoping to buy time to get an answer, or let it through. Both of these are really good for you. Playing these Actual Value cards makes your opponent have to react, which in limited, you eight times out of ten don’t have exactly what you want. No one drafts the perfect deck all the time, and you know that flaws that would be unforgivable in a standard deck, are free game in Limited. So sometimes you’ll force them  to stall, and playing that card’s actual value becomes the amount of turns you have where you can just have control. I’m serious, Feral Krushok shifted the control of the game several times. A guy had six creatures out to my one Feral Krushok, and I won that game. He kept drawing, hoping to find that kill spell, while I kept drawing more problems. But what if you’re not stalling? This means that these cards will do another valuable thing; take a hit. In magic, never hesitate to do something because your opponent MIGHT have something. It’s good to be cautious, and being cautious pays off really well if you’re in standard with a lot of counterspells swimming around, but in limited, you have to know that it is not an every time thing. So play it. I often will old extra lands in my hand to mess with my opponents mental math, and this pays off more times than you can imagine.  So you play your creature and it gets dunked. Rest in Peace Feral Krushok. This is all that matters. You might have that creature, but it often means they’re out of answers to use on your next problem.  And Sunscorch Regent is only WORSE than Feral Krushok. Feral Krushok does damage and trades well, but Sunscorch being played goes like this. I either answer it immediately, meaning you’re up one life, and both of you are down a card, or it means their hand of creatures just became a hazard. If they play creatures, yours gets bigger, harder to deal with, and worst of all, they lose any life advantage they might have had. The strategy of Actual Value comes in these two parts; Sunscorch Regent making all of their current cards not worth it, but worse, mind games. Acting is always easier in magic than reacting. Turning a creature sideways is always easier than doing the math in your head. Cards with Actual Value can really help this. Another sub-part of this value is creatures with bad stats in general. 3/3s for four mana. 2/3s for three. 4/4s for 5 is a common one. 4/3s for four. They’re inefficient, but they really pull weight. They help you trade up, they help you stop small creatures. You don’t need your creature to kill every creature your opponent has. A one for one trade is usually worth it, so keep that in mind. TL;DR, Sunscorch Regent is bullshit in draft, cards do more than what they say on them.

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Attention! This is an important message straight from the Toon Council, so I’ll make it short and to the point! The gates of ToonTown are opening tonight at 5:00pm ToonTown time (8pm EST) and toons are being welcomed back into the game! That’s right folks, beta begins tonight!

You can view Live...

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Grand Prix Kyoto

So, I went to my first Grand Prix yesterday, which happened in a foreign country.

As a slight disclaimer, I am not that good at Japanese. I can pronounce things, write things, but a lot of grammar and words just aren't in my knowledge pool.

I started off doing a draft of Theros, and just due to my ability to memorize cards, I drafted a really nice black white deck. I lost and was eliminated first round (It was a side event), but the one game I played was really interesting.

It's not because of the plays, it's not because of how great our decks were, it was because we could play a game without saying anything. We both knew the rules and the cards, and we got to play with no problems through hand motions.

In our 3rd game, which was really close. I had him at 4 life, and if I had drawn one more creature, or some sort of flier, I would have won. But I drew nothing but land for roughly 9 turns. I flipped over the last plains, and we both started laughing. He thanked me for the game, and was over all a really cool guy, and it was super interesting to go through this despite this thick language barrier.

It was pretty cool, and it was just really nice that I got to have this experience here.

In other notes, I bought some packs and enter some raffles and walked away with an Ashiok, and my 3rd voice of resurgence. Also, Japan is much more lenient on card prices. I got a Pentavus, Warstorm Surge, and Crawlspace for 100 yen, which is 1 dollar.

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2 Years

-- Warning: This post is nowhere near as focused as my last few --

So, keeping up with the long posts I did over my summer, I've realized that right about now, I started playing Magic: The Gathering. One of my friends, freshman year of college, had just put together some decks, not really playing a whole bunch himself, and said, hey come play with me. So I did. He taught me how to play the game, and a lot has changed since then.

Innistrad had just been out for maybe a month when I got my own cards. I borrowed some from another friend of mine who had stopped playing, and I made a green-white deck. Now, Theros has come out, and while I haven't had the opportunity to get my hands on much of it due to being in a foreign country for studying abroad, this post is just going to be about the phases of magic I've gone through, and many players do. So when I first started playing, I was amazed at how much I liked it. I always thought that magic was one of the nerdiest things someone could do, and while I've never been the star pupil in being a cool kid, it's like how a lot of nerds look down on LARPing. It had just enough luck and skill to get me hooked, and we played a lot right off the bat. I quickly got into playing White, even thogh my friend's best deck was his black deck with two grave titans. One of the things with how magic starts out, is there will always be that one card, when rares are scarce, that will be the best. Grave Titans happened to be this card. If one hit the field, the game ended.

When no one was really buying cards at the time, there were few to no solutions to this one card, and it made the black deck broken. One of my other friends, who had played a little before, started joining us, and soon the three of us were playing all the time. So after a bit of using the same 3 decks, I decided it was time to get my own, so I borrowed from another friend, as I've mentioned above. I couldn't deal with Grave Titan, but oh well.

So eventually, the rules were a bit out of our grasp, so I decided to buy Duals of the Planeswalkers 2012, to get a better grasp on the rules. I discovered an innate love for artifacts, and quickly bought a bunch of Mirrodin, and in addition ordered the Black Blue White Archenemy Deck. I also, quickly pulled my first mythic after discovering this love. Blightsteel Colosus. The One Shot Robot has never once resolved and won me a game, but he was a force to be theoretically reckoned with. But, at this point, The Third Friend, who from now on I'll just refer to as D, bought the Vampire Event Deck from the 2012 coreset.

This leads into the next phase. Decks are no longer made out of the 5 drop 3/3 commons, 2 mythics, and nothing but removal, we suddenly had someone playing with a structured deck. The Event Deck was quickly joined by a purchased Noctornus, becoming impossible for our decks to compete against. Time went by, and D won nearly every game for 2 months. I made a goblin deck, which for a while, could beat the vampire deck, but eventually, I stuffed the deck with too much, without taking anything out, and the deck crumbled within itself, as such, it lost its umph. These are two separate paths, that I can talk about. There is my path, which was the, this card is good, I'll put it in my deck, and D's path of buying rares, instead of buying nothing but packs. Decks need structure, and going down my path, you learn that quickly. Just because you can have more good cards, doesn't mean you should. I was suddenly no longer drawing my super fast goblins, or any of my burn, because my deck was weighed down too much by awful cards. While the path of buying cards is another thing magic players as a group will most likely run into. Suddenly one player is much better than everyone else, and everyone must step up their game.

Around this time, I realized my true calling was red blue. I couldn't make a usable deck, but I would play it any time I had the chance.

And that happened. We went to some prereleases, and decks come and go. But then Avacyn Restored happened. I won a box out of sheer luck, and with those 36 packs, I vamped up my green white deck to be Green White Black (Junk) humans. Suddenly there was a deck that could compete with vampires. It wasn't as good, but suddenly the scales evened out. Summer Break happened, and on the return, when all of us got together (Our group had grown and more of us began to play), things changed. My first friend, really stepped up his game with a bant deck, D made a human deck and really tweaked it to be a force to be reckoned with. My first friend also had a terrifying Golgari Deck. D was no longer the only winner, and the tables evened out. The first friend stopped buying packs, and was now solely buying cheap cards, cheap cards that worked. The Budget Bant Deck as I like to call it is based around a cycle of cards that get buffs if you control multicolored permanents, buffing them by playing other cards in the cycle, then buffing them with multicolored enchantments. It can't take multiplayer very well, due to being open to a lot of retaliation, it destroys in one on one. This is one of the other thing that starts to happen to people who play magic over a course of time. People buy more singles, less packs, but also decks become focused and precise. This deck is loaded with playsets, and while the vampire deck had playsets of Nighthawk, everything else was either sitting at a 1 or a 2. When the decks become more focused, power level starts shifting again, and people react.

4 Captivating Vampires soon found their way into the vampire deck, as did Intangible Virtue find it's self a playset in the Human deck. This can highly rev up the cost of magic for all players. I now run a merfolk deck, that running smoothly can deal 20 damage by turn 5 or 6. So over time, decks become focused, and players really amp up their game. Also, people start to understand the rules more at this point. Suddenly, things you were hesitant about become realized, players actually say "the stack", and the game plays a bit more like it actually would if a judge was there.

Time went by, and I ended up placing in top 8 at my Gatecrash Prerelease due to Dimir Mill. Because of this I ended up pulling a lot of Legendary Creatures, and decided to hop into Commander. I made a Black White Orzhov Deck, and a Red Blue Izzet Deck. I played one or two games with my first friend who was really apprehensive about playing in the first place. His response was making his own deck on the spot. I mentioned a Golgari deck, and it soon became a Varloz commander deck. D went with Ruric Thar, and a third friend has made an Aurelia deck during my study abroad. We got big into commander, and over the summer of this year, its about all we played when we met up.

So as time goes on, I think this represents the fact that people look for new ways to do the same thing. We've sunk a lot of money into magic, and due to the fact that commander suddenly allows unplayable 9 drops to be used, all of those 1 dollar rares that were sitting in my binders have formed into 4 commander decks. So people also look for game changers. Commander really changes how magic is played. Suddenly every draw is a miracle, and you depend on finding that one card to save you.

Also, I started getting into limited play over the summer, by making a pauper cube, and doing a bit of drafting. Drafting is a good way to get cards, open packs, and also get to play a bit more magic. Now that I've been away from everyone I usually play magic with, I've signed up for MTGO. Magic Online is basically the way to play magic when you have no one else to play with, or you love drafting. Drafts are always happening. I did a Theros one, and got 11th out of 64, which I was pretty proud of.

So now we're up to the current moment, and magic has changed a lot for me. It's less about the exploration of a new game, and more about the workings. Starting magic is a lot like driving a car. You start off just freaking about your new found freedom, and you're just using any excuse to drive. Now that I've been driving for 2 years, it's more about getting to places as fast as possible, and fine tuning my machine.

I'm glad I picked it up, and I'm excited for what the rest of the Theros Block holds for the game as a whole. I'm also excited for, actually getting to play magic with people again.