Let’s take a quick look at where things stand in various non-dayjob areas right now.
Cold Streets
I’m beginning to think my “end of 2012” prediction for this novella might have been too ambitious. That, or I simply need to make more time to write. I have the outline laid out and a decent handle on how things should proceed from point to point, I just need to sit down and make myself do it. It’s all about discipline, and I need to do it more to myself even after long-ass frustrating commutes at the end of long-ass hectic days.
Untitled Fiasco playset
I’ve realized there’s a great deal of storytelling potential in the collaborative role-playing game Fiasco and I have an idea or two for a playset of my own. I’ve been looking at a couple of the others (Alpha Complex, Saturday Night ’78), just to make sure I’m not repeating too much that’s been done before. Not aware of what Fiasco is? No problem, Wil Wheaton’s gotcha covered.
Extra Life
Still no donations to this year’s campaign. That sucks. I still feel I should go through with the marathon anyway, at least get it started, but it’s disheartening to say the least. I’ll do a post-mortem next week either way, try and figure out what, if anything, I’ve done or am doing wrong.
Magic: the Gathering
With everything else going on I’ve actually been playing a bit less Magic in the past week. In person, anyway. I’m inclined to throw together a cheap deck for the upcoming Gameday, as there’s a whole pre-ordered box of Gatecrash on the line, but we’ll see what happens. More important stuff needs to be addressed. Meantime, I went in for some of the pre-release events online, and the result has been the ability to self-sustain some drafting for the time being. It’s good practice, if nothing else.
Boring Real-Life Stuff
My wife and I are moving! Yesterday I donated a ton of books to my local library, and I have bags upon bags of clothing, blankets, and towels set aside for the Salvation Army. There’s a metric fuckton of crap in my basement I’m straight-up throwing away; much of it I haven’t even looked at in the three years since I moved in here. The new digs are pretty and spacious, right across the street from a golf course of all things, and much closer to the dayjob. Between the balcony with a decent view of the outside world, plenty of room for a writing desk separate from major distractions, and the shorter commute, I’m hoping this will help me get into and maintain a writerly state of mind more often. I’ll have to find a closer venue for Friday Night Magic, but them’s the brakes.
Remember the old advice “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything?”
Every once in a while I speak without thinking. It’s been known to happen. My emotionality has been a problem many times in my past, and while I have a much better grip on things now, I still occasionally slip up and say what I’m feeling rather than thinking it through. Sometimes I think I’m being clever. Sometimes I just want to express myself. But when it happens, and I look back on what was said, I realize I was a bit of an ass.
Case in point: I uttered the following words at my friendly local gaming store during the last rotation.
“If you run a decklist from some top player on the Internet, nothing personal, but I hate you.”
For a bit of background on why this is the wrong way to approach competitive gameplay in general and Magic in particular, you should be familiar with Timmy, Johnny, and Spike. Here’s an article on these guys and what they mean to the average Magic player.
When you get down to it, not everybody is going to fall entirely into a single category or type, nor is it reasonable to assume other players will play the game you play it. When it comes to Magic, I’m a bit of a Johnny/Spike. That doesn’t mean Timmy players are wrong, nor are those who go fully Spike and are just in it to win it.
Neither I nor any other person has the right to tell other people how to play their games.
Provided you’re not being a jerk, cheating, or otherwise making the game deliberately unpleasant for other people, play the game however you want to play it. Some players just want big, splashy things to happen or to pull off an impossible combo. Others are interested in building their decks in new and interesting ways just to see how they play. And still others just want the glory of victory.
All of these are fine, and none are invalid. For me or anybody else to say otherwise is just ludicrous.
It’s probably part of getting older. When I first started playing Magic almost twenty years ago, there was no Internet to speak of. Folks had to take what cards they had and build what they could. When Scrye magazine or The Duelist arrived with some decklists and advice, such articles could be cited by aspiring professionals and enthusiasts of the game. How are “net decks” any different? In hindsight and examination, I can tell you they really aren’t.
All that said, all I can do is apologize for speaking as I did and hope I didn’t outright offend anyone in doing so. The only basis by which anybody can truly come down on how you play the game is if you’re making everybody around you miserable while playing for reasons outside of normal frustrating from losing. Basically, as long as you’re obeying Wheaton’s First Law, you should be fine.
The wait is over. The rotation has occurred. We have returned to Ravnica, and the plane-spanning cityscape has not disappointed. As much as things change, however, some thing do remain the same.
A challenge whenever a set rotates out of Magic is adapting old decks to the new Standard. Some designs are more resilient than others. Some cards in and of themselves take the wind right out of certain decks, vis a vis [mtg_card]Birthing Pod[/mtg_card], while others like [mtg_card]Delver of Secrets[/mtg_card] lose the suppor they need to really shine ([mtg_card]Ponder[/mtg_card], etc). To be frank, I’m pretty happy to see both of those decks fall by the wayside or perhaps slip in to Modern, a format to which I must sadly send my trusty [mtg_card]Hero of Bladehold[/mtg_card] – more on that tomorrow.
However, the token generation of my Scars/Innistrad Standard deck remains mostly intact. With the addition of the Populate mechanic used by the Selesnya Conclave, the possibility exists to generate even more creatures without warning. Examination of existing resources also indicated some potential that, until now, went unrealized. To that end, I built the following deck.
[mtg_deck title=”Spirit Squadron”]
// Creatures
4 Doomed Traveler
4 Drogskol Captain
2 Geist of Saint Traft
The centerpiece of the deck is, of course, [mtg_card]Geist of Saint Traft[/mtg_card]. With every attack, his guardian angel appears. She has a tendency to disappear after combat, but Instant-speed Populate cards and [mtg_card]Cackling Counterpart[/mtg_card] can copy her, and the copy sticks around. Enhanced by [mtg_card]Intangible Virtue[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Favorable Winds[/mtg_card], she’ll be a force to be reckoned with. The multiple Captains protect each other and any Spirit tokens I generate, as well as making them even more powerful. It’s a heavily aggro-flavored deck, but preventative spells like [mtg_card]Rootborn Defenses[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Detention Sphere[/mtg_card] should help stave off sweeping responses or large defenders.
As eager as I am to test this deck in a true FNM situation, my heart remains leaning towards Izzet. In the wake of the various pre-release and release events, I know I have a variety of mad science choices. As good as the cloning technology in the Spirit Squadron deck might be, I feel a strong Izzet deck will be a touch flashier in its climax. I’ve been playing around with a few designs, facilitating between control and aggressive burn, and I think what follows is the best one yet.
It’s still a work in progress, and I’m torn between [mtg_card]Dissipate[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Syncopate[/mtg_card] as the main deck counterspell. The Electromancers reduce the cost of each, both include the Exile clause, and while Dissipate may be a touch costlier, it does not allow my opponent the chance to ‘buy’ their way out of the counter. I’ll run with it for now and see how it works. If it looks promising, I may alternate between using this deck and Spirit Squadron in upcoming FNM events.
Standard isn’t the only format out there, though, and I’ll address the formats I’ve been neglecting since my days in high school… next time.
For the Terribleminds Epic Games of Aspects Redux, the d20 of Destiny instructed me to write Fanfiction about a Heist Gone Wrong featuring a Sea Monster.
The small, customized keyrune did its job, unlocking the door to the facility. It was an excellent forgery, one of Grigori’s finest. Natalya pocketed the keyrune and looked over her shoulder. Bringing Grigori along still seemed like a bad idea, yet there he was, right behind her, his face eager. She considered knocking him out and wiping his memory, but that was always tricky business, and House Dimir needed his forgery skills.
“Just stay close,” she hissed, and pushed the door open. The interior corridor was dark, luminescent fluids flowing through transparent tubes under floor grating the only light. Natalya was fine with this; her domain was the night itself. Grigori, for his part, obeyed and remained quiet, close at her heels.
They had only taken a few steps inside when the door slammed shut behind them. Overhead lights crackled and snapped to life. At the far end of the corridor, a small mechanical dragon perched above the doorway. Ruby eyes peered at the trespassers, and when its mouth opened, it was not fire that issued forth, but a tinny voice.
“Greetings, trespassers! My master, Benedict of Nivix, bids you welcome. As you have entered through a locked and secured gate, it is my duty to inform you that neither my master nor the Izzet League will be held responsible for any harm that comes to you should you remain. If you do not heed this warning… well, good luck!”
“Do you think he was expecting us?” Grigori was even more nervous, now.
“Don’t be a fool. We’re here to retrieve this ‘blistercoil harness’ that Benedict is building, and to remove all memory of it from his mind. It’s a straightforward job, and I won’t have you making a mess of it. So stay close and do as I say.”
The younger man nodded twice. She turned back to the corridor, studying it.
“Well? Are we going on?”
Natalya glared at him. She reached into her satchel for one of her wooden rods. Choosing one of the shorter ones, she tossed it down the corridor. About two meters from her hand, it was caught in mid-air by a wild burst of static electricity, and fell to the grating a blackened length of collapsing ashes.
“How about you help me find the trigger switch, first.”
So it was that they proceeded through the laboratory, one step at a time, disabling all manner of pitfalls and traps. Static fields, jets of flame, spatial distortions, gravity plates, time traps: Natalya defeated them all, with a little help from the forger. Finally, after several roundabout corridors, they found a vast open area, on a catwalk far above an indoor reservoir.
“This must be run-off from one of the Izzet steam vents!” Grigori peered over the railing.
“Yes. And Benedict’s main laboratory is said to be close to one of them. It must be near.”
They made their way carefully along the catwalk, testing each step. They were about halfway across when it disengaged from the walls.
Grigori screamed the whole way down. Natalya, while shocked, focused on aiming her fall way from the catwalk. Thankfully, the water was not electrified or anything else sinister, merely quite warm. Grigori came up for air.
“Ugh! I’m so sick of this dungeon! Now what do we do?”
“Be quiet.” Natalya’s fangs were out. She didn’t bother to retract them. She had more important things on her mind. “I’m thinking.”
That was when something large and scaly slid past her ankle under the water.
Grigori’s eyes went wide. “Well, think faster! I think something down here wants to eat us!”
“Stay calm. Or, at least, try.”
Moments later, a great serpent burst out of the water, glaring at the intruders with large, yellow eyes. It opened its mouth, revealing a glittering array of razor-sharp teeth, and hissed at them. When it dove back under, Natalya invoked one of her favorite spells.
An illusion of Natalya appeared across from her, mirroring her movements, while she herself disappeared. The giant creature snapped at the illusion, which exploded in a puff of dark indigo smoke. As it tried to shake the fog away, Natalya lunged for its throat. The moment her dagger touched it, however, electricity shot through her system. It catapulted her back into the water. Grigori kept her afloat while she recovered her senses.
“Ah! I see you’ve met Richie.”
The Dimir agents looked up. Benedict himself floated high above the pool. Over the blue and red clothing of his guild, he wore a metallic vest, gauntlets, and greaves, all connected by cables of various colors, featuring luminescent cylinders that crackled with power.
The blistercoil harness, Natalya observed. He’s wearing the bloody thing.
Speaking aloud, she asked “How dangerous is ‘Richie’?”
“Oh, not terribly. Not usually, anyway. Do you like him? I’m surprised the Combine doesn’t need an electric eel three meters long with defensive scales. He’s a very good watchdog, though.” The magus tossed a fish towards the pool, and Richie burst up to snatch it from the air before disappearing again with a splash.
“We’re not intimidated by him, or by you.” Natalya felt Grigori grip her arm as she spoke. Untrained fool. “We will find a way out of this trap.”
“No need. Let me give you one.” Benedict pointed at the wall. A bolt of lightning snapped from his finger and hit a crystal not far from the surface of the water. A hatch opened. “You can leave now, with my blessing, and my thanks for showing me how better to conceal my earlier traps. Or, you can remain, find your own way out of the pool, and continue to try and reach my inner lab. Of course, it only gets more dangerous from here. Your choice.”
Grigori was already swimming for the hatch. Natalya made no move to stop him. Instead, she narrowed her eyes at the floating man and his blistercoil harness.
I must confess that, as much as I adore the setting and dynamics of Ravnica, I missed the block the first time around. I picked up Magic: the Gathering for the second time just as Time Spiral was debuting, after a long hiatus from the game stemming from the events leading to my breakdown. If I knew then what I know now… ah, but it’s water under the bridge. The future is brighter than the past, and the future is the Return to Ravnica.
I committed myself to representing Izzet all weekend long, and not just because their promotional card is a lovely alternate art foil of [mtg_card]Hypersonic Dragon[/mtg_card]. Which we could actually use, in deviance from the normal sealed rules. I was looking forward to what amounted to a Magic marathon, especially because the last couple work weeks have been so grueling. So it began at my friendly local gaming store, Cyborg One, with…
Friday Night, Midnight
After a long day of work and a less than stellar showing at Friday Night Magic, I prepared myself for the first pre-release event. Upon opening the box, I found my packs were leaning towards the new mechanic Izzet introduces in the set, Overload. Each card with Overload can be cast for that increased cost, which allows you to switch the word “target” on the card with the word “each”. The highlights were [mtg_card]Mizzium Mortars[/mtg_card], [mtg_card]Cyclonic Rift[/mtg_card], and [mtg_card]Teleportal[/mtg_card]. Two [mtg_card]Goblin Electromancer[/mtg_card]s made those spells very inexpensive, even on Overload. The main card from the guild pack, however, was [mtg_card]Mercurial Chemister[/mtg_card], a somewhat beefy scientist that allowed me to draw cards with relative impunity.
However, it was difficult to strike the right balance with the deck, and all of the big spells supporting rushes towards the win only ever broke even for me. Still, a record of 2-2 is nothing to sneeze at, and I did get a couple new prize packs.
Saturday Afternoon, Noon
With the guild box at this event, I found myself splashing into Azorius. Two of my big rare pulls, [mtg_card]Righteous Authority[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Detention Sphere[/mtg_card], seemed extremely helpful in maintaining control of the battleground. Considering my largest bomb was the intimidating [mtg_card]Utvara Hellkite[/mtg_card], I wanted to make certain I would see the turn in which the big guy hit the table. More often than not, however, I didn’t need him. As good as his synergy was with the aforementioned Hypersonic Dragon, most of the work was done by a [mtg_card]Stealer of Secrets[/mtg_card], usually enchanted with [mtg_card]Pursuit of Flight[/mtg_card]. Multiple Detain effects (Detain shuts a creature down for a turn) and other removal made fliers even more difficult to stop. At one point, I had a Stealer with Pursuit, [mtg_card]Knightly Valor[/mtg_card], and Righteous Authority enchanting her. This sort of thing saw me placing second overall in the event, with a record of 3-0-1. I split my prizes between packs and store credit, and opened a [mtg_card]Blood Crypt[/mtg_card], [mtg_card]Vraska the Unseen[/mtg_card], and [mtg_card]Epic Experiment[/mtg_card] among others.
Sunday Afternoon, 2 p.m.
Sundays during these weekends are different. Cyborg One runs Two-Headed Giant events, and with this pre-release, each team got two guild boxes to start with. I paired up with Jay Treat, mastermind of Wizard’s Familiar, to make the most of the event. He chose Selesnya while I continued to participate in these things FOR SCIENCE! He opened a [mtg_card]Grove of the Guardian[/mtg_card] to go with the one he had as a promotional foil, while I opened an [mtg_card]Armada Wurm[/mtg_card]. I also opened a second [mtg_card]Hypersonic Dragon[/mtg_card], and we began to formulate our plan. In essence, it fell to me to manage the early game, holding off aggression with [mtg_card]Frostburn Weird[/mtg_card]s and removal like [mtg_card]Street Spasm[/mtg_card] while he made preparations for his large token creatures. Once he had at least one out, he would Populate them as much as possible, generating additional tokens as part of several instant-speed spells, such as creating flying creatures with [mtg_card]Eyes in the Skies[/mtg_card] or making his creatures indestructible with [mtg_card]Rootborn Defenses[/mtg_card]. We felt prepared for just about anything.
Our first game ended with a rules dispute, and while technically the win was ours, after all of the back and forth we offered our opponents a draw, rather than just cackling all the way to the winner’s circle. After that, though, all of our wins were legitimate, though some were a bit narrow. At one point, I had a Hypersonic Dragon on the field, and he had two Bird tokens and a Guardian token. While the Guardian did not fly, there was a [mtg_card]Rogue’s Passage[/mtg_card] available, which meant that, since our opponents had no way to block flying creatures, we could damage them with impunity. And with that mix of creatures, with every attack we were devastating their life total.
We placed first in the event. It may be the biggest prize pool I’ve ever won in Magic. I couldn’t have done it without such an exemplary partner.
Conclusion
With a very comfortable amount of store credit to my name, and after several good trades, I am now in a position to roar back into constructed Magic events. My Legacy deck is nearly complete, I have two Standard decks to finish, and I have a couple ideas for the Modern format. But that is a post for another time.
