Category: Games

Magic Celebration

September 10, 2011

Today I played in a free MTG ‘Mini masters’ tourney which was held by a local game store to promote MTG.

Each player received one free booster, which he combined with 15 lands (3 per colour) to form a deck. It was to be a four round tournament, with each round best of three. Every time you win you get a new (free) booster to refine your deck, so the ultimate winner would end up getting four boosters. There were no additional prizes.

I lost first round 0-2 🙂

The cards in my booster were a bad match. My rare was this:

and my biggest creature was a serpent that couldn’t even attack! My opponent had a lot of fast fliers and beat me handily each game.

I played at a store different from the ones I usually go to for pre releases. I wasn’t much of a fan of their organization, or how long everything took, so I left after the first round 🙂

However before I left I was happy to find in their binders a card I had been looking for for a while. This is it:

Why did I need this? It’s a perfect fit in one of my Commander decks 🙂

Ajani vs Nicol Bolas Review

September 3, 2011

Today I purchased the new Magic The Gathering Duel Deck, “Ajani vs Nicol Bolas”. I played each deck against each other today three times… and found that the Ajani deck destroyed the Bolas deck every time.

Ajani’s is a deck built around fast, aggressive creatures with a good dose of lifegain included. The Bolas deck on the other hand is far less coherent; bits and pieces of powerful spells and strange creatures all limited by high costs or penalties. Yes it has some “I win” cards in the shape of Cruel Ultimatum or Bolas himself, but the deck is so slow that Ajani, in my games, had won handily long before Bolas could cast anything that expensive.

In each game, Ajani defeated Bolas whilst having over 20 life. A complete blowout!

As for the product itself, I’m pretty pleased with it. Not only did I get 2 new art foil Planeswalkers (“Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker” and “Ajani Vengeant”), but there is 7 lands (for my collection!), 2 tokens (also for the collection) and about 6 of the cards are good enough to go into my new Commander decks (ironically enough, most of these are from the Bolas deck).

All things considered, another fine duel deck. Recommended.

A (No Longer) Brief Post, Before My Trip

August 18, 2011

Yesterday I went to the Altamont fair with SFL. We got their before the midway opened, and started by checking out the animals:

That’s a photo of a brand new Doctor and a goose! The lemonade cost $5 with $3 refills, which we did three times. We both figured the lemonade carney was mad at the fact we actually carried the cup around so long.

This was the brand new ride at the fair, called The Stinger. This shot was taken when they were testing it before the midway officially opened:

With a stunning mix of bravado and foolishness, I rode the above ride. Here is a video of the entire experience (watch for my reaction at the end):

If you couldn’t see the video, here is a hint as to the effect The Stinger had on me:

Check out these art panels on the front of a very, very bad ‘haunted house’ type ride:

Nothing to do with haunting I know, but ultra-cool nonetheless.

After some time I had somewhat recovered from The Stinger, and we chose to go on a very mild looking thing called Avalanche (which we dubbed ‘Glacial Forest’). Basically you sit as seen in the picture and it goes around and around… how bad could it be?

All I’ll say is I was slightly relieved that SFL, too, got terribly nauseated by the above ride since if it had been only me I would have felt like an old man indeed 🙂

The day was very hot and we were there slightly over eight hours (time flew)! The fair seemed bigger than last year with a great deal of things to see, especially animals. Including beyond the usual – such as Kangaroos, bears and even coatimundi!

Oh, and I had my first ever taste of fried dough, which was delicious!

All told a very fun day, even if The Stinger absolutely ruined me for… almost 40 hours and counting so far 🙂

Later today I shall go to San Diego for SPIE. I will not have internet, so no blogging, but you can follow me on twitter.

If you’re not sure what twitter is, or how to access it, click on the ‘Me on Twitter’ link on the right side of the screen —>

Robot Claw