Category: Games

I’ve always been enamoured of the basic land cards in MTG. I used to sort my lands so I kept a copy of each unique card separate from the bulk that I used in decks. I valued the more exotic examples, and considered them an important part of my collection.

< Unhinged

So is it any wonder that a few months back I decided to start putting the basic lands – and just the basic lands – together in a binder. I was then bitten by the collecting bug and went out and purchased basic lands (at the price of $0.10 each) to fill the empty spots in the collection. The binder grew, the pages filled. And eventually my ‘land binder’ had become a fairly complete collection of MTG basic land.

< Mirrodin

How many cards is this you ask? The answer is… about 600 cards.

I have every land for each expansion from Tempest onwards, excluding all of the non-full-art Zendikar lands (that were only in premades). I have most of the Ice Age land, except some examples are from Cold Snap. And I have a motley collection of Unlimited lands. As for core sets, my collection of land from 8th Edition onwards is complete. I also have all of 6th Edition but (amusingly) am missing quite a bit of 7th Edition.

< Zendikar

Harder (in some cases much) to obtain are the lands that were packed into the non basic products Wizards has sold over the years. And even then I have a great deal of these. I’m speaking of such things as Beat Down, Portal, Duel Decks or the Un-sets. That said the biggest gaps in my collection are definitely in this area. For instance I have zero Battle Royale lands, and only 2 examples from Portal: Three Kingdoms (not surprising, since it was the expansion with the smallest print run in English).

Speaking of language, I only have 2 foreign language lands (both Japanese). One of these days I’ll make a better effort to obtain lands in each of the 9 languages MTG is printed.

< Lorwyn

Obtaining lands is a bit tricky because few people seem to value them. As such, checking retailers online is rarely successful since they will treat all swamps as the same card irrelevant of expansion. Isolating the gaps in the collecting in the pre-numbered days is also proving to be tricky, and my research has even revealed a few errors on Gatherer. I shall continue though – after all a collection is started to be completed!

< Kamigawa

A benefit of my land-interest is that when a new product or expansion is announced I find myself as interested in the land as anything else! Although I’ve only been back ‘into’ MTG for about a year I have to say the most exciting post on their website in that time was when they showed the Eldrazi lands. Not only did they form a mural, but the fact they even existed at all (new lands for the third in a block?) was something unexpected and delightful.

Scars Of Mirrodin will be out in a few weeks. I haven’t seen the lands yet but since it is a sequel to Mirrodin and that set had some of the most unique and striking land art in the history of MTG I am optimistic that we’re in for a treat 🙂

I can’t talk due to the endless whooping, so instead I’ll type! And what better thing to type when I’m sick than a brief history of the few times in my long and storied life when I have stayed up all night in the name of video-gaming.

Note that this list is probably not exhaustive, but I think it is close. I’m trying here to describe the games that for various reasons I played so madly they made me skip sleep!

Gauntlet (Commodore 64)

The C64 version of Gauntlet lacked a pause button (recall that this was well before the days of game saves). I was pretty good at the game and could play for very long periods without dying. Eventually I noticed I could play more or less indefinitely, and so did just that over one Saturday night. I started after mum and dad went to bed and played all through the night, probably wanting to get to the dragon level or something like that. I was using the warrior. My game became a marathon and continued all the way to Sunday baked lunch, at which point mum made me stop playing to eat. At this point I had about 9999 life (the maximum) and had observed that since life decreased at the rate of 1 point per second I could just walk away from the game for hours assuming I parked myself out of harms way. I believe I could have played forever, but I have no memory of how I actually ended that game.

Alleykat (Commodore 64)

Your guess is as good as mine as to what I found so compelling about this Andrew Braybrook game. The marathon occurred in about ’87, and I played the game from start to end many times in one credit. I had moved the TV into my room and sat on my bed playing hour after hour all through the night. Some time around this period I may have done the same with Ranarama but I can’t recall with certainty like I can Alleykat.

Shadowrun (Super Nintendo)

Looking back it is somewhat amusing I never actually bought this game. In fact it is perhaps the best SNES RPG I don’t own, and this is what led to the marathon. You see it was a one-night rental (such things were common then) and I was apparently far too cheap to simply rent the game a few extra nights and instead vowed to beat it in the one day alloted. And I did, although it meant no sleep – not much of anything actually save playing the game. This was about 1994 if memory serves me correctly. (By the way, the SNES Shadowrun is a completely different game from the – also superb – Genesis Shadowrun, which I do own!)

Ys III: Wanderers From Ys (TG-16)

The game was on loan from a friend (Vic Ireland, of Working Designs) and I discovered that I could place the character in a certain position in the mine level and the enemies would infinitely respawn. I quickly surmised if I put something on the attack button I could ‘farm’ them for as long as I wanted. This I did, and then went to bed (so this is not really all all-nighter). The next morning my character was maximum level, making the rest of the game a walk in the park. Somewhat of an amusing memory for me, this is.

Might & Magic 3 (Super Nintendo)

Back when I did the fanzine, as luck would have it one of my readers worked for FCI. This was a company that licensed and translated Japanese RPGs into English. He liked my work and sent me the odd game or two. One day I was surprised to receive an EEPROM (basically the innards of a cartridge) of a half-finished M&M3 for the SNES. There was no save game facility so I had to leave the SNES on to keep playing. I went one step further and left myself on as well, playing for many hours on end through the night. I had beaten the game several times on PC so I knew various tricks and was able to get quite far in a short time, finding many bugs in the process. To this day I have no idea if I ever got a test play credit since I never got the final game because FCI went belly-up simultaneous with its release.

That’s it; a short list but one that has many memories for me.

Oh there have been other times when I have gone on crazed game marathons. These include World Of Warcraft, various Monster Hunter games, Angband and even (IIRC) The Great Giana Sisters (MMN and I played this well into the night one time at his house). But only the four games listed above are the times I can remember skipping sleep entirely in the name of gaming 🙂