Category: Otaku

Kaladesh

September 28, 2016

I went to the prerelease for the latest MTG set Kaladesh this past weekend. I’ve been to dozens of these over the last eight years and have blogged many so you know the drill.

Kaladesh is an artifact-heavy set that takes place in a sort of ‘Indian steampunk’ world. It’s a wonderful set both in design and the way it plays, with oodles of fun cards that work well with each other.

There were many players (about 40) and there were four rounds of play. As has been the trend the last year or so, the tourney was very casual and you won boosters according to your games won. In the end I won two and placed somewhere in the top third.

My deck was green and white, and when it won did so mostly due to this pair of cards:

The artifact is seriously powerful, and generated me tokens every round while pumping up my other creatures. If I got it out with a +1/+1 on a card, I usually won.

The set includes a new vehicle artifact type, but I included none in my deck. They are powerful though, and were difficult to deal with when played against me. The guy that ultimately won the tournament was lucky with his card pool and played a deck based around vehicles.

For me the measure of an MTG card – and an expansion – is in the answer to “do I want to build decks around this”? This is why Kaladesh succeeds, because it has many such cards. These two for instance…

That first one seems made for my life gain deck, and the second just cries out to be abused 🙂

So my verdict is: a great set with cards that are fun to play. Doing just that this past weekend may have been the most fun I’ve ever had at a prerelease.

Kit Bashing?

September 13, 2016

This is a Chaos Terminator Lord model kit by Games Workshop:

I bought this a few months ago. I’d always wanted to assemble and paint a Warhammer model, and this guy was inexpensive and looked good. Here’s what I found inside the box:

And here’s a close-up of the parts still on the runners:

As someone with a decent amount of experience assembling model kits from Bandai or Kotobukiya I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. For starters this is not a glueless kit. For seconders few – if any – of the connections have tabs or slots to strengthen them. For thirds the pieces are strongly attached to the runners and would need quite a bit of cleaning up after removal.

In short, it looked like a pain.

And that was before I saw the instructions:

These are the instructions to make a ‘Chaos Terminator Sorceror‘. If you want to assemble it as a (melee style) ‘Lord’, you’d use the other sheet of instructions. Both ways have multiple possibilities, and you can see that during assembly you can mix-and-match parts as you see fit. Unlike a Gundam (where the weapons and sometimes even armor is removable and replaceable) this kit is final once made due to the gluing.

Assembly took a while and was a fiddly as I had feared/expected. To be honest it wasn’t really much fun at all! But I think my final version looks fairly nice:

If you’re going to make a kit like this I strongly recommend using a low viscosity glue that can be applied with a brush since you’ll want to put tiny amounts in very specific locations.

Building the kit is only half the fun though, since it must be painted! Master painters can make these tiny kits absolutely come alive with their skilled paint jobs. For instance here’s an example of what someone did with this very model (remember it’s about 2 inches tall):

Looks great doesn’t it?

Here’s where I ran into a bit of trouble. In short: Warhammer paints are bloody expensive! The basic Warhammer 40k space marine paint set of only five colours is about $20, which was more than this kit. If I wanted to buy all the recommended colours for this particular guy, it would have cost about $65! That’s probably ok if you’re building an army to play with (since Warhammer is a miniatures wargame), but crazy just for one tiny kit. I needed another solution.

One option was to take it to a Warhammer store and paint it for free since they encourage that. This would be great were there any Warhammer stores around here. I went into one in England and was tempted to spent an hour painting one of their free miniatures just for fun but didn’t have the time.

But it was during our very same trip to England that the solution appeared in the form of a freebie attached to a very inexpensive Doctor Who kids magazine:

Most people will look at that and think “Oh free magnets!”. I looked at it and thought “Oh free paints!” And in vaguely Space Mariney colours as well! This was my salvation, and months after assembly I finally had the means to complete my Chaos Terminator Sorceror.

Here he is:

I think I’ve done him justice wouldn’t you agree?

In Brighton

August 27, 2016

A few weeks ago, when we were in Brighton, I visited a stamp shop. As in stamp collecting, a hobby so nerdy that even I hesitate to discuss my ‘collection’.

I bought these first day covers:

Several animal-themed ones and one each commemorating the marriages of Charles and Andrew.

The guy that ran the tiny hole-in-the-wall store was very friendly, almost a bit too much so, and went out of his way try to find stuff I wanted. Since I was there on a lark, and only purchasing decades-old 50p first-day covers I was bemused by this.

Once I decided what I wanted he told me to take them for free! This was a bit weird so I insisted he take at least £1 – which he did – before he then went into a tale.

He said when he was young someone did something nice for him without expectation of repayment or any other obligation and he wanted to do the same for us. He then gave us these:

They are (so-called) Cinderella stamps, issued by St Moritz in 1940 to commemorate the Helsinki Olympics. Cinderella means they’re not real stamps (never authorized or used for postage) but they are still of interest to collectors. There were four colours in total; he gave us two each of three of them.

He was proud of them, and gave the gift sincerely. We waited for the catch that never came, until we realized he was simply a friendly old man that probably was cheered up by us stopping in that day. He didn’t claim the stamps were worth much (on eBay right now the 6 are maybe $15 total) but said if we sold them when we are his age we may make some money 🙂

Of course I’ll keep them forever. And for just as long I’ll remember that friendly old guy in Brighton that gave me these curious 75+ year old ‘stamps’!

Robot Claw