Tomorrow is the New York Comic Con 2010, and as we have the past two years, we’re taking a train down to New York City to attend.
It promises to be a madhouse this year (as if it wasn’t last year or the year before), especially since they are estimating over 100k people attending.
What surprises are there in store? Last year I met Colin Baker…
Anyway watch the twitter and (on Sunday) this blog for a full roundup!
Recently I found the following two items in a local used bookstore:
Yep, two gamebooks from a series I hadn’t even heard of. Mine are in better condition than the ones in these images, even including the cardboard pull out rules/stats sheets.
They are from TSR, and based on their old Marvel Superheroes RPG system (itself based in 2nd Edition AD&D). They look like they’re going to be a fun read, and I was stoked to find them and add them to my collection 🙂
So as I tweeted, I played in the Scars of Mirrodin Magic The Gathering pre-release this past Saturday. Here’s a more detailed report of the event and how it went for me.
The rules are simple: construct a deck of at least 40 cards from 6 boosters (containing 15 cards each). Land is provided. Then play five best-of-three rounds for the chance to win prizes including up to a box of boosters. You need to be in the top 8 after five rounds for prize contention.
We were given 30 minutes to construct our decks from the boosters. I eagerly ripped them all open looking for poison (Infect actually) cards and found… two. Yes, only two cards in my 90 had the keyword Infect on them.
So scratch my plans of building a poison deck.
I then took a second look at what I had. The colour of which I had the fewest was red. Furthermore the cards were very uninspiring – seemingly overcosted (in terms of CMC or activation cost) creatures and not much else. I instantly ignored red.
Artifacts I placed aside. I had a great deal of them, which was unsurprising since Mirrodin is an artifact expansion. I knew whatever colour I played, artifacts would prominently feature in my deck.
Green and black were similarly uninspiring. A weird mix of combo-y creatures and dull spells were in my selection. Not bad cards per se, just (probably) not effective in a prerelease situation.
This left me with white and blue. Each were tempting, and I had the most cards of each. But white seemed the most likely to actually win me games, especially due to the following two cards:
Given I was going to include artifacts – four of which were equipment – I had reasonable expectations the above could produce me a few tokens during my games.
Other notables that made their way into my deck:
The angel-bomb never went off. Many times I sat with it in hand – and the mana to cast it – hoping to erase a few fatties my opponent had tapped. Although I cast it a few times, it killed not one single creature. Perilous Myr on the other hand was ruthlessly efficient, and probably helped me along in a few of my wins.
So white/artifact it was. Exactly 40 cards. 16 lands, 17 creatures, 4 equipments, 2 sorceries, 1 instant.
My first opponent played Black/Green/Blue. So inefficient was his deck that I didn’t even know he was playing green until the second game. My guess was his goal was poison/control, but his cards, land and draws were very slow (and, being honest, unlucky). He did manage to play these though:
But to no avail. I beat him quickly and very soundly, and my life was over 20 in each case. I was enthused and encouraged by the fact that one game was won on the back of my Myrsmith and the other my cat regent. In each case however, this card (also in my deck) was a boon:
I had the Deathmantle on her…
My opponent was a child, and he had a “how can someone be so lucky?” artifact deck with a splash of white in it. So many good cards, and in multiples. Including these:
He beat me soundly and convincingly in each game. But the second game in particular was basically my loss. A no-land draw led to a one-land mulligan draw. I didn’t want to risk five cards so went with one land and then failed to draw any at all for the rest of the game (which I think was only 5 turns).
Only afterwards did I realize I had made a terrible error in misreading one of my cards that helped this opponent greatly. Twice he pulled artifacts I had revoked out of the graveyard – but they should have been exiled. Who knows how things may have changed had I noticed.
My next opponent was perhaps even more blessed by the gods of luck than my previous, because he drew both of the following from his 6 boosters:
However only the dragon was in his deck (he showed me the other after our games). His deck was a focused, fast poison deck. In both games he drew the dragon in his opening hand and played it as soon as he could (often before turn five due to Scars reprinting the mana Myrs).
I would experience my first and only poison defeats against this opponent, and in each case I was well ahead in life (in one game I was more than 20 life over him). His strat was ignore his life and just go for the infect kill, and it worked twice. Of course having that monster dragon helped.
Even though I lost the games were very enjoyable. I felt that each were close, and could have gone either way.
In each round, players are matched against opponents with similar win/loss ratios. So now I would face someone else that had only won (overall) one of his three rounds.
His deck was a hodgepodge of all sorts of stuff – not really easily categorizable. It also seemed to lack a gimmick (it was blue/green/artifact) and was very slow. Even so, he got both of these out in the first game:
Ouch and ouch! However he also (foolishly, I thought) put two -1/-1 counters on my sentinel:
Which gave me a great, low health-cost Slagworm blocker. I had my cat-regent pumping out tokens as well, which blocked his juggernaut every turn. Things quickly became a stalemate… and the board got completely locked down. The game went on and on and ended up lasting almost 35 minutes! At the very end he won with his life at 2. I only had 5 cards left to draw from as well. A fun game.
Things were very different for the next two though. In each case I drew well and pressed the offensive very quickly, taking great advantage of my monocoloured deck. He lost each game in less than 5 minutes, so I grabbed the overall win.
Oh yes, he also played Lux Cannon in the first game, plus he had time to use it. This meant all my opponents so far had drawn – and played – mythic rares. I don’t think I saw a single mythic played at the Eldrazi prerelease…
Surprise surprise, this hit the table quickly:
Sigh, another mythic. However this, my final opponent, didn’t really know how to use it. His green/black deck seemed to be a poison deck but the player made many mistakes and frankly would have probably lost even if I didn’t have a ‘win-the-lottery’ opening hand each time that led to more cat tokens than anyone would care to face (in one game: 8 2/2 cats on my battlefield at one time).
As we played he confessed it was his return to MTG after not playing for 13 years. He had played in tournaments from Alpha through to Homelands and had then walked away. He was now returning since his wife was insisting he either play with his cards (which he still owns, including multiple copies of the power nine), or sell them!
So he chose to play.
Even though he was the weakest of my opponents that day, he was perhaps the most fun to play against. I actually even felt a bit guilty as those cats kept popping out of my four-times-equipped regent and I sailed to two easy wins.
But I got the feeling he had fun himself, and that’s what matters most in the end.
So my final rank was 10th out of 24, which meant I just missed out on the final rounds and a prize. I enjoyed the event a lot though, and plan on attending the pre-release for Mirrodin Besieged when it comes out 3 or so months from now 🙂
This weekend I’m playing in the pre-release tournament for the new MTG expansion Scars Of Mirrodin. It’s on Saturday, and should hopefully be as much fun as the last one I played in. Or perhaps even more so, since I like artifact decks and Mirrodin promises a scad of them.
Here are a couple of cards from the set:
The one on the left is the promo we’ll get for competing in the pre-release. The one on the right is everything I love about Magic. I hope I get one of them (and I have a good chance I reckon, since I’m buying a box of boosters) and can’t wait to use it in a game. Does that make me a Johnny I wonder?
Anyway I’ll be tweeting during the tourney and blogging the results, so stay tuned.
In other game news I’m still hopelessly addicted to Dragon Quest IX, which is probably the best DS game ever made. I’ve been focusing again recently on killing some of these guys:
To get my character up to a ‘Sage +4’. If you have a DS, then you simply need to own this game (you know who I’m talking to don’t you?)
School has been extremely busy. Much more than ever in fact, and it rarely leaves me with time to just sit down and relax. As such I haven’t been playing many non-portable games recently but when I can, I’ve put time into Infamous on the PS3:
This is a game I’ve had my eye on for some time. It’s a sandbox game that tells the story of a man that gains super powers (related to electricity) and battles against a mysterious group that evil intent. The graphics, gameplay and story are all top-notch, and I can honestly say had I paid full price I would definitely be happy with the purchase. Given I got the game for a mere $18 in the Target budget bin means I got an absolute bargain!
It really is an excellent game, and if you have a PS3 I think you could play a lot worse.
In other news I’ve become strangely addicted to ancient issues of Dragon magazine. I’m reading them cover-to-cover regardless of the content and in the last week alone have learned some fascinating information like how to run court cases in the Top Secret game (a spy RPG that no one ever bought or played…) or what % of hits on a flumph hit the top and what % hit the bottom. Thank god for 27-year-old magazines, else I’d never know such info.
What’s a flumph you ask?
This is a flumph:
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 🙂