“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
Friday is KLS’s birthday, and once again we’re turning it into an event by attending New York Comic Con.
This year we upgraded to VIP tickets. No lines for us! We walk the path of kings!
Expect all the usual nonsense here on this blog as I experience the madness of NYCC. I’ll do my best to get shots of the wildest, wackiest, otakuest and maybe even prettiest 😉
I wonder if we’ll see any cosplay better than this:
Oh yes! I have prepared a costume… watch for it on Saturday 🙂
Last week I got the latest Magic duel deck, called Heroes vs Monsters:
According to what I read online, duel decks not based around Planeswalkers don’t sell as well, so this one needs to get by on strong deck design and perhaps the fact that it contains preview cards for the upcoming Theros set like this one:
My experience is that this set nails the design, and the two decks are better matched than in any other duel deck I have played. In fact, in 6 games played, the scores were evenly matched with 3 wins apiece.
The first of the two decks is mostly white with a splash of red. It is heavy on creatures, with a slight enchantment theme. As with most duel decks, some of the included cards are not what I would choose, and were I to tweak the deck I would start by making more of the creatures below 3 CMC to better enable the Sun Titan that is one of the big-hitters of the deck.
The second deck is a red/green big creature based deck with a token theme. The hydra up top is one of the biggest (and best) cards in the set, but victory with this deck was often too fast for such a card to be relevant.
In the many games I played the pattern seemed to be if red/green didn’t win in the first 5-8 turns, then white/red would be the victor. In all six games I only cast the hydra once (and immediately shut it down with Bonds of Faith) and never cast Sun Titan. Red/green often won on the backs of such cards as Blood Ogre and Volt Charge, and white/red via cards such as Freewind Equenaut and Bonds of Faith (which I always cast on an opponents non-human creature).
I very much enjoyed playing these two decks. As with others, they help give an appreciation for cards I may otherwise have overlooked. In addition, there are some very good cards in here ‘for the collection’. I think overall the product may have benefitted from slightly slower decks (or at least a longer mana curve for each) but overall this product gets two thumbs up 🙂
It was time once again to remove from my shelf a new Lego Technic set. As with all the others I have build in recent years, I’m going to call this set – officially known as a ‘Motorized Excavator’ – another crane:
I bought this oodles ago and I’m going to pretend to forget how shockingly expensive it was. Last birthday I got (yet!) another ‘crane’ set so there were two on my shelf for a while. I knew this guy would take time and attention to build, so earlier this summer I cracked him open. Here’s what was in the box:
Er, that’s not actually everything. That’s what was left after I’d removed 75% of the pieces and the three lengthy instruction manuals 🙂
This kit was a challenging build. In fact it was probably the most complex Technic kit I have ever made, close to the Death Star in terms of frustration. I built it in many phases across several weeks, and one step in particular required two people. KLS helped me then, although not without cursing and teeth-gnashing, and I can’t imagine how it would have been possible to attach the arm to the chassis without at least three hands.
Some under construction shots:
They are the four separate electric motors that power the excavator. Note the required crossing of the wire order. Eventually the above would be connected to the battery pack, which contained IR sensors so the device can be controlled wirelessly.
A very small portion of the incredibly complex gearing that the excavator uses. Four motors each have a separate degree of freedom (as you’ll see in the video) but – amazingly – some of these share gearing. As I was building this many times I wondered how anyone devised this mechanism in the first place, much less in a way it could be built via Lego.
At the time of the above photo, I had spent maybe a half-dozen hours on the kit over a few weeks. I’d say this was about half done at this point.
The finished kit. It is very large (about 60 cm long and 50 cm high in the position shown above) and quite heavy. You can see the battery pack in the back of the cab. Not shown are the two separate remotes. All told the device requires 10 batteries (6 AA and 4 AAA) to work, and unlike some other kits I have there is no manual override to allow for non-powered use.
Here is a video demonstrating the various functions controlled by the motors:
As you may have noticed I made an error switching between remotes manually. I didn’t realize how complete the remote control is!
This was a challenging but very entertaining kit to build, and I was surprised it all worked first go since some of the gearing seemed extremely tight when I was building it. Given the size and complexity, it’s hard to believe Lego will ever top the scale of this kit 🙂