Category: Otaku

NYCC Day Two

October 12, 2012

Here’s how I feel right now:

Assuming, of course, that her face says “My hips need replacement and I need to sleep for a day!” 🙂

We spent over 7 hours at the con today, and the highlight – indeed the highlight of the entire con I expect – can be summarized by this photo:

Yep, I was star struck a little. As would be expected meeting a childhood hero. He was personable and charming and gracious and everything you’d expect him to be.

Later on we also went to his hour long panel…

…which was held in a massive room where all seats were packed! The moderator made a few funny jokes about the disparate audiences, which included the old-schoolers and the new, much younger fans (who were well aware Doctor 5 is now Doctor 10’s dad-in-law)!

We actually saw two panels in a row in this room. Before Peter Davison we sat through Grant Morrison which was very entertaining, including the bits when he spoke about his experiences summoning demons via black magic (he didn’t seem to be joking).

But thats not the only Who we saw today! Not only was the Doctor Who shop twice as big as ever:

But they even had a special guest in the form of Karen Gillan’s cousin, aka. young Amy Pond:

There was also some actual comic appreciation going on today! A good chunk of the main hall has vendors like this:

I bought some comics today, and then later on in the day met (and got an autograph from) Amanda Conner, whose comic art I’m a fan of.

There’s so, so much more. About a dozen hours at the con so far and I still feel there’s lots to see. Tomorrow we’ve got more panels to see and some special autographs to (hopefully!) collect.

Before I end for the day, the cosplay! To say the quality is high is an understatement. Check out the three best I took photos of today:

NYCC Day One

October 11, 2012

We had an early start today, then hopped on a train for a mini-vacation in New York City. As we have the last several years, we’re going to the New York Comic Con!

Today is KLS’s birthday as well, so that makes this little trip even more special 🙂

The show runs Thursday through Saturday, and we’ve got 4-day passes. We got to the city a few hours before the doors opened which was fortuitous, since I had to visit the Australian consulate. With that out of the way, after stops at a few shops (I spent $70 on the new Monster Hunter Jsoanese art book at Kinokuniya!), we headed down to the convention center.

For some reason I had assumed the lines would be small on this first half-day of the con, but as you can see that was hardly the case.

As usual, sensory overload was what followed. Hundreds of exhibitors filling several halls across 3 levels of a gigantic convention center…

Movies and books and comics and games and clothes, toys, cars, food and art. Free stuff everywhere, and even more (do much more!) for sale!

And then, the cosplay:

The major highlight of today was seeing the next Monster Hunter games so prominently featured at Capcom’s booth. I lined up to play the 3DS version and it was awesome. The WiiU version was also playable and has beautiful graphics. I can’t wait for these to be released.

After about 3.5 hours we were ruined. Not only had it been a long day, but we were toting heavy bags full of purchases ($280 in total already!).

We’ve only got to see maybe a half of the total show so far, and even then need to revisit the booths we skimmed today. But now it’s time for bed 🙂

Return To Ravnica

October 10, 2012

A couple of weeks ago, the new Magic The Gathering expansion, named Return To Ravnica, was released. As with all previous expansions for the last few years, I attended the prerelease tournament.

This prerelease was a bit different from most, in that you had to pick one of the ‘guilds’ that the set is themed around. I chose ‘Azorius’, a blue/white guild themed around control and denial. Each participant was then given a fun little box that contained various goodies (and, importantly, their cards) themed around their chosen guild:

So… I built a bad deck! I had misunderstood the rules a little, and assumed I must play blue/white only, and did just that despite perhaps having better green cards than blue. So I took what I had, put it all together, and ended up with a deck big on denial (especially the Azorius keyword detain, which prevents opponents creatures from acting for a turn) but very weak on offense and – importantly – removal.

The first round I won 2-0, against a player using a tri-coloured deck based around the guild Rakdos (which is red/black, but he put a bit of green in as well). I’ll admit my victory has a lot of luck in it, and even after only one game the weakness of my deck was clear to me. After the round I debated changing it (which is allowed, only between rounds) but was at that point already irritated by the sheer amound of players and general stuffiness of the venue that I decided to just continue and leave after my first loss.

This would end up being the very next round. I face another Rakdos opponent, and actually played a very lengthy but fun game against him, that he eventually won by (quite literally) a toss of a die. See this card for what I mean 🙂

The game had taken a long time – almost half an hour – so I forfeited the second match to give him a 2-0 victory against me, and I left early. I only played 3 games during that prerelease, and can’t say I had anywhere near as much fun as I did at others, mostly due to the crowd.

The next week I went back to my store and picked up my box of the set, which I had preordered. Over the last few days I’ve been opening the dozens of booster packs this gave me, and the above photo is a shot of all the cards laid out waiting to be sorted and boxed. There’s a lot of interesting material in this set, and I’m looking forward to tweaking my existing Commander decks and perhaps making some new ones.

The above shows the few mythics (and promos) I have pulled from the boosters, with only 4 or 5 left to open. In terms of numbers, this is statistically low. But I’m happy I got the Gorgon plainswalker and the big angel at the back of the picture. Epic Experiment though… that’s an underwhelming mythic!

Anyway I have a few unusual plans for my Return To Ravnica cards. In time, these plans will become clear to some of you 🙂

Robot Claw