Robot Claw – Page 528 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Samurai Scorpion

July 4, 2012

Remember Mega Mantis? Well he now has a friend:

Once again, this kit was a gift from my brother. I have the same high praise for the design, the instructions and the quality of the pieces. Even better: this guy was easier to assemble than the mantis!

While there were many pieces, some of which required bending, everything went together with ease.

Doesn’t he look like a water scorpion without his tail?

He took me about an hour to assemble, using just the tool in the box and (once only) a pair of tweezers. Here he is complete:

And here’s the fated battle that everyone knew would happen one day…

Machine Brain

July 1, 2012

Remember those commander MTG decks I made before my last Australia trip? If not, they are described here. Note the last comment, where I describe how I replaced the monogreen deck with a Green/Black tokens deck. In Australia the six decks were played in 3 or 4 player games an average of 10 times each. The results (wins-losses) were as follows:

– Darien, King of Kjeldor (W soldiers): 6-3
– Mayael The Anima (RGW fatties): 6-5
– Skullbriar, The Walking Grave (GB tokens): 6-5
– Olivia Voldaren (RB vampires): 5-4
– Grand Arbiter Augustine IV (UW control): 4-5
– Wrexial, The Risen Deep (UB mill): 2-7

Yep, Wrexial bombed hard! The other decks, as you can see, were very closely matched. I believe Grand Arbiter was a bit stronger than it’s wins suggest, but tended to be a bigger target in the multiplayer games so ended up losing more than it won.

I have another trip coming up in about a month, and the decks are coming with me! I’ve made slight adjustments to five of them to include cards released since last December, and I scrapped Wrexial entirely in favour of a brand new deck. This was done not because it was the weakest, but because in 2-player games (which I will be playing in NM and CA) I reckon it would just be tedious to play against.

So the question arose, what would the new deck be?

The above card is from one of the recently released new Planechase 2012 decks. His particular deck is the strongest of the four (at least in my playtesting), and focuses on enchantments. I greatly enjoyed the deck, since I like enchantment cards and they are often underutilized. My first idea for a new deck would use this guy as commander, and include all and every enchantment boosting card I could find in white and green. It would have been a slightly defensive deck, heavy on lifegain, that relied on building up 2 or 3 creatures to shockingly powerful levels before finishing the game in as few attacks (ideally, only one!) as possible. I still think it’s a good idea, and that it may have been well balanced against the other five decks, but after some brainstorming realized I couldn’t actually build the deck without heavily changing some of the other five (specifically the Skullbriar and Augustine IV decks). So I scrapped this idea, or rather put it on the back burner for a while.

So… what next?

I wanted something I could build without cannibalizing the other decks. Furthermore, I wanted something quite different from them as well. With Wrexial gone I was left with only one blue deck, so ideally the new deck would use blue, and hopefully avoid the other colours since each were represented twice in other decks. Also – and this was a big one – I wanted to feature artifacts since they hadn’t been a large component of any of the other five decks.

A few minutes of research led to me finding this guy, and as soon as I saw him I knew I had my new commander:

He’s one of those cards that you occasionally find with an ability that just seems too good to be true. There are any number of game-winning artifact cards that could be pulled from the deck right into play, and all I needed to do this was an artifact creature already in play. Here’s an obvious combo:

Use the turbine to create Myr tokens, which can then be sacrificed using Arcum to put things like the Forge into play. This could happen very quickly given a perfect hand. For instance:

Turn 1: Seat Of The Synod, Sol Ring, Mox Opal, Palladium Myr
Turn 2: Arcum
Turn 3: Myr Turbine, sac token to put Forge into play

And that scenario even has some flexibility!

But a commander deck contains 100 cards, and this combo requires some sort of artifact creature or token generator to start. Happily, being blue there are any number of ways (Treasure Mage, Fabricate) to get specific cards into your hand (the deck contains other token generators aside from the Turbine) or to speed up card draw entirely. So what about the rest of the deck? What is the ‘gimmick’ to the remainder of the cards?

Here’s a hint:

Yep, it’s a ‘charge counter’ deck! Over the years I had coincidentally amassed almost every good charge counter card in existence, and it was finally time to collect them all into a deck. So about 20% of the entire deck is cards that utilize or manipulate charge counters, often to hilarious results:

So the deck is a control-based artifact deck (about 90% of the non land cards are artifacts) that utilize Arcum Dagsson’s ability to ‘tutor’ up broken cards to make the player invulnerable while he bases a win around fun-to-play charge counter cards. I’ve done some test deals to make sure it seems to work in principle, but it should be fun to see how it actually works against another one of the (mostly successful) other five decks 🙂

Krull

June 27, 2012

I was 11 in 1983. At that age my mania for SF and Fantasy had long since developed and was strengthening day by day. This was constantly being fed by all manner of media, including books, games and television. But for a boy of that age, in that era, nothing seemed as important as motion pictures.

Everything was of course compared to Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. In the summer of 1983 a strange madness would have overcome me for months on end, since Return Of The Jedi was soon to be released and would be, undoubtedly, the most important movie ever. I’m not sure how I was able to sleep at night!

In waiting we occupy ourselves as best we can, so the years between Star Wars films had to be filled with other movies. The Dark Crystal had been one such film; Raiders Of The Lost Ark another and naturally I had absolutely loved both. My sci-fi/fantasy fandom was such that even ‘lesser’ files like Conan The Barbarian or unquestionable trash like Metalstorm: The Destruction Of Jared Sin were anticipated by young me with fervour. But from the moment I first saw the preview trailer one film jumped to the top of my ‘I can’t wait’ list, and made me positively giddy with anticipation.

That film was Krull.

Something about this film hit a chord with me. It had lasers and spaceships but also monsters and magic! The hero wielded a crazy weapon and even the name of the film was powerful and mysterious! How could it not be amazing? I wanted to see it so badly, and in the months before it would be released I was always looking for information! As an 11-year old in Australia in 1983 though, my options were decidedly limited.

One day I went into a bookstore and discovered that my then-favourite author – Alan Dean Foster – had written a Krull novelization! I bought it (which means begged dad to buy it for me) and read it cover to cover immediately (spoilers be damned!). Oh, and it had pictures from the movie! I was in heaven.

I recall being particularly enamoured of the ‘Glaive’ weapon. I expect this was also during my ‘ninja star’ period, and the only thing better to an 11-year old mind than a shuriken would of course be a bigger shuriken with spring loaded blades! I made one out of cardboard – I remember this very clearly – by cutting up a cereal box and gluing aluminium foil to the ends for the blades. It would have no doubt been a piece of garbage, but I bet I loved it.

Marvel put out a comic adaptation of the movie. I couldn’t afford comics at that age – I expect my allowance was only about $2 per week or thereabouts (although we used to occasionally be able to buy books, most of which in my case were gamebooks or movie novelizations by my then-favourite author). But even though I didn’t buy the comic, I remember looking through one issue in the newsagent (I did this a lot) and completely spoiling a large section of the story. That I had of course already spoiled via the novel 🙂

The newsagent was a popular lurk of mine then. I used to save up and buy the game magazines from England, as well as the occasional issue of Smash Hits, but would just hang out in the newsagent (particularly the ones at Charlestown Square or Garden City) and read the Sci-Fi movie magazines from America. It was a bittersweet experience for a young fantasy-obsessed lad, since many of the (incredible looking to an 11 year old) featured movies would never see an Australian release. For those that did, these magazine articles were fuel for my burning anticipation!

Eventually, after months of waiting, the movie came out in Australia in late 1983. I would have seen it with my brother and my dad, being too young to see a film unsupervised. Looking back on it now, I bet dad was bemused. I absolutely loved it!

During the opening credits, the glaive flies across the screen and reveals the logo. As a child I would have found this to be unspeakably awesome, since I had ‘a thing’ for logos (I used to spend hours drawing them). The combination of an awesome weapon with an awesome logo! It was like they had a direct feed into my dreams!

So the film had been seen and had been loved. It was everything I had hoped for! I expect I read the novel again, probably through around my crappy homemade glaive, and even quoted the film in the playground: “Short in stature, tall in power, narrow of purpose and wide of vision!” For a brief period, Krull was the best movie ever made!

A scant few weeks later (48 days, to be precise) things would change, since Return Of The Jedi was released and my life (as a fan!) would rise to a new level.

The flame of Krull had burned only briefly in my heart, but it had burned brightly indeed!

Last week I purchased the Krull DVD (for only $5) and we watched it again. This was KLS’s first time ever seeing the film, and my first time in almost 30 (thirty!) years. And I have to be honest: it holds up quite well.

A titanic flop when it was released, due mostly to a bloated budget, the film has surprisingly good special effects that still hold up today. Furthermore, the massive and impressive set design has barely been equalled, and the abstract interiors of the ‘Black Fortress’ are alien enough to not suffer from the sort of dated design common to many films from those days. Yes the story is weak, the villain has an anticlimatic ending and (let’s face it) the glaive weapon is criminally underused. But, most importantly, the film is still fun.

I’m in no way surprised that I had such an enthusiasm for this film back when I was a little sprout, and honestly look back on those days with an uncommon (for me) sweet nostalgia.