• Around the block 6: DGM set review part 1   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Ya I wasn't sure if the maaka would go in either. I had just dismissed the shaman early on as it seemed inferior most of the time to maaka.

  • Tales from the Swiss: An Innistrad Block Draft   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Another new sets of your drafts, which I think many of us would this. Stay making such wonderful like this. - The Balancing Act

  • Around the block 6: DGM set review part 1   12 years 8 weeks ago

    You might be right re makka, I just couldn't see the deck playing giant growth when it would rather anthem with overload. The shaman has a different role, but agree it could be one the deck doesn't want.

    The boros deck does actually have 60 main deck cards, the deck list generator doesn't work with DGM cards and I forgot to update the summary numbers. You're right that it should be 24 lands though, and it is missing 3 legionnaires in the board.

  • What else could the next big creature type be?   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Mythical Salamanders are not the 3" newts you might find in a stream. They are huge and deadly. (CF: D&D and variants). Specifically they have a tie in to Elementalism. They tend to be fiery and in fact in literature often are used as synonyms for fire spirits.

    Goats/Sheep could be part of a set with lots of herders (Think Cyclops with giant goats/sheep) and potentially something to do with an Argosy type adventure with a golden fleece at the end or something.

    Gnomes in folk lore are woodlands/sylvan creatures and I am surprised WOTC hasn't picked up on this even a little bit. In fact I don't know who came up with Gnomes as tiny mechanical people but that's just crazy. Love bottle gnomes though.

    Gorgons + Castles? I don't get it. All the stories I know of depict them in out of the way places like Grottos/Caverns/Stone gardens (wasn't there one in Prospero's Island (cf The Tempest)?

    Mystics + Nomads are pretty much a thing. In fact I expect any set that has lots of nomads to feature a nearly equal amount of mystics.

    End of article finisher: Wyvern?

    Edit:

    Short story concerning slugs.
    Setting: The Year is 1979, the place is Oakwood friends school (A boarding school run by Quakers.) I am a freshman who just learned about a game called AD&D.

    I am at the headmaster's house for an open house meet and greet thingee at the beginning of the first trimester. I enter a room with a bunch of kids sitting around playing the aformentioned game AD&D. They invite me to sit down and roll up a character. I make an Elf Fighter/Magic User on the advice of a friendly helper/fellow student. In the game we (the party) are wandering down a long corridor, and we come to a door.

    We stop. The thief does his thing checking for traps, picking locks, listening for horrors/monsters/other greedy adventurers. Nothing found. As soon as I (the neophyte player) hear this I have my character open the door before anyone else can do anything.

    I see a couple of Ghouls staring at me while cowering in a corner. (In this game they were afraid of elves for some reason so yay me) The party rushes in and slaughters them before anything untoward can happen to me their new good luck charm/aka door opener.

    The party gets some loot, we travel on, find another door. The same old stuff happens. And again, this time with the party approval I open the door. Inside is the largest slug anyone has ever seen. I mean it fills the room. I quickly shut the door, but being boneless and strangely aggressive it oozes through the cracks in the door and attacks us, eating me first with its acid. Everyone else runs...

    Needless to say a horrific colossal slug eating an elf should make you run.

  • What else could the next big creature type be?   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Yeah, Gnomes are where it's at. Like you said they don't have to remain artifact creatures, although I think they will have a lot of overlap with kithkin, unfortunately. But you could have them branch out into several different colors fairly easily. I could see Red gnomes doing artifact based stuff, White gnomes being protective, and Green gnomes helping out with creatures or lands. Even Black gnomes being little evil dudes. Blue ones don't seem too intuitive though.

    I feel bad about Pegasi. There's not really a lot of ways you can get around the whole "small flyer" feel they have going, and they don't translate well outside of White. My daughter loves them though. If they can find a new mechanical identity, like Jellyfish have recently, that would be great. But they've done nothing since the beginning of Magic, sadly.

  • Around the block 6: DGM set review part 1   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Why didn't you mention Rubblebelt Maaka for RDW? It seems like a more likely inclusion than pyrewild as from my experience with the deck, if you aren't in a position to win by about turn 4 or 5, it's pretty much over anyway. The one mana bloodrush seems a lot more useful more of the time.

    The boros deck only has 51 cards...and 25 lands for a speed based aggro deck seems like too much.

  • Conqueror & Commander, Vol. CVI: Sygg, River Cutthroat   12 years 8 weeks ago

    It's Youtube videos of me playing games with the deck. You get to see it in action and hear my thought process. You can go directly to Youtube if you want to check them out.

  • Modern Days 7 - Lotus Storm   12 years 8 weeks ago

    I like this deck! Very creative!

  • Conqueror & Commander, Vol. CX: Devour For Power   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Thanks! I realize that I probably should have covered them earlier, but when they came out I wasn't online as much. Hopefully people still find them helpful.

  • Conqueror & Commander, Vol. CX: Devour For Power   12 years 8 weeks ago

    I really like these precon reviews. You do a great job going through the deck, explaining what works and doesn't, and how it could improve.

  • Modern Days 7 - Lotus Storm   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Thank you very much grapplingfarang. I was inspired from your original deck and follow a path for a semi-budget version of it. This deck has its own unique way and it was very entertaining to play with it.

    Maybe I can also try 1 or 2 Talara's Battalion in this deck with some adjustments.

  • Modern Days 7 - Lotus Storm   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Sweet deck!

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    v3 Has lots of faults but it works. Shiny not so much. I am not saying it doesn't work at all but it really makes the game unfun in a thousand small ways akin to the death of a thousand cuts.

  • Freed from the Real 220: the Good, The Bad, and The Shiny   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Nope not going to be playing the Prereleases, being that my only interest in paper m:tg is a local gaming group I recently met. I am surprised it took them so long to ban Sunrise. I've been expecting that for ages now. Not that I hate it but it just seems so tedious for opponents to sit through.

    Also, Nice meeting ya Sebastian! Next time go Mets! :)

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    That said, I know one person who likes Shiny better than v3. I fell for the "you get cube tickers for being on shiny" thing but after that I have not touched it. It is just incredibly unintuitive, but I guess it is even worse if you are used to v3

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    It's a shame that I am going to be unable to play Magic for a number of days. I can't even use the client (my processor is only a 1.0 Ghz) and so every time I so much as move from, say, collection tab to store tab, there is a semi-frequent percentage of my whole client freezing and locking up. It's just a terrible programme.

  • Color Theory for Dragon's Maze limited.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Sorry this didn't come out before the paper pre-releases, but there's still the releases and of course all the MTGO pre-release and release action ahead. I played in SIX paper pre-releases with six different base guilds this weekend, will try to get a writeup submitted soon to update these initial thoughts based on some real world experience!

  • Conqueror & Commander, Vol. CVI: Sygg, River Cutthroat   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Hey,This videos are not working on my computer so can anyone tell,What exactly is available in the video.

  • Rick's Picks #23 - UG? Madness!   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Jam should really take the fairly obvious steps to crush this blight. It is a bit tedious but not particularly hard or rocket sciency to stop spam bots from doing this.

  • Rick's Picks #23 - UG? Madness!   12 years 8 weeks ago

    to control the spammers, sometimes I leave the house and there are 40 when I get home, sometimes not, at least to me though they are entertaining. I'm glad you were able to find the article though, but I'm moving closer and closer to just making commenting facebook only. :(

  • Rick's Picks #23 - UG? Madness!   12 years 8 weeks ago

    For what it's worth, these aren't your traditional spammers, they are paid search engine placement optimizers.

    They don't care if anyone on this site ever clicks any of those links, they just need the links to be out there on well trafficked sites so that they get picked up by search engines.

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    I've tried the latest build and it hasn't fixed my issue with battlefield size. I know in Ryan Spain's article he addressed the point but so far all that seems to have changed is that you can hide your hand away to make the battlefield bigger. I don't find this very helpful as generally I want to be able to see my hand.

    Having looked at that section of his article in more detail it does sound like there are plans to get rid of the footer on the client and allow you to get rid of other things to help give you the vertical space to increase battlefield size. So there is hope. However, right now I still not happy with how the battlefield looks.

  • Rick's Picks #23 - UG? Madness!   12 years 8 weeks ago

    Hey, spammers serve some purpose after all: I missed this article about my favorite color combination at the time! (And it even ties up with your latest revival of the triple Shadowmoor format. Serendipity!)

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago

    The latest build has introduced a really bad error with card loading. I've never had this many crashes with the previous build. After playing extensively over the weekend, I think it's related to basic land images but it could be anything.

    It's really frustrating that they've introduced this bug right as they're trying to push it to a wider audience. The other changes also seem to be in the right direction, so it's really bad timing.

  • State of the Program for April 26th 2013.   12 years 8 weeks ago
    yes

    right now, build 3.4.7.293 is locked up on my desktop. Once again, failed to load the collection. Loaded a deck, most of the first row of cards, now frozen and unresponsive.

    This is after leaving it alone and "loading" for 20 minutes.

    Only thing running was the virus protection and Task Manager. Neither CPU usage nor memory usage are notable.