“It’s been a long time, been a long time Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time”
This morning I was round Gavin’s to play some MtG.
It felt soooo good to finally play a game in the real world once more. Over 18 months since I last played with a real person in the same room. I’d almost forgotten what it was like.
Plus I got to meet the latest addition to Gavin’s household young pup Murphy. I’m hoping Murphy has got his name because Gavin is a Robocop fan. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s because of some tenuous link to Top Gun. Gavin is somewhat of a Top Gun fanboy.
We played some two player Commander. Yes it’s not really the same as playing with more players. But it gave Gavin a chance to try the Ur Dragon and Markov precons from 2017, plus play his Strixhaven precon. And I got to try a new deck I’d been working on during the lockdown.
There was also some standard played as well. It was Gavin’s mono green deck up against my mono red dragon deck. There was one game where I missed played that cost me the game.
I’ll have to get Gavin’s deck list off him. But mine I’ll look at in another post. There were a couple of times I ran out of gas, and was unable to end the game, going on to lose. But on the whole it did it’s thing.
Not been up to much. To be honest I’ve not felt up to doing much. Despite having some posts in various states of completion.
I’m not going to be cryptic about why I’ve felt this way. Wednesday my Aunt was rushed into hospital after having seizures. It wasn’t looking too good at one point. But she has improved a little, but not out of the woods.
It’s made harder by the fact that my Aunt is on the opposite side of the world in New Zealand.
So you can imagine we have been a bit distracted, shocked, and worried.
Apparently I’m to blame for my friend Gavin getting into MtG!
All I can say is if that is what he has to say to himself so that he can sleep at night. Then I’ll be the bad guy for him!
Gavin has learnt to play MtG using Arena, and bought the last starter set, and a Commander deck. Gavin is looking to upgrade the Commander deck, and has been pointed in the direction of one or two sites that write upgrade articles about the precons.
We should be playing MtG this coming Monday. Although it won’t be the full Commander experience we’ll play 2 player Commander. I’m going to use this as a chance to start testing one of my new decks that I built during lockdown. Plus I might take the Ur Dragon precon for Gavin to try. I was taken aback at how much that deck is going for these days. It’s shockingly high.
So I’m looking forward to actually playing again in real life. So you know what the next post will be all about.
It’s prerelease weekend once more in the world of Magic the Gathering.
This year instead of giving the world another core set, WotC have decided to break from the norm and the MtG universe by cross pollinating with their other major product they sell D&D, to bring us a D&D themed set called Adventures in the Forgotten Realm.
The prerelease kits are slightly different from “regular” prerelease kits in that we get a proper d20 die instead of the usual spin down die.
The reason for this change is that some of the cards in the set require the rolling of a d20 to decide which benefit/option is selected on the card. There is a card showing this “mechanic” in the gallery below.
Each prerelease kit also has the 3 adventure cards as double sided foil cards, with a token on the opposite side. These 3 adventure cards named after famous D&D adventures are a new mechanic for this set.
As you can see we are getting some great new looking cards. I really love the ones that look like a classic D&D module cover. Although the ones that look like art from early rulebooks look very cool too.
Sticking with the D&D theme we get new enchantments called classes. As you can see in the one above, each level of the card has a mana cost to activate.
Sadly world events are still conspiring to prevent in real life prerelease events taking place. Which is a shame because I’d love to be playing this sets prerelease with friends. I think it’d have been very popular.
This is the last prerelease where we will get 2 draft boosters with the prerelease kit. From the new Innistrad in the Autumn we will be getting a set booster instead. These are more expensive, so naturally we will see an increase in the cost of a prerelease kit.
Along side the prerelease kits the Commander precons were also on sale. With this set we get 4 new decks to play with. Which takes my back log of precons to play to about 20 odd decks now since world events kicked off over 18 months ago.
Before you know it over a week has passed since the last post.
Not much has happened to share on here. Obviously world events are still putting a dampener on things like playing board games in person. Plus there hasn’t been much online gaming using apps (outside of Star Realms and Epic the Card Game) either.
My “secret” project is going slowly. I’m not sure what folks will make of it. It is a departure for me and this blog. Which I hope folks will like.
On the Kickstarter side of things Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals finally landed (after it hit retailers).
Naturally I’ve sleeved it all up with the official sleeves that came as part of the Kickstarter. I’ve even used a couple of the Stonemaier token containers to surprisingly store the tokens for the game.
From a recent Renegade live stream it was revealed what the next expansion will be after the first expansion Blood & Alchemy comes out. It will be called The Wolf and The Rat. But it was also revealed they have a third expansion that has finished production and a fourth currently being worked on. Both of them currently remain unnamed.
And yes for the record I have pre-ordered Blood & Alchemy. The bonus for doing so are a couple of alt art vampire cards, one for each clan.
Vampire the Masquerade: Rivals first 3 OP kits
Another big reveal from the stream were the contents of the first three OP kits for Vampire Wednesdays. These will be available for your FLGS to order, or for those that can’t get their local store interested, or get to a store to participate you can order direct from Renegade. These OP kits introduce three new vampires that will eventually be available on the Renegade website to purchase.
I got the season 0 OP kit as part of my Kickstarter and plan to get these as well. These will form part of my attempt to kick off a Rivals scene in Wisbech once Fenland Gamers starts up gaming sessions again. Although my track record in doing that sort of thing is pretty poor.
Which brings me nicely onto the news that Jonathan and I have had chats between ourselves and also with our hosts The Luxe about when and how we will start gaming sessions back. Taking into account current world events we are eyeing September as our target month for once more holding meet ups.
Hopefully in the meantime those corrupt, lying bullies in charge of running our country will not screw things up (although history is not on their side on that front) and we will indeed be able to safely once more gather to roll dice, shuffle cards and move pieces of plastic around a board.
On the D&D news front apparently next week (Tuesday) instead of releasing stories setting up the next MtG set, because that set is a D&D/MtG standalone crossover set, WotC will be releasing five free D&D adventures for players to download. These 15 to 20 page adventures are aimed at tier 2 characters, specifically levels 8 – 10.
Hopefully the next thing you read on here is the “secret” project. But you know me!
Thought I’d give a little update on the iOS version of Arena.
I raised a support call with WotC over redeeming the codes I had. Which they did respond to. You need to either use the PC/Mac version, or go to your account settings and https://myaccounts.wizards.com/code. Now this bit must be new (as in the last year) as I don’t remember WotC allowing codes to be redeemed via the web before.
Completed Colour Challenges!
So now I have some free packs and decks. Not many but some. It’s a start.
However having ground out the Colour (I refuse to use the American spelling here) Challenge unlocked the rewards as I progressed through each, and unlocked the other game formats. What it does not do is give me the free deck for having completed it, or acknowledge that I’ve completed it!
But Colour Challenge Not Complete!
The WotC twitter support did reply to my query about this with…
WotC Twitter Support Reply
So I visited the link, and created a feedback (that’s all it allows you to do) with the above screen shots attached.
In the meantime, I entered promo codes (happy I can do that now), ate, slept and other stuff.
With time to kill this morning I decided I’d check to see if I had a reply.
I want to say to my surprise there was no reply or even acknowledgement that my “bug” had been seen. But I was disappointed that there had not even been any form of acknowledgement. Which is the minimum you expect, even if it’s automated.
Naturally I voiced that disappointment via social media with the WotC Help account in a fairly civil manor.
I know the cards in this red/green deck aren’t going to be great. But they are cards none the less. Plus the challenge needs to be acknowledged as being completed so it can give me another to attempt (possibly). These challenges are one of the ways to grind out gems/coins and boosters for free. If the aim is to spend as little as possible (my total outlay so far has been a fiver on the intro booster offer) then this needs to be working.
Today Magic the Gathering Arena hit the iOS App Store.
Finally! It’s long over due on the platform. It came out on Android as an early access at the end of January.
Mini rant…
In my opinion Arena should have been on mobile from launch, or failing that within the first 6 months of launching. I really do think WotC fumbled the ball on this. By taking so long to reach other platforms other than PC, WotC really failed to make a significant dent into rival games such as Hearthstone. And that’s despite throwing lots of money at advertising, and “buying” streamers.
Initial impressions…
So this morning after downloading Arena onto my iPad, it had to then download even more data before I could do anything but play the tutorial. Then before the majority of game modes are made available I had to complete the Colour Challenge to unlock them. Which is basically play a mono coloured deck against an “AI” opponent playing one of the remaining colours, then the final game would be against a random real opponent. And you have to do that for each colour type, before you can play Standard or Historic for example.
The “AI” opponents are more logic puzzles than playing against an AI, as the cards drawn are the same each time. So it’s basically about playing the cards in the right order.
The real player opponent was fun. However there were some uneven matchups with obviously more powerful decks, they were not mono colour for starters. I think this for a complete novice to the game could be very off putting.
Being a paper player I have collected more than a handful of Arena codes over the last couple of years. These codes unlock decks, boosters, etc within Arena. You have to enter the code within the in app store to unlock them. However it appears that in the version of Arena released today there is no way to redeem those codes. So if like me you don’t have a PC/Mac you can’t use them, hopefully they won’t expire before WotC sort this out. Which would not be cool.
I knew I’d like playing MtG using Arena. It’s MtG with a slick “modern” UI. What’s not to like?
Another rant…
However it’s all the crap around playing the game that WotC have with their nickel and diming players for every penny they can screw out of them I don’t like.
I’ve seen comparisons online, and WotC are one of the meanest, less generous companies for this type of game. The in game economy is very much weighted in their favour.
Which means building up a collection and being able to build decks requires you to spend a lot of time grinding away, or spending lots of money. Neither is ideal.
Will I continue to play Arena? Possibly. Redeeming these codes is a biggie for me. Maybe a deal breaker.
It’s that time once again for a new release of MtG cards. This time WotC have gone back in time to 2006 and the Time Spiral block, and created basically a curated set of cards from that block, and released it as Time Spiral Remastered.
If you purchase a booster box or a ticket to the play online event this weekend (which gets you 4 booster packs to build a deck from and play online with using spelltable) you get a promo foil Lotus Bloom.
I’m not going to go through all my pulls but one pack had the following two cards in it. A foil Path to Exile and old style Etali! I was very chuffed to say the least.
Etali is my commander in the mono red aggro Commander deck I have. So I’ll be replacing the Ixalan card with this very cool retro looking one for sure.
It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these deck posts. There are more planned. After all I have two new decks nearly finished, and three other decks that need updating with new cards.
I thought after the post the other day about one of the upcoming Kaldheim cards that I was really excited about I’d finally update the Big Green Stompy deck this morning.
Some times it is so easy to update a deck. Especially if its one I built a long time ago and I wasn’t using “good” cards but ones I had at the time.
Other times it’s so hard to do, as you don’t want to take cards out. But you have to because you want to use the new cards.
Below are the updated decks stats. The AMC has crept up.
Ok according to the Decked app that I use and CardKingdom if I had to replace this deck I would not be able to. But below I’ve listed the top 10 most costly cards that the deck currently uses.
Like so many cards, The Immortal Sun is in need of a reprint. It’s almost a staple for me, and possibly many others too. If at the same time they could reprint Growing Rites as well I’d appreciate it.
Ok here is the bit you really want the cards that make up this version of the deck.
Note yes it might be on the low side for lands. But there are mana rocks, cards that reduce the cost, creatures that tap for mana, and cards that search for lands. Plus cards that increase the amount of mana that lands tap for.
1 Adventurous Impulse
1 Animist’s Awakening
1 Attune with Aether
1 Sol Ring
1 Bonds of Mortality
1 Emerald Medallion
1 Heroic Intervention
1 Land Grant
1 Lightning Greaves
1 Nylea’s Intervention
1 Thought Vessel
1 Charge of the Forever-Beast
1 Crushing Canopy
1 Cultivate
1 Garruk’s Uprising
1 Gift of Paradise
1 Growing Rites of Itlimoc
1 Krosan Grip
1 Nissa’s Pilgrimage
1 Retreat to Kazandu
1 Rhonas’s Monument
1 Unbound Flourishing
1 Vivien, Champion of the Wilds
1 Court of Bounty
1 Leyline of Abundance
1 Momentous Fall
1 Return to the Earth
1 Tempt with Discovery
1 Whirlwind
1 Wilderness Reclamation
1 Doubling Season
1 Garruk, Primal Hunter
1 Primal Vigor
1 Vivien Reid
1 Vivien, Monsters’ Advocate
1 Caged Sun
1 The Immortal Sun
1 Wave of Vitriol
1 Zendikar Resurgent
1 Praetor’s Counsel
1 Sandwurm Convergence
1 The Great Aurora
1 The Great Henge
Lands:22
1 Detection Tower
1 Emergence Zone
1 Field of Ruin
15 Forest
1 Guildless Commons
1 Temple of the False God
1 Tranquil Thicket
1 Bala Ged Recovery // Bala Ged Sanctuary
At the end of this month MtG players get their hands on the new Norse inspired set Kaldheim.
Until then we are in the middle of what is known as spoiler season. Which is basically when WotC use various content creators (mainly streamers and YouTubers) that they deem worthy to reveal cards from the new set (and hopefully building up excitement) over like a two week peroid before revealing every card in the set.
WotC did spoil one card that has me very excited for it, and adding it to my Big Green Stompy Commander deck.
This deck is my mono green deck that plays big creatures. Naturally there are more than a handful of hydra in the deck. I think it would be fair to almost say I’m not far off from this being a hydra tribal deck.
To make those hydra and any other that I put a +1/+1 counter onto I have the following three cards in the deck.
As you can guess with just one of these cards out the hydras can come in pretty big. If I’m allowed to have more than one of these cards out at the same time (a pretty silly move by the other players) then the hydras start to become silly.
However I do play one hydra that just abuses the cards above and the math can get insane! That card is Primordial Hydra.
I think in a previous post many many moons ago now I told you about a Commander game at my FLGS where I indeed did have Primordial Hydra out with Primal Vigor and won the game swinging in with a 156/156 hydra. You can imagine how insanely large Primordial Hydra would have gotten at the start of my next turn.
Now with Kaldheim I will have a new instant add to the deck. And forgive any pun but it doubles down on the counter doubling for me! The new card is Vorinclex, Monstrous Raider.
For my deck it’s an insane card and increases the odds of me hitting a way to double my counters. That’s the bit I like a lot. A 6/6 with tramp and haste for 6 CMC is nice, and a green deck not a lot to pay, and possible to play early ahead of curve with the right ramp pieces in hand. And I have ramp in the deck. It’s green!
The final paragraph on the card is a really nice bonus. Which if I’m reading this correctly means that while Vorinclex is on the battlefield any Planeswalkers that opponents play comes in with half the counters on it! Which means it takes longer for an opponent to ultimate them and gives me and others longer to remove the Planeswalker. Plus it negates single +1/+1 or -1/-1 counters being placed if my understanding of the text is correct. But making sure that whatever permanent the other player brings in with counters is smaller is amazing.
So in my deck this is a monstrous card indeed. I think you can see now why I am excited about the card.
We are now in to the last few days before Christmas. A Christmas that will be unusual for many. Where time will be spent away from loved ones instead of with them.
Over on the Fenland Gamer discord server we have a game of chess in progress. Which at the moment looks mainly to be between Jonathan and myself. Gavin did suggest a couple of moves. But otherwise it hasn’t captured anyone else’s imagination and had them participate.
Sitting in my pile of RPGs to try are the new Fate Condensed rules, and the Fate Space Toolkit (a source book for running space themed Fate sessions).
It’s looking like the Cyberpunk Red core rules won’t be hitting the UK FLGS’s until the new year. It’s the now expected reasons for the delay of current world events. So I’ll try and get a copy then.
The last couple of days have seen the start of the Kaldheim spoilers.
If I remember correctly Kaldheim is a viking inspired set.
There have been a couple of cards spoilt that will be insane in my elf tribal Commander deck. Elven Ambush (below) potentially could give me an insane number of elves on the battlefield. With cards like Essence Warden (life gain), Elvish Vanguard (gets bigger), Ivy Lane Denizen (+1/+1 counter) also giving a major benefit from playing it.
Canopy Tactician gives a nice Lord effect making everything else bigger, and taps for 3 mana.
I like Sarulf, Realm Eater. I’d like to use it in the new deck I have in the works.
There are some nice looking angels as well in this set. And I really do need to revisit my angel deck and update it. Especially since Iona got banned.
Naturally I have preordered the two Commander decks that will be coming out along side Kaldheim. Plus a couple of the white and green themed boosters. I also have a prerelease kit preordered too. I’m still deciding whether I’ll get a draft booster or just a gift box.
I’m also tempted to pick up some of the excess prerelease kits that my FLGS has left over from previous sets. Thanks to world events times have been hard for all FLGS’s. It’s because of this that this rare opportunity is an option. Under normal circumstances this would not even be possible because they get sold out prerelease weekend. It’d be cool to use some as prizes once physical MtG is possible again to once more try and get something started locally.
