Golgari vs Golgari

magic, Magic League, MtG

Saturday I went over to my friendly local purveyor of fine luxury cardboard rectangles (nicked that from the MTG Historian YouTube channel) or FLGS The Hobbit Hole as it is also known.

Old age had been playing its cruel tricks on me in the days leading up to the weekend. For some reason I’d thought there was another store champs happening, and had been building/updating my Standard deck (see my Golgari deck list – although it’s slightly out of date now and I’ll have to update it).

It was in fact Magic League time. I was there already, I had to be to pick up some product. So thought why not? Opening packs and building decks is always fun. Although history should have taught me by now I never do great with my pulls in these sealed events.

I ended up throwing my red and white pulls together to make a Boros deck. It was a deck, not a great deck, used the throw spaghetti against wall and see what sticks method. Others there seemed to be taking the whole thing a lot more seriously, and spending a lot of time analysing cards and building their most optimal deck.

So while that was going on John (the pusher of fine luxury cardboard rectangles) and myself had a game of standard using our standard decks that we are planning to use in the standard showdowns (which start next weekend).

It was Golgari vs Golgari. A mirror match up? Not quite. Johns plan and cards were based around the graveyard and the undergrowth mechanic. Mine as you saw in the deck list (even with the tweaks) is an aggro deck. It’s creatures and removal. If you include the Ravenous Chupacabra and Thrashing Brontodon there is 13 pieces of removal of one form or another in the 60. Something that it would turn out plays into John’s plan. Apparently the more competitive regular players at the shop play a lot of removal or denial in their decks. So now I have a little bit of info on the meta I might be facing next weekend.

Anyway in our first game it came down to one moment. It was fairly evenly balanced. I’d been removing John’s creatures with my removal suite, that had pumped John’s creatures. He had a 12/12 flyer on the board because of this. I was empty handed, and needed an answer. I needed to top deck a solution. Ideally as John said at the start of my turn, some removal. I didn’t draw any of my removal. But I did draw the next best thing. Masterminds Acquisition. Plus I had the mana to cast it and cast the solution I fetched. I went to my sideboard and fetched my walk the plank. Obviously I remove the threat and swung in for the win.

Our second game was more one sided. John did get his Vraska, Golgari Queen out and use her +2 ability once. He was lucky I didn’t have any open mana at the time. But my turn was easy, I cast my Vraska’s Contempt and got rid of her. There seems to be a bit of poetry of removing Vraska with her own contempt! I was also building up a few creatures on the battlefield, dealing damage, and finally swinging in with lots of lethal.

It was interesting to see the two different approaches to the same guild. Obviously John was building for the meta he plays in. While I built for a play style I like, and not knowing what meta I’ll be up against. It was also reassuring to see my deck work as planned and great to test it.

I did get my butt handed to me in my single Magic League game. The only notable thing was they were playing a 3 colour deck, oh and unlike me put thought into their deck.

To go with my haul, I bought 3 copies of the 3 cost Pitiless Gorgan, and 2 copies of Demotion. Those 5 cards were 90p. I do like Pitiless Gorgan, not just the art, but as a 3 drop to play.

I’ll go over my pulls from the haul in another post.

Targi, Perudo and Small Detectives

Fenland Gamers, game night

Have 2 weeks passed already? A Friday evening gaming and a monthly meetup in the same week, that’s always a good week. Jonathan had repaired the table. Which I’m very grateful for. He saved the day.

According to the Facebook event we were expecting to be a total of 3 turning up. But ended up as 7 in total. It’s a bit annoying when this happens because we generally use the information from the event page to help guide what games to take along.

We split into 2 groups. James and I played a learning game of Targi. Whilst the other 5 played Forbidden Sky. I bought Targi as a purchase of opportunity at Tabletop Gaming Live the other weekend. It had been on my radar since Zee looked at it on the Dice Tower YouTube channel earlier in the year.

Targi is a 2 player worker placement game, with some set collection thrown in. Because of the number of players playing the other game James and myself were playing on a table that was just big enough for the main board. We had to use chairs for the player tableaus.

I liked the robber mechanic used in the game. It acts as a timer for the game for starters. Once the robber has completed a circuit of the board the game ends, unless the other game end trigger happens first. The robber is also used to block actions. As the robber moves on to a space, that space is not available for selection that round by players. And finally there are 4 spaces (the corners) on the board that when the robber lands on them trigger the players having to give up resources,gold or victory points.

The whole taking turns to select actions on the outside of the board, and not being able to select a row column occupied by the other player is nice. Because you are also getting to take the tribe or goods card in the middle where your Targi intersect, you are having to try and balance between choosing actions you really want and getting the goods/tribe card in the middle you really want. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive. I love the fact you only take the actions selected at the end of the round when you remove the counter. You get to select the order things resolve. That way you get to make sure you have the resources needed to buy that tribe card.

It’s cool the middle area of the board is constantly changing as you use the goods or buy the tribe card there. Especially when the used card gets replaced by its opposite. So a tribe card gets replaced by a goods card, and vice versa.

There is no resource hogging in this game, you are not allowed more than 10 goods and 3 gold to carry over between rounds. Any excess gets returned to the general supply.

The set collection element of the tribe cards for your tableau is nice. The fact they only score on complete rows of 4 is a great touch. Either player getting 12 tribe cards in their tableau also triggers the end of the game.

You can probably tell there is a lot to this game. I haven’t covered everything, about 80% or 90% of it. It actually took longer to play than I thought it would for a 2 player game. Maybe that’s because it was our learning game. But still it was a very enjoyable game, and definitely one I’m glad to add to my collection of 2 player games. The only issue with this whole game category is they don’t get played often enough.

Oh the history books will record that James beat me by a narrower margin than I thought it would be. I think there were 4 points between us, and that’s despite him having a complete 12 card tableau to mine incomplete one of half the cards.

As luck would have it both games finished at roughly the same time.

Our second game of the evening was a members favourite, the dice bluffing game Perudo. This time I was able to bluff my way to victory.

We finished the evening off with Small Detectives. A great little find by Jonathan, and still enjoyable. I think this was the first time I’d played it at the full player count of 5. Not sure if the optimal player count is 3 and 4 for this game. 5 players meant I was being blocked a lot of the time, I saw only one tile before Jonathan correctly guessed the solution. So it worked out in his favour, he got to see enough to make a correct guess. I did suspect and was proved correct afterwards that one player (the tablebreaker) had been cheating and making a note of the suspects and weapons they’d seen on their phone. It’s a memory game, you have 6 things in total to remember. I’m not impressed by this person as you may be able to tell. Still no apology for breaking the table. Although Jonathan did make a brave attempt at defusing any tension, and the elephant in the room by making light of the table incident. Jonathan compliments me quite well, he’s a better human being than me. I still had as little to do with the tablebreaker as possible.

It was a great evening of gaming. The staff at The Luxe were super amazing as usual. Fantastic hosts.

Golgari Stompy – Standard Deck

magic, MtG, MtG Deck Building

I needed a Standard deck to play at Standard Showdown. A few of the cards that I used in my mono black aggro deck had just rotated out. So I used this as an opportunity to update it to a green/black or golgari deck. The Assassin’s Trophy when I saw it kind of put that idea into my head.

So the “classic” combo of Llanowar Elves with Steel Leaf Champion were obvious additions. But what else? Well because this is stompy, Ghalta and Carnage Tyrant were also must adds.

I still kept the Mastermind’s Acquisition, it allows me to run some single copies of cards,and to go into my side board for an answer or even my library. That card has saved me a couple of times in the past.

As you can see I finally decided after a week of flip flopping to settle on Skittering Heartstopper. The deciding factor was it’s ability to still be around after a Chainwhirler.

This should be hopefully a fastish deck. The ideal opening hand has a swamp, forest, one of the dual lands, Llanowar Elves, Steel Leaf Champion, Assassin’s Trophy and any of the 3 or 4 drops. This deck wants to be hitting hard and fast. But I also want it to have the ability to go to a mid to late game if need be. That’s where my 4 drops and above come in. 3 mana allows me to play the majority of my deck.

Here’s the deck break down.


I’m really chuffed with the AMC. I’m fairly happy with the mana curve. If all goes to plan in a game those 3 and 4 CMC cards are coming out a turn early.

I was flipping shocked when I saw how much the deck would cost me to buy if I didn’t have the cards. I’m lucky I had 99% of the cards already. One or two of them have had to come out of a Commander deck or two (I’ve left a card in the decks to remind me what came from where). I could have pushed the cost up of the deck by running a playset of Overgrown Tomb and a full playset of Woodland Cemetry, and I could have justified the cost by saying that they could be used in other decks afterwards. But deep down I know I couldn’t justify the purchase knowing I had the plenty of the slower and cheaper Gates.

Here is the list of cards that make up my Golgari Stompy deck.

Creatures:29

4 Llanowar Elves
4 Skittering Heartstopper
4 Vicious Conquistador
4 Dire Fleet Poisoner
4 Steel Leaf Champion
2 Thrashing Brontodon
1 Nullhide Ferox
3 Ravenous Chupacabra
2 Carnage Tyrant
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger

Spells:10

2 Duress
3 Assassin’s Trophy
2 Mastermind’s Acquisition
3 Vraska’s Contempt

Lands:21

6 Forest
1 Foul Orchard
4 Golgari Guildgate (a)
1 Overgrown Tomb
7 Swamp
2 Woodland Cemetery

Sideboard:15

2 Kitesail Freebooter
2 Thrashing Brontodon
1 Demon of Catastrophes
1 Ravenous Chupacabra
1 Doom Whisperer
1 Tetzimoc, Primal Death
1 Ghalta, Primal Hunger
1 Silent Gravestone
2 Walk the Plank
1 Never Happened
1 Vraska, Golgari Queen
1 The Immortal Sun

Monthly Meetup October 2018

Fenland Gamers, game night

Last night was the October monthly meet up for the Fenland Gamers at our amazingly generous hosts The Luxe Cinema.

The evening started off well. Jonathan had finally joined the Ice Blast Crew! It’s the drink of choice for the group. Jonathan and Nathan had a rare opportunity to direct the banter at me. I give as good as I get, and it’s nice for them to get this rare occasion where they have the upper hand. My turn will come again.

We split into 2 gaming groups, a group of 4 and group of 3.

Jonathan, Gavin and myself started off playing Kingdomino. I hadn’t played Kingdomino before. I know it had a bit of buzz when it came out, and it’s got an expansion and a follow up, was even nominated for an award or two. But it had not made my radar for something to play. Gavin was keen to try it, and I was happy to give it a go.

Wow. How much fun is the game? Lots. It is quick to teach, simple mechanics to grasp, and quick to play. I love the tile selection mechanic used to determine the order of choosing in the following round. It presents some nice tough decisions to make with such a simple mechanic. Do you go for that tile you really need and chose last next time? Do you hate draft to block someone else? Which could also potentially mean you get to chose last. Or do you try and get that first selection for the next round because there is a tile you really must have?

Then you have the placement mechanic working along the lines of the pub classic dominos, and being limited to a 5 x 5 grid, and getting an end game scoring bonus if your start tile is in the dead centre of a completed 5 x 5 grid.

That is literally all there is to the game, a handful of simple mechanics that seem to work so well together to create a fast, fun game.

Somehow in our 3 player game I managed to run away with the victory. But we then added a fourth player, taught the game in seconds, and we were back playing. This time I was getting less of the selections I really wanted. A few rounds I was finding hard not to be the one choosing last, because that was the only option I was left with. There was very little denial drafting going on. I thought Jonathan was running away with the game, he had large scoring areas that we had failed to prevent. Sadly those scoring areas were also ones I was going for early on also. But when it came down to the final scoring, I lost to Jonathan by 4 points. That was a lot closer than I thought it would be. So yes I was first loser.

Our second game of the evening was another new game to me, No Thanks!. Wow another simple game to learn, but so much fun. You either take the current card or pass and place a token on it. If you have no tokens in front of you, you can’t pass. So you are forced to take cards until you get some tokens. The idea is to have at the end of the game the lowest score. That’s an over simplification of the card bit, which involves collecting runs of cards, say 33,32,31,30 but you only score the lowest value of the run. So that example run would be worth 30 points. I also didn’t mention that there are 9 cards removed at the start of the game from the deck. So there may or may not be a run, and you get stuck with a high value card. Sometimes you need to take that high value card because there are just too many tokens on it, that the points it will give you out weighs the fact you need those tokens. I lost the first game we played on the tie breaker. Gavin won our second game, and I won the third and final game. And yes it was that much fun.

For me No Thanks joins the ranks of Red 7, The Mind and Love Letter: Batman that are fun little filler games that should always be in the bag. So yes this will be joining the collection real soon.

Our final game of the evening was The Resistance. 8 resistance fighters, but they had been infiltrated by 3 traitors. A fun way to have everyone playing together at the end of the evening. Luckily I was using my copy of the game that I use with students. With the mess that the Ice Blast drinks create from the ice on the outside melting, and one or two players being less than careful with game components, this worn copy of the game was the ideal one to use. And these two points are starting to become a bit of an issue on club nights. Our hobby is an expensive one, some of the games we own and play are beautifully made and expensive. So you would hope/expect those playing to show a little respect to using someone else’s game. Sadly it’s not happening. Which does make you reluctant to bring games along to play.

However back to our hunt to find those traitors to the cause, who were sabotaging our missions. Our first mission was a roaring success, despite us having to refresh our memories to the rules. Mission 2 was foiled, there was definitely a traitor in our ranks. But who? Mission 2 had 2 people from the initial mission and 2 newbies. It had to be one of the newbies. Mission 3 was a roaring success. I’d been on all 3, and I think by now the majority had been on a mission. So despite having been on 2 successful missions I was under suspicion. Mission 4 I wasn’t on, but somehow a traitor had managed to sneak on to the team and once again sabotage it. It was all down to the final mission. We thought we knew who weren’t spies. The final missions team was selected, and it was a failure. The traitors had won. when the smoke cleared, we had identified correctly 2 of the traitors. But Jonathan had done the con job of the century and managed to avoid suspicion the whole game.

After the game as we were clearing up, I was once more the brunt of banter from my good friends. This time teasing me about being a fanboy who wouldn’t sell out. So yes that time had come again real quick. Twice in the same evening. I must be getting old. I enjoy the banter, it’s good fun, nothing nasty. Although I forgot to pay Gavin back for his awful joke on Twitter the other day. It was truly awful and deserved retaliation. Ok the joke was “which spice girl can carry the most petrol?”, “Jerri Can”. See it was bad.

Then the evening went tits up once more. The frickin’ idiot who I talked about previously, broke my folding table I use for gaming. The folding table the club uses for our game nights now at The Luxe. Snapped two rivets connecting the legs to the supports that keep them in place when set up. The support collapses, is held rigged by a sliding metal ring. But no if it won’t collapse, just repeatedly force and break it. Not a word of apology, offer to fix it, or replace it. To say that I was not happy was yet again an understatement. I really don’t know what to do about the guy.

Jonathan kindly offered to take the table home and fix it. The earliest I could even start to look at repairing the table was Sunday. Which would totally screw up our planned Friday evening gaming session at The Luxe. Hopefully it is just a matter of replacing the broken rivets with screws or bolts, and that no other damage was done.

Otherwise it had been a great evening of gaming.

A None Boardgaming Project

Uncategorized

I have a current none board game related project on the go at the moment. It’s going a bit slowly. Mainly because there is only a specific time that I actually do it.

I’m slowly working my way through the Judge Dredd Chronicles, which is 30 odd volumes at the moment I believe. I’m on volume 3! The reason for the slow progress is that I only read it when I’m having a relaxing long soak in the bath at the weekends.

So I’ve covered The Cursed Earth and The Day The Law Died storylines in the first 2 volumes. Which are classics I grew up with. Although for the Cursed Earth storyline I went and got the uncensored version. Apparently the 2 fast food chains parodied in a couple of the issues for a while scared the publisher enough not to reprint those parts of the story.

Volumes 4 and 5 that arrived yesterday cover another 2 of my favourite storylines The Judge Child, and The Apocalypse War. After that 2000A.D. and myself separated. It wasn’t anything they did, just college and work got in the way. Although we did meet up again when he crossed over with Batman for a one shot.

But during that time I did have fond memories of playing the Judge Dredd boardgame (which is now back in my collection). I remember having the role playing game and it’s companion book, but that got lost somewhere in moves over the years. If it turns up I’ll be over the moon.

I never got into the Judge Dredd mini’s game. But that was more of where I was in life at the time than anything else.

I wouldn’t mind getting the Mongoose games Dredd RPG that came out in the early 2000’s. I think that may have used D&D v3.5 as it’s core system. But don’t quote me on that. But it would be great to use the stuff for that as source material for a Genesys based RPG.

So with the a new Judge Dredd RPG currently on Kickstarter (oh I’m very very tempted), a boardgame set in the Cursed Earth using the Lost Expedition as it’s basis coming out next year. I’m sure going to be fanboying it up with one of my all time favourite comic book characters.

I also like that there are plans for Rogue Trooper stuff (I have the 80’s boardgame in the collection) and there is a Strontium Dog mini’s skirmish game (although I was put off it because of my usual complaint about this type of game). So it really is nice to see these great IP’s starting to get some love again. But for now I’m enjoying old favourites, and then looking forward to seeing what new adventures the stone faced lawman got up to.

Flip flopping

magic, MtG, MtG Deck Building

Yesterday morning I was “deckbuilding” or more like gathering the cards I have for my Standard deck to use at this coming weekends store championship at my FLGS The Hobbit Hole.

At the moment I have Hired Poisoner in the deck, but it’s eating away at me that maybe I should be putting Skittering Heartstopper back in instead. Skittering Heartstopper had that slot in the deck in the old mono black aggro deck before rotation gutted it.

Why do I like Skittering Heartstopper? In this post Goblin Chainwhirler world it’s going to stay on the board. It will also block other 1/1 creatures and remain on the board (assuming they don’t have deathtouch). Plus I can give it deathtouch and have it take out a much bigger creature. Which is nice, and something an opponent has to think about before swinging in with that big hitter. However I do have to sit with 1 swamp untapped to be able to do that. And that’s a draw back.

Hired Poisoner I like because it’s a 1/1 with deathtouch. That makes it a great chump blocker taking out much bigger and costlier creatures. However in this post Goblin Chainwhirler world will it be able to stay on the board long enough to do that kind of job? I like that I don’t have to hold a swamp back to activate the deathtouch.

I have no idea what the meta is like at The Hobbit Hole. I’m expecting that I will have to go up against decks with Goblin Chainwhirler in them. I’d be surprised if I didn’t. I’m also expecting I may be up against “mirror” decks. I was at the last one, although we did differ by one or two cards.

As I finish writing this post I think I’ve talked myself into…

Binge viewing day

Uncategorized

Yesterday ended up being a binge tv day. Amazon Prime had just put up Season 3 of the excellent series they produce The Man in the High Castle. Which is based on the Philip K. Dick book of the same name.

I’ve never read the book, so I’ve no idea if they have gone beyond the book now, if they are still within the plot of the book, or even if they have deviated from the book much. However I am a fan of his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the movie that was based on that. Plus I loved A Scanner Darkly (another one I hadn’t read the book for).

So when Amazon released The Man in the High Castle just the source material had me interested. Then the synopsis got me really interested. The whole alternate history thing I love. The what if? For this book/series the premise is the Germans and Japanese won the Second World War. America has been split by the two victors. But it’s an uneasy peace, the threat of war between the two bubbling underneath. Against this backdrop you have these films turning up mysteriously showing a world where the Germans and Japanese lost the war. These are all linked to The Man in the High Castle, and a kind of resistance movement.

I’m really enjoying the series, good acting, not bad effects for tv these days. The story has now introduced multiverses, and a plot of multiverse domination by the Germans. Can’t wait for series 4.

Naturally you were expecting me to be writing about the no holds barred Commander game. But that fell through. Crowded social calendar meant that the others who had planned to take part couldn’t. Luckily I knew Friday evening, and hadn’t driven for an hour, and sat around looking like Billy no mates at the library.

So in a moment of boredom I decided to recreate visually what Zo-Zu the Commander of my mono red mass land hate deck thought the real reason was.

I did see on icv2 a news story about an interesting expansion for Catan. This one is for charity and is educational! The charity being supported is the Global Crop Diversity Trust and the expansion is called the Catan Crop Trust Scenario kit.

“But in this semi-cooperative scenario, players must balance the needs of the future against their immediate plans by working with the other players to store and preserve seeds.  If players overharvest, they risk damage to the environment, possibly causing a collapse of the food supply.”

Sounds really interesting. Apparently it’s big introduction to the world will be at Essen. I’m gobsmacked they didn’t chose Tabletop Gaming Live last weekend for that! That’s sarcasm folks.

But I like the sound of this, and has now jumped on to my wishlist.

No Holds Barred Commander Game This Saturday

Commander, magic, MtG

This Saturday the Huntingdon and Chatteris MtG Group that some of my ex-students set up will meet up at their usual location of Huntingdon Library and play what I call a No Holds Barred game of Commander.

Usually the group plays with the usual Commander rules, plus the social contract of

  • No mass land destruction
  • No infinite loops
  • It’s not a big list but one that hopefully makes the games enjoyable for everyone even if they lose.
  • But the game Saturday those rules are off the table, you can play mass land destruction, you can go infinite. Plus one or two of the regular Commander rules get suspended. Your Commander can be a Planeswalker (not just the ones that have the text allowing them to be), and there is no ban list.
  • My entry into this game will be a slightly tweaked mono red mass land destruction deck.
  • I’m looking forward to seeing what the others have in their decks of hate. I’m also hoping that there will be a chance to give the new goblins tribal deck an outing.

    • Some of my pulls from the GoR booster box

    magic, MtG

    Last weekend was Prerelease weekend for Guilds of Ravnica, I didn’t attend a Prerelease event (I gave that up for the disappointing Tabletop Gaming Live) but I did get a booster box and the 2 Planeswalker decks.

    So I thought I’d share with you some of the cards I pulled got from 40 booster packs in total that I cracked open. I will put a disclaimer here, these may not be the best cards in the set. However they are cards that I liked the art of, or thought I could use in one of my Commander decks. Sadly for this set none of the legendary creatures I saw in previews grabbed me, and made me jump up and want to build a deck around them, or even use them in a deck.

    I was chuffed to pull Vraska, I liked the art for this version of the Planeswalker, and the abilities were not bad. I’m half tempted to use her in a Commander deck. But at the moment I’m more interested in having her in the sideboard for my golgari Standard Deck for Store championships. Which was why I was over the moon to get one Assassin’s Trophy (which I think before Prerelease was the most expensive card to buy on preorder. I don’t think the price has dropped since either). Ideally and living in cloud cuckoo land, and having the Magic equivalent of a lottery win, I was dreaming/hoping of more than one copy of this to be pulled. As I said I could dream. I can see it as a Commander card, but this is going to be a strong removal card for my Standard Deck. Chromatic Lantern is going to go into a lot of decks. It’s such a good mana fixer.

    Impervious Greatwurm the buy-a-box promo. I saw that in the previews and thought that was made for my big green stompy deck. I can’t wait to find a spot for it and play the deck again. And I love the flavour text of the card, it is so me, and my stompy deck.

    Vicious Rumours is definitely a multiplayer game or Commander card. I love the art on it. Definitely think I’ll be using it a deck or two in the future. Another card I really love the art of is Thought Erasure. It has that noir look to it. Very atmospheric.

    Never Happened, a more costly Duress? Maybe but it should help to stop that nasty graveyard shenanigans happening. The addition of picking from the hand or graveyard and exiling I think makes the extra cost worth it. I love the art also. The next 2 cards I like for the cheapness to use in a black aggro deck. In fact Hired Poisoner may replace a card in the new deck. The flavour text is cool too.

    I know at the top of the post I said none of the legendary creatures inspired me with deck ideas. There was potentially one exception. Niv-Mizzet, Parun. I have another Niv-Mizzet legendary creature. Sooo the idea of building a deck around them and their abilities might be interesting. Or would they fit better in a death and taxes style deck?

    Ok Homeward Path isnt from GoR but I thought I’d tag it on to the end because I got it in the post the same day. Forgot how I stumbled across the card, but it was a must have. I hate having my commander stolen, it throws a serious spanner in the game plan. This will be my protection against that.

    Did you get any good pulls from the weekend?

    Scythe Encounters Announced

    news

    This December sees the release of Scythe Encounters. 32 fan designed encounter cards for my all time favourite game Scythe. Sufferers will remember my recent preview post of four cards for this where I rambled on trying to sound intelligent about the cards. But they were pretty sweet cards.

    You can find links to other preview cards from Scythe Encounters and preorder links HERE.

    Looks like Christmas arrives a couple of weeks early.