Once again I did nonsense to finish out my weekly limited bounties in Monster Hunter World. The problem is my currently play times seem to be diametrically opposed to the play times of my friends who are currently playing the game. Most nights I start playing early in the evening… around 6 pm cst and am logging out around 9 pm when folks start to show up. As a result I have gotten used to doing things is really silly ways involving a bunch of random players. This weeks was weirdly harder than the 9 star quest in part because at the end of the day… people will likely always be farming Xeno’jiiva for parts and that quest is really hard to fail.
The 8 Star quest however is more or less Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Teostra, Kushala Daora, and Kirin. All six of those have a pretty high threshold for failure so I feel like more often than not players are just doing them solo… something that I weirdly don’t enjoy that much. So instead I check the SoS Roulette and see what is available and ultimately managed to get all of them done with random players. The easiest was weirdly enough Kirin… which considering how big of a pain in the butt the tempered version was seemed like it would have been the hardest. The most challenging is generally Nergigante because if you get players who legitimately need to fight him… they are more often than not simply unprepared for how much harder he is going to hit them than what they are used to.
The truth is I need to start farming Nergi for parts because there are several weapons I would love to be able to make that require copious amounts of bits. Last night I managed to craft the first version of the Nergi Sword and Shield, because in truth that is probably the weapon I am most comfortable with if I don’t have my longsword. I spent some time earlier in the week playing with Gun Lance because also as part of the weeklies I needed to kill a bunch of Fanged Wyvern… which mean’t I could kill that green punching bag Great Jagras over and over. I think its a weapon I could get used to with time, and I managed to pick up a couple of reasonable options during the Kulve Taroth event. Still very much in love with this game and hoping they give us some more surprise events soon… because I can sorta see an end to what I actually deeply want to be farming.
The rest of my evening last night was spent poking around with my Fauxlgari Exploratic deck which is a tweaked version of Golgari Exploration… one of the stock decks that come with MTG Arena. It is not the most successful thing in the world for me, but I enjoy playing it and if it is not going my way pretty early on I concede out to move on to the next battle. If everything goes as planned you end up with a few really powerful creatures that keep growing each round, combined with Lurking Chupacabra that you can use to start taking out critters on your opponents side. It isn’t perfect and I am sure I should tune it some more. Right now I feel like I am playing with way too much land because I have had moments where all I am drawing is land for way too many rounds in a row. Regardless I find the whole experience of playing it enjoyable and I can lose hours just plinking away at other players.
I think that ultimately is going to the role MTG Arena plays for me… just letting me play magic when I want to play it. For whatever reason MTG Duels and the year branded Planeswalker games always felt really limited in the types of magic I wanted to play. They were shadowboxed in on a specific number of sets and as a result it felt more limited than what we already have in Arena. I like just sitting down and playing, regardless of the win condition. Sure it gets frustrating when you go on a losing streak when you are one win away from being done for the day… but even then the simple playing of cards makes me happy. It is something I have missed more than I realized… simply because I don’t have access to a lot of MTG players right now. I play to have fun and my version of fun is not exactly drift compatible with the meta. I enjoy bad magic.