Exploration and Magic

Last night was one of those nights where I was driven by a purpose…  one that was over relatively quickly.  For the last month in Elder Scrolls Online there has been a Summerset expansion themed event where they have been challenging users to go out and get the Summerset Pathfinder achievement.  For doing this the community could earn rewards…  first a pet, then a mount and finally a nonsense house.  It was the nonsense house that really drew me out of the woodwork and while I feel bad that I did not participate until we had hit 100%…  I still wanted to get on and do the thing before the event expired which is I believe at some point today.  I have no clue when I will actually get my baubles but regardless I did the thing and saw the really pretty land mass known as Summerset in the process.

Now I am going to go back to not questing there until I managed to make it there organically.  I am really stubbon and weird about wanting to do content in the correct order… and even in systems that claim not to have a correct order…  I try and determine the optimal order.  For example in World of Warcraft Legion… the correct starting zone was Azsuna because that was the zone that had the first tier of profession quests (minus mining which was weirdly in Highmountain).  So I always started characters there in order to get them access to tradeskills as quickly as possible.  Similarly I could play the Star Wars the Old Republic content in any order I choose… yet I did the leg work to research the order in which it was released and have played through it in that fashion.  This is effectively what I am doing in Elder Scrolls Online as well… because I am odd.

The other thing that I played a significant amount of last night was Magic Arena which as of yesterday went into Open Beta.  Now several of us have been playing the Alpha and Closed Beta for awhile now, and are sorta sad to see our stockpile of cards go away.  They did a big wipe of everything between the Alpha/Closed Beta phases and in theory will not do another wipe period (unless there is some catastrophic issue that comes up between now and release).  I had enough gems that I managed to purchase my way back into my favorite deck so far… which is Mono Black Creature Burn.  This is by no means my creation, but I do plan on spending some time tweaking it eventually, and maybe even trying to build in for paper magic as well.  It only has a value of about $15 in physical cards so it is a pretty great entry level option that can be pretty brutal.  I’ve never run up against anyone playing something similar, and I think the way it works catches a lot of players off guard because it does a lot of things that deal damage to the player but mean me in the process…  allowing me to break out a Chainer’s Torment pretty early for a massive creature in the process at a stage of the game that they can’t really handle a 12/12.

That said it is completely weak to any sort of creature removal and you can chump block it for days…  but the deck also has a bunch of flyers to get in and plink away at anyone with an army of ground creatures.  If you end up with a board stall…  there are cards like Fell Specter, Vampire Neonate and Vampire Sovereign that can hit the opponent directly without actually attacking.  It has a good deal of hard creature removal, so you can sort of selectively remove their big bruiser.  It doesn’t have any ramp to speak of with a bunch of one drops that deal significant damage quickly like Viscious Conquistador...  that deals a point of damage to the opponent just by tapping them regardless of how combat resolves…  it can add up fast.  However in the above game the opponent lost because they got mana screwed… not because of some skill I had.

If you have ever played Magic the Gathering in the past, I highly suggest you check out Arena.  Hearthstone is cool…  but it isn’t Magic.  This is finally Magic the Gathering for the Hearthstone world and does an amazing job of delivering fast and fun gameplay.  You start off with a selection of Mono Color themed decks, and then each day there are quests allowing you to earn additional multi color decks… like today I picked up Chaos and Mayhem which is a themed Black/Red deck from the looks of it revolving around Rekindling Phoenix.  I am hoping this means I will also get back my beloved Explore matters deck… either that or I will get the tokens needed to build it.  One of the key differences between Magic Arena and Hearthstone is you get tokens that are good for one card of a specific rarity, instead of having a crafting system.  In some ways this is awesome, because you can swap a mythic placeholder for any mythic of your choice…  but there is no way to break down the cards you have no interest in to fuel the ones you do.  Basically it is a trade off but the placeholder tokens seem to still be pretty prevalent.  This makes getting a Mythic Placeholder feel awesome, because you know you can trade it for the card you actually wanted to pull from that pack.

Lastly it was requested that I get pictures of outdoor cat…  this is from this morning when I went out to feed and he was so much more interested in nomming the food than getting his picture taken.

This is from awhile back when you can actually see a little bit of face to go with the gratuitous munching.  It is a sweet baby, but unfortunately we are full up on cats… and another family has pseudo claimed him as theirs.  If they do not however let him come inside as it starts to get colder we may have to change that stance and at a bare minimum let him become garage cat…  since our girls likely would not take kindly to his presence.