Hunts, Singletons and Dragalias

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I was all over the place this weekend as far as gaming time spent.  I would say that largely this was the weekend that I did not play World of Warcraft…  but that isn’t entirely true.  I logged in every day and did my Emissary quest, and then last night while watching Fear the Walking Dead season finale I was piddling around on my Draenei Paladin.  Past that however I didn’t end up doing much in the game I had until now been almost exclusively playing.  This weekend saw a major resurgence of Monster Hunter World, in part because they are just about to release the Wyvern Ignition blade quest to the PC crew and I want it.  In fact the Fall Festival event has a bunch of the quests all lumped together at once and I plan on trying to pick them up as well.  That means unfortunately I have to be able to get my way to High Rank, which also means I am going to need to play in a more focused manner than I am used to.

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Weirdly enough I have found myself lately favoring the Hammer instead of the Long Sword.  While I am still maintaining a collection of swords and effectively keeping both weapons up to date…  I am finding that there are just some monsters that become easy to farm with the hammer.  Namely Radobaan is nonsense easy with a hammer, and the stupid spin attack off of a surface is amazing in a whole lot of situations.  Right now I am largely sticking to the Iron line of hammers because it allows me to craft them fairly easily… and also sets me up for a Nergi hammer at some point.  I am up to the point in the quest chain where I need to hunt a Rathalos and a Diablos…  which will be challenging I am sure but also doable given I have beaten both of them multiple times.  Diablos should be considerably easier with a hammer than I am used to with Longsword.  The other weapon that I want to craft at some point in the switch axe, which is something I played with and enjoyed at high level but never really messed with at the lower levels.  If I am remembering correctly…  Zorah Magdaros is immediately following the quest chain I am on and then I will be moving into High Rank territory.  If I put my mind to it I should be able to wrap that up before the event starts I believe Thursday or Friday.

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The other game that I have been playing a shocking amount of lately is Magic the Gathering Arena.  On September 27th they launched the Open Beta and with it in theory the last of the card resets.  Since then I have started tinkering with decks and have a few reasonable options….  but honestly mostly find myself playing Stompy Green/Steel Leaf Champion or my Mono Black Burn deck.  The first I am still tuning but the Mono Black Burn is still performing like a champ, but since it was built before the advent of Guilds of Ravnica it could probably be greatly improved with a few cards that are now available and with splashing another color.  Assassin’s Trophy is still the champion of the new expansion so far, but I am also loving a bunch of cards like the Nullhide Feerox and as far as one drops go… I love Pelt Collector that increases in potency as you start summoning bigger creatures.

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They had a freebie event this weekend that allowed you to create a singleton deck and so long as you got a single win… you got an uncommon or better card.  This netted me several mythics and rares, but also served to keep me engaged and grinding.  Unfortunately they allowed Rat Colony decks…  which by rules can have any number of copies of the card rat colony…  so essentially when you get matched up with one of those you might as well concede out because there is no way your janky singleton mess can keep up with it.  I also had a large number of wins under questionable terms this weekend…  namely there were several times when I got an awful lot of damage out of Llanowar Elves.  I am not exactly proud of this moment when I enchanted one with Blanchwood Armor to ultimately win the game.  Guilds of Ravnica sealed was a heck of a lot of fun and I went 3/3 with my deck…  the prime problem being that my love of black and green keep me from drafting pretty much anything else.  It isn’t that I cannot see the good in other colors… its just that my brain values those colors over pretty much anything else.  I am in fact Golgari at heart.

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In the “Game I didn’t expect to play” category… I was somehow busy enough during the tail end of the week to completely miss Dragalia Lost becoming a thing.  As such on the podcast I was introduced to the game when all of the other members of the show were talking about it…  then was super slow getting the podcast out because I kept spacing out while playing it Sunday morning.  It is an awful lot of fun, but I am struggling with the same problem I have with other mobile games in thinking “this would be so much better if it were not a mobile game”.  I think I largely just hate touch screen interfaces, and while this game is an awful lot of fun… the clunky nature of having to drag your finger around the screen makes it feel extremely awkward.  If this were on the switch I would be completely hooked, but on a phone…  you still have that barrier that I don’t like playing on my phone.  The other problem I am encountering is it completely shreds my battery, so I guess I need to tweak down the settings to try and come up with a flavor that looks less pretty but doesn’t decimate my charge.

Lastly we have the podcast itself, that I named Gacha of Mana since Dragalia Lost reminded me so much of Secret of Mana.  You have a brash guy, a blond girl, and some sort of a sprite thing that provides a lot of the comic relief.  Anyways during the show we talk about Spiderman PS4, Magic the Gathering Arena Open Beta, Celeste, Dragalia Lost… and then a conversation about how the grind in Battle for Azeroth just feels lousy.  The last part is largely why I had a weekend without much Warcrafting, as I am trying to limit my exposure to maybe extend the amount of time it takes me to angrily quit.  I need to spend some time tonight doing Mythics, but in truth I have reached a point where that doesn’t even matter that much to me given it will be a box of disappointment on Tuesday.