magic: the gathering Archives - Page 2 of 4

MTG Arena Beta

April 18, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday was of course the ninth anniversary of the Tales of the Aggronaut blog… and Wizards of the Coast got me a present. Roughly halfway through the day I checked my mail and noticed that I got an email from WotC inviting me to the closed beta of Arena… their attempt at making a modern Magic the Gathering client. The truth is Hearthstone has been eating their lunch for several years now due to its extreme accessibility. It also does the dual whammy of giving both a nostalgia buzz for magic the gathering and collectible card games in general… while delivering a fatal blow of world of warcraft nostalgia at the same time. It’s a good game… and honestly lately I have been playing quite a bit of the warrior rush deck, but even that said… it is no Magic the Gathering. There is just something about this game that causes me to follow the community and buy cards… even though I don’t get to play that often.

The biggest problem for me is that I don’t really have a LGS or Local Gaming Store to be spending my time at. I live out in the burbs and the closest thing to me is on the opposite end of Tulsa from where I live… making it not exactly convenient to go to in the evenings and play cards. Where a game like Hearthstone or Arena comes in is it allows me to get that fix… without the need to actually get hands on other players. That said I am working on fostering a little community at work for lunch time gaming and am building up some balanced decks to sort of make an easy drop in and play environment. All of that said… it is just so much easier to get online at the end of a day and get my gaming fix rather than trying to coordinate with other human beings.

When you start up the Arena client you are given a handful of packs to start crafting your own decks with. This assortment essentially encompassed the last two blocks of play… Rivals of Ixalan, Ixalan, Hour of Devastation and Amonkhet. I got a handful of decent cards and could have probably crafted together a serviceable deck from them. I personally like these two blocks of play theme wise and together they give quite a bit of reasonable synergy. I believe the plan going forward is to largely limit Arena to standard sets by default… which seems a little if that were the case why Kaladesh and Aether Revolt are not included. It was my understanding that when the Kaladesh block cycles out the Amonkhet block will as well in Q4 2018. Quite frankly I struggle keeping these things in my head as to which sets are in and which sets are out because it doesn’t seem anywhere near as clear as it used to be. I apparently am not the only person to think this because there is literally a website called What is In Standard.

One thing that is going to be a challenge to get used to is that the pack structure is vastly different from live paper magic. When you open a pack you get a grand total of 8 cards instead of 15 cards… which I hope means they are going to charge a reduced price for the packs when the whole buying packs for money thing is eventually introduced. You get a single rare/mythic, two uncommons, and five commons. If you already have more than a play set of a card they replace it instead with a token as you can see underneath Samut in the above picture. These can then be spent to fill out missing holes in your collection trading a rare for a rare or a mythic for a mythic. At first I could not understand why I kept getting them since at this point in my head… I had only opened a handful of packs.

Also in your collection are a wide variety of deck archetypes built and ready to go. Personally I have been shifting back and forth between Golgari Exploration for which Green/Black has always been my preferred color set, and Legion of Dusk which similarly is heavy black and vampire themed enough to ignore the fact that I am using white mana. I love the exploration mechanic and when it compounds with cards that do stuff when any card explores. This means you can get some really big critters on the board that escalate rapidly. Ultimately in a perfect situation I want a foul orchard out on turn one, Wildgrowth Walker on turn two, and then some combination of creatures that explore like Seeker’s Squire or Ixalli’s Diviner to pump up the Walker and start my assault proper. What that works it is beautiful… when it doesn’t there seem to be enough alternate paths to victory to hang in for a very long time.

For the most part the client itself plays exactly like you would expect a magic client to play. It does a lot of things for you, like if you have no plays it goes ahead and skips to the next turn which is likely going to throw you off at first. There is a way to flip the client into a more granular level having you verify each and every trigger that happens… which would be important for more technical decks. I do feel like the timeout is maybe a little bit long given how many phases you have to get through… there have been times that matches have taken forever because the other player was just slow at evaluating their options… or potentially just doing something else at the same time. Unlike the Duels of the Planeswalkers clients I never felt like it was rushing me through things and causing me to lose card play opportunities. It seems to have some intelligence built into the client and stalls anytime it thinks you might have a play option, and so far it has not missed a time when I needed to play a card in response to something.

After each victory you are awarded a single random card, and there are various quests that you can be working on while playing matches. For example you can see in the bar that I am at 8 wins of 10 needed for my next pack of Rivals of Ixalan. The pack quests seem to come at 5 victories, 10 victories and 15 victories… and not sure if that trend continues on every 5 victories or if you are limited to 3 packs per week. Similarly there are quests that I had already completed like Kill 13 of your opponents creatures or cast 13 white or blue spells, each of those rewarding 250 gold. The in game pack purchasing mechanism allows you to buy a pack every 1000 gold, so essentially after doing four of these quests you can get some more cards. I am assuming this gold currency will also eventually be used for drafting which sadly is not in yet… but I believe they have talked about wanting that game play mode exists.

The only real thing you need to know is the fact that I set up my account around 6:30 last night and the next thing I knew… it was 9:30. The game is extremely good and brought back all of the right nostalgia beats for sitting around playing magic the gathering and trying to figure out how to dig yourself out of a card draw hole. There are times when things go extremely well… then there are other times like the above match when things go south really quickly. I just could not get the exploration cards I needed to power up my front line and managed to keep the other player long enough to get a recursive combo on the ground. As a result they manages to gain up 183 life before finally finishing me off in a single round. I could have conceded at any point, but I wanted to see how big they could manage to get their health pool. Even in a horrible loss condition… I was entertained. I look forward to seeing how this product evolves over time and I am likely going to start streaming it on occasion so you can laugh at me as I make obvious mistakes.

Bizarre Obsession

July 17, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend we recorded somewhat of a mega show of AggroChat. We originally sat down thinking we might not have a complete show… and then recorded for two hours and wound up dropping a few topics to try and manage the show length. There were a whole slew of topics but one of which is one that I did not expect to blow up to the level at which it did. Kodra has been talking magic for a year or so in his adventures in doing drafts through Magic Online for each of the expansion releases that have happened. Lately however I have found myself obsessing about the game even though I have not regularly played it since the tempest cycle. Magic the Gathering will always have this nostalgic characteristic for me because I have had a lot of really good times playing it. The problem is… once I entered the adult world I stopped having a regular stream people to play with. I’ve never really gotten involved with a local shop doing the Friday night magic thing, because in truth people just don’t play Magic the Gathering the way I want to play it. The prevalence of NetDecking and combo magic turned things into a weird cold war… where you either needed to be playing whatever the new hotness needed to be… or at least come up with a way to counteract that new hotness. When I last stopped playing… the format of choice was called “Type II” and I believe this translates to the “Standard” in the current naming of formats. So when I left during the Tempest cycle it was all about the combo to beat… and either scrambling to get the cards… or scrambling to get something to beat it.

The style of Magic the Gathering I enjoyed was back when you never quite knew what you might be encountering in a players deck. Maybe it just took my area while to get super competitive, but in early tournament play I only ever once encountered the “power nine” but instead came up against a lot of seemingly fun to play themed decks. For me a lot of my decks centered around some card that I wanted to play with… and then blunting the negative effects of that card. So say I wanted to play with the Lord of the Pitt, I would run some token creatures that I could just keep churning out to feed to it rather than pay the 7 life upkeep. If I wanted to play with Leviathan I would run Icy Manipulator and Twiddle to keep from having to pay the two island tax to untap it each round, then figure out some way to retrieve islands from the graveyard every so often. It was fun trying to figure out a way to counteract what was not good about the cards and then figure out how to make them work well enough to be playable. Some of the most fun I ever had was in college the magic store I used to hang out in had a deep common bin… and we would end up building these $5 decks out of the archives and then pit them against each other. I guess the modern equivalent to this would be pauper, but even then… that format takes itself way more seriously than I wish I could when it comes to MTG. I’ve been trying to sort out a way to play the game how I want to play it… but also find some people to play with.

The biggest problem right now is availability of people. There are enough folks who have played MTG at one point in their lives to maybe create a lunch time group at work. The problem there I am not not sure what sort of format would work best. I am leaning towards something janky along the lines of Pauper Commander… without the commanders. Where you functionally construct a deck of common cards without the ability to repeat any cards. I would functionally need to probably fund a lot of the commons given that there are simply not enough in any one set to make up a deck of entirely common cards. I think a format like that however might bring back the random weirdness that I miss from playing Magic. There were moments where you would sit down and encounter something you never expected to see… and it would be interesting to figure out how to adjust to that and find a way to either defeat it or work around it. In truth I love common cards, because they tend to be the unappreciated workhorses of magic. It always bugs me a bit when people just dismiss them and toss them aside like garbage… when you cannot really make ANY deck without relying on a whole slew of them to serve as the glue between those higher dollar cards. I have no clue how this will end but thusfar it has simply been a case of be re-familiarizing myself with Magic the Gathering and trying to figure out if this is really something I want to jump back into.

Tale of Dice Games

January 31, 2017 by Belghast

It is bizarre to me how I went into Pax South thinking it would be largely about the Nintendo Switch for me… and it wound up becoming almost entirely about Tabletop gaming. More so it was the tale of dice games… and my experiences trying three different ones. There was King of Tokyo that I had never actually played, and while I found it enjoyable it wasn’t exactly the sort of game I was going to rush right out into the store and purchase. Then there was Dragon Dice… which sounded familiar at the time as a game that TSR once published… and it turns out that in fact it is the same game just self published by the creator now. The problem is that I looked in the general direction of the booth and got sucked in by an extremely motivated salesperson in the form of what I can only guess was the thirteen year old daughter of the creator. I sat down to play… and got Ashgar roped into doing the same. So we played and tried our best to wriggle out of the booth as soon and as politely as possible. It was bad… and not just in a general sense of not fun… but bad in a sense of whoever attacked first essentially put the other player on the ropes for the rest of the game and since attack and defense is out of the same dice roll… it made it extremely hard to ever recover. As a result we avoided anything else that was dice related like the plague… that is until while waiting in the hour and a half long Dauntless line I ended up getting into a random conversation with the folks I was standing shoulder to shoulder with as is the way of PAX. We started talking about our favorite games of the show so far, and one of these other folks mentioned Dice Throne. So before the night was up we wound up making our way over to the Dice Throne booth in the PAX Rising area, where unfortunately no one was giving demos at that moment. However they mentioned that in the tabletop area there was a completely different set up where folks had been playing nonstop. Little did I know that essentially this would be the last thing I played during my time at PAX and would eat up my last few hours.

I am of course swiping images left and right from the Dice Throne twitter and Kickstarter for the purpose of this post. The game itself is a weird mix of dice battling, action RPG and Magic the Gathering starter deck duels. Each player chooses a character to play from the current list of Barbarian, Moon Elf, Pyromancer and Shadow Thief… with Paladin and Monk playable at the show but ultimately stretch goals in the kickstarter. Each character comes with a unique play mat, card deck, five dice, and a sheet that describes their status effects that they can give to opponents and explains the chance of rolling a given symbol on the dice. What made the game addictive to me was the aspect that as you move through the session you can play cards on top of your playmat and upgrade your base abilities. Sometimes this is just a matter of making the abilities more efficient, or having a lower number of dice needed to trigger the effect. In the case of the game where I played the Shadow Thief… some of the cards actually served as two completely different abilities that you could then choose from. I personally only have experience with the Barbarian and Shadow Thief, but I think Ashgar and Paragon wound up playing Shadow Thief vs Paladin… in which I heard that the Paladin is completely brutal.

Regardless of the specific configuration the game is ultimately a game about duels… which admittedly is the part that makes me the most excited. I love tabletop games… but I don’t exactly have a wide circle of people that I can play them with locally. I mean I could branch out and just show up at a game shop and look for people to play… but that isn’t really my way. I am way too introverted to ever make that work. So instead I have limited opportunities usually one friend at a time to play things. Dice Throne is absolutely perfect for this situation because it creates a completely meaningful experience with only two players. In theory this game also works with any multiple of two, in that players can set up 2 vs 2 or 3 vs 3 scenarios and some of the cards would play perfectly into that situation. The reason Magic the Gathering comes into play as a reference for this game is that it is set up in a number of phases: Upkeep, Income and Draw, Main Phase 1, Offensive Roll Phase, Defensive Roll Phase, Main Phase 2, Discard Phase.

Players start out with 50 Health, 1 combat point or CP and 4 cards from their deck with the ultimate goal of reducing the other player down to 0 Health to win the match. Each round the players gain 1 CP during the income phase and draw one card, with the CP being spent to play the various cards they have in their hand. Each character plays a little different in that the Shadow Thief seemed to be all about hitting the 15 CP cap as soon as possible and then striking from the shadows with critical attacks that scale based on the current CP number. The Barbarian seemed to be about healing back lost health and avoiding taking damage by simply overhealing the incoming attack… all the while smashing with big attacks that can easily become unblockable. Barbarian absolutely was “my thing” but it also sounds like the super defensive Paladin might have been a good fit for me as well. Each round of attacks you roll your 5 dice and then take the symbols and numbers and try and make something with them. You are given two rounds of re-rolls as you attempt to hone in on the exact thing you need. There are also cards that shift your abilities so that you can make certain dice wild, or with “samsies” swap any dice to match any other dice. These however take the luck of the draw and the CP to play them when needed.

What I found most interesting is that essentially you are having to look at the symbols and the numbers to see what the best course of action is. All of the characters have something interesting that happens when you roll a small straight (4 numbers in sequence), and something interesting that happens when you roll a large straight (5 numbers in sequence). Then again there are other things that are super powerful that can play off of the other attacks. For example 2 swords and 2 “pow” symbols on the Barbarian gives you an attack that deals less damage… but becomes undefendable which when upgraded serves as an amazing way to finish off your opponent. The Shadow Thief allowed you to shift in and out of the shadows… allowing you to be essentially untargetable until you exit on the next round. Attacking from the shadows allowed you to roll an extra dice as you exited to deal a little bonus damage. Every hero has an ultimate attack that is essentially triggered by rolling five 6s, but in truth I found these pretty freaking hard to make work unless I had a wild card or two available in my hand. There is a lot more nuance that I feel like I cannot adequately cover after literally having only played two games. Suffice to say there is a lot of meat on these bones, and I am sure more than enough to start to develop even a bit of a meta game among players. I was not well suited for the Shadow Thief because the whole poke from the shadows thing is not really my deal. That said I know players that would absolutely excel at that game play style since essentially the Barbarian and the Shadow Thief are playing two completely different games. From what I understand each of the characters plays this way essentially with the Moon Elf focusing on dealing damage while defending for example.

The long and short of this is that as soon as I got back home on Sunday night I went out to the Kickstarter and backed the game. I was completely and thoroughly sold. As of this morning even though the page has not updated they have already hit the Paladin stretch goal so it will be included in the Champion version of the game. Next up is an upgrade to Linen Cards at $35k, Vacuum formed tray at $40k, Thicker Box at $45k and finally the inclusion of the Monk Hero at $65k. With 24 days to go they are already sitting at 200% of the original goal, and I have to think that Pax South is going to give them a lot of good exposure going forward. There was a pair of guys who had literally spent about twelve hours over the weekend playing the game… and wound up serving as surrogate coaches when we had so many people wanting to play the game in the Tabletop area. The rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up, and the game play while actually taking awhile to resolve itself… feels like it moves forward instead of stalling out. I have to say for something in prototype form… the game felt really damned polished. The cards and artwork all felt great… with the only complaint being sticker dice. However the first stretch goal was to upgrade to engraved dice so that will in theory no longer be a thing. I went with the $39 Champion edition which seems to be the point that the majority of backers are entering at, which in theory should give you access to all six characters and slightly nicer multi-tone dice. The base game will include four characters: Shadow Thief, Barbarian, Moon Elf and Pyromancer which sits at $29… so I felt that extra $10 was more than warranted even for the shot at two more characters. Dice Throne was definitely my tabletop game of the show… but in truth I think probably it was my game of the show as a whole. I highly suggest if you have the opportunity to check this out at any conventions between now and the projected November release date that you grab hold of it with both hands.

Kickstarter Link

Communing with Fae

August 10, 2015 by Belghast

Freemium Magic

While I still have aspirations to cease the swiss army posts… I guess in reality I live a fairly swiss army life. This weekend was really no different, and the one hundred plus degree temperatures just caused us to spend more time than normal indoors. When this happens I start to get a little wanderlust at least from the standpoint of what games I am playing. As a result this weekend I played a mixture of Final Fantasy XIV, Star Wars the Old Republic, Minecraft, and some Magic Duels. You can blame the podcast we recorded Saturday for the later, because both Thalen and Kodra talked about playing it. I have several assorted versions of the Duel of the Planeswalker magic game cluttering my steam account. I end up picking them up when they go on sale and then only ever playing them a few times. Ultimately part of the excitement of magic for me is playing with physical cards and opening physical packs. We have joked about it before but “that new pack smell” is really a thing, and it can be intoxicating. That little tingle of excitement as you rush through the “commons” to find out what rare you got in that pack is a thing I have repeated thousands of times over the years. So is the sinking feeling when I see that rare is a blue or a white… the two colors that I most have a negative reaction towards. The real life magic really really wants me to play White, because I have an insane number of rare angels… but all I ever really want is the dark and sinister Black cards.

Right now I am still about halfway through the unlocking story of the White deck of Gideon Jura. The game does a really cool job of telling you the story of how each of the planeswalkers found their spark, which according to Kodra is the central focus of the Origins story line. The only negative that I have so far is that you have to wade through a lot of tutorials before the game just lets you play. Normally I would say these could be skipped but the game rewards you in gold for watching them, and that is gold that you will need later for purchasing packs. Where this gets really frustrating is when a new card mechanic is introduced and it stops whatever duel you are in the middle of to show you a tutorial on how that mechanic works. I can absolutely see however how this would be beneficial to brand new players, and even for me there are card mechanics that are being called by names that I don’t recognize in spite of fully understanding the game play behind them. The other big frustration with the Duels client is the fact that it crashed on me, numerous times… so I am guessing they are still having some issues. From what I can tell you stay connected to their servers even though you are essentially playing a single player match, and if that server connection wavers your game cannot seem to recover gracefully. I figure this is going to be something I piddle with from time to time when I am not in the mood for other games.

Communing with Fae

As I wrote yesterday Arcanist has always been the class that I struggled the most in playing. For whatever reason I have caught the desire to play it, and I spent most of yesterday working my way through content doing a mix of low level roulette, Haukke Manor, and guildhests. As a result early yesterday evening I managed to push across the line and ding 30 while in one of those Haukke Manor runs. After that it was chasing down two different job quests and learning how to be both a Scholar and a Summoner. The thing that I did not initially realize was the fact that the two Carby summons ultimately become the Faerie summons. I guess this makes sense, as without them somehow overwriting those low level abilities there would be no way for the job to scale down and effectively heal low level content. The other thing that I was not really expecting was how “un-healer-like” low level instances ultimately felt. My first dungeon as a Scholar ended up being Halitali… where I have exactly one useful heal button. So instead I just made sure I was standing next to the tank and dotted everything up. I am not sure when the class feels more “healer-ly” but until then I am just pretending I am still playing an Arcanist.

The other shocker for me was just how relatively easy the Summoner job quest ended up being. As you can tell by the Summon III icon, I had to fight Ifrit and after fighting him in several different versions… I have to say it was way easier than I expected it to be. I cast dots on all of the things, and then eventually he fell over… which I am guessing is how summoners are supposed to play? This play style is just so weird to me because it feels oddly passive. Maybe a better way of putting it is it feels like I am playing a completely different game than the rest of the people in my group. Much of the time leveling to 30 was spent tabbing through targets, applying dots, and then tabbing back to the first one to reapply dots after I had finished one circuit of the mobs. This just doesn’t feel natural to me I guess because it feels like the sort of triage that I do as a healer… but to damage all the mobs rather than heal all the players. I guess the truth is that I have never really successfully played a damage over time class, and it almost makes me want to fire up and play my Warlock again to see if this new outlook makes that class more enjoyable. In any case I now have a Scholar so I can begin leveling that through the instant duty finder queue. I should try and catch up to Tzi and Rylacus and run up with them.