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Battle Box Playtest

June 28, 2018 by Belghast

So last night I did a thing… and unfortunately did not stop to take any photos of said thing I did. I’ve said before that we have a friend in town and have been occasionally meeting him for dinner. This friend happens to play Magic the Gathering and last night we met up at one of our favorite Mexican restaurants that is not super busy on week nights… and commandeered the table for a significant amount of time. In theory we got there around 5:30 which means it probably took until 6 for us to get our food and eat it… then we hung out playing magic for a couple hours leaving sometime after 8. Thankfully I am in there often enough and tip well enough that the wait staff did not bat an eye at us doing this.

Firstly I am pretty sure that my friend is a way more serious magic player than I am. I would probably put me in the collector niche that likes to play weird and quirky decks but not really going to make much headroom at a Friday Night Magic because I am not super focused on the meta. I did not however actually bring my “real” decks but instead something else for us to try out. Some time ago I watched the above video from the Professor and it planted an idea in my head. We have a bunch of folks at work that are former magic players or ones that were interested in potentially finding out more about it. That said most people didn’t really have decks anymore… and most definitely not decks all at the same power level.

The theory was to assemble a series of decks that were of roughly equal power level and try and create a sort of starter magic experience out of it so we could drop in and play a few games over lunch without much effort. This didn’t really gain much traction until I happened upon the Tribal Warfare Battle Box set from Card Kingdom. One of the cool things for me personally about the Ixalan block was that it added a bunch of interesting Tribal cards and combinations, since theme decks have always been a thing I enjoyed greatly. This set of decks included White Black Vampires, Red Black Pirates, Green Red Dinosaurs, and Blue Green Merfolk… giving a pretty wide range of play styles and card types. So I assembled this batch of decks into an Ultimate Guard Stack ‘n’ Safe box leaving two of the six slots for counters and dice and created a packaged experience.

I still need to get something to number the decks with but in theory the slots are going to be numbered 2,3,4,5 and each players start by rolling a d6. Whoever rolls highest chooses “play or draw” but also begins the picking of decks. There still need to be some working out the kinks but the theory is a little something like this…

Roll 1 – You get to choose the deck your opponent is going to play, after choosing re-roll to determine your own selection
Roll 2 – You play the deck in slot 2
Roll 3 – You play the deck in slot 3
Roll 4 – You play the deck in slot 4
Roll 5 – You play the deck in slot 5
Roll 6 – You get first pick from any of the decks

Now there are some problems with this… I was wanting to go with the whole “botch” roll concept but it doesn’t seem like it will work out so I might shift things to the slots being numbered 1-4 and 5 being the choose any deck and 6 be choose your opponents deck. That makes sense given that you want the quirky one to override the other options numerically. Whatever the case I listed how we played last night and more or less it seemed to work out just fine. We started off with three rounds of White/Black Vampires vs Blue/Green Merfolk and they seemed like extremely even match-ups with me winning the first one and not quite getting the cards I needed to win in the last two. Next up we played Green/Red Dinosaurs vs Black/Red Pirates… and once again over the course of the three rounds the two decks felt extremely even.

I am super thankful to my friend for helping me play test this concept and I think it is finally read for prime time to start trying it out at work. Ultimately the Card Kingdom Battle decks seem really fun, and while they were slower than the decks he is used to playing… they still had just the right amount of power. Ultimately what I was hoping was for matches that lasted long enough to allow players to get a feel of the game rather than simply getting shut down on turn three. Feeling like you don’t have a chance is the sort of thing that makes learning magic against a veteran player an extremely frustrating concept. These relatively balanced battle decks really do give the feeling that you have all of the power you need… you just have to get things to work together in the right combination to build your win condition. Regardless it was an extremely fun night and were the AC not on the fritz at the restaurant we would have potentially stayed longer.

forty two

June 19, 2018 by Belghast

First I feel like I need to start this mornings post off with a discussion of how completely overwhelmed I am by the birthday wishes yesterday. We were travelling and each time we stopped I furiously tried to catch up with personal thanks to everyone who sent me something. I completely missed Facebook unfortunately because I refuse to install the Facebook app on my phone and wound up doing a sort blanket thanks over there when I got home. Twitter however is my social media of choice and I tried my best to keep up throughout the day. I think I successfully thanked each and every one of you… but given how fast everything was scrolling there is a high chance that I missed someone. If I did I am truly sorry because I am super thankful for all of the awesome friends I have.

For the last several years my wife and I have been doing this little mini vacation to the Kansas City metro. As the rockstar teacher she is, she signs up to grade the AP Statistics exams… and for the last several years has been a table leader that is responsible for making sure that all of the essay questions get graded effectively the same way by all teachers. For those who are having trouble picturing this… imagine a convention center filled with tables full of teachers… all of them grading essays for eight hours a day in a sort of weird factory type environment. That is what my wife has been doing for the last week and some change.

Instead of having the AP Board fly her back home I have been driving up on the day she gets released and picking her up. Then we run around Kansas City that night and the next morning and drive back to Tulsa. Because we are lame we mostly just hit a bunch of the Half Priced Books stores there and usually the Microcenter since we don’t have one in Tulsa and pretty much anything else that happens to suit our fancy in the journey. That means as the birthday wishes are rolling in we are usually moving from location to location with me trying to catch up as we go.

I tend to tweet out random things I encounter… like yesterday I made a joke about these being apparently the Amiibos that did not sell, given they were at a Five Below in Olathe KS. Later I found out that no… these are fairly rare and were Amazon exclusives and who knows how they ended up in the secondary market. I wished I had picked up a couple because various folks like Pizzamaid really want the Palutena one. You can find a bunch of odd things that show up at Five Below, which is a discount chain that I wish we had in my area. The Below part is generally a lie because I’ve seen very few things there that are cheaper than $5.

Another weird thing I stumbled across in my journey was this controller at Microcenter. There was no way I was going to pay the $70 price tag but I did snap a photo because I thought it was interesting. Once I got back to civilization I looked it up and apparently it is the Emio 5-in-1 switch controller, but based on the reviews from Amazon it is not a phenomenal product. Apparently the Switch 5.0 update completely broke this controller like it did so many third party peripherals, but it was an interesting idea with swappable button layouts for the different Nintendo control schemes it is trying to emulate.

Anyways this is one of those rambling nothing posts. I feel like I should suddenly feel wiser today given that I am not forty two and apparently the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Unfortunately I don’t feel much different apart from the fact I woke up this morning with an insane headache. I remember as a kid anytime I would go through growth spurts my joints would hurt. I wonder if headaches are just a sign of your mind going through a growth spurt too. Personally I like that thought better than the alternative explanations.

Upcoming Lapse

June 15, 2018 by Belghast

I don’t really have much of a proper post to make today, but I did want to give my readers a heads up that it is highly unlikely that I make a post before next Tuesday. Nothing bad is happening, it just won’t be reasonable for me to be posting much. This makes it all the more inexcusable that I don’t really have much to say today. I’ve been playing a lot of The Division and have managed to get back into the swing of things after the gear swaps I talked about last night. Unfortunately I am having hell taking screenshots right now because both Fraps and the Nvidia Experience based fall back seem to not be picking up and taking the shots. I am not exactly sure what is up but whatever the case I’ve been going into gaming sessions thinking I was taking a bunch of captures but not ending up with anything in the end.

The one new thing I have been playing around with is Survival mode, which was suggested to me by a lot of people. The premise is you are trying to get to the dark zone in order to extract some cure that was found for the small pox based super bug that started the whole problem in the first place. This in itself would probably be reasonable but there is a massive blizzard hitting New York and upon approach your Helicopter crashes… puncturing your hazmat suit and leaving you stranded with only a pistol. Essentially as you roam around you are fighting two problems… the extreme cold and the fact that you have been infected and are trying to stave it off. Either of those things can straight up kill you.

For the cold you wind up moving from building to building or fire barrel to fire barrel trying to stay warm while wandering out in a whiteout blizzard. For the infection you can pick up medication periodically and use it to pause the timer that is ticking down. On top of this… you lost your filter in the crash and need to gather up enough materials to craft a new one in order to move into the dark zone, get the cure and successfully extract. If you choose to queue into a PVP session you are also up against other players who are trying to compete for the same resources and the same eventual cure. To spice things up… you will also encounter the various factions from the game roaming the streets that will of course start firing on you the moment you come in range.

There are a number of things that you can do to improve your odds, because you drop in with a base set of green gear. Drops occasionally upgrade your weapons or your armor, but everything is limited to this one survival session starting you back at square one. The cosmetic clothing increases your survival against the cold letting you stay out longer before needing to run back and warm up somewhere. The entire process is really interesting because it is basically this intense survival game in the middle of an MMO complete with hunger and thirst meters that you need to keep an eye on. Basically the entire world is dead set against you and you need to keep moving, keep searching and keep looting to gather enough resources to be able to survive for a long periods of time as you attempt to cross New York, get into the Dark Zone and retrieve your cure.

From what I understand there are also a number of other gameplay modes that show up once you reach thirty… and as I am sitting at 28 I am feeling close enough to the finish line to try and push through this. Super thanks to everyone who tipped me off to Survival since there were several of you. I linked a guide video since I didn’t have much in the way of screenshots.

Significant Gear Swaps

June 14, 2018 by Belghast

I thought I would talk a bit about my varied experiences with The Division of late. I wrote the other day about some of the difficulties I had and frustrations that it was not easy to swap gear around to fix those problems. That said I decided to start trying to incrementally improve my lot in life. I sifted through my bag and my wallet and decided that I had enough components to be able to craft a single item… which luckily rolled with stamina on it. After that I found that the base vendor also had an item I could afford that added stamina to a slot I had none in. The above image is the original state of my character before swapping anything around. Notice how heavily I am apparently leaning into electronics… more than likely because that is just what I was able to get through drops.

This image is after that first swap of two items… gloves and mask. Firepower and Electronics obviously took a hit but my stamina went up significantly. This was enough of a change to make the game feel completely different for me. No longer was it feeling like a single shot was taking an entire pip of health off and I did not really notice that much of a difference in my ability to kill things. This little act alone was enough to revitalize the game for me, which makes me question… should stats make that much of a difference in the way the game feels? It basically took something that felt horrible every single time I attempted to play it over the last year… into something that feels pretty good. Sure I still feel squishy if I get caught in the open but so long as I stick to cover I can hold my ground, which is absolutely not something I could do before without swapping out those two items.

After a few more gear and mod drops this is where I am sitting today and the game feels pretty great. I played some last night, but eventually sleep claimed me. I did however managed to knock out a few lengthy side quests including one that had like five phases two it and involved taking down two yellow mobs. Now I am not entirely certain the yellow mobs were connected to the particular quest… but I took then down nonetheless in the progress of doing it. I also seem to have completed some Division Shields mission that rewarded me three pieces of endgame gear that will sit there and wait for me to hit 30. I am just shy of dinging 28 so I sorta can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I had a lot of fun playing last night and it just seems weird that two item swaps could make all that difference.

I still have a significant number of quests to knock out in the world and there is at least two areas of the map that I have never even been to. I seem to be getting back into the swing of things and enjoying my time. It is funny how E3 works because it often has these side effects of making me interested in games that I dropped along the wayside somewhere. The coverage of The Division 2 gave me the drive to give the original another shot. Based on some twitter discussion that happened yesterday while I was completely swamped… it seems like there are a handful of other people still playing as well. I still have yet to fully catch up from the threads that went nuts while I was sitting in meetings all day. If you are playing Division however… friend BelghastStern my UPlay handle. I still don’t fully know what I am doing but I am dying a hell of a lot less.