cryptography
krɪpˈtɒgrəfi/
noun
noun: cryptography1.
the art of writing or solving codes.
Basically, again our favorite subject of math.
Recently it was announced that the former Team Star City Games (the professional MtG team sponsored by the largest reseller of MtG-related stuff in the world) had switched to being sponsored by Channel Fireball, which already had its own team. One of the results of this change was that the team no longer had a name and this age of social media, they went out and asked people what name they should use. They got some fairly good answers, such as ProsBloom, which I would have enjoyed (it being another iconic combo from the early days of magic, just like [scryfall]Channel[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Fireball[/scryfall]).
Then there were answer like [scryfall]City of Traitors[/scryfall], [scryfall]Act of Treason[/scryfall] and [scryfall]Dark Betrayal[/scryfall].
Back in maybe ’95 or so, me and a couple of my friends took part in one of my first tournaments (see Gaming Stories in the top of the page to see my actual first tournament) in small municipality some hours drive outside of our hometown. I was playing a black and white weenie deck with [scryfall]Armageddon[/scryfall]. Don’t really remember, but it probably looked something like this:
Once I began the work on the “second tier” playbooks for my Apocalypse World hack I quickly realised this hack still has some major issues. Though in my mind the premises and the main idea behind this hack is clear it might not be for others.This was a point that I noticed while we get together to play it a couple of weeks ago.
Aki was wondering why would his character stick with the other characters. I realise that this is something that pops up every once in a while in any game. My current approach to this kind of a problem is to get rid of the character as soon as possible. Questioning the motives of a character is a quick way to kill the mood and diverse the story from what is actually happening. But this time was different. It got me think of the reasons any of the characters are involved in “the hunt”.
I don’t play much modern. I just lack the knowledge of the format. I’ll probably accumulate that over time, but I’m not in a real hurry. I’m much more interested in the formats with limited cardset I can master on my own. Since I don’t have that much time, I’d much rather stay with standard and block, as well as limited.
What I do know is that aggro is pretty bad in modern. Sure, there’s affinity, but that’s pretty much it. What I’ve heard from more active players is that affinity is just so good that it simply displaces all other aggro decks. Well, at least to me this means I should be playing aggro, and not affinity.
Note to self – iPad is not for photos
After three year hiatus we finally returned to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2nd edition. We played a memorable campaign with the WFRP 3rd edition and a couple of failed tryouts in those three years. And while I still think it is an excellent system opening the corebook of 2nd edition was like seeing a good friend in a long time.
This time we have a one of my original WFPR2 players alongside with a WFRP3 player and a couple of new ones. The Old World is not as familiar to them (excluding the vet from 2nd edition) but that does not hinder us. In fact it might prove to be a good thing since we are decided to go with a different approach than your regular WFRP campaigns.
We decided to go with dungeon bashing.
I wrote about my general approach to prereleases last week, but now we know the prerelease promos for Born of the Gods, so its time to go a little deeper. The problem here is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of room. These are quite similar in nature. There isn’t an outlier like the last few times, so you pretty much can’t go wrong at this stage. However, I do have personal preferences.
Last summer we were at Lauri’s gathering for guild members. We played a lot of games, one of which was MtG. We didn’t play much of it, but I played against a younger guy. I had a bunch of decks with me and I decided to play my copy of Travis Woo’s Monogreen Eldrazi deck. I curved out perfectly. I got a [scryfall]Spawnsire of Ulamog[/scryfall] into play on turn three (with a small [scryfall]Genesis Wave[/scryfall]) and activated him to cast the real big boys from my sideboard on my next turn.
Yeah, I crushed him. He had so little to say in that game that I don’t actually remember what he played.
In Ars Magica, the typical student of magic takes fifteen years to graduate into the wizardly order. When I was in the army, we took a whole day to learn how to use grenades. Of course, as usual in the army, most of the day was waiting for other people to throw grenades before we got to try it ourselves.
Why this comparison? Seems strange. Well, not actually. The wizard has a quite specific role in most groups: they kill lots of things with one blow. In our world, grenades can serve a very similar purpose, as do assault rifles and machine guns, both of which I have training in. Most of the training was about how to take care of the gun. Actual shooting training took about a day, although an hour at a time during a longer period. Using fifteen years to be able to cast a fireball and perhaps some other spells doing pretty much the same thing seems pretty redundant after all that.