Deck Time: Immortal Servitude, Black or White

Historically, in Magic, two drop creatures are usually the most efficient. There’s a reason people play maindecked [scryfall]Spell Snare[/scryfall]s in Modern. Some examples: [scryfall]Snapcaster Mage[/scryfall], [scryfall]Tarmogoyf[/scryfall], [scryfall]Spirit of the Labyrinth[/scryfall], [scryfall]Meddling Mage[/scryfall], [scryfall]Putrid Leech[/scryfall], [scryfall]Scavenging Ooze[/scryfall], [scryfall]Pack Rat[/scryfall], [scryfall]Dark Confidant[/scryfall], [scryfall]Baleful Strix[/scryfall], [scryfall]Thalia, Guardian of Thraben[/scryfall], [scryfall]Arcbound Ravager[/scryfall], [scryfall]Quirion Dryad[/scryfall], [scryfall]Lord of Atlantis[/scryfall] and its ilk, [scryfall]Young Pyromancer[/scryfall], [scryfall]Precinct Captain[/scryfall] and so forth. This is only what I can come up with from the top of my head. Sure, there are creatures with other casting costs, which are definitely good, but two just seems to be the sweet spot.

What can we do with this information? Well, the title of this post says pretty much: if all our creatures are of the same casting cost, we can bring them all back with [scryfall]Immortal Servitude[/scryfall] and since we don’t want to go too high on the curve, two is a good spot to put all our creatures in. So, now the question is, what do we use here. Since I tend to go with monocolored decks, we can choose either white or black as our color. So, the first step is figuring out all the creatures we can use use in standard:

Continue reading

Flavor of Magic

Back at University a teacher of mine used to call UNIX scripts spells. I guess that’s pretty much right. A series of unpronouncable words and strange symbols, which actually do something, but often its hard to see what actually happened and the results can be as incomprehensible for the layman than the commands themselves. Sounds like magic to me.

(I’m not even bringing up Clarke’s third law. Except this much.)

Continue reading

Self-Criticism

The Boondock Saints used to be one of my favorite movies. Then I saw the sequel, which was kind of mediocre, but what really ruined the first movie for me, was the attitude of the director on the commentary track. He would critisize other sequels for their lack of understanding of how to do a sequel and he would then go on and do the exact same things in his own movie.

Continue reading

Solomon Draft Variant

I tend to win some booster packs each week, so I generally have some at home. The joy of opening them wears of quite quickly, so what you should do instead is use them for something to get extra value. Classic options are drafting and sealed, but there’s also the newer Wizard’s Tower, which is becoming more popular.

And then there’s Solomon draft.

Continue reading

Strange Holidays in RPGs

Like everyone knows, Valentine’s Day is very much a manufactured celebration. There’s a historical background, but the modern way is just an attempt to sell more crap. Once again. The thing is, this is actually anything new. All holidays and celebrations are manufactured. They didn’t come from nothing. Certainly, some days, like various independence days all over the world, are better motivated then various random others, but it still wasn’t written in the stars and we know that religious celebrations are very arbitrary, like the traditional hijacking of pagan holidays by the Christians.

The question here is, how do you use them in your RPGs.

Continue reading

Importance of a Name

Back in the 50s, there was a workshop to decide what the field now known as artificial intelligence should be known as. For a long time, computational rationality was the forerunner, but in the end, we have what we have now.

Of course, I can’t really say that this decision affected much, but how much more does something like “artificial intelligence” spark the imagination then “computational rationality”. Would we have 2001: A Space Odyssey? Terminators? Asimov’s robot series? Deep Thought?

Continue reading

Wayward Sons: Love letters & Demonic possession

WaywardSons13022013

Disclaimer: This post includes bad language and attitudes that really aren’t a representation of what we actually think. It only goes to show out we have bad taste.

As we grow more and more accustomed to this hack and how it works we manage to extend the game and bring in more interesting elements to the game.

This week I send two of my players a love letter. Now I am not sure I actually used them the right way but since this is after all our game I think the point was that they were successful. Or at least one was.

Due the first letter and the roll that followed one of the PCs got a prison tattoo. That was not too interesting. That taught me to be more considering when making the letters. Dull outcomes bring a little to the game.

The second letter was much more interesting. It bring out demonic possession and end up nearly killing the whole group.

Continue reading

EDH Pauper Deck Time: Centaur Battlemaster Voltron

So, I couldn’t leave this topic to yesterday’s [scryfall]Bloodbraid Elf[/scryfall] as I felt I could do more with a [scryfall]Centaur Battlemaster[/scryfall], a card I’ve grown very fond of in Theros limited, although our relationship is sometimes strained as I’ve [scryfall]Spark Jolt[/scryfall]ed and even [scryfall]Shredding Winds[/scryfall]’d my own battlemaster to grow it. But hey, its won me quite a few games, sometimes basically oneshotting an opponent.

So, what can I do with one in EDH?

Continue reading