Monthly Archives: February 2014

EDH Pauper Deck Time: Bloodbraid Elf

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To keep our EDH games fresh, we decided to take a break from the normal games and go for Pauper next week, maybe for longer, you never know (as we don’t really plan these out). Some of the players are very excited about this and I find it hard to contain myself with my deck ideas.

The rules are simple: You can choose any uncommon creature to be your general and the deck is the normal EDH singleton deck, except that each card has to a common (or has been printed as common at some point, such as [scryfall]Doom Blade[/scryfall], which used to be common, but was moved into uncommon in M14). The number of potential generals is huge compared to the number of legendary creatures, so this is going to bring some diversity, but on the other hand, most uncommon creatures are still pretty simple and don’t necessarily have that flashy abilities or stats.

After contemplating most of the guildmages (from both Ravnicas), [scryfall]Centaur Battlemaster[/scryfall], [scryfall]Shipwreck Singer[/scryfall], [scryfall]Krosan Warchief[/scryfall] and many others, I went with [scryfall]Bloodbraid Elf[/scryfall].

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Wayward Sons: Moving from tier 1 to tier 2

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This post is a direct followup on Aki’s post from yesterday. It started out as a comment but quickly lengthened in a way to seemed like it should have its own post.

Advancement in this kind of a game is problematic. On the one hand many players want to see their characters gaining more skills and progressing towards something like a demigod status. You may advance your character according to the “spend experience” chart found in each playbook. It all changes when you advance to “tier 2”.

This is the threshold of problem. How to keep the character in the same mould but allow him to grow?

I think that something like the advancement of John McClane has always been my ideal of character development. They might get more and more things done but they loose a bit of themselves on the process.

One thing that occurred to me just while I read this post is adding a simple and elegant system for advancement.

“But”

In simplest for this might work out when you change your playbook. You develop from a dealer to the Avenger BUT. This might even be a Move. When “when you advance your character, choose 1” and then a list of shit that might hit the fan.

This idea is presented in some ways in various hacks and I just discussed about something similar with one of the players from the same group as Aki and myself. It should not be simple to do something or if it is there should be a cost for it. You could look it the way Aki said. McClane survives (ie. develops) BUT loses his wife.

The trick here is to build the conditionals in a way that would make sense for the narrative and for the character.

Character Development vs. Advancement

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Lauri has been bugging me to write my own seasoned playbook for his AW hack, Wayward Sons (see Resources above, and the Wayward Sons -tag on the right). Just haven’t gotten around to it. Also, I don’t really have inspiration right now… which is a bit of a problem.

One thing I’ve been thinking about though: One of the characters has been becoming more and more sociopathic in his paranoia, while two other characters (mine included) have been becoming more and more relient on alcohol to get through their “adventures”.

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Playing Your Temples

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Sorry about the downtime. Fucking Internet. As if taking over our site actually accomplishes anything. Although, they can’t know that and the whole process is probably automated, so from their point of view, no harm done. Whereas from out point of view, downtime, bit of panic, lots of frustration and maybe even unexpected expenses.

I’m telling you this partly because Lauri felt he might have to take out the plugin which lets me show the cards. I don’t know why, really, but since its in his hands… This just means that some posts might look really awkward in the future, including this one.

In other news, I didn’t do very well at the prerelease. Blue was definitely the right choice, as the two matches I lost were against blue decks (actually, blue-black, which I was playing as well), but I just wasn’t at top form. I dropped out at 1-2 after three rounds, because there was a competing offer of some boardgaming. The thing that put me over the top on this decision went as follows: I had [scryfall]Arbiter of the Ideal[/scryfall] in play, but due to me being on the phone at the same time, I missed the Inspired trigger, which meant I missed putting [scryfall]Prescient Chimera[/scryfall] on the table for free on the following turn, I got only a swamp and then drew a [scryfall]Tromokratis[/scryfall] instead of being able to put that on the board for free. It even got countered.

Generally I don’t like to drop out, because I go to these events to have fun playing, but that mistake was so severe it would have eaten at me and I just didn’t have the chance to reset.

.. but I did come up with topic for today and its not about missing triggers.

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