I’ve been thinking about making a thread like this for awhile(assuming one doesn’t already exist from back in the wayback). I know a couple of people have made references to playing Magic: The Gathering in other threads, and I know some people have tried D&D too, and it wouldn’t shock me if somebody played Warhammer or what have you. This is nerd territory after all.

Anyway, I’ve been playing Magic since late high school(starting with the Onslaught block) and stopped playing just before Time Spiral dropped. I started playing again this fall once I moved back to DFW as a way of hanging out with some of my old bros, but it’s still pretty fun just to play the game.

Plus I found out about EDH. What is EDH? Ask me about EDH and I will TELL YOU what EDH is. If you play Magic and you don’t know, you need to know.

Never played D&D, although I’ve played lots of D&D-based PC games(you know the ones). It does seem like fun though, and I’d give it a try if I could get some other people interested, and a DM who had a clue.

So… yeah. Have at it, I guess?

I started playing Magic: the Gathering during the original Mirrodin block, and stopped playing after Lorwyn. Lately, I’ve played a few games, as people in college seem to like it for nostalgia.

D&D is good fun, if you have a good DM, but not otherwise.

I play magic on occasion with the boys on lunch break at college. It’s pretty fun, though I don’t know all the ins and outs or whatever. For me it’s just a way to kill time. (also, I’ve won a few times, somehow). They have a deck specifically put together for me to use, and it’s a good one. I don’t have my own deck though, and I don’t get to play as often as I like.

I also get made fun of cos I’m the only girl.

I think I’m going to regret this, but… what is EDH?

I’m glad you asked, swenson!

EDH(which stands for Elder Dragon Highlander), also known as “Commander”(but only to noobs) is a variant format for Magic. It’s super-casual, and it’s primarily intended for multiplayer games.

The rules are different from regular Magic as follows:

Decks must be 99 cards, and you can only have one copy of any given card except for basic land(this is where the Highlander part comes from). You also begin each game with 40 life, rather than 20.

What makes EDH truly different is your deck’s General. Every EDH deck must have a General, who functions as the 100th card.

The General must be a legendary creature, and the cards in the deck can’t contain mana colors that aren’t present on your General. The General begins the game in a special zone called the Command Zone where it can’t interact with anything. At any point you could normally play your General from your hand, you can play it from the Command Zone for whatever it would normally cost.

Whenever the General dies, you can put it back into the Command Zone instead of into your graveyard or the RFG zone. To play it again, it costs 2 more colorless mana in addition to its base cost. If it dies a second time, it costs another 2 on top of that, and so forth. It’s an incentive to protect your General once it’s in play without punishing you too harshly for it dying(and it WILL die, no matter which one you pick).

If the same General deals 21 combat damage to any particular player over the course of one game, that player is dead regardless of his actual life total. This is to keep mass lifegain strategies from being overpowered(my brother hit something like 16,000 life in one game without even really trying before somebody decided to finish him off) and to make attacking with Generals more meaningful than just swinging with random dorks.

The biggest thing about EDH is that it encourages creativity in deck design and play decisions, while competitive Magic formats(which I also love) reward tight playskill more than deckbuilding. Since you’re only allowed a single copy of any given card, you’ve got to be imaginative in the way you set your deck up to accomplish whatever its overall plan happens to be.

Since there’s less pressure with 3-5 players and twice as much life, you can build decks around elaborate themes or weird concepts, since most EDH players tend to be more concerned with doing cool shit and winning in hilarious or stylish ways if they’re going to win at all.

Your choice of a General really helps you put your stamp on the deck too, since a legendary creature actually generates a sense of identity. Some people don’t play their Generals much(these people are lame), and some people build their decks entirely around the General to the point where they have trouble functioning properly without the General in play(these people are cooler).

I’ve currently got two EDH decks, one of which is Black/Green with Savra, Queen of the Golgari as its General, and another that’s Blue/Green with Momir Vig, Simic Visionary as its General. Savra is probably more consistent and refined, but Momir Vig is significantly more powerful. Of course, in a multiplayer game, if I don’t play politics properly, that means Vig is much more likely to get ganged up on.

I’ve also got a Karrthus, Tyrant of Jund deck in the works that’s going to be wall-to-wall beating the shit out of people with dragons, and a Ghost Dad deck that I’m making just because I find that card’s nickname terribly amusing.

...Man, that was a ton of shit I just typed.

I started playing Magic: the Gathering during the original Mirrodin block, and stopped playing after Lorwyn. Lately, I’ve played a few games, as people in college seem to like it for nostalgia.

Oh man, I loved Mirrodin, but it seems like a horrible place to start playing. That block was pretty much insane, and I still don’t know what they were thinking when they printed a bunch of the shit from it.

lolskullclamp

To again shill for EDH, it’s got a high level of nostalgia value since pretty much everything(except for a small banlist that you don’t even really have to follow if you don’t want to) is legal in it. It’s easy to construct a functional deck with just a pile of old crap you have laying around from back in the day. It won’t be optimal obviously, but it’ll run.

My problem with that sort of thing is that people don’t like to just play to have fun, it’s all about the perfect strategy to win, getting the perfect line-up of cards, and so on.

Well, I don’t know about those other games, but there’s no such thing as a perfect strategy in Magic. Almost everything can be battled somehow. When I first started playing competitively, the dominant deck in the Standard format could kill you as early as turn 2, sometimes slipping back to as late as turn 4 with an unusually slow draw. People still found ways to beat it.

That said, your feelings here are what fuel my love for EDH. It’s more about the journey than the destination, the spectacle of using weird, bad, obscure, or expensive cards and strategies to, well, if not win, to at least make memorable and epic games. When I play with my Momir Vig deck, I actually hope the other players will disrupt my combos or else it’s no fun.

I also get made fun of cos I’m the only girl.

Girls are overpowered at Magic. This is fact.

Yeah, that’s one of its other charms. In regular Magic, it’s usually a sign of a well-designed deck if it plays pretty much the same way game-in and game-out. If you let the focus of it dilute, you’re diluting its consistency. Randomness is the enemy, and a big part of competitive Magic is trying to minimize the randomness inherent in the game itself.

In EDH though, you never know what the hell’s gonna happen in a given game. It’s further exacerbated by the fact that everybody at the table has such variance, so even if I’m playing with a General like Momir Vig, where it’s built so I can pretty much fish any specific card out of the deck between 1 and 3 steps, I still have to make my choices around what my opponents are doing, and it’s frequently the wrong decision to just ignore the present gamestate and get Teferi and Seedborn Muse in play together(which is when the deck starts going wild). Before he left for Korea, one of my cousins had a deck with Experiment Kraj as its General(a big dumb mutant that can copy other creatures’ abilities if they’ve received a small, common strength buff), and it was just as frequent for him to slightly boost his opponents’ dudes to copy their abilities as well(rather than just his own). The things his deck could do varied to an absurd degree, because everybody else at the table had a hand in it too.

ffffffff I type too much about this. It’s like The Wire or something.

Speaking of which…

Many of my friends play Magic, but I’ve never tried. I hear mixed opinions about how it’s ‘awesomely broken’ or just plain ‘broken.’ I’ve played DnD a little. I’ve wanted to try Dark Heresy but Warhammer 40k is a little over-the-top for me. I like subtelty. For that reason, even though I’ve been asked to on a few occasions, I blatantly refused to play Exalted.

I grew up on Call of Cthulhu but never played it seriously—just with a few friends once in a while. Currently I’m trying my hand at GM’ing a CoC campaign. I’m not particularly good at it; I’ve only GM’ed on a few occassions before, and I’m bad at improvisation and excessively cruel to the players. I think this campaign is going well, though. It’s nice to explore this different mode of fiction writing.

I was inspired to talk about magic a bit.

Sansa, no leave comment? =(

You looking forward to the EDH special decks releasing in a few months?

EDH is particularly fun because of how the games are usually long enough for everybody’s deck to do its thing, without dragging on too long.

Wooo, a brofist from sansa! Now I know I’m a real man.

I use Mayael (get 6 mana, get big things), Sedris (reanimate stuff) and Jaya Ballard (burning!). Mainly Mayayayayael, though; the deck is basically made of all the impractical massive creatures that I can’t fit in regular decks.

You know, I admit that I really like the flavor and balance of the Ravnica block. It’d be fun sometime to do an EDH match themed around the guilds.

I’m thinking… you have to pick a guild and can’t put in any card with a watermark that doesn’t match it. And/or your commander has to be the guild leader.

Of course, if I was playing I’d have Nicol Bolas as my commander just on principle. XD

I came in first at my LGS’s New Phyrexia prerelease tourney today, so hurrah for me(beat my brother in the last round, he came in third), and only lost one game all day(to my brother). Played a Red/White Metalcraft deck with no bombs besides a Precursor Golem to speak of, but I did have a couple of good burn spells and double Tumble Magnet, which is a sick-ass card in Limited formats. Anyway, got 16 NPH packs in prize and my brother got 4, and between us we opened 2 Batterskulls, 2 Swords of War and Peace, and a Phyrexian Obliterator as far as mythics went. Also got a pair of Surgical Extractions which I think suck but are worth ~$10 right now, so I need to unload them.

It was a good day.

I think I’ve finally weened myself off CCGs, and committed to only playing in sealed tournaments.

Went to WoW’s War of the Elements release two weeks ago and did pretty good (especially for not having played WoW or cards in general in awhile).

I’m actually looking at making a 2nd WoW TCG... one that’s less… magic-rip-offy.

Congrats to you, sansa. We’ll have to face each other some day.

That was a pretty interesting article, swenson. It’d take a lot of thought to make it work, though.

Three new generals from the precons spoiled today, and all three are pretty interesting compared to the previously spoiled 3-color generals.

Also, my playset of Arcbound Ravagers came in the mail today. It’s like seeing your best friend after having been away for years, and finding out that he’s coming to live with you and be your bro and win you money in glorious battle. Just need to finish my Mox playset and I’ll be ready to play Legacy, which is pretty much the best constructed format right now by miles.

“Ravager, what is best in life?”
“EATING ROBOTS”

I play D&D. Never got into Magic, mostly because all the friends I’ve met who play it become horribly addicted to it at the expense of other activities, and within about half a year after discovering it, they become horribly uninteresting, dickish people. D&D? Magic is better. Parties? No thanks, playing Magic. Girls? Even though I always cry about not having a girlfriend, actually talking to a girl would require I put down my Magic cards. Conversation about anything that isn’t Magic with a friend who doesn’t play? So they’re coming out with these new black cards…

Seriously, I had one friend in high school who got really bad. How bad? At that time, in my home town, Magic tournaments were held every Friday night at the local card shop. You had to pay $10 to enter, and your reward was store credit people would just use to buy more Magic cards. This friend of mine always had to go. We would make plans weeks in advance for a certain date, he would offer to drive a bunch of people. Then, 15 minutes before our meeting time, I’d get a call from him saying something like “I can’t come, I’m sick.” Suspicious, the first couple times I called his parents and they would tell me he was off at Friday Night Magic (the incredibly creative and witty name for the weekly tournament). The worst part was, because he was a ride, and he backed out at the last minute, 4-6 people were dicked out of a fun night because of him (after a while we stopped trusting him with being in charge of a carpool). He missed almost every one of his friends birthdays (including mine), graduation parties, a wicked awesome 4th of July, a wicked awesome New Years party, all so he could play at Friday night Magic.

Every other person I’ve befriended who plays Magic is like him (though most to a considerably lesser degree), and it’s kind of disturbing. The lying to hide that they’re playing, the moodiness they have when not talking about or playing Magic, the amount of money they spend just to play a damn game, the way Magic cards litter every nook and cranny of whatever living spaces they occupy; I’m beginning to think Magic has some damn strong addictive properties. Or maybe I’m just unlucky.

“I find it hilarious that I can get away with playing a female seamstress-turned-pirate disguised as a man, recently escaped from prison, and out for revenge against an ex-husband.”

I laughed. :) Kind of reminds me of Twelfth Night.

I’m a D&D person, myself (well, now Pathfinder, since D&D went all WoW for 4th edition). I’ve never played Magic, but I’ve had friends who have broken away from its grasp say it’s pretty addictive and draining. But then I’ve known people who have done that with D&D, too.

Sansa, I picked up one of the Magic:Commander decks recently, so now I have an EDH deck for playing.

(also, I like the modded card)

Since this is apparently the place for it:

I’ve never understood what the strategy of Magic is. It seems pointless and counterintuitive to “construct” a deck that needs things done in order, only to play with it randomly shuffled. Hints?

Variance is an important part of the game, and one of the keys to building good decks is finding a way to reduce the variance. In regular constructed Magic formats, you can only have 4 copies of any one card in your deck(except for basic lands), otherwise you’d just stuff your deck with 40-something Lightning Bolts and have the rest be Mountains, and just throw Bolts at your opponent’s face until they die(note: there is a Legacy deck that does this, but it has to play inferior versions of Lightning Bolt.)

The ultimate idea is to provide diverse gameplay experiences even when you play the same two decks against each other multiple times. When you’re playing competitively, Deck A having a 70% loss rate and 30% win rate against Deck B would be considered a horrible match-up for Deck A, so if you’re both lucky and good, you’re not guaranteed to lose against decks that should be favored against you.

That said, Wizards of the Coast has really been trying to push even more randomness into the game as of late, and it’s debatable whether or not this is good(loldelver).

Ravagers

Just saw that there are more Mirrodin (when I stopped playing for a while, since everyone used damn Ravagers) cards, and… Phyrexia?

Yeah, last year’s block went back to Mirrodin, and it was getting invaded by Phyrexians. Sadly they didn’t reprint Arcbound Ravager or the artifact lands or any of the really busted stuff from the original Mirrodin block, but they did print 3 more Swords of X and Y(Body and Mind, Feast and Famine, War and Peace). The fall set this year is going to be another Ravnica block, so if it’s 75% as good as the original Ravnica, it’s gonna be pretty sweet.

Did they ever make a third “Un-” joke set? I loved collecting those. And have Slivers returned since Time Spiral?

Nope and nope. They claim they’re going to do both “someday” but who knows when that is. I just want more awesome full-art lands. Unhinged Islands are like $6 a pop ;_;

Yawgmoth is dead(and I think Phyrexia is destroyed) but Phyrexians still exist. They somehow invaded Mirrodin and drove the natives out to set up New Phyrexia. I don’t pay a whole ton of attention to the “story” nowadays, since it’s all based around boring Planeswalker characters(yeah, that’s something you probably weren’t around for, Planeswalkers are a card type now) who can just leave the plane in question whenever the situation gets bad instead of having to deal with shit they stir up like Gerard and his homies.

several shiny

I hope there weren’t any Islands. They’re $30+ in foil. One store I was at playing in a random 1k or something announced they were having midnight Unhinged drafts and their most repeated selling point was “You could open a foil Island!”

There’s also a fair variety of people, who (I am happy to say) are all keenly aware of the importance of personal hygiene.

WHAT FROM MAGIC PLAYERS NO WAY

I haven’t had a chance to play EDH yet, but it sounds like a ton of fun, and I’m trying to see if I can maybe borrow one of the other guys’ EDH decks to get a feel before investing in one myself.

That’s probably feasible. Most EDH players that I know have multiple decks, and letting someone else play your EDH deck gives a special vain intellectual thrill if you put a lot of work into it(back when I still had Momir Vig, I lent it to a friend/good player who recently had his cards stolen, and it was hella fun watching him trying to figure out how to play it). I have a specific EDH deck I built to loan to noobs(Ezuri), but it’s still kinda hard to riddle out the trickier plays besides “Tap Rofellos for obscene amounts of mana, untap him somehow, tap him again, use Ezuri’s Overrun a bunch, swing for a hundred.” I lent it to the new girl yesterday and she did pretty well with it once she knew what all the cards did. Even pulled the ol’ “Morph Tribal Forcemage with 5 elves out to enable Mosswort Bridge to flip Regal Force to draw a bunch of cards” trick and I was a little proud. Of course, we still all died horribly to a Primeval Titan nobody could kill.

Once I get back into the swing of things, I’m definitely planning on playing in tournaments.

Get real familiar with Delver of Secrets and Snapcaster Mage.

I was struck by the frequent appearances of one Mr. Sansafro! Any relation?

THE VERY SAME

Any other nerds go to the M13 prerelease today? Mine went pretty well. Pulled Thundermaw/Bolas/foil Nefarox in my pool, but U and R weren’t deep enough so I went BG with Rancor/Nighthawk/some other decent guys(but mostly Rancor and Nighthawk). Helped one of the new girls build her deck for the achievement and also because she is nice and kind of cute, and she forced a draw with my brother in Round 1, so I felt kind of proud. I ended up finishing third, which was pretty good I guess. Didn’t really open much in my prize packs, but I didn’t care, since I was close to making up entry on my pool by itself.

Best part of the day: Traded a bunch of fairly useless(to me) mythics for a slightly dinged Jace, the Mind Sculptor, and traded a bunch of other cards I’ll never play to the other new girl for a Top and a Krosan Grip.

Worst part of the day: Playing an unnecessarily long EDH game with the store owner and a few of my friends after it was over as they got progressively drunker, more obnoxious, and way slower playing, while I had to stay sober for the drive home. It stopped being fun about a third of the way through and just became a chore.

Had a lot of fun drafting. Wound up playing a white/blue/green deck, and although I didn’t win all my matches, all my games were either super close (as in if my opponent hadn’t drawn and played a Duskhunter Bat and so been able to block my Welkin Tern, I would’ve nailed his last 2 life before he had a chance to mob me) or a clear win (Sands of Delirium + Boundless Realms = if I haven’t milled you to death earlier with Sands + Mind Sculpt, you’re dead now).

And I’m beginning to find my place in the ranks of players there. While I’m nowhere near the top (yet), I’m no slouch, and I got a lot of compliments from the top players at the shop about my playing and deck this time around. I’d probably be better if I could devote the time and money to be more than just a casual player. XD

Hah, I had a long, long period of obsession with 40k. Tau are the coolest thing ever. Did you get any of those awesome tanks?

When I used to Magic heavily my friends and I would quote Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged liberally. That upped the fun factor quite a bit.

TIME TO D-D-D-D-DDDDDDDDDD D-DUEL!

And now, for the ultimate question… to brave traffic to play constructed, or to stay home and play TF2?

Ah, decisions. I do have some cards I wanted to pick up that I forgot to last night, though…

I love how you type these mini-articles full of words I don’t understand. It’s so cute and enthusiastic.

EDIT: @Swenson: Screw the money, I have rules! ...Wait.

So, I’m kind of excited about DnD 5th edition and Warhammer 40K: Only War being in their beta states. On the 5th edition front, I wonder how they’re going to fight the Pathfinder for the 3.5 market or if they’re going to try in yet another completely new direction. Apparently they’re going to try to combine 3.5 and 4.0, which sounds kind of disastrous. But hey, they might pull it off. Doubtful, but there’s still at least some hope.

On Only War, I can’t help but think making an RPG out of following the Imperial Guard would have been the first logical step. Really, it seems like a much easier place for noobs to the setting to jump in. But I guess they were aiming for people who were already into the tabletop game with the other two. I keep getting the feeling it’s not going to be anywhere near as popular as the other RPG books though. Maybe if they kept the Black Crusade character creation system, but that doesn’t fit the rank feel of the Imperium. And after you’re acquainted with the universe, who’d play a glorified red shirt when you can be a Tech-Priest, a Navigator or a Space Marine of pretty much any variety? The only thing they need to do now is make a system based around the Xenos exclusively instead of relying on a billion supplements.

Double post because I finally got a decent look at RtR and OMGSQUEE!!!

I think I’m in love.

Nope. He was playing with his friend’s GB deck. It may have started life as the GB event deck, but his friend tweaked it a fair amount.

It was still no match against my mono-white deck though (for all his friend’s claims that it was a strong deck). If I hadn’t been nice, the match would’ve been a massive curb stomp. And then I played his friend later, and completely stomped him. Said friend actually forfeited out of frustration. It was hilarious.

You tap in the wrong direction, though >:[

Lies. So long as the card is at a 90° angle, all is kosher.

Screw the arrow.

Pithing Needle

There’s also Detention Sphere if you like playing U/W.

Or, if you’re feeling particularly evil/confident, Havoc Festival is always an option, especially if you have cards like Bump in the Night and Chalice of Life / Death. Paired with Lifelink and other life-altering effects, especially on cards like Deathrite Shaman, Elixir of Immortality, Essence Harvest, and Killing Wave (among others), and that’s a pretty nasty answer to Thratgust. And quite a few other things.

Plus it’s cheap. ;P

Needle doesn’t work on Thragtusk. Its abilities are all triggered, not activated.

The Star City Open is rolling into town this weekend, and I’ve already got my Legacy deck more or less ready(UW CounterTop), but I too am in the position of trying to find a deck to play against thragtusk-dot-meta. I’d probably be playing UWG or WBG Thragtusk if I could, but my brother and I share cards and we’ve only got one set of them between us. I had been playing UWR control with Jace/Tamiyo/Terminus before aggro decks got squeezed out by Thragtusk, but I’m probably gonna switch over to UWR tempo since it’s supposed to have game against the BRG Thragtusk variant at least. Tentative list is as follows:

So yeah, I guess I’m trying to treat Thragtusk like a hair in my food and eat around it.

Yeah, I’ve never been a fan of Lobotomy-style effects for a number of reasons. I’d only go that route as a last resort. I’d try something like Traitorous Instinct or Nightbird’s Clutches(lol) and see how they work. RDW decks are so math-heavy that some weird card might be enough to push your numbers over the top when your opponent would’ve otherwise stabilized.

Yeah, Conscripts were going to be my other suggestion, but as you said, they’re rather pricy for the average RDW setup. They’re definitely better than those cards I suggested in a more midrange-ish shell, but it might be tough to swing them in a pure aggro deck.

U/G Faeries was my favorite deck of all time to pilot. So much fun to be able to sit with mana open for counterspells and still play creatures at the end of their turn.

SCG Fort Worth Open tomorrow. I’m not too thrilled about Standard, but I’m gonna play in it anyway just on the off-chance I rungood all day. Sunday’s gonna be the bigger day for me(fuck yeah Legacy). I’m sure I’ll post boring updates from my phone.

UWR Tempo in Standard, similar to the list I posted upthread, but I made a few tweaks to it that’ll hopefully pan out. Playing UW CounterTop in Legacy, and the list is thus:

4 Flooded Strand
3 Misty Rainforest
2 Arid Mesa
3 Island
2 Plains
4 Tundra
4 Mishra’s Factory

3 Vendilion Clique
4 Jace, the Mind Sculptor
3 Counterbalance
4 Sensei’s Divining Top

4 Force of Will
3 Counterspell
2 Entreat the Angels
4 Swords to Plowshares
4 Brainstorm
1 Detention Sphere
3 Terminus
1 Supreme Verdict
2 Spell Pierce

Sideboard is still TBD, but it’ll have Terminus #4, Elspeth 1.0, Counterbalance #4, probably another Detention Sphere, and some number of Rest in Peace. I had been playing a Snapcaster build prior to this but it’s almost always the worst card in the deck, and I’d rather have Clique to close out games in a timely fashion considering it’ll be at least 7 rounds. The CB curve is a little more even now with the Cliques and the second Entreat too, to tell those Knights to fuck off back to their Reliquary.

I dropped when I hit 3-3, but my brother’s 7-0 and needs to win one of the next two to make top 8. I’ll see if I can find the archived video footage when I get home to post, since he played in/won a feature match in round 5.

Got stuck on 3 lands against UW aggro, and then lost in 3 to UWR Burning Vengeance, which was the worst feeling in the world.

My brother hit the skids after round 7 and finished 7-3, which was good for 29th(which was still a hundred bucks). He punted a game 2 against UW aggro in round 8 that he probably would’ve won with more conservative play, based on the cards he had coming up, and then he played in another feature match in round 9 and his deck took an absolute shit on him. That round was against UWR tempo, and he saw 7 lands in two games, even with a mulligan in game 2. Apparently the commentators felt sorry for him as he got steamrolled by the Geist>Resto>Thundermaw nut curve and died on turn 5, which is amusing.

I was just contemplating resurrecting this thread :3

My tabletop gaming club just picked up the new edition of Netrunner and I really like it so far. I like the LCG model far better than CCG’s, and the asymmetrical gameplay of Netrunner is really interesting.

If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a LCG originally by the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was a CCG that got discontinued about ten years back because it died after they released a set that perfectly balanced the game (har har – proof to my theory that the only reason that people keep buying Magic cards is to find new ways to unbalance the game). Now it’s been picked up and reissued by Fantasy Flight with some changes.

Basically, one player plays an evil corporation and the other player the ‘runner,’ a hacker infiltrating the corp. The corp deck is completely defensive; its goal is to advance seven points of agendas to win the game. The runner is completely offensive; he wins if he steals seven points of agendas from the corp. There’s different corps and runner factions and each has different styles of gameplay, for example a virus deck which leeches power away from the corp’s ‘ice’ (barriers they can put up to keep you from getting to their agendas) and a corp deck that uses brute-force tactics to gain money, but takes bad publicity (IMO free money for the runner through crowd-sourcing) as a result.

The starter decks are very well balanced, and the first expansions are about to come out, so I might start on some deckbuilding of my own. The flavour is also fun, and I’d like to see where they go with it. If FFG goes the L5R route with regards to storyline, that would make me extremely happy.

So, did 2 prerelease Gatecrash tournaments over the weekend. Initial thoughts:

• Boros is the definite winner for limited. They may get pwned in constructed but they are THE guild to try and beat in limited.
• Simic and Gruul are the next best with being a little more conditional. Gruul can win with frightening speed (I took 5th out of 16 2nd night with them). Simic are just unpredictable and fun. I’m wanting to try constructed decks of both.
• Dimir and Orzhov are both good, but HIGHLY card conditional. The previous 3 are composed of colors where it is very hard to pull a bad base for them. The colors of these guilds mean you need to pull a good base or go somewhere else. Surprisingly, they pair extremely well as you can extort off a cipher. I’m interested to see how well someone can draft a Dimir mill deck.

• The new Gideon (I pulled a foil one on night 1) is a BEAST. Seriously, he just needs his first two abilities. By the time you get to his ultimate, you’ve probably already smashed the opponent’s face in (so glad proliferate rotated out). I’m thinking he’s going to be nearly as format warping as Jace, MS.

Yeah I’m putting a bit more effort into modern. Though standard isn’t too bad if you want to test out some of the new stuff.

Here’s my current group’s records for quickest death sorted by system. We’ve played more systems but no one’s died in any of those.

Pathfinder/D&D 3.5: 2 sessions in.
Dark Heresy/Rogue Trader/FF40K: 2 hours in.
Call of Cthulhu: 1 hour in.
Paranoia: 2 minutes in.

This is part of why Paranoia is my favorite tabletop game ever.

I only know CoC by reputation and the source material, and even I know that you don’t “win” CoC – you survive it.

Yeah, you’re character is probably going to die in both games, but at least in Paranoia that doesn’t mean a whole lot.

Hey, there is a tabletop game called MonsterHeart that I’d like to try running someday. It’s a tongue in cheek paranormal romance game where you play as stock characters and try to deal with being a teenager. We tend to spork the exact kinds of books this game is both playing straight and making fun of, would anyone be interested in a one shot?

Go for it, would fit in well with the Queen or the Fae.

I was thinking of either turn-by-turn on the forum itself or through Skype. It doesn’t rely on actual tables so text-only seems like a good option.

The Basic Concepts:

The Skins: