Dragons vs. Dragons

It had to happen eventually. Mike and I both brought our Dragon Decks to Lunchtime Magic this week. Mine was my retooled Hellkite Overlord deck, with four of the big guy and three Dragon’s Heralds. I’ve added Bloom Tenders for mana, plus several multicolor critters for sacrifice like Jund Hackblade, Bloodbraid Elf, and Sprouting Thrinax.

Unfortunately, it was hardly the epic battle that it could have been. We played four games, and in each of them, at least one of us had mana problems. I was happy to have won by getting Hellkite Overlord into play twice, but in both those games, Mike’s Dragon deck had let him down and he’d had to mulligan. In the game he won, he played a Dark Ritual and a Seething Stone to activate Dragonstorm and put three large Dragons into play.

Afterwards, we quickly took apart Mike’s Dragon deck and found that it had only 19 lands. It had about 13 accelerators like Dark Ritual, Seething Stone, and Ruby Medallion, but without the land, you can’t get started. He’s taken out a couple of the accelerators and put two more land in, which hopefully should improve things.

The thing I noticed about my own deck was that I didn’t always have the colors I needed: in one of the games I won, I had a very slow start due to a lack of green mana. In particular this led to having a problem with casting Sprouting Thrinax or Putrid Leech. If I see the same problems in our rematch on Monday, I may need to look for some hybrid mana critters that are easier to cast.

Beside the Seaside

Seaside, the new Dominion expansion is fun, fun, fun. Kiddo #1 and I played a game before bed four nights last week, and we dragged my Devoted Wife and Kiddo #2 in for a total of five games on Saturday and two more on Sunday. Early favorite cards of mine incude Island, Explorer, Treasure Map, and Treasury. Salvager and Wharf seem solid as well. I need to play more with Outpost and Tactician but I think both of them will grow on me.

During a couple of our Saturday games, everyone else fell in love with the Pirate Ship, and so I spent some time trying to come up with a viable counter-strategy. Lighthouse is probably the best thing that I saw that worked. I tried Embargoing the Pirate Ships, but it didn’t stop things quickly enough. In one game, I managed to edge out Kiddo #1’s Pirate Ships by using Islands to get all the Estates out of my deck and then using Explorer to accelerate my treasure-buying to make up for the money that was being trashed by the pirates. It isn’t clear to me that this strategy would always be a winner, but in that game it worked pretty well.

Overall, I’m very happy with this set. The new Duration cards provide some interesting options that I think the game needed. The set seems to behave a bit differently than the previous sets. In previous sets, I have usually felt like it was best to only buy one or two action cards and concentrate mostly on buying money and victory points. In this set, it feels to me like a strategy with more Action cards is more viable. I feel like the balance among the cards is very good as well. I’m looking forward to more games with this set, and to mixing in cards from the other sets, over the next couple months.

Book Review: Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martell

Disclaimer: I was given this book by my Devoted Wife, who, as far as I know, has no connection to Nevin Martell, Continuum Books, or Spaceman Spiff.

Looking for Calvin and Hobbes is a reverent summary of what can be known about Bill Watterson and his legendary ten-year run in the newspaper comics. The author traces the life and work of Bill Watterson. This includes a description of  Watterson’s early steps in the cartooning field, his ultimate success, and his struggle with the syndicate for control over the strip. The book also describes the events that led Watterson to stop drawing the strip, and interviews several cartoonists who knew, were influenced by, or in some cases were antagonized by Watterson.

I seem to recall that I first encountered Calvin and Hobbes in a daily paper when I was on a job-hunting trip, and I went out and bought the first collection right after I got back. I own all the original collections, and my kids have had a good time reading them. This book was fun to read, because it reminded me of the things I liked about the strip. Martell’s devotion to Calvin and Hobbes shows when he discusses particular strips or makes observations about Watterson’s trees and Martian landscapes. He reminds the reader of particular storylines that stood out, like the injured raccoon storyline or the recurring conflicts with Susie and Rosalyn.

The whole history of this strip is actually rather short, but I think Martell describes it well. It’s well-known how Watterson wrestled with the syndicate. I didn’t realize how reclusive he was, even during the height of his popularity. The description of Watterson’s 1989 speech to the Festival of Cartoon Art is absolutely jaw-dropping. Apparently, Watterson used the occasion to take the syndicates to task for propping up old strips after their creators had died, and for caring more about merchandising than about the strips themselves. I had never heard of this speech before, and from the description, I can’t imagine that it was comfortable to listen to.

The author was never able to speak to Watterson himself, so he interviewed Watterson’s peers, that is, other cartoonists. I was pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable the excerpts of these interviews were. It was nice to hear of folks like Michael Jantze or Berke Breathed again. Martell uses an interview with Jim Davis, creator of Garfield, to draw a contrast with Watterson’s absolute refusal to market his strip and to point out the absolutely mind-boggling extremes to which licensing and the associated money can go. I have to admire anyone who can turn down the amount of money that Watterson could have gotten from licensing Calvin and Hobbes. (Fortunately for my own moral standing, as a software engineer, I’m in no danger of ever making that kind of money.)

The book has a couple of problems. Toward the end, I felt like I was learning more about Martell than anything else — he talks about the stress of waiting for a call from Watterson that never came, conversations back and forth with Watterson’s publisher, and the music he was listening to on the drive to Watterson’s hometown of Chagrin Falls. Also, the entire book has no illustrations or drawings. That seems almost impossible in a book about comic art, and yes, the book suffers as a result. Unlike Michael Farr’s Tintin: The Complete Companion, we get no examples of early work, no prototype illustrations, no actual panels. The author uses verbal descriptions of each of these and, at least for me, it doesn’t work so well. I am sure that the publisher had problems getting rights, and I can appreciate the need to keep the book cost down, but the end result is that the book is much less than it could have been.

Overall I recommend the book. It’s a relatively fast read, and if you were at all a fan, it’ll provide an interesting back story for the comics and remind you of what you loved about them in the first place.

Deck Fail

During our make-up session of Lunchtime Magic last week,I tried out a new deck that I’d been toying with for a while. The original version of the deck was made by my friend Dave back in the early days of Magic. He called it “In the Army Now,” as it involved Red, White, and Blue cards. The basic idea of the deck in those days was to take control the opponent’s creatures (“drafting”), sacrifice them to City of Shadows, and use the resulting mana to burn the opponent with Fireballs and the like. While this is a great concept, I don’t have the cards (especially, the red-blue lands) to make it work. So I started making a more generic blue-white deck, keeping the creature control, subbing in Prodigal Sorcerer for direct damage, and cloning Serra Angels to hurt the opponent. I’ve had the deck built for a couple months now and finally decided to sleeve it up and try it out.

Unfortunately, this was the day Mike chose to bring his all-blue control deck, which (among other things) Thornwind Faires and Charisma to take control of my creatures. Basically, this is a much better version of the deck that I had been trying to build. In our two games, he got out ahead of me in each and I was locked out of being able to cast anything — had I cast any creatures, he would have just taken control of them.

I am not sure what to do next with this deck. I thought of adding in Wrath of God, which if I drew it might have broken his lock on the game, but in the interim I’ve had another idea about a deck that uses the Serra Angels. I might just let this blue-white deck languish for now and try something else.

Zubera vs. Devour

According to the archives, it was right after a match between my Alara Dragon deck and Mike’s Zubera deck that I decided to focus my Dragon deck on creatures that have Devour. Last Friday lunchtime Magic was the first rematch of these decks since then, and we had a 1-1 split. In the first game, I drew Goblins early and did some serious damage to him by pumping them with Colossal Might. Eventually I got a Hellkite Hatchling out as a 4/4 flying trample, which was too much for him to handle. The second game was much more lopsided his way. I drew three Dragon Broodmothers and only 2 land in my first few turns. I don’t think any deck that I have can survive a draw quite that bad. He had several shrine cards that were generating spirit tokens for him to attack with and I just never drew enough castable creatures to mount a decent counterattack.

The Dragon deck seems to do best when it can get in some initial damage with fast creatures and use the Dragons as finishers. Dragon Broodmother is a really nice card, but so far I’ve failed to draw them at the right time to have them be effective. I’m not ready to give up on them yet, though.

Travelling Elves

Corporate Game night last Monday was a welcome break after a coding deadline. We had 6 players show up, and so Jamie suggested Elfenland, introducing it to us as “The Travelling Salesman Problem: the Boardgame.” It’s not entirely an accurate description, as I think the travelling salesman problem doesn’t usually involve playing cards to determine what paths you can go down. However, given that we work in a software company and had at least 3 Ph.D.s at the gaming table, it definitely led to lots of geeky jokes about lines, circles, and optimization.

The actual object of the game is to visit as many cities on the map as you can in four turns. Each round, you and your fellow players get to play counters to choose what transportation modes can be used on particular paths through the land. Then, after all the counters have been placed, you play cards in your hand to travel between various cities.

The game was a close one. Three of us (Jamie, Steve, and me) ended in a tie for first, having visited all but one city and having no cards remaining in our hands. The other three players had visited all but two cities, so there really wasn’t much daylight between first and last place. It was a fun game, and I wouldn’t mind playing it again sometime.

Oh, That Jokulhaups

We skipped Lunchtime Magic two weeks ago because of a product deadline, so it felt very good to actually have a match this week. I brought my Elephant deck, and Mike had a blue-red deck with phasing. It took me a while to get the feel of his deck, at least partly because he had a lousy draw in the first game andthe Elephant deck got off to what is for it a fast start (turn 1 Elephant Graveyard, turn 2 Emerald Medallion, turn 3 Call of the Herd and leave Elephant Graveyard untapped).

During the second game, it became clear what was going on. He had out some sort of large blue phasing creature that caused his land to phase out when the creature phased in. I had gotten him down to 10 life, but then, while his creature was phased out, he cast Jokulhaups, getting rid of everything in the game except two indestructible artifacts he had and his phased-out creature. Then he pummeled me with it for the remainder of the game. By the time I was about to die, I finally had enough land to flashback a Call of the Herd, but it was too late by that point. A slight bright spot was that I got to use “Harm’s Way” to clobber one of his blockers at one point. Mike pointed out to me that I might be better off with Giant Growth. I think that having the potential to actually re-direct the damage makes Harm’s Way worth it in white decks that have no other way to do directed damage, but I could be wrong.

We decided to play faster decks for the third game, and we ended up with his Varchild’s War-Riders deck versus my Knight of New Alara deck. The War-Riders give your opponent more and more 1/1 creatures, and the War-Riders themselves are trample and get +1/+1 for every creature blocking them after the first. He got a War-rider and a Tempting Licid out quickly and that pretty much ended the game . At that point, I had no creatures yet, and any that I cast would have been forced to block. The Knight deck utterly failed me: I drew about 8 land, plus only two creatures, one Knight and one Steward of Valeron. The only good thing was that I was able to enchant each of them with Shield of the Oversoul so that they were indestructible and flying, so they were able to do damage to the War-Riders. The Steward was even able to attack, because he has vigilance. I might almost have been able to win except that he also got out some other enchantment that gave his creatures bonuses for being blocked, plus another War-Riders to put even more tokens into play on my side.

Afterward I looked through the Knight deck again. I am wondering if 22 land is too much for that deck. I think it might be able to get by with less, though I’m not ready to try it unless I notice another couple games where the 8-land draw occurs.

Beating the Trading Post

“All right,” I said to Kiddo #1, “What did you do in that game?”

We had been playing with the Best Wishes set from the Dominion:Intrigue expansion, and he had gotten, I think, 6 provinces — probably the worst beating he’d ever given me. I’d been experimenting and had bought a few too many action cards, but the game had gotten way out of hand before I realized what was going on.

So he let me in on his secret: Trading Post plus Courtyard. Courtyard to get just enough card draw to ensure that he would usually have a match, and Trading Post to turn coppers into silvers. He says that in most games, you need an Upgrade to turn the Trading Post into a gold later.

We played a couple more games with that set, while I tried to find a combo that could beat the Trading Post. I did beat it at least once with a Scout/Wishing Well combo, but it was a close enough game that I’m not comfortable saying that it was a sure thing. Seems like Trading Post is a better card than I had been giving it credit for, and he did well to come up with the combo.

Inter-family Gaming

Our friends Sarah and Matt liked out Dominion session from early September so well that they bought the game. A couple weeks back, we went over there for a Sunday afternoon game session, which introduced us to Cartagena and also featured 3 games with the Dominion: Intrigue expansion.

Cartagena is a nice, fast, clever strategy game, whose basic object is  to move pawns along a track to the end. Supposedly there’s a pirate jailbreak theme painted on, but you have to really want to see it. Each space has a symbol, and you are given cards that match. You play cards to move your pawns:  you can move a pawn onto the farthest uncovered symbol that matches your card. The cool catch is that in order to collect new cars, you have to move backward, and how far back you move depends on the position of other pawns on the board. The game did slow down somewhat the second time as we all analyzed the moves a bit more, but it was still pretty fast. All in all, an interesting game, easy to learn and engaging.

For the three Dominion sessions, we shuffled together both the base set and the expansion. We allowed a lot of selection in terms of which cards we kept and which we got rid of, and this more or less guaranteed cards that we all liked. I don’t recall any details other than I think that I tied for first with my Devoted Wife in the last game, and I remember Market and Envoy being an important part of my victory.

It wasn’t until we were on the way home that my Devoted Wife and I realized that someone in our family had won all five games. Will we get invited back? Stay tuned…

Where Be Dragons?

Lunchtime Magic this week featured four matchups. I’m going to quickly summarize them here.

Match #1, Alara Dragons vs. Quick Critters — my Dragon deck is no match for Mike’s eight-land, one-cost creature deck. I was just warming up by the time he rolled me over.

Match #2, Knight of New Alara vs Quick Critters — these two decks are much more evenly matched. He made a bad first move by sacrificing the only land in his initial draw to play Rogue Elephant. I sent it away using Path to Exile, and since his deck has no basic land, that was pretty much the end of the match.

Matches #3-4, Alara Dragons vs. Pandemonium — Mike’s Pandemonium deck has lots of heavy casting cost creatures with high power. It doesn’t matter if they actually attack, as they do damage as soon as they’re cast. We split these two games, but it was a pretty good matchup. In both games, I did some fast damage to him by bringing Elves and token creatures into play. Mogg War Marshal was particularly helpful, as I could do more damage by failing to pay its ‘Echo’ cost.

The interesting observation here is that the Alara Dragon deck has not won with a Dragon since its revision a month or two ago. In its wins to date, Colossal Might and the hoard of fodder creatures have been the keys to victory. It may just be that I need to add more cards with Devour. On the other hand, in the first game, I ended up with a hand full of cards that were too big to cast right away and no fodder. There’s clearly a balance here that I want to maintain and I think I need more plays to figure out which side of it I’m on.