Game 1: This was one of those games that makes you wonder why you bother playing Magic. I drew tons of land and he didn’t draw enough. He torched the Student of Warfare that was the only creature in my opening hand, but then didn’t have anything else he could do. Eventually I drew another Student of Warfare and a Knight Exemplar and was able to bring him down.

Game 2: Excellent start for the Knights, with a Leonin Skyhunter and two Knight Exemplars. Once again he failed to have enough land to do much.

Game 3: I had an Aether Vial in my opening hand and led with it. In the first 3 turns I put out a Student, a Skyhunter, and a Knight of the White Orchid. After my attack (turn 4?) Mike still didn’t have any creatures out and said, “Well, I have to do it this turn or you’re going to win.” So he played Dark Ritual and Seething Song and some other spell and Dragonstormed for 4 hasty dragons and 20 points of damage.

Afterward, Mike commented that he didn’t think the Aether Vial did me any good. After analysis, I have to disagree. Here’s roughly what happened in the game with the Vial:

Turn 1: Plains, Vial.
Turn 2: Second plains, Vial gets one counter, play Skyhunter. End of his turn, tap vial for Student.
Turn 3: No third land drop. Vial gets second counter, level up Student, attack for 5. End of his turn, tap vial for Knight of White Orchid who brings a land with him.
Turn 4: Attack for 7 more, 12 total.

If you assume I drew a land in place of the vial, then those same four turns would go like this:

Turn 1: Plains, Student.
Turn 2: Second plains, level up Student, swing for 3. (Alternately, play Skyhunter, attack with Student for 1).
Turn 3: Third land, play Skyhunter, attack for 3 more (6 total). (Or, level up Student, attack for 5, same total).
Turn 4: Play Knight of White Orchid, attack for 5 more (11 total). Questionable whether or not I get a land off the Knight.

The value of the Vial is that I got to use the Knight a full turn earlier than otherwise, leading to an extra damage. I also got to play him after Mike had played the third land. I think that if the game had gone on longer, the Vial would definitely have been a plus.

I have one additional comment on that last game. I like Dragons as much as the next guy, and I have the utmost respect for Mike as an opponent, but I think the storm mechanic is busted. It completely reversed the game from “This is completely one sided in my favor” to “Wait, I just lost.” That seems a little too random for me.

We still had time after those 3 games, so we started a game with my Mirari’s Wake deck vs. his Cleric deck. I got off to a fast start with a Savannah and a pair of Loam Lions and knocked him down to about 6 life, but then he got out a Battletide Alchemist, which, in combination with the 4 other Clerics he had out, completely stalled the game. We had to leave before the game was decided, but the only way I was going to win was with removal, and I saw no evidence of that arriving.

1) Pick your cards from the new expansion without bothering to read what the symbols mean.

2) Don’t look at your neighbors before deciding whether to play a military card that won’t catch you up with where they are now.

3) Don’t pay attention to the cost of your card until it’s time to flip it over.

4) Try to play a card that uses a resource from your neighbors that they don’t actually produce.

Yeah, okay, really I have no excuses — I don’t know what the heck was wrong with me. Pretty much this is the way to lose at any game, that is, don’t pay attention to what you’re doing.

Just as a side note I’ll point out that even ignoring my bad play, I was really not terribly impressed with the expansion. If you want another draft round in 7 Wonders I can see it being great. For me, one of the things I value is that the game is fast and I’m not sure adding complexity is worthwhile. Having said that, I’d be happy to try it again, and maybe this time I’d have my head in the game more…

In game 1, I mulliganed to 6 and had Student of Warfare on turn 1 and 3 points of damage for him on turn 2. He had trouble getting anything but land, but then finally got enough to cast first Mirari’s Wake, then one the next turn Wrath of God followed by 3 Llanowar Sentinels. By that time, though, I had knocked him down to 3 life. Since I suspected a board sweeper I had opted to cast Sword of War and Peace rather than Mirran Crusader for a fourth critter, so I was able to cast the crusader on my next turn. He didn’t have anything to stop me from getting in with the equipped Crusader, though he was able to do Decree of Justice for a lot on the turn before he died.

In game 2, he played first and was at five mana by turn 3. He followed with Mirari’s wake on his next turn, and four Llanowar Sentinels on the turn after that. I had two early Students of Warfare and a Leonin Skyhunter. I tried to equip the Skyhunter with Sword of Fire and Ice, but he had the Naturalize to get rid of it. At that point I didn’t have the cards to race him and he just sort of shredded my blockers for the win.

Overall I was happy with the way both decks performed. I got to play with cool new cards and each deck had a game where it seemed to be firing on all cylinders. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten to five mana as fast as Mike did in game 2: he said it’s a knack he has for decks with elves…

Walkenhorst and Porter, No Abandon: this 2009 release features the lead singer from one of my favorite bands, the Rainmakers. It’s a quiet, country-ish album. My favorite tracks are I hope you’re laughing and Jimmy Lee.

Springsteen, Darkness on the Edge of Town: I wanted to like this album more than I actually did. My absolute favorite track is Racing in the Street, and Badlands and the title track are quite good.

The Cars, Move Like This: You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw this on iTunes. I think I hesitated about 3 tenths of a second before buying it. This is a solid Cars album: even though it’s clearly not nearly as good as their debut album or Heartbeat City, it’s the best Cars album since 1984, and I for one am very glad that they decided to enter the studio again. Sad Song is my most-listened-to song purchased this year.

Weird Al Yankovic, Alpocalypse. Another return by an old favorite, and one of my two pre-orders this year. I liked Craigslist a lot, and I found Skipper Dan and the inevitable Polka tune funny. My kids and I enjoyed Ringtone, Party in the CIA, Perform this way, and Stop forwarding that crap to me. I have to say that I didn’t recognize any of the official parody songs on this one: my wife pointed out to me later that I’d heard one piece of the Polka song in a YouTube video she showed me once, but I couldn’t have picked it out of a line-up.

Sara Bareilles, Kaleidoscope Heart: I passed over this last year when it came out but my Devoted Wife bought the album for me and I’m very glad she did. On this album, Sara Bareilles seems to be in the same style as Aimee Mann and Sarah McLachlan, and I think this may be the best album I’ve heard from a female lead vocalist since Aimee Mann’s last release. A very enjoyable listen all the way through.

The Alan Parsons Project, I Robot: I have only sampled the Project’s greatest hits, but I decided to give this one a try after reading in an iTunes review that it was a ‘must-buy for fans of 70′s prog rock.’ Yep, I’m afraid that’s me. I was very glad to have picked this one up. I don’t think its theme comes together as well as a typical Pink Floyd album, but it’s solid, thoughtful music throughout.

The Eagles, Long Road out of Eden: I stayed away from this one when it came out in 2007 because I wasn’t sure I really wanted the political commentary, but I succumbed finally and overall I feel good about doing so. About half of it, including tracks like How Long and What do I do with my heart, could stand up there with their best albums and do just fine. Seriously, Henley and Frey still sound great singing together, Schmitt has a great voice, and Joe Walsh’s two songs are a lot of fun. As for the rest, well, I do find myself wishing they’d made a single album rather than a double.

The Rainmakers, 25 on: Another knock-me-over with a feather moment. These guys used to play a concert on the last weekend before classes started when I was at Kansas State, and I figured they were done for since they last released an album in 1997. I think this is their best album since 1989′s The Good News and the Bad News. They’re more country than they used to be but I find I can live with that. Given Time, Go Down Swinging, and Missouri Girl are three good songs from the album. Kansas City Times makes me laugh out loud. Not for everyone, but if you’ve ever heard of and liked these guys before, you have to get this one.

Coldplay, Mylo Xyloto: My other pre-order this year. A very impressive album all the way through. Three of the songs — Every Teardrop, Paradise, and Hurts Like Heaven — appear in my type 20 songs for the year despite being the last album purchased on this list.

Overall I’m quite happy to have purchased 9 decent new albums within the same year, and I’ll be surprised if I can repeat the experience in 2012. I’ve heard that Aimee Mann is working on another album, and am looking forward to seeing that along with whatever else the year brings.

Most played games: Okay, no surprise here: Magic is my most played game with 55 plays. This is similar to the number of plays that I recorded for it last year as well. In second place, I recorded 38 plays of Dominion, including 11 plays of its various expansions. (If I set up a game specifically to use a new expansion, say Hinterlands, I record that as a play of the expansion: otherwise, I record it as a play of the base game. Yes, it’s probably too nuanced to really bother with.) Last year, the number was 26 for Dominion, and I think the greater number this year is due to the availability of isotropic.net. Or, it could be that I just wasn’t as good at recording plays in 2010.

Other games I played more than twice this year included

• Race for the Galaxy (8 plays)
• Forbidden Island (7)
• 7 Wonders (6)
• Settlers of Catan (5)
• The Secret Door (4)
• Cosmic Encounter (3)
• Star Fleet Battle Force (3)

Thinking about it, the one aspect of my gaming life that isn’t captured by these stats is computer board gaming. The Dominion stats include games on isotropic.net, and the Race for the Galaxy plays include on-line games with Kiddo #1, but I haven’t been recording computer games that I play against the AI. I’ve played many, many games of Puerto Rico on the iPad, and look forward to more games of both it and Titan on the iPad in the coming year. I also bought Tigris and Euphrates but have yet to sit down and learn it.

I’m not sure what the next year holds for gaming. Perhaps I’ll actually use the iPad to play against humans next year. Kiddo #1 and I now both own Ticket to Ride for the iPad, and I think we’ll probably play some games during 2012. And while I don’t know specifically of any paper games that I’m awaiting in 2012, I am hoping to see iPad versions of both Dominion and Race for the Galaxy next year. I plan to use the stats above to either help suggest games that should see play with the kids, or to suggest games that haven’t been played in a while that I might consider selling.

My thanks to the few of you who will read this post. While this blog is largely my own record-keeping, I hope that it is occasionally useful or entertaining to others. I wish you good gaming in 2012 and beyond.

Following this we spent some time taking apart both decks. In the Cleric deck, we tried to weed out some of the one-ofs in the deck to concentrate on the mechanics that seemed to be giving him success, which I outlined above. For the golem deck, it really seems like I have two decks, a Master Transmuter deck and a Golem/Glassdust Hulk deck. Now I have to decide if I want to spend money upgrading either or both of them.

The second match featured Elves versus Slivers. This was a new build of Mike’s Elf deck, Red-Green with Bloodbraid Elf. I have no idea how any of my decks are ever going to keep up with that monster — it is very fast, and much more focused than previous versions. It gets out a lot of elves quickly and then has enough mana to do whatever it wants, including just burning you to death with Devil’s Play. The one game that I won, I had Crystalline Sliver to give the Slivers shroud and enough Muscle/Sinew slivers to make them really big, plus the Flying Sliver for the win.

In the final game, I played my Valakut Ramp deck against his Black-Green Spike deck. The ramp deck did really well, pulling a pair of Plated Geopedes and enough land-drawing cards to pump them 2 or 3 times every turn. Finally I got enough mountains to activate Valakut and that put me over the top.

Playing Magic for four hours sounds like a lot, but actually we didn’t get in that many games. Deck take-aparts are something we’ve always talked about, and it was good to finally get one in. Overall, we both had a great time, and though I don’t expect we’ll do this very often I hope we get the chance to do it again.

Matt jumped out to an early lead and claimed the first victory point, but he ended up with no cards in his hand and didn’t really draw anything good with his activation tokens the next round. Sarah and I split the next two rounds and then we agreed to quit. By that time, the two of us each had 2 level-3 Goblins and were full up on level-2 and level-1 Goblins, while Matt hadn’t managed to fill out his power structure nearly as well. And so I remembered what I disliked about this game earlier in the year: if you don’t draw cards that let you draw more cards you are doomed. It happened that I drew blue and black Goblins that gave me card advantage, and this was why I was in better shape than Matt at the end of the three rounds.

I did notice this time that many of the level-3 Goblins seemed to have catch-up effects, such as giving everybody four cards in their hand or making the player with the lowest victory total draw cards. But that doesn’t strike me as a particularly good design, because the losing player doesn’t control his own destiny at that point. If he gets back into the game as a result of those effects, it’s because someone was forced to play that card to try to win the battle.

The game also suffers because the rulebook seems to have been written for humor and for learning the rules the first time rather than for reference and being able to find out things quickly. I looked for quite a while to try to discover what the yellow band around the level indicator means on some Goblins, and I couldn’t find it. I also remember earlier in the year being confused by the parenthetical numbers on some cards. I think they refer to what happens if you have the advantage token, and that’s how we played, but I don’t recall if I ever found a statement about that in the rulebook.

Overall the game seems to be too dependent on drawing the “right” cards  to be much fun. I don’t think that I’ll be giving it too many more tries. It’s a shame because a simpler game with cool Magic-like effects could be really great, but I don’t think this game manages to achieve that goal.