Burns My Eyes

(Ed. sorry I meant to mention I was going out of town and there would be no posts until the 31st. My bad.)

The card that stands out as being less helpful in Xnoybis is Rootgrapple. I understand why the card is there, since it can be cast for four, draws a card and has a positive interaction with Leaf-Crowned Elder. I knew a little bit about what I was doing when I made the deck!

However, it also slow. It doesn't protect my creatures and the Achilles' heel of Xnoybis has to be a removal spell on Timber Protector in response to an Armageddon. 

There isn't much in the realm of Changeling spells to help though, with Crib Swap being a decent removal option but that's about it. There are a few Treefolk with graveyard interactions but the most appropriate one is Tilling Treefolk and that isn't a spell I want to cast until after I've played an Armageddon. 

Except the whole point of Xnoybis is to not lose my lands after an Armageddon. 

The reason I'm thinking about these four cards so much is because I'm trying to take my own advice. Frequently, when I see people asking for deckbulding help on Reddit, they lack one of two things: either interaction with their opponent, or ways to consistently do what they want to do. 

Examples of the former could be cards like Counterspell, Crib Swap, or even Kogla, the Titan Ape. In the case of Xnoybis, I'd want to do something that deals with creatures because that's the most common victory axis. But, dealing with creatures could look like Blossoming Defense or Tamiyo's Safekeeping, where I protect my stuff in risky situations.

Examples of the latter would look like running four copies of Armageddon, Night's Whisper or Harmonize. In this case I would want something to help me dig deeper into the deck so that if by some chance my copies of Armageddon are all in the final 30 cards, I'd have a chance to find them. 

Green and White are not known for their exceptional card drawing abilities but they do have some good interactive pieces. Since I'm already running copies of Swords to Plowshares, and I've already identified the big weakness here, I'd like to look for something to save my stuff.

The other card to consider axing is Dungrove Elder. It seems to do one thing but that's it and I'm not sure this deck needs an untargetable idiot. Since the first two turns don't have plays with massive impacts, having something happen on turn three that is important. Doran counts as such a thing-but what else might?    

This is where some playtesting will be necessary and so that's next.

Xnoybis

I got a spicy one for folks today. Appropriately, this one is named after a Godflesh song. 

4 Timber Protector
4 Treefolk Harbinger
3 Leaf-Crowned Elder
4 Bosk Banneret
4 Unstoppable Ash
2 Doran, the Siege Tower
2 Dauntless Dourbark
3 Dungrove Elder

4 Rootgrapple
3 Swords to Plowshares

5 Plains
4 Murmuring Bosk
1 Temple Garden
1 Savannah
12 Forest

4 Armageddon

Armageddon. There are probably fewer spells in Magic that are as iconic, polarizing and impactful in the game as Armageddon is. 

I understand why modern design has stepped away from these kinds of cards: They often narrow, if not eliminating all meaningful gameplay decisions. Decks that run Armageddon are frequently reduced to "can I get Armageddon or not" and players going against these decks are reduced to "can I make enough meaningful decisions before Armageddon to win or not". 

Neither of which are great for the long term health of the game. 

One of the worst things I feel players can experience is having someone cast an Armageddon without any follow up. I've seen this in Commander, especially: Players drop a haymaker of a spell that doesn't end the game but instead results in everyone just twiddling their thumbs until a topdecked answer appears.

UGH. 

But, what if Armageddon wasn't symmetrical? What if I didn't have to wait for an answer; my answers are all on the table and ready to go, and their responses can only come from a dwindling set of resources? 

Enter Timber Protector. I get it, Treefolk is not the most thrilling of tribes. The curve is wonky and top heavy, and there doesn't seem to be much of a theme beyond 'butts'. 

Which this is a job for Doran, the Siege Tower. That means Xnoybis can play a subgame where my creatures are often in a position to do more damage than my opponent's, helping me accelerate into a win. This isn't even a new idea; for awhile there were Doran decks in Modern that could be pretty fast! 

It's time to give this deck a tune up, so here I go. 

Not Playing

I'm still playing Elden Ring and, of course, there's a ton of media surrounding the game right now. It's even part of conversations I'm having with non-Ring players, as they know just enough about Elden Ring to talk to me: you die a lot. 

One of the more interesting things I've read about the game comes from Defector, and as with the chats I'm having with non-Ring players, it raises some interesting points about videogames at large. 

Probably the most interesting thing is about how one can have fun watching it. They don't say this in the article but it becomes more like watching a sport, in a way.

I can’t remember ever having had so much fun watching other people play a video game. To me it’s very cool that video games can work this way. The same remove isn’t really possible with other media. A book that is not for you is not any more interesting when you watch someone else read it. A movie that drives you crazy will still drive you crazy; a song that brings you to the brink of a rage meltdown will not suddenly become good and fun while it is enjoyed by some anonymous stranger. Elden Ring is unapologetically Not For Everyone, in the best tradition of FromSoftware games. The solution, for me, is to simply not play it, whereupon it ceases to be a game that is driving me insane and becomes a thoughtfully crafted and beautifully rendered fantasy television show about other people going insane due to conflicts with overpowered skeletons. It’s great! 

That's something rather surprising. Unlike watching a sporting event, where there is a narrative, either already there or being crafted from the available information by the announcers, Elden Ring spectators don't need or need to care about such things at all. 

They can enjoy one simple phrase: YOU DIED and it still works. You can simply give people memes like this, and it's funny to ER players because bears fucking wreck you but anyone who doesn't play the game is going to go; Well yeah, bears fucking wreck you and it's still amusing. 

Does it matter why there are skeletons hanging from sky balloons? Or there is a turtloid species? Or a golden horseman? Color changing jellyfish? Nope! And the thing is: it doesn't even have to matter to ER players! Which might be the secret of it all: because the story and lore in FromSoftware games is so dense, often players know what a casual viewer knows:

Everything wants to kill you here, and you're gonna die. 

I've put a couple days worth of hours into this game and I still don't have the slightest idea what the hell is going on. I know two things:

There are eagles and rabbit-like creatures who don't want to kill me.

Everything else does. 

Let's go.

Late to the Party: Spiritfarer

Fetch quests are often considered to be a bane of videogaming. Something that was required back in the early days, now implemented in nearly eye-rolling ways. If you've ever had to "kill 5 ants before we can give you our help" or heard someone complain about such a thing, you effectively understand the fetch quest. 

Yet, Spiritfarer does a pretty admirable job of hiding the fact that it is one massive fetch quest, with nested fetch quests inside. 

The plot is pretty simple: you take over the role of a modern day Charon, ferrying the dead around an ocean purgatory, until they feel it's time to move on. The characters you pick up need food and have specific dietary requirements-so you need to get food. They need places to live-so you need to get materials to build them homes, and they get depressed when they have drab homes, so finding furnishings becomes important-which of course needs other kinds of material to make. 

But the plot is compelling because the characters in the first half of the game are interesting and well developed. Some even have relationships with each other that require other kinds of (fetch) quests that you help with. 

However.

The map isn't very helpful, failing to mark the places you've visited with names. That becomes a problem when you need "10 aluminum ores" to build a house for a frog, and they give you a name of an island to visit but you don't remember where it is. 

This happens frequently and as the game expands its borders, places become more and more difficult to track. When I was in need of items to move into the next area, I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out where to go next and the relaxing process of growing food, talking to passengers, and catching fish turned into a timesuck, which would involve me looking up things online so I could find what I needed to move on. 

The other real bummer about Spiritfarer is that about halfway through the game, the characters and minigames become very thin. I didn't want to engage with the characters-who were constantly demanding food, even if they weren't hungry, with nothing else to say. Previous characters talked about their past lives, or their relationship to the main character-that all dried up. Worse, the new minigames became dull button mashing exercises that felt grindy and unfun, to progress. 

And I noticed this because of the need to build an Orchard. 

Because most buildings in Spiritfarer are either upgradable (so you can get more out of them) or unique, like someone's dwelling. The game doesn't tell you you can't build multiple fields to grow onions, but it doesn't tell you you should, either. 

So when I built and filled my orchard, and needed to plant new trees in it, I searched all over, trying to figure out how to expand the orchard with an upgrade. No luck. Then I saw someone online say: I just built another one.

Oh. 

By then, though, I'd had enough of grumpy, unpleasant passengers who didn't have any depth, and minigames that didn't engage any sense of timing or finesse. The game killed its own momentum by going on longer than it should have, or by not giving me important information for me to interact with it in a positive way. 

Which sucks, because Spiritfarer is about something really neat: the people you ferry around are people you knew, but don't remember. So there's a process of re-connecting to your past that I thought was quite engaging! At least when it was working. 

Then it stopped, which is too bad, because the game was doing something different and cool. 

Called It

 I'm just going to take a moment here, given what's come up in the This Week In Legacy article at mtggoldfish. 

From the article:

The key question is whether Legacy as a format is fine or not. I think the format is reasonably okay at the moment, and the printings from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty definitely did a small amount of things to help push variances in the format. UR Delver still remains the top deck and I think we expected this after the banning, but there is a lot of things to be doing in the current format that isn't Delver and those decks remain very interesting to me.

Emphasis mine. 

And, just going back to what I said:

I'm going to tell you what the future will be and it's easy: the U/R Delver decks are going to up their Delver of Secrets count to four (some had gone down to as few as two), and then they're going to go right back to the well: True-Name Nemesis, Brazen Borrower, Monastery Swiftspear or Magmatic Channeler, maaaybe Ethereal Forager taking up the slack.

It'll take about a month, so from the outset people might feel "hey, it worked!" and then once the UR players have it figured out, we will be right back where we started.

Because I told y'all so.

Yes, there are other things to be doing in Legacy but the article at mtggoldfish even says that they now expect Murktide Regent to be next on the chopping block. They might be right about that! The card is incredibly good. 

But I refer you back to where I quoted myself. 

Ponder, Brainstorm, Daze, Preordain. 

The format won't truly change until one of those cards is gone-maybe not until two. 

Playstyles

In three days, I put in nearly 24 hours into Elden Ring so you could say that I'm enjoying it. However, I'm also learning about the limits of playstyles.

I've been co-oping most of the dungeon fights with Jason and while we are having a pretty good time doing it, I'm underleveled compared to him. It took about a day before I figured out why but I've got it.

Jason likes to get his characters to god mode, and then dominate the game. 

I like to wander around and find all the things, which eventually improves me to the point where I'm incredibly knowledgeable about what to do. I don't want to lock in a path, especially early in a game. I want to mosey. 

These two things don't mesh well. 

I have seen some amazing sights and found weird stuff! But I've also gotten some accomplishments, too-because of Jason's suggestions. There's a great way for me to gain more runes to level up and it's been nice to use some of those shortcuts to make my exploration less punishing. 

It's definitely a call to enjoy what I want, but there's a way to make things engaging for the boss events too. Also, I hope my exploration can give him places to check out too!

Elden Ring: Prologue

It probably doesn't come as a shock that I picked up Elden Ring, though it might be a little surprising that I went to the early release, having pre-ordered the game. Preorders are generally a terrible thing, rewarding people for something just existing, not the quality of that work. However, the beta test that they were doing late last year was overwhelmingly positive. I haven't seen that kind of enthusiasm for things in years, so I was willing to take a risk. 

When I checked in for my place in line, they put a sticker on my receipt and then gave me a little promo tchotchke. No idea what it was: It was a tiny black bag in a plastic wrapper, probably the size of a silver dollar, and I immediately pocketed this thing I didn't really want and didn't know I was going to get. 

I went outside to wait, and saw another fellow waiting with his girlfriend. All of us with our masks on, just floating outside the doors, knowing why we're here but not talking about it. Until he asked me "Elden Ring?"

So we got to chat a little and he asked me if I had pre-ordered it. "Yeah, last Saturday, actually."

"Aww, man. I didn't do it until Tuesday and then I couldn't get the promo item!"

Promo item? 

"You mean this?" I ask him, pulling out my tchotchke with a little 'what this silly thing' vibe. 

"Yes! Hey. Would you sell that to me?"

"Uh...sure, maybe-"

"I'll give you $10 for it."

"Dude, it's yours!"

And he handed me a tenner, and I thought 'hey that's cool' until his girlfriend said to me "You have no idea how happy you've made him."

Which is absolutely true! But it made him happy, which is great, so that's what I said. This thing would've just been clutter to me-but it made a stranger happy and ten bucks is ten bucks! 

Then, as the time drew near and a crowd of about sixty (60!) people lined up, the fellow I'd sold my promo piece to was first in line-because they handed out numbers and this cat had been waiting for awhile-and I got to chat a little with other people who were psyched. Some of them were brand new to the world of From Software games, others old hands at them but it was neat to talk to people.

Which is what I thought about on my walk home. The memories I'll take away from this game are about, still, the people I interact with because of it. 

That's pretty cool.