Shallow Ground

I've been holding off on this one, but it's time. I named this after the Corrosion of Conformity song, just to give y'all a sense of how long ago I first started on this deck.

2 Talisman of Unity

3 Quirion Elves
3 Terravore
3 Werebear
3 Watchwolf
3 Soltari Champion
3 Mother of Runes
2 Titania, Protector of Argoth

2 Seal of Cleansing

3 Wild Might
4 Swords to Plowshares

8 Forest
1 Havenwood Battleground
4 Windswept Heath
2 Flagstones of Trokair
6 Plains
2 Horizon Canopy

4 Armageddon
2 Catastrophe

Why have I been resisting playing this deck? 

First, Magic has largely moved on. Armageddon was once a terrible spell to witness. Now, it barely registers. Mana has gotten a lot better since Armageddon's heyday, the game has sped up significantly and losing all your lands doesn't sting like it once did.. 

Second, Armageddon creates unfun game states. That's just a fact and it's why WorC hasn't printed a Standard legal version of this card in literal decades. 

But now; now I'm wondering if this should still exist--and if it does, should it just be combined with Xnoybis. 

More is Too Much

 This season of Marvel Snap has been a mess. 

First; every since the Golden Gauntlet 2 (which was entertaining as HELL to watch the finals of), there's been a mild Thanos/Arishem/Agamotto meta, where you throw ALL THE CARDS in your deck, which I haven't been able to beat even with cards like Cassandra Nova and Darkhawk.

When the tech cards no longer keep the meta in check, you have a problem.

What's created more outrage among the community though has been the tweaks to the High Voltage. 

Effectively; the mode does three things:

First, it adds random "charged" cards to your deck, making every deck an Arishem one.

Second, it offers a random "overdrive" ability which triggers if enough charged cards are played. Sometimes it's beneficial, as when you can earn double credits for a win, but it also includes "Cull all the weakest cards" or "transform all the charged cards" and you just have NO idea what you're going to get. 

And third, the visual effects of all these things-charged cards, the overdrive trigger-crates this visual mess that just makes the whole board difficult to track.

Making things worse by far are two other things-cards they didn't ban before the mode started, then had to fix 24 hours later (which, kudos here but a card like Gorgon should NEVER have been allowed).

However, the real chafing has been in the store; the communication about the funds players get, and the cost of the new cards. 

New cards that are kinda assy; Kid Omega and Cobra are baffling to me. On top of that, the price to get them is brutal. Players are supposed to get something like 500 "charge" points a day to help us afford these things but that wasn't communicated to the playerbase well at ALL. 

And these changes come to a game mode that people loved once upon a time! Now people are just frustrated and angry about all these things. 

Adding more to the mode didn't really help.

However, I want to say that: I get it. I'm a homebrewer, both of beer and Magic decks and I understand that people like to tinker with things! And this is a temporary thing as all things are in Marvel snap. 

But dang did this one not go well

Rethinking White

I found this breakdown on "fixing" the color White to be really interesting! 

For all of Magic's flaws, I appreciate that they are still trying to reinvent the wheel to make the game a better one.

Star Realms: Rise of Empire

My friend and I have completed the campaign for Star Reams: Rise of Empire, so I'd like to offer my thoughts. 

If you have played Star Realms, then you have a sense of how this game works. This cuts both ways, of course. because on the upside, the game is easy to learn. There are minor tweaks to how gameplay works, but that's all they are, minor.

Which is, of course, the downside as well. Rise of Empire doesn't do anything new with the game that isn't already being done. Adding three new shades of color isn't a gameplay twist, folks. It's just extra instruments.

Which is fine if the song is still good and if you like Star Realms, then the song is still good!

But one other drawback is that while the trade deck is shaped by your choices, the story the game is telling the players is a nothingburger. Sure, the winner of the last game gets to make some choices about what will modify the next one (will Vipers give you +1 gold or let you draw and then discard?) but that's the extent of the choices.

The story itself is on rails and the winner or loser of a game doesn't change where it all ends up. 

Now, I had fun with Rise of Empire but that's because I'm already part of the game's ecosystem. But I didn't come away impressed by it, and feel like they could have done something to expand on what the game played like, if they had wanted to. I certainly don't think this expansion will convince anyone who isn't interested in Star Realms to care about it. 

I definitely think that people shouldn't pop for the reusable version of the game; there is nothing to be gained, in my opinion, from the ability to re-use stickers and modify games every single time. Ugh. 

But if you like Star Realms, then yeah, Rise of Empire is a solid time. 

Late To The Party: Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth

 I have, at long last, finished Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. It took me over 140 hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if I hit 150.

And I spent the last 20+  hours doing one thing: Fighting the final boss.

As a result, I have come away from a game that told a pretty interesting story, made some bold choices about what it wanted to do, and never left anything on the table, hating it.

After 130 hours in ANY game, I should be overleveled. I should be able to power through final bosses like a kid going through ice cream. 

But the final boss did several things that just ruined the entire experience. 

First; it was a multi-part boss that had no save points between them. You have to do all six stages of this boss in one roll and while there are checkpoints, so if you loose at stage five, you just start at stage five, but if you have to say, go to bed and try again tomorrow, you have to start the ENTIRE fight over again.

Second; It introduces a brand new character with new mechanics. You know when you shouldn't introduce a new thing? At the very end of the game. 

Third; it has an autodeath sequence, and autodeath sequences are BULLSHIT.  Third-point-five: it does a piss poor job of telling players how to avoid that sequence. Why? Because it introduces a new thing in the LAST BATTLE. 

Here's how that works; in battles, you have the life bar of an enemy, and a pressure bar that goes up the more attacks you made on that enemy. The more appropriate the attack, the further the pressure bar goes up: if you can max it, the enemy goes into a staggered state, where they can't do anything and you can just whale on 'em. 

The pressure bar is orange-except for in the last battle, when it is blue, and it is ONLY blue in the timer sequence before the autodeath move. 

Now, I hate the "pressure/stagger" element of fights anyway. But at least there would be some tactics involved with fighting enemies-or at least it would be if it was worth keeping all 230 enemies in your brain was worth it. 

However to change how that works in the last battle? WHAT IS ANYONE THINKING?

So when it was all over, instead of any sense of accomplishment, or vindication, I just felt exhausted and tired. Fuck this game, was my response. 

A few days later, I've softened my reaction but it's still soured. They failed to stick the landing, and I ended up feeling bad about the whole thing. 

It Never Lasts For Long

The card draw didn't quite do what I was hoping. Perhaps if Thrilling Discovery was an instant, I'd find it more usable? Rebecca's comment was, "I just don't feel like I'm doing something powerful, I feel like I'm discarding powerful things to get more cards."

So this is what I settled on.

4 Balefire Liege
2 Hearthfire Hobgoblin
3 Skyknight Legionnaire
3 Aurelia, Exemplar of Justice
4 Swiftblade Vindicator
3 General Ferrous Rokiric
4 Figure of Destiny
2 Boros Recruit

3 Legion's Initiative

4 Lightning Helix
2 Lightning Bolt
1 Legion Leadership
3 Path to Exile

7 Plains
7 Mountain
4 Sunbillow Verge
2 Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire
1 Castle Embereth
1 Needle Spires

// 4 Sideboard

SB: 4 Cursed Totem

The Sideboard is incomplete: Rest In Peace seems like a gimmie, Wear/Tear and Red Elemental Blast likely too.

I ended up cutting the Boros Swiftblades, because I wanted to keep the deck as low to the ground as possible and make room for more Legion's Initiative. The boost in Swiftblade's toughness wasn't the answer I was looking for.

Anyway, I like where this deck has ended up and we're on to the next one!

Marvel Snap: Masters of the Arcane

The new cards this month!

Merlin, the card for the month feels like a fun boost for the small decks archetype. I think it's going to provide a lot of interesting versatility while ALSO having the problem that randomizer cards have. Some moderate variance for fun times. 

Morgan Le Fay-does this card have a home? It's an interesting twist on Ghost Rider, but because she returns cards to hand, how much help is that? She's interesting, to be sure! At the very least, she could remove the drawback of having Corvus Glave discard Hela.

Jennifer Kale is fine. You play her anytime before T5 and you get a boost; I think this is a solid card that you'll be happy to see more often than not. Not sure that she's a Series 4 card though. 

Nicolas Scratch is a card I didn't understand until I saw it in action. The bonus happens whenever you play a "spell" like Merlin's Incantations or Agamotto's Ancient Arcana (or the upcoming effects from Clea & Dormammu). But because the card says "skill" I had no idea what that meant. Seems like there's going to need to be some wording cleanup. 

The Ancient One is absolutely cracked. Get it; the ability to duplicate ongoing abilities from Blue Marvel to Goliath is too strong to ignore. 

Nightmare has been the hype card of this season; everyone is expecting it to do insane things with Sauron decks. I don't think that's going to be true; I think the RNG is too  high for this to be consistently good. When it hits, it'll be a lot of fun but what I think Nightmare is mostly going to do is make players think extra hard about how to play their cards. 

Clea provides an interesting tool-I like the 'boost' decks that use Forge, Nakia, etc but now there's a little affliction added in. I don't think she's great but she's not bad. 

As for Dormammu, this one will likely spawn a new deck, some kind of destroy offshoot. Worth getting just for that: new archetypes always find interesting ways to evolve the game.

As for the game mode rewards (and yay, High Voltage is coming back) 

Cobra seems like a very niche card. How often will it be useful? It's not like Victoria Hand/SHIELD decks are running wild. Seems like a solution in search of a problem. The stat line isn't anything to write home about either. 

And Kid Omega's ability seems odd-do we need another take on Venom? But free cards are free!

Free Pizza: New Mutants Season

 I feel like this one came a little later in the season but, I still hit free pizza! 

While typically I am not a fan of Arishem decks because they are too chaotic, chaos seemed to fit very well in a meta full of Thanos decks. Color me surprised! That's emphasized all the more by the use of Loki. Having to suddenly play someone else's deck means knowing what the metagame is like and how decks basically function. 

I believe I saw a version of this on Snap Judgements and I wanted to play something that wasn't Thanos, a deck I just never seem to be comfortable with. Remarkably, this deck did the work! It needed me to play very smart; Arishem can throw a lot of different cards at you. Knowing what cards do and how they work is really important. 

But I got there, and that's always nice.