Magic the Gathering and other CCG's and boardgames discussion

[kiggidykev]

Double strike is much stronger than first strike. I hate it when a creature with double strike manages to get through and damage me.

[AzureAngel17]

Yesterday, I saw a teaser for the new Planechase sets coming out and I'm psyched to add new cards to our Planar deck. Planechase is probably my favourite multiplayer variant because of the randomness and having to adapt to the planes' ongoing effects. One of the new Planechase sets is ninja-themed, so another bonus!

One of our group printed off a bunch of planes yesterday and we had a big 4 player free for all with them. It was insane. I effectively killed myself when I tried to change planes and hit chaos instead, forcing me to discard the Terminus that could have saved my life.

Still, it was a ton of fun and made the free-for-all really interesting. Downside was the guy I used to borrow cards from was using the deck I had built and used previously. He pointed out that I had made the best multiplayer deck that he owns, so he wanted to try it himself. That was the closest to winning a 4 player match he's ever come, so that gave me warm fuzzies. He landed the death blows on two of us using strategies he picked up from me.

Having my own cards is still nice though, I have a Green/White deck that does a lot of flickering (built from an Avacyn Restored fat pack) and I just bought an intro pack. They had every deck except the one I wanted (Slaughterhouse), so I bought Solitary Friends instead. The green/white's main way of winning is to survive long enough to get any combination of Champion of Lambholt, Craterhoof Behemoth, Angel of Glory's Rise, and Restoration Angel onto the field. There are a few winning combos involving those, judicious Cloudshifting, a pair of Conjurer's Closets, and Terminus.

Also congrats to Ellie for making the jump to Magic and getting set with her own cards! Careful of the slippery slope that is deckbuilding.

<3 Just so everyone knows, it was Kev that walked me through the options for how I could get started with a decent number of cards that I could use to build my own deck.

Edit: and if you want to have even more fun with Double/First strike, throw a Somberwald Vigilante into the mix.

[Der_Lex]

In interesting other card game news, Fantasy Flight Games is relaunching Netrunner as an LCG (for those who've never heard of it: it's a cyberpunk card game pitting one player as a rogue hacker against another player playing a massive megacorporation) . It's a game that got rave reviews at the time and I never got around to trying, and I like the 'easy on the wallet' approach of living card games as opposed to CCG's.

It's going to be part of FFG's Android setting, which has another interesting game coming out soon, the board game Infiltration, a risk/reward game which has you infiltrating a megacorp as a data thief, trying to get as much data as you can and, most importantly, making it out alive before security finds you. It's cool to finally have some cyberpunk-themed games out there.

[AzureAngel17]

What's the verdict on the board game version of Ticket to Ride? I played the demo of the XBLA version and I have to admit I was tempted to actually buy it, but I figure the board games are better.

[Der_Lex]

Ticket to Ride is very fun as a casual, quick to learn game. It's the one I tend to break out when we have people over who rarely or never play board games.

That being said, when people start placing 'F you trains' (single trains only meant to prevent another player from making his connection) things can get ugly fast, though.

[AzureAngel17]

I've spent several hours retasking my cards into 3 separate decks. I have a Slaughterhouse-esque Black-Red deck that has a disturbing capacity for self destruction, plus a mostly unchanged Green-White deck with plenty of flickering, then I also have the modified Solitary Friends deck. Most of its good black cards went to my Laughterhouse deck, so I guess "Antisocial" would be a more apt description of the new set that has been born. I also gave the deck some extra Mist Ravens and added some flickering capacity so I could have some fun kicking creatures off of the battlefield at will. I also realized a downside to getting the intro pack is that I now have cards from the Magic 2012 set that's getting replaced in just over a month, and I hadn't intended to buy any of those.

So yeah, I think I'm a lost cause at this point.

Ticket to Ride is very fun as a casual, quick to learn game. It's the one I tend to break out when we have people over who rarely or never play board games.

That being said, when people start placing 'F you trains' (single trains only meant to prevent another player from making his connection) things can get ugly fast, though.

Perfect, I fully intend to turn my niece into a shrewd and heartless businesswoman that I can mooch off of after she's wildly successful and this sounds like an effective training tool. Atlas Shrugged the Board Game?

[instantdeath999]

Think I'm going to pick up the first of the ones you suggested me this weekend, Lex. Looking into them, I'm thinking about grabbing Small World. Any objection to that one being a "first"?

[Der_Lex]

Nope. It's pretty easy to learn, works well with just two players and is a lot of fun.

By the way, if they only have Small World Underground and not basic Small World, you can pick that up instead, since it's basically the same game with a different theme (and different races) and one or two extra gameplay elements. Both are equally fun in my book.

[AzureAngel17]

Epic, epic 3 player planechase Magic tonight.

The first one included a moment where two of us wound up with 3 0/1 goat tokens each. Then we planeswalked, and the next plane gave each creature a +1/+1 bonus for each other creature that shared a type with it. The goats all became 5/6's and we resumed play about 10 minutes later after we finally stopped laughing at our sudden armies of Death Goats.

The second duel wrapped when a plane came up that let creatures do direct damage when they enter the battlefield equal to their power to target creature or player. Then I drew Angel of Glory's Rise. I managed to get my friend to kill both of my humans on the field, then played the Angel, restoring them and all my other humans that had already died to the battlefield. Victory!

[instantdeath999]

After really enjoying Small World, I decided to skip to the one that I'm really, really interested in: Arkham Horror. Just got it, reading over the rules... damn, is it complex. I'm going to have to devote some time to just the rule book before even playing the first game, it seems.