Contains: 1 Reusable storage box, 10 Card dividers to be used with your storage box , 1 Crown of the Heavens playmat, 1 Crown of the Heavens Deck Box, 6 Crown of the Heavens Booster Packs, 1 Crown of the Heavens visual pocket guide, 5 Random Foil Heroes from Crown of the Heavens, 1 Common Loot Card
Crown of the Heavens is the second release in the Aftermath block and introduces new playable Monster hero races and classes! Demons, Dryads and Ogres are the featured Monster races in Crown of the Heavens. Look for new exciting powers for each of the featured Monster races and of course brand new Murlocs (including an epic Murloc)!
Card set total 218 (64C, 60U, 24H, 60R, 10E) • 16 Cards per pack, includes 15 game cards (10 C, 4 U, 1 R or E) and 1 hero or crafting/token card (Loot™ cards randomly inserted—replaces hero/crafting/token) • 3 Different Loot cards (1U, 1R, 1E) • 36 Packs per display
The Six Samurai Attack! Start building your very own Six Samurai Deck with Samurai Assault! The Six Samurai are one of the most powerful Decks in years, and the booster packs that introduced them are available again for a limited time! Players can combine the Samurai cards from Samurai Assault with more Six Samurai cards available in Extreme Victory booster packs and in the Legendary Collection 2: The Duel Academy Years Mega-Packs. Each box of Samurai Assault contains one pack each of Strike of Neos, Crimson Crisis, and Storm of Ragnarok, plus one Super Rare Elder of the Six Samurai.
I’ve been talking with a lot of newer players lately. They’ve been bringing it to my attention that many of them don’t understand simple concepts or maneuvers that effect the balance of power between players. These concepts or maneuvers, as I like to think of them, are card advantage, card quality, tempo, and board control. All of these can be quite simple to explain and quite difficult to master. Part of that might be because they are often so closely related that a player might not be able to tell them apart. For example at times it isn’t that difficult to confuse card advantage with card quality. Which in turn could also be tempo. But wait a minute, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Lets talk about what each of them is before we get carried away in debates.
Card advantage is a series of plays, or a play where a player has gained an advantage in the number of cards drawn and or used from their deck. In short card advantage is staying ahead of your opponent by drawing more cards than your opponent, or making plays that force you opponent to use more cards than you.
The classic expression 2 for one can easily be applied to card advantage. It makes perfect sense to everyone, I hope, that if one player plays 2 cards for every one of the opposing players he will not have cards for long.
I have taken the time to find some examples of card advantage.
WoW: Clash of Champions
$ 45.00 SRP
A new deck building game, centered around one of the most popular online worlds – World of Warcraft: Clash of Champions. Players take on the role of their favorite World of Warcraft Heroes: Thrall, Jaina, King Varian, Garrosh, Sylvanas, and King Magn. Each Hero has special abilities that only they can use in combat. As Heroes level, these special abilities shuffle into their decks. Face off against up to 126 Monster Cards and 9 Epic Bosses. For each victory against an Epic Boss, Heroes level up! Defeat monsters, gather loot, bring down bosses, and stand victorious. World of Warcraft: Clash of Champions allows for incredible replayability with 425 Game Cards. No two games will play the same!
Contents Summary:
The Silence of the Lambs (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)
Wow, I just saw this article written by Joelcool7 at gamrConnect. Basically, the article states Hollywood is going after board game licenses for movies. One of the games he mentions is Magic the Gathering. I didn’t like that fact that Joel lumped MtG into the board game genre, but he didn’t really speak about MtG either. He just mentioned that there is a possible movie out there.
Joel’s article talks about how board games lack plot. Well, That is actually a good thing. A good story isn’t about plot alone. In fact, a good story is really told by the characters. If a writer doesn’t develop the characters the plot will fail. Stories are far more about a balance between plot and character with character carrying the weight.
Lets look at a couple of movies and see if I can get my point across. The Expendables was an intense action packed movie with a lot of characters. Who were played by some really big names (Jet Li, Sylvester Stallone, Mickey O Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, and Jason Statham). I liked it. It would have been a lot better if it was 45 minutes longer and all the characters had a chance to develop. Better yet, start with 3 characters and introduce the rest in a sequel. In the Expendables the plot was there but there was just not enough time to develop the characters.
The Silence of the Lambs is probably the best plot verse character success I can think of. The characters DR. Lecter and Clarice played by Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster have plenty of time to develop. As a watcher you really get to know them and you want to feel what at least one of them feels. Understanding a characters feeling in a story gives the viewer a more enjoyable experience.
In the world of Magic the Gathering the characters already have so much detail it’s a no brainer to turn this IP into a movie. The only question is with so much story development already done, where would you start the movie? I would love to see the Brothers War saga turned into a movie or three. It would be far more realistic for WotC and oh we will say Paramount (first to pop in my mind) to start with some of the more recent planeswalkers. The Shards block storyline would make a good storyline. Who would play Nicol Bolas?
I am pretty excited about this. And it is not all speculation as this article from MTV’s Movie Blog seems to indicate.
It looks like we are in for some really cool promos at the theaters in the future.
Moving on in our discussion about how Innistrad effects the standard environment we come to RUG. I know I said we would go somewhere else first. but we made a wrong turn. What is RUG anyway? For those of you that don’t know it is an acronym for Red/Blue?Green. Most of the RUG decks are control driven, but they are not your traditional type of control. At least I don’t believe so.
RUG doesn’t have the named history like some of the other archetypes do. Take Fish for example it was an archetype before it was named. That doesn’t mean the roots of Rug do not run deep. I remember building Blue/Green decks when Prodigal Sorcerer still thrived, and Gaea’s Liege deprived your opponent of everything except Islands. It wasn’t long before you saw Channel, Fireball, and Mana Drain enter the deck. Yeah, that was a while ago. Somewhere around the time of Conflux (I believe) RUG got its official name. Why, I don’t know. But the name has lasted ever since.
First I am sorry for not posting this yesterday, real life got in the way. Second, I was going to start with more black cards, but I really have not had a chance to look it over yet.
Why does red burn Innistrad? Lets take a step back a moment and look at what I am saying. Red Deck wins is hardly using any Red cards from Innistrad. David Doberne took 1st at the Star City open in Indianapolis. Here is the link to his deck. In the whole deck there are only three named cards from Innistraad, Brimstone Volley, Stormskirk Noble, and Traitorous Blood. The deck I was going to post differed like this instead of Brimstone Volley I was going to run Goblin Grenade, and instead of goblin Arsonist I was going to run Reckless Waif.
After looking at his deck I can’t believe I overlooked Brimstone volley. Duh! 5 damage, an instantand it was one of my favorite picks 2 weeks ago. The really funny part is I just used a whole bunch of creatures that had good card quality, like Spikeshote Elder, Chandra’s Phoenix, and Grim Lavamancer. I didn’t even see how good it was until I started writing this article today.
Brimstone Volley is so easy to cause its 5 damage (Grim lavamncer or spikeshot)
With Chandra’s Phoenix you can almost always guarantee having a creature in play. Too bad the phoenix doesn’t have Flash.
Stormskirk is just darned good right now. I mean you have to play him; the anti human energizer vampire just doesn’t stop growing.
Enough about the deck. Why isn’t Red Innistrad seeing more play, when it has some pretty good cards?The truth is Red deck wins didn’t really lose that many cards. It still has a lot to offer us like Devils Play, and Ancient Grudge. I am sure the will turn up in a control deck somewhere. It wouldn’t be surprising if Curse of the Stalked Prey and Curse of the Pierced Heart make it into a goblin deck that does fairly well. HMM I think I will build that for my second son.
Next Time I hope to look at Green and blue. More Specifically R/G aggro. With any luck we might even get to talk about R/U/G.
Two days ago, I wrote about White and how it received some really great new creatures giving White Weenie a fighting chance again. Today, I am going to focus on Liliana of the Veil. She is pretty amazing. Being the other 3 drop planeswalker in the game I expect to see some great things from her. I was hoping that her +1 ability that forces each player to discard a card would be able to take advantage of Flashback. It seems that the best card to do that with is Unburial Rites. Which is not the best idea. It could work, but it would be difficult to make a good combo with the two in T2. Here ability to target player sacrifice a creature does have some promise though. The combination of hand control and and board control is an excellent representation of black and a better combination. Her last ability “-6: Separate all permanents target player controls into two piles. That player sacrifices all permanents in the pile of his or her choice.” is going to be used. It kind of reminds me of Fact or Fiction, but only because the player has to chose his pain.
Liliana is pretty wicked good. There is already a really good BUW control deck built around her and there will be more. here is a link to that deck list WUB. Since that is a really great deck I will focus on a simpler deck for a thirteen year old player.
4 Distress
4 Despise
24 Swamps
My sideboard is yet to be determined
Now that I have built this deck I am thinking it might have too much hand disruption. What about you? Do you think it has too much? Here is what I like about this experiment. It has good creatures for a themed deck. It has a descent amount of control. Right from the start. There are just enough mechanics like , discarding, planeswalkers and Grave titan triggers to make this deck a good teaching deck. Wouldn’t be great if on the first turn you cast despise and surgical extraction? While it won’t win a PTQ it is a great deck for my son to have fun with at FNM.
Black has a lot more cards to offer from Innistraad. We will look at them tomorrow, along with some red cards. I am hoping to design a new version of Red Deck wins this week. Any ideas as to what I should play?
Hey again, welcome to Revising Standard. In this set of articles we will always discuss the impact of the most recent set. The goal is to make this a living document that changes as the format matures. I will attempt to update each article by using the comments section of the blog.
The first installment of Revising Standard will discuss some of the impact Innistrad has on Magic the Gatherings standard or T2 format. More specifically we will start discussing how white is being influenced or becoming an influence.
White has long since been known for its one and two drop creatures. It also has a history of having one or two good reset buttons at any given time. White is often splashed or used as a support color. In fact blue and white have become a tradition among the deck archetypes of our day.
