Innistrad | Through Gamer Goggles

Delta Green Wins Multiple ENnie Awards

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Aug 262016

Delta Green Wins Multiple ENnie Awards

(LOCATION REDACTED — August 25th, 2016) Award winning publisher Arc Dream announced today that their first two Delta Green products since rebooting the game line via Kickstarter both won ENnie Awards. Delta Green: Need to Know won the gold medal for Best Free Product and Delta Green: Agent’s Handbook won the silver medal for best supplement. The Gen Con EN World RPG Awards (the “ENnies”) are an annual fan-based celebration of excellence in tabletop roleplaying gaming. The ENnies give game designers, writers and artists the recognition they deserve. It is a peoples’ choice award, and the final winners are voted upon online by the gaming public.

Matt’s Dark Ascension Picks

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Jan 282012

Wow! It is that time already another Magic Prerelease is upon us. I am sorry for not doing this sooner, but I have been busy making some videos for the blog and trying to pay for life. So Dark Ascension is what we are going to talk about. Specifically my picks. Since this is my second ever set review I am trying to be different. my reviews will always differ from the other guys because I am a both competitive and casual and a judge. I tend to look at a set and say wow this is cool or this really stands out for this deck. What you won’t get from this is the best draft picks, or replacement cards in deck types. What you will get is a broader selection. I don’t care about only the competitive end of the game.

With that said I am going to take a different approach this time. Since, Dark Ascension is only 150 cards I ma cutting my selection to only 3 cards per color one common, an uncommon, and a rare. Starting with black.

I think the best three cards in black are GravePurge, Wakedancer, and GraveCrawler.

GravePurge

Because putting a card(s) on top of your library from your graveyard and drawing it is cool. The fact that it is an instant makes it really good.

WakeDancer

She has all the synergy you want in a card. Cheap to play and a good ability.

Gravecrawler

What can I say undead should always be played from the graveyard

Revising Standard: Red Burns Innistrad

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Oct 062011

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.

Revising Standard: Influence of Innistrad

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Oct 022011

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.

Innistrad Picks Part 3

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Sep 212011

While looking at green I have concluded that green is just kind of blah. Now, I don’t mean that in a negative way. Green in Innistrad is just so similar from card to card that only a few cards stand out. We will get to those in a moment. Green has a couple of recurring themes that happen too frequently. They are +X/+X where X is number of creatures in your graveyard and werewolves. They both happen so much that it waters them down. I do not really like the fact that Green is full of transforming cards, and I even dislike the trigger for them more.

On to the cards.

Innistrad Picks Part 1

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Sep 192011

With Magic the Gathering’s Innistrad right around the corner, I have decided to do something I have never done. I am am going to review a hand full cards from each color. This will most likely take me 5 days and I will make mistakes. The only thing left for me to do is select which color is first. I think I will go Black, Blue, Green, Red, White and anything else.

In black I do see some potential for card quality. My favorite cards in Black are, Blood Gift Demon, Liliana of the Veil, Endless Ranks, Morkhurt Banshee, and Skirsdag Piest.

Bloodgift Demon 3bb
Creature – Demon Rare
Flying
At the beginning of your upkeep, target player draws a card and loses 1 life.
He relishes the devotion of his Skirsdag puppets and their belief that it will earn them immortality.
Illus. Peter Mohrbacher #89/264 5/4

All I have to say is a 5/4 flyer for 5 is good. In the current environment he is not that good, but keep in mind we will be changing things very soon. But I doubt he will replace any of the current staples in Standard.

Innistrad Mechanic Review

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Sep 132011

So the next Magic the Gathering expansion is on the horizon. It will bring with it 5 mechanics. Some of these mechanics are making a return, like Flashback and Fight (which is a new keyword). While others are just knew. But before you go any further I suggest you read Wizards of The Coast article on Innitsrad mechanics here. Because this article is going to talk about rules in significant detail.

Transform

Of the the mechanics being introduced in Innistrad this has to be the most complicated one.

It will have a tournament legal proxy.
There is no Magic back on the card.
The face up side is marked with a sun.
The transformations are triggers.
Both faces are the same card. That means counters, tokens etc stay on the card if it transforms.
Transforming is different from flipping.
Always enters the battlefield face up.
Copy effects only copy the current “face” of the card.

What does all of that mean for a player and for the judge?

Judge Perspective

While double faced cards are going to bring to the game a potential for new levels of card quality it is going to be a messy mechanic at first. I suspect that early on players are going to miss the transform triggers left and right. I can just see it know some random player draft 10 double faced cards and put 7 in his deck. Can you imagine having 4 of them in play at the same time? You might have different faces face up. In other words the players might have four different triggers to remember on top of normal game play. The good news is that this is most likely to happen at the casual level of play for some time – practice. In the end I think it will force both players and judges to improve their game.

Player Perspective

As a player I am looking forward to the card quality that thes might bring us. And I do believe there will be enough good double faced cards that a handful of them will see play. Otherwise, WotC is waisting their time with this mechanic.

Morbid

Judge Perspective

There is not a thing that is so unique about this mechanic that we have anything to worry about.

Player Perspective

The trigger is going to be easy enough to pull off that you will definitely see it played. I kind of like Skirsdag High Priest. I used this spoiler for information. I kind of like putting 5/5 flying demons in play.