Bay 12 Games Forum

Jester's Caps get no lovin'  

I thought I remembered liking Ice Age, but I'll be damned if I can remember most of what was in it now ...  Icy Manip?  Although, the whole "snow-covered" mechanic was pretty damn stupid, as I recall. 

Misc. note:  I have four oversized (8-inch?) MtG cards up on the wall in my office.  Aswan Jaguar, Jester's Cap, Shivan Dragon, and Black Lotus.  After many years, no one has commented on them

Hey, I've got most of those buried in moving boxes around here somewhere! Except no Lotus/Cap, and with Chaos Orb and Guay-art Serra Angel.

Ice Age rocked. Orcish Lumberjacks, Jester's Cap, and various other good things were floating around there. Snow-covered stuff would have been better if they'd actually done stuff with it, but it's one of those things Wizards will never touch again. That's actually one of my main complaints with Wizards: They absolutely love printing new mechanics willy-nilly and then dumping 90% of them without doing anything interesting with them.

"We like to keep things simple when introducing mechanics, and save more complex versions for later sets" combined with "We don't like reusing mechanics, because players will get sick of them" makes for a lot of stuff never getting a fair shake. Then, if a set becomes unpopular, you get "We don't want to remind players of a set they disliked, so you'll never see the mechanics again."

I honestly would like to see stuff get printed that has minor mechanical throwbacks to old sets, just to support interesting deck types. Reuse old sub/supertypes like Arcane, Trap, Shrine, Snow, and Curse, for instance. The subtypes won't mess up the current set, but people playing casual/legacy might enjoy having something new that works in their old decks without resorting to Tribal Matters.

/rant>

Oh my, Isolde! This should be jolly exciting! Who knows what majestic abilities you might gain! I'm positively giddy with anticipation!

"He's a genetically engineered Amish grifter living undercover at Ringling Bros. Circus. She's a bloodthirsty foul-mouthed safe cracker who can talk to animals. They fight crime!"

I wasn't all that impressed until it came up with that one. Then I was... well, impressed.

That doesn't work; The spirit guide goes into the exile area, not the graveyard.
*almost wrote gravyyard. Yum.

Y'know, I never noticed that. Dammit.

All right then, just use Seething Song, Pyretic Ritual, Desperate Ritual, or Rite of Flame instead.

Pretty neat, if simple, puzzle shit going on. Speculation: behind the door is the last survivor, the last denizen, of the planet.

Quote from: Liber celi on April 14, 2012, 04:08:31 am

Quote

Heroes promoted to nobles-> their people craft giant amounts of useless crap-> everyone dies and the land is devastated

...why has nobody drawn the connection to DF yet?

So CD and JN were tantrumming?

Spoiler: Walkthrough for the lazy (click to show/hide)

-Walk away from the hole. Examine surroundings if you want to.
-At the split, go right, t, and pick up Seb. Talk to UU
-Go  back to the first split, go left, enter the doorway, go all the way inside and take the skull. Talk to Rox if you want.
-Back outside, go to the building in the background, enter, read slabs. Caution, might be NSFW.
-Go further inside, pick up skull, go up, use first skull in indentation. Talk to Jake.
-Go isnide pagoda and read engravings. Have Seb go up, and turn the lanterns thrice.
-Go back to the cave where you found the first skull and activate the orange switch. Take other skull.
-Go back to lanterns, rotate another three times. Take Seb.
-Go to where you talked to UU, and go further ahead. Send Seb down the hole and enter the Mausoleum.
-Enter doorway ant take skull. Oh no! Be dwarfy.
-Sacrifice the blasphemous cake and go all the way back to where you found the first skull.
-If you have read Problem Sleuth, you'll know what to do.

Quote from: JoshuaFH on April 08, 2012, 12:04:32 am

Being beaten to death by a deck with no creatures whatsoever, and consistently at that, is ridiculous. Enchantments and hard to remove creatures just seem tame by comparison.

Go on MTG:O, face anyone with a Burning Vengeance deck. You wouldn't think they'd be as hard to beat as they are.

I remember in the old MTG computer game, there was a prebuilt green/black deck (Centaur Shaman) that focused mostly on "inflict damage each turn/on tap"-type enchantments. Could be horrifying to play against some times. Your artifacts were steadily killing you, your creatures were steadily killing you, your enchantments were steadily killing you, and if you tried to cast something to fix the situation, tapping your lands damaged you.

I loved the old Microprose game. I'm still waiting for Wizards to make a new set: "Arzakon Reborn" 

Surely that 4000+ years he got reimprisoned for has passed by now, going by the timeline. (In fact, he was my top suspect for smashing Alara, up until Wizards revealed that it was all on Progenitus.)

I wasn't into Magic was the original Ravnica came out, so I can't see what everyone's so excited about. I mean, like literally everyone on the official forums were crying and wailing for a Return to Ravnica without end, so I'm sure it must be awesome, but from what I can see it was just a bunch of warring guilds and multicolored cards.

I think it has a lot to do with the tournament environment, which I personally couldn't care less about.

It was the set that came in after Mirrodin rotated out, and so Standard suddenly lost the ridiculous nastiness of Affinity, (which was dominating the tournament scene) while gaining a bunch of cards that were far less overspecialized and underpowered than the Kamigawa block that had immediately followed Mirrodin. So, we got a more diverse metagame and decent power creep, which folks associate with Ravnica itself rather than its placement.

In Ravnica's defense, though, it also introduced hybrid mana, (which allowed for multicolored cards that were actually easier to cast) as well as greatly enabling tri-colored decks, which would then be supported by at least three different guilds' mechanics. Each guild felt different, and had at least one fun legend running around in it. (Yes, each guild had two legends, but a lot of the secondaries were just 2/2s that did minor things when you cast spells in their colors. Decent, yes. Interesting? Less so.)

tl;dr = I liked Ravnica, but don't think it quite deserves the hype. I'm still looking forward to it, but not enough to say "Screw Avacyn Restored! Fast forward 5 months NAOW!" like a lot of folks seem to be doing. Angels vs. Demons 2.0 looks like it'll be fun too, y'know.

You steal everybody's nothing and make it your own!

No, he steals The Nothing, and makes it his own!