24 hours of Matriarch Adoration

It’s Mother’s Day, you filthy, basement-dwelling ne’erdowells! Put down that keyboard, turn off your monitor, and dedicate your day to making your mother (or grandmother, stepmother, or guardian) feel appreciated, loved, and generally let her know that you appreciate all the hard work she does, or did, for you.

For my part, I won’t go into the mental anguish and torment I put myself through making this tray full of cookies with my kids, to be presented to Gdaysheila (and also to her mother). Needless to say, after growing up with one of the only things I actually liked about myself being my spelling ability (yes, I’m a sad, sad individual), actually casting aside everything I knew to spell Mum ”Mom” almost killed me. With death. That’s how much I love the mothers in my life. And yes, I called the ones back home in Australia too.

At least Gdayboy and Gdaygirl had fun making the cookies with me.

Now, let’s tie all this back to VS.

Warmachine: Gorten, Thumper & Jennifer

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Well, all VS and no… anything else, really… makes Gday an overly obsessed fanatic. Now, I know some of you are ready to string me up as a heathen for even suggesting that there was anything else out there in the world other than VS, but I come from a many years of gaming in an assortment of genres, including several years of slavish devotion to Games Workshop’s plethora of miniature games.

Now, over the years, GW has moved towards more and more plastic figures, while their prices have skyrocketted. Not only do you now get less figures for your money, but you get little pieces of plastic rather than solid chunks of metal. So sue me if I like to feel like I got something substantial for my money.

Thus it was with delight that I discovered Privateer Press’ Warmachine.

Caption Contest #1

I was sitting around the Gdaycave, having a nice cup of tea, when I turned to Bill and said “Bill, how’s them Asgardian’s doing?”.

Bill, he turned to me and says “How would I know, according to continuity I’m stuck in a dark dimension fighting a bunch of demon things.”

I looked at him for a while, pondering how to utter my next statement. In the end, I just went for the straightforward approach.

“Bill, you’ve got a piece of lettuce stuck like, right there.”

And when you don’t generally have lips to speak of (except when drawn with Alpha Flight), that’s a rough deal. So, I decided we need a caption contest.

Here’s the drill: Below is a picture. The picture alone is amusing enough, but Bill and I want to see how much more amusing YOU can make it. Make it amusing enough, as determined by the judge of the week, and you’ll win three cards from my trade binder. All three will be either Modern legal, or prize cards (such as EA’s, DCX, MAA, etc).

Each week I will choose a new judge from an assortment of disinterested individuals, which may or may not include my wife, my daughter, one of my co-workers, or that a random staffer from my FLGS.

Enough! Picture!

Thursday 13 #14: The Light Fantastic

You know, I was sitting here earlier this week pondering what I’d ramble on about, and Thursdays often present a little bit of a challenge there, since I can’t just ruminate on a single card or team or theme, and rather need to present a list of 13 thingumies to entertain the masses and confuse the non-VS-playing Thirteeners.

Well, this week’s preview update on VSSystem.com solved all my problem. Aside from getting me all giddy and excited about the Illuminati as a pseudo team in the upcoming Marvel Universe expansion… aside from giving us more Namor’s… aside from making a Dr Strange Legend deck viable… aside from feeding my secret hunger for something cool to do with Black Bolt…

… the new versions of Mr Fantastic bring the total count up to thirteen versions of Reed Richards in the game! Providence, I tells ya, Providence!

Without further ado, thirteen versions of Mr Fantastic! In order, nonetheless!

Hobby League: Burnt Follicles*

Alright, the BYOS tourney is almost upon us. I considered looking at MTU, but the Eponymous Pablo needs to pilfer some of my Marvel Defenders and Spider-Friends stuff so he can polish up his Moon Knight deck. I have other options, so being the benevolent soul that I am I’m turning instead to MVL.

I’m working on getting together playsets of the X-Men stuff, and of course there’s our old tried-and-true stomping grounds of the Marvel Knights and the Fantastic Four.

What’s that? You don’t think I’ve rambled on about MK and Fan4 enough in this blog? You’re always glad to hear more inane mumblings about cards that everyone’s had for almost a year now? Why, that’s just wonderful. I knew we had something in common!

So, if we delve into the world of netdecks, we see the likes of Both Guns Blazing and Family of Four (though truth be told, Family of Four kinda builds itself, so it can’t really be called a netdeck). We can maybe see variants on the Nova Blast deck, and I’m sure we could build something around Elektra if we really tried…

… but you may recall we put some work in to dealing with dandruff a few weeks back. It’d be a shame to waste all of that and just slap together a deck somebody else has perfected.

Spud is an irresponsible jerk.

Wet Feet

Amusingly enough, I’ve had thoughts in my noggin re: writing something about the assorted versions of Namor for a week or so now - well before today’s bombshell that each of the members of the Illuminati will be receiving new cards, including quasi-legend treatment in MUN! Woot!

Spreading the love

Lost Hemisphere has the distinction of being the first ever “Hero of the Month” blog as decided by the powers that be at UDE; We received one of the first MUN previews, a bunch of guest articles for Crime Lords Month, and we’re a regular feature in the weekly Rallying Cry!; We’re consistently in the top 5 over at VS System Network’s rankings, but we’re not the only game in town. There’s a myriad of other blogs, podcasts and fora out there doing their best to cover our game, many of which feature on the rankings.

At the time of writing there’s no less than 46 entrants in the rankings. A couple of these are regional fora (*waves hi to VS-Chile, Expertforum and Skillze*), and others haven’t been updated in over a month (*shakes a fist at Emo VS, Just Grazing and Phoenix Rising*) [NB: examples chosen at random], but there’s some solid, regularly updated blogs out there that just don’t seem to be getting the attention I think they deserve.

Today I’d like to bring to your attention:

Teen Avengers are all the rage these days

Marvel Universe, how we long for thee. How we pine at our windowsills, baying at the moon like lovesick hounds, tears of anticipation caressing our cheeks as we long - we long - for June 10th and your release. But just what will end up in our hands? What cardboard adventurers do you bring forth? In other words, who the smeg is on the Avengers roster?

• Avengers week showed us Captain America and Vision.
• SHIELD week showed us Iron Man

It’s been hinted that we’ll be seeing a bunch of new Avenger goodness; what sort of deckbuilding viability will we have for times when Captain America and Iron Man weren’t on the roster at all? What about the time when the active team consisted of Sub Mariner, Wasp, Black Knight, Captain Marvel, Dr. Druid, and She Hulk?

Now, I know, I know - we’ve seen these characters before, all bearing the Avengers affiliation… heck, we’ve even seen a dual-affiliated Quasar, who’ll no doubt reappear with the United Front in MUN (Yay!)… but will we see the boundless fury of prepubescence trapped in the body of a steroid-overloaded luchador?

Will we see Elvin Haliday? Will we see…

The more things change

… the more they stay the same.

One thing that’s caught my interest of late is the evolution of cards.

By that, I mean that if you pay attention to some of the plot twists and the like that are available to us nowadays, we’re seeing repeats of effects and abilities that were printed way back in the days of Marvel Origins and DC Origins… but this time, they’re team-stamped.

The net result of all this is it keeps cool and funky abilities in the game, but it makes them so much less prevalent. By limiting them thus, it can do wonders to reduce or outright remove broken combo’s in the game, while still allowing those teams who are stamped for the abilities to use the effects as intended.

Some examples! (because you know how I like to post pictures…