Modern Mythology Continues

After posting about the influence of mythology and legend a few days, back, I just had to share a link to ish #560 of Order Of The Stick.

Even ignoring the pop culture references to Lost, Batman’s origin and a reference to ninja-pirate-monkey-robots, this panel alone is just all kinds of awesome.

If you don’t get the reference, you’re clearly out of touch with Classical Greek myth. No feta for you.

Have you been paying attention to your blogs?

If you have, you may have noticed a little something unusual about posts over three of your favourites for the last couple of weeks. Here’s the deal: We’ve been up to something.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

1. Identify the three blogs involved. This bit shouldn’t be hard.
2. Analyse the linked posts on the three blogs.
3. Solve the puzzle.

To help you out:

The first portion will lead you there, if you can interpret the key 3.19.3 3 6 

The second portion will provide the path, if you can decipher the clues 1 18.5.4 8.5.18.18.9.14.7

The third portion will tell you how to submit your response 13.5.24 16

Only submissions using the correct method will be accepted.

Now, the question remains: Why bother? Why should you make the effort of digging through a bunch of posts on three different blogs? Howzabout for a mixed bag of a dozen booster packs?

On behalf of the three of us, I trust that whets your whistle.

 

Caption Contest #4

Yay! After reeling from the Bill preview, it’s time to get back to the shenanigans.

This week’s Caption Contest:

Thursday 13 #16: The Unbroken

Captain Spud held me down and demanded I let him to a Thursday Thirteen. Demanded it, I tell ya! I hereby relinquish control of this T13 to CaptainSpud, who runs through a bunch of cards that, if someone could only figure out how to best utilise them, should IN THEORY spell Endgame for your opponents.
- Gdaybloke

We’ve all seen them– the cards that inspire a ten-page preview page brimming with insane combo ideas. The card is completely nuts… and yet…

Sadly, very few broken cards ever turn out to be so. They seem busted at first, but in practice there’s always some limiting factor that stops them from performing. But still… the potential is there. Dozens of combo decks have come together over the years on the basis of some clever designer figuring out how to circumvent a cost or a restriction, and turning an expensive or inconsistent effect into a massively powerful one that can be fired easily and cheaply. And so, we can’t simply dismiss these difficult cards just because their straightforward use didn’t pan out– because somewhere, somehow, there must be a way to make them work.

There are hundreds of these cards– broken cards that nobody has broken yet. Here, I present to you a small cross-section of the most notable ones.

Card Preview - MUN222 Beta Ray Bill

There comes a time in a man’s life when the cosmos recognises his efforts. Some karmic balance is finally tipped. All those times you walked the little old lady across the street. All those times you distinctly didn’t take the last doughnut. All those times you actually emptied the dishwasher before your mother / wife / girlfriend / alternative-lifestyle-partner-of-choice nagged you.

And then there’s those times when some crazy dude in an office somewhere who, for some godforsaken reason, has control over these things decides he’s gonna be nice to you to make up for that time he ate a puppy.

I have no bloody idea which this is, but, let me just say…

HOT DAMN!

How I’d Do It: Episode 11

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled How I’d Do It to bring you something a little different!

When the fan previews were first announced, I had just started working on this article series, and I made a semi-joking request that when LH got its preview card, could it PRETTY PLEASE be on a Tuesday, so that I could form my article around it, designing cards to go along with it? I didn’t expect anyone to listen… and maybe they didn’t. Maybe this is just pure blind luck.

But hot damn, it happened that way, so I’m going to take advantage of it! Now, a fairly obvious caveat here: the stuff I show you today is almost guaranteed to be proven completely wrong. In fact, it’s likely that we’ll see cards before the end of this week that contradict one or more items in this article. And that’s fine; I’m just having fun here.

Modern Mythology

Our imaginations often run rampant with thoughts of spandex-jockeys with fanciful names, futuristic gadgets and amazing powers that boggle the senses… but it amuses me how often things return to roots in mythology.

I spent more years than I care to admit at University studying the cultures of Classical Greece and Ancient Rome… with a splash of Egypt, and a short stint in Viking territory as well, and I retain a deep affection for the tales created by these cultures that to this day affect the tales we ourselves tell.

Everywhere I turn, I see the roots of myth.

The bigger they are, the more I wanna play ‘em

I was cruising the blogosphere, and as I was passing over StuBarne’s Full.Body.Transplant my mind turned to Army characters. I rarely play them, being addicted to Curve decks as I am.

Manhunters and Anti-Green Lanterns are obviously an exception to my curve addiction.

Of course, any time my thoughts turn to my beloved red robots, I cry a little inside that we’ve never been able to really make a Curve Manhunter deck. Sure, Curve Sentinels wreaked havoc, but what about DC’s robotic menace?

All of this took me to DocX’s search engine (donate, you fools!) and well, did you know there’s over a dozen Army characters out there that hit the deck at 4 or higher?

Rising to the challenge

Oh, how I wish that I could attend the Worlds… it’s a smidge (that’s a technical term) over a month away, and the creme de la creme will be there. I’m not talking deckbuilding prodigies and competitive masters, I’m just talking about a bunch of cool folks I’d love to meet in person.

Of course, with the release of Marvel Universe two weeks prior to Worlds, that means a bunch of players are truly going to be…

This tournament has so much potential. So many new cards will flood the market with scant time to properly playtest the decks. We’ve all seen the niftiness of the previews, but will someone be able to slap together an all-crushing Alpha Flight Deck?

Face-down in the dirt

Alternate themes appeal to me. Every team seems to have a strength, one theme that does well, but I always wonder about the secondary and alternate themes, and just how much fun can be had with them.

This was the appeal of the Squadron No-Break deck, the Avengers Leader build, and the Morlock No-reinforcement build. So sue me, I like Marvel decks.

When Darkseid’s Elite was refeatured in DLS, it didn’t take long for peeps to jump on the substitute bandwagon, but what about the Furies?

DLS gave us a pretty solid suite of Granny Goodness’s girlie goon squad.