Radio Songs: Seven Guns

My comic store owner’s name is Mike. Mike picks most of my comics. See, I only follow four or five books at any given time, so I rely on Mike to bulk up my picks each week and find stuff that’ll interest me. He knows my preference for books with no continuity, so his recommendations often lean toward miniseries and contained arcs. They also lean, shockingly, toward “stuff Mike likes“.

As a result of that, I seem to be reading a lot of the UK Trio lately– Ellis, Ennis, and Morrison. Mike likes ‘em, and Mike picks my comics, so they end up in my comic bag most weeks. They’re all very good writers, though I find they can get a bit caught up in their heads from time to time. Still, I can’t really put my finger on much of their work that I’d call “bad”, so I’m happy to keep accepting recommendations for their stuff.

Radio Songs: Faith in Monsters

Ugh. My air conditioning died on Friday, and now I’m hot and sticky and uncomfortable. Short article today cuz my arms are sticking to the desk.

The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Today I pulled a random TPB off my shelf, and ended up with Thunderbolts: Faith In Monsters. It’s written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Mike Deodato Jr., and takes the TBolts in a new and… interesting… direction. I originally picked it up during TBolts week of the MUN preview season because I was unfamiliar with this new direction for the ‘Bolts and found it a little confusing to see actual villains on the team, and grabbing the TPB seemed like the easiest way to brush up.

Radio Songs: The Immortal Iron Fist

I lived in residence in my first year of University, and my best friend on my floor was named Terry. To be honest, I’m not really sure what drew us together, as we had almost nothing in common except hating his roommate. I guess that’s enough sometimes.

A Puzzle With No Solution: The Illuminati (part 2)

Aaaaand we’re back.

For those of you who are just joining us, I’m rather exhaustively covering the cards available to an Illuminati deckbuilder. In part 1, I covered Illuminati-stamped support effects, the various members’ name-stamped Legend effects, and all the characters available to the “team” in Silver age. Today, I’m going to cover team-stamped effects you have access to thanks to the six members, as well as generics that are useful to the team. Finally, I’ll put it all together with a couple deck lists, and talk about general strategy.

At that point, my hands will fall off and I can sleep for the first time in a week.

*cries*

A Puzzle With No Solution: The Illuminati (part 1)

I can’t stress enough how happy I am that UDE printed the Illuminati in Marvel Universe. Not just because they’re massively frustrating to play against, though that’s certainly an enticement. No, I love this team because they are mind-bogglingly complex, and their existence will provide the jank deckbuilding community with a months-long puzzle. See, most control decks are fairly obvious, and it simply becomes a matter of how to get them to work BEST. But with the Illuminati, you have to fight tooth and nail just to get them to do ANYTHING at all! This is exactly the kind of challenge I live for.

Hobby League Report: The Flash, the Slowest Man Alive

by Captain Spud

At last night’s Hobby League, we played Deck Roulette– each player brought three decks, which were put in the middle of the table and randomly assigned to a player each round. We intended to do standard games, but since Carrie and Gamerette couldn’t come this week, it was just me, Gday, and the Eponymous Pablo. Rather than giving someone a bye every round, we just shrugged and decided to do 3-player games.

How I’d Do It: Episode 12

Remember back in the day, on the last day of the elementary school year? Remember how useless it was to try to get the kids to do anything? Summer was a day away, report cards had already gone out, and it was impossible to grade you on anything. So generally speaking, we had parties. No lessons or tests, we just watched movies and brought in snacks.

Those were some good times.

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.

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.

How I’d Do It: Episode 10

For those of you just tuning in: this is week 2 of a 3-week series, wherein I’m trying to cobble together an Invincible Essential Collection using all the combined strategies and techniques I’ve talked about in my previous articles. Last week, we covered the good guys; this week, we cover the bad ones.

I ran into a problem with these guys right off the bat: which bad guys do I even pick? There isn’t a single enemy group in the Invincible universe who can be justified as anything more than a six-character team. So, it seemed like the best solution would be to bring them all into one big “umbrella team” that would contain all the various bad guys from the IP, but still keep the groups distinct by unifying them with versions.