RAWR! I'm a robot dragon!

Those of you who know me personally probably already know that I recently rediscovered my love for Magic: The Gathering. Sadly, being a Mac partisan without a Boot Camp partition, I’m not cool enough to play Magic Online–I’m stuck with Duels 2012 on my PS3. Which can actually be a lot of fun, particularly when I’m playing Archenemy with the Kiora deck and I bring out all my lands by turn 10.

Here’s a decklist for my current favorite deck, which is white/blue and heavy on artifacts. Once I figured out that most of the cards were going to be from either M12 or Mirrodin Besieged/New Phyrexia, I added an additional goal to make the deck entirely Standard-legal…not that I do any serious tourney play (other than the occasional booster draft, which I suck at, at my local comic book store) or even FNM, but just to add some additional focus. Since then, I’ve added some cards from Scars of Mirrodin and Innistrad.

I probably won’t win any tournaments with it–I’m a decent player but a mediocre deck builder–but it’s fun to play.

Paranoid Android (although usually just called “The Robot Deck”): 60-card deck

Lands (22)
6 × Plains
9 × Island
4 × Glacial Fortress (M12/R)
3 × Buried Ruin (M12/U)

Creatures & Artifact Creatures (20)
2 × Alloy Myr (NPH/U)
1 × Ardent Recruit (MBS/C)
2 × Brass Squire (MBS/U)
1 × Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite (NPH/MR)
1 × Hovermyr (NPH/C)
2 × Mirran Spy (MBS/C)
1 × Phyrexian Ingester (NPH/R)
4 × Phyrexian Metamorph (NPH/U)
1 × Porcelain Legionnaire (NPH/C)
1 × Spellskite (NPH/R)
1 × Spined Thopter (NPH/C)
1 × Steel Hellkite (SOM/R)
2 × Trespassing Souleater (NPH/C)

Non-Creature Artifacts (6)
2 × Darksteel Plate (MBS/R)
1 × Flayer Husk (MBS/C)
1 × Mirrorworks (MBS/R)
1 × Sickleslicer (NPH/U)
1 × Strandwalker (MBS/U)

Other Spells (12)
2 × Demystify (M12/C)
2 × Feeling of Dread (ISD/C)
3 × Remember the Fallen (NPH/C)
3 × Stoic Rebuttal (SOM/C)
2 × Unsummon (M12/C)

Sideboard: I don’t really have a sideboard for this. However, in the deck box I usually keep an extra copy apiece of Demystify, Feeling of Dread, and Unsummon (usually to take the place of a Stoic Rebuttal or Remember the Fallen), two Arrests (in case Feeling of Dread won’t do the job), and a couple of as-needed critters such as Gust-Skimmer (for when I need an extra cheap flyer) and Master Thief (for artifact trolling).

Theory: I’m about 85% Timmy. Combos are fun, and I’m glad that Magic is flexible enough to accommodate lots of different strategies and win conditions. But I’ll also be honest: I’m not much of a strategist, I’m even less of a mathematician, and I’m not particularly creative when it comes to combos.

To me, Magic is, was and always will be a game about beating your opponent into submission with creatures, and I’m particularly fond of the critters I’ve got up at the top of the mana curve. In addition, note that all three fatties (Steel Hellkite, Elesh Norn, and Phyrexian Ingester) all have some form of removal built in.

Copying is also a strong theme here. My all-time favorite Magic card is Clone, so I’m totally gaga over Phyrexian Metamorph: it copies critters like the Clone, and it also copies artifacts, plus it’s cheaper than the Clone if you’re willing to take a two-life hit. Combo it with Mirrorworks (and remember, put two mana into your Mirrorworks when you’re copying it with the Metamorph and you get a third Mirrorworks!) and you’ve got a respectable swarm engine going, whether it be unblockable Land Sharks Trespassing Souleaters, flying Spined Thopters, or first-strike Porcelain Legionnaires. Living weapons provide on-theme equipment.

Ardent Recruit is a bit off-theme, but a one-drop that gets +2/+2 when the metalcraft condition kicks in is a big fat no duh. Another metalcraft favorite is Stoic Rebuttal, which can be a Cancel for the cost of a Counterspell. Spellskite and Darksteel Plate protect key critters (and Brass Squire evades equip costs). Alloy Myr is essentially a 2/2 Myr of Paradise–there’s not a lot of useful acceleration available to this deck, so including this guy is a no-brainer. Plenty of copies of Buried Ruin (oh, if only Academy Ruins wasn’t legendary!) and Remember the Fallen keep the graveyard useful.

The future: I’d like to replace the fourth Phyrexian Metamorph with a second Mirrorworks if I can get a hold of one. I’ve also got a couple of Phyrexia’s Cores hanging around, and I’m wondering if I should jettison a couple of extra basic lands to make room for them. Once Hook drops and the Scars block rotates out of Standard…I’ve got an M11 Voltaic Key which would probably work great here, and I understand that there’s some blue-generating lands in Zendikar block that let you (for all intents and purposes) scry when they hit the battlefield. And an Academy Ruins would be nice.

The other deck I use on a regular basis is a red/green deck based on haste, burn and ramping. I’m also currently working on a black/red vampire tribal deck with proliferate. I’ve got one deck I can use for Commander/EDH, a slightly modified version of the preconstructed “Counterpunch” deck (white/black/green). Decklists for the first two can be seen at my MTG Vault profile page.

Obviously, I’m still writing reviews for Forced Viewing and acting as site admin. We’ve got some projects in the works–nothing I’m going to give any details about yet, but we’re pretty excited about them. Also note that we’ve got a Facebook page.

Non-horror-related stuff I’ve been watching: Fringe, obviously, and Desperate Housewives (which still manages to come up with some good stuff). Just started Burn Notice, but don’t know how committed I am to it yet. Alcatraz looks like it has potential. Revisiting Intelligence and The IT Crowd, and watching Black Books on an intermittent basis. Will probably start Mad Men after the spring finales.

Carlos (the three-part French miniseries about Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, aka Carlos “the Jackal” Ramirez) was excellent. I enjoyed Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor, but most people who aren’t already familiar with Le Carre’s Smiley/Karla mythos are going to be lost. (I somehow managed to read the Karla novels in reverse order, starting with Smiley’s People, and only just began Tinker Tailor, and I found myself a bit adrift at times.) My friend Robin put it best: there’s just too much plot for a 2-hour movie.

The 1979 British miniseries is on the docket. Also hoping to get around to F for Fake and the two Mesrine movies.

Right now I’m working on a few gaming projects as well:

Project Number One is definitely going to be a Call of Cthulhu campaign, mostly set in Europe (the first couple of chapters might be set in the States) in the early to mid-’70s. (Which explains why I’m interested in movies about the Cold War, terrorists, criminals, spies, and art forgery…)

Project Number Two is the current iteration of the Radical Dynamics game I’ve talked about in the past. Right now I’m describing it as a cross between The X-Files and Leverage (or what I imagine Leverage is like, since I haven’t seen it yet). I may be dropping the alien invasion angle.  System undetermined–this was going to be Spycraft at one point, now I’m uncommitted.

Project Number Three is a dark high fantasy campaign, heavily influenced by ’60s and ’70s Gothic horror movies (especially the AIP Corman Poe adaptions and Hammer Horror). I’m going to have to put a lot of work to keep it from feeling like a knock-off of Ravenloft or the current block of Magic: The Gathering expansions (you just know the dev and design teams at Wizards are locked in the basement with a stack of Peter Cushing/Christopher Lee movies). As with Project Two, system TBD. I’ve been looking at a lot of D20 variants, and none of them have tickled my fancy so far.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. See you in a couple of months.

Occupy the first person plural

Adam hits a lot of good points in this piece. Reading it also made me think about libertarianism and my biggest problem with it, which is that assume that (to coin a phrase) “everyone is an island” and that every person’s own personal choices only affect that person. If you indulge in behavior that has the potential to cause serious health problems down the road, when those health problems manifest, someone’s going to have to pay to treat them. When you’re no longer able to pay for that treatment on your own, that responsibility is going to fall to your family.

With the costs of healthcare skyrocketing and the government working to dismantle the social safety net, let’s hope your family made the personal decision to have some money.

* * *

And while we’re on the subject of the politics of economy:

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is how, over the past fifteen or so years (at least to my POV), the cost of living has outpaced income growth. It does seem to me that, increasingly, it’s necessary to live beyond one’s means just to get by.

I have a decent enough job and my lifestyle is hardly extravagant. (I’m not going to actually reveal my salary in public, but I make a good wage, especially considering that I spent so little time in college that I barely qualify as a dropout.) Yet while I’ve got a decent cushion of money in case of emergency, I’ve only been able to save this as a result of taking in what amounts to a roommate and splitting the rent with that person (people who know me personally know what I’m referring to here). When I lived alone, I was always struggling–and my lifestyle was even less extravagant.

Looking at my own situation, and those of my friends, it seems to me fundamentally wrong–in a genuinely moral sense–that I shouldn’t be able to afford to live on my own with what I make.

* * *

And just to prove I’m not all doom and gloom:

It takes a lot to offend me, but I’m literally offended, outraged and disgusted by this.

via Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club.

In what alternate universe are Alan Tudyk (whom I only know from Firefly/Serenity) and Tyler Labine (whom I haven’t seen in anything since the two episodes of The X-Files he did back in ’96) “recognizable” to the point where a movie suffers from them being in it?

Something my friend Scott has said several times on the subject of Mage–and he said it again today–is that the setting’s greatest tragedy is that the Traditions can’t put their differences aside long enough to crush the Technocracy.

I don’t actually consider this a tragedy. I don’t see the Technocracy as the villains. I don’t want them to be crushed. Give me a choice between a reality defined by the Technocracy and one defined by the Traditions and my vote will go to the Technocracy every time.

I don’t have a problem with magic in the context of an RPG–I’m the guy who’s spent the last 12 years championing Unknown Armies, even to the point of actually running a session–but my philosophical materialism/skepticism is pretty deeply ingrained. If you create a modern-day setting where science and mysticism are at war with each other, my sympathies are going to be with science. And there’s very much a sense of “mysticism good, science bad” (“pseudoscience good, science bad” in the case of the Etherics) in Mage.

(IIRC, even the Guide to the Technocracy seems to discard the idea that a campaign can be run around the premise that the Technocracy is a heroic agency, citing The Prisoner and 1984 as the best possible campaign models.)

The thing that occurred to me today is that it seems to me that the great tragedy of the Mage setting is not that the Traditions can’t work together to crush the Technocracy, but that the Traditions and Technocracy can’t work together to crush the Marauders and the Nephandi, both of whom present greater threats (both philosophically and practically) to reality than the Technocracy or any individual Tradition.

To be fair to Jane Espenson…

…most of the last season of Buffy was dull, inconsistently-characterised story-arc filler as well. Look, she wrote “Band Candy”, she can’t be all bad.

She also co-created Warehouse 13. She definitely can be all bad.