June 29, 2010

July Formats

With July coming up really fast, we get to celebrate Canada Day. Flag waving in the sun is good fun, but I think I'm looking forward to having an extra gaming night this month. And what a cool event it's going to be! Make sure to clear your schedule, send the wife out of town or play dead then sneak out of the house...because the event on July 30th is one that you absolutely don't want to miss.

Before we get to the 30th though, we have some other games to play. The Avengers sealed event is pretty self explanatory. If we have more than four players we'll draft from three packs. If there are four or less, we'll play sealed instead.

I think most of us have played the Alter Ego format as well, but we're going to add another twist to it this time: switch deck. Not only will you get a random Alter Ego to play with each round, but it will be accompanied by a deck made by one of the other players. Talk about warping your mind...this one should be a lot of fun.

And finally, before we play the big golden age event you all salivate over, we're going to try another block formatted tournament. This time will be Crisis Block. You may only build your deck using cards listed below. The Crisis Block contains the following sets:

- Legion of Super-Heroes
- Heralds of Galactus
- Infinite Crisis
- The X-Men & X-Men Starter
- Justice League of America
- The Avengers
- Fantastic Four Starter

So get your deck-building hats on and strap yourselves in...July promises to be a good one!

June 17, 2010

Countdown to Fun

So last week was our first time with a new format, and I have to say that I thought it went really well. It was a lot of fun being able to play a game with all the big characters out on the table. With the big guns on the table, the games didn't last very long and we were able to play four rounds.

I decided to go with Darkseid's Elite, using Darkseid and Kara Zor-El as my 7-drops. One thing that did come up with this format was that if you missed your 7 cost character it was really tough to survive the game. I feel that adding a little more chance to the game was part of what made it fun!

Here's an example of the craziness that ensued:

My last game was up against Will, who was playing a Heralds deck. He got his 7-cost Galactus out, and having first attack, simply burned me for 25 endurance right off the start! I was able to hit all my drops a cause us to gain a resource, allowing me to play a second 5-drop Darkseid to his 4-drop Human Torch. With an Apokalips in my resource row I was actually able to come back and make a narrow win out of it.

I think this is a format we'll keep around simply for its fun factor. It requires an entirely different deck building strategy and is a great format.

June 04, 2010

June Schedule

Well summer is here, or so the calendar would have us believe. It's almost a week into June and I don't think we've broken 20C since March. But that could just be me being pessimistic!

Anyway, I'm a little late with the format list for this month. I've been swamped in paperwork, but for my job and on a personal front. If you take a look at the list of tournaments on the left you'll notice two tournament names. Let me explain them.

Countdown
This is something completely fun and different. It works like this:

1. Roll or flip a coin to decide initiative. Both players start with 50 endurance.
2. Each player places the top SEVEN cards of their deck down into their resource row. Players may look at their resource row, but no cards may be flipped yet.
3. Each player draws an opening hand of four cards and may decide to mulligan or keep.
4. Each player draws their two cards and turn 1 begins. Resources may now be flipped up.
5. At the end of each turn, each player KOs a card from he resource row. This means that you will be able to recruit a 7-cost character on turn 1, a 6-cost on turn 2, etc.
6. NO ALTERNATE WIN CONDITIONS may be played.

Origins Block constructed
This is a basic constructed game, but you may only use cards from the following sets:

- Green Lantern Corps
- Batman/LoA Starter
- Marvel Knights
- Man of Steel
- Web of Spider-Man
- DC Origins
- Marvel Origins

Don't miss out!