Thinking Outside the Box

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. A...

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 r...

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 pla...

Last week we had 7 players out for our clone saga tournament. I always love to see that many players out for events! It's been a week since then, so I'll do my best to recall what everyone was playing. Colin - Superman Jordan - Magneto Nathan - Dr. Doom Roy - Iron Man Scott - The Thing William - Jean Grey Me - Batman I was only able to play two games, my third round being a bye. My first game was up against Scott, who started his early game strong. By turn four he had a copy of Yancy Street and an ongoing plot twist that made it so I couldn't target his clone character. I had the hidden Batman, Founding Member and used it to replace his Yancy Street on turn four. The tide seemed to be turning, as even with the Scott's character advantage things were looking pretty good for me. Next turn however, I replaced his ongoing (which I wish I could remember the name of!)...with another copy of Yancy Street! Things that were untargetable and massive meant my game was over...

Last week was a Modern Age event that I played an illegal deck at. At least in the first game I did anyway. I had it in my head that it was built entirely from DCU cards, but in fact I had built it for the BYOTT (Bring Your Own Two Teams) event a few weeks back. As such, it had cards from DGL and DCR in addition to DCU. Roy had no problem with me playing it, but as the organizer of these things I really should have been paying more attention! For the second and third games I promptly switched to my Doom Patrol deck. It's apparently the only Modern Age legal deck that I have at the moment, which I really should change soon. I've been neglecting my deck building lately, and in fact feel like I haven't even had much of a chance to play in the past few months. I'll be missing the Golden Age event that finishes off April as well, but after that I certainly hope to not miss any more for quite some time! The schedule for May's events are now up as well. Just in cas...

Ok this will seem a little random for most of you...since I usually keep my stuff here related to gaming and whatnot. Here's the story. Something sorta freaky happened recently. There’s a band I have liked since high school called Type O Negative. I hadn’t given them much thought for a few months (they haven’t put anything out since 2007), but during lunch on Wednesday I brought them up in conversation…saying that I wanted to see if they were working on anything new. So, when I got home and was doing some work in the evening I flipped open the Type O Negative website and saw that two of the band members had a new band called Seventh Void. I opened youtube to see if I could find a tune. I did…and one of the comments said “RIP Peter”. Peter Steele is…or rather was the lead singer for Type O. He died Wednesday. It was confirmed by the band on Thursday morning. The time of day we were having lunch was within an hour of the likely time Peter would have passed away. I've co...

Greetings all... I've been a little lax on the updates lately. I have no excuses, so I'll not offer any. Last week we had four players join in for the Infinite Crisis sealed event. I opted to sit this one out, as I'd have made it an odd number and I didn't want someone else having to sit out for byes each round. Will took top spot and I owe his two copies of one of his prize cards, because I apparently couldn't count past four when I added them to the pool. Oh well, he'll get them this coming Friday. I had also been meaning to post up a deck list for my BYOTTs deck from a few weeks back. I don't have it handy with me, but I had chosen Anti-Matter and JSA. I was able to build a deck using about 50 cards from DCU, with a few Anti-Matter supplements from DGL. It was fun to play, and a lot of the Anti-Matter characters I had were also Manhunter which proved pretty interesting. I actually intend to keep the deck around and refine it some more...likely dr...