-+@ Savagery To Match Their Numbers @+-

That's such a cool card title. Never used the card though. Maybe I should at some point.

Watched a few LotR games today, and saw an interesting Isengard Men deck which did things with Saruman. Don't think they had Savagery in there, but it might be interesting. Makes me want to try to build one... if I have any Sarumans that is... I doubt it though, I barely have enough cards from Two Towers to do anything, and I'm too lazy to trade for them. I played a game with my Hobbit Hospital deck and totally took my opponent by surprise. Nobody has been playing with the ally hate sites now and I took advantage of that to power my way through the game based on the strength of the Hobbit allies. It was interesting. I saw someone else doing the same with elven allies as well which was also interesting. I guess the power gamers shouldn't write off ally hate sites so soon... and that reminds me, I have a few things I wanna tweak in that deck.

Also played a lot of gToons on Cartoon Network and I've ditched my orange/black deck for a green/red one. It's an animals deck now and it's had a mediocrum of success. Those jawbreaker decks are the ones to beat though. Still, I've seen my rankings go from 74,000+ to under 4,000 now and hopefully I'll be able to break into the top 1000 sometime this week. Yeah, I wish.

CCG Workshop wise, I updated the plates post... but haven't posted it yet. Good thing too. You know why and what? ToJH isn't public yet. Urgh. I thought it went public the same time as FZOO. Looks like I was wrong. Urgh. On a better note, the update I did before the weekend on the Torunament was compressed as a cmp and thus didn't get deleted. So the 3 hours spent working on it wasn't wasted after all. Hooray. I sent it to JC who will upload it when he has the time I guess. Truth be told, I wonder what JC does for a living. Inquisitive minds and all that.

I just realised that I spent most of this month on MND customs and totally ignored what I was supposed to be doing - Bowling, Babylon 5 and Hyborean Gates. I guess I can move them next month and cascade everything else down the line. Babylon 5 is important though and Bowling should be done by next month, but I don't think I will make anymore promises for Hyborean Gates this year... and next year? Wildstorms Legends, Triple Triad (both of which are very similar games coding wise) and Firestorm are all on my plate. After that, I'm thinking I should be taking a holiday.

Someone's who's not on a holiday apparently was Kev who was working on Monkeys last weekend. It's good to see him in the midst of things although. Also just found out from nipa about a quick shortcut to use menu test. Hrmmph... wish I had known about that when I was working on Quartet. Anyways, back to Kev, let's hope we'll see Monkeys soon.

Oh and today is the end of November. Hopefully we'll get VTES into open testing, as Martin promised. Oh and Aaron is in the chatroom today after a long long break. I wonder what that means...

One last thing - the featured games were gone for this week, so I guess it's time for me to do the counts and to recommend the games to be featured I guess. Did that and found that over the last 29 days, there was an increase of almost 300 games. That sounds like good news I think. Shadowfist is still going strong, and how can it not? It's the only free to play game after all. Every other game seems to be played by the remaining die-hards... except for BattleTech... someone logged in today and asked about it. I told him it was gone so, they'll probably go back to apprentice to play it.

-+@ Nasty Foul Hobbitses @+-

If the title of today's blog doesn't give away which CCG I've been using cardnames from, I have no idea what will. I have been trying to blog for the past 2 days now... it didn't allow me to do so until today. Sometimes this thing has a mind of its own.

Well, I'll blog more when I get the time, but there's one thing I wanna get off my chest for the time being...

The Tournament. JC's original game. The one where I laid the groundwork. Well, something wasn't quite right with the code, so I spent 3 hours working on it, updating a lot of things and then uploaded it... Well, guess what, apparently I don't have permissions to modify it so I never got to upload it... and long story short, I essentially wasted 3 hours of my life. Urgh. That was yesterday, and it was a downer. Hopefully the file is still there on the other PC... but somehow I highly doubt it since it was saved on the cache directory where I knew it'd be deleted. Well, I'll have to find out on Monday whether I have to start work from scratch...

In other news, ToJH and Frank's Zoo went public a few days ago, bringing up the total public games to 63 or something like that. Good times all around I guess. Oh and the Portable Adventures Beta announcement was also made sometime within the last week. Which is good.

On the LotR front, Decipher is doing a few weird things and it's almost funny to see what they are doing... it's almost amateurish. They probably would have singlehandedly driven away some of the players with the antics of the past three months or so, and I'm guessing that they are hoping that the new changes (rotation and new minion cultures being the major ones) would entice more players to the game. Somehow I doubt it though... the prize support isn't as good as VS or MTG and there's no more movie to pull in new gamers. We'll have to see what happens.

On a lighter note, I discovered a "new" online only CCG that's free... well, sorta. It's gToons from Cartoon Network. It's driven by shockwave and the game pieces remind me more of POGs rather than cards. Oh well. The game is simple and apparently someone from White Wolf or associated with White Wolf designed it, but don't let the simple game fool you, the strategy behind the game can get rather complicated. The biggest plus I have discovered? It's cool to have Superman next to the Power Puff Girls while being beaten by Ed, Edd and Eddy! It's a riot.

-+@ A Shadow Rises @+-

I haven't logged on to the engine much these days and when I was on for about 2 hours earlier, there were a number of people who said Hi to me. I wonder though if I was the only person present then and if they were wishing to ask for favours. I don't know. Oh well, it's a good thing I was away for dinner anyways.

Dulcaoin (Josh DLH) got me on IM today and asked about Hoth. I had to walk him through the upgrade of the engine because of the server move which made the update path redundant. Oh well. He wanted to see how Hoth is and wasn't too happy to see that things still aren't to his satisfaction. Oh well. I'm glad I'm not leading that project. Poor Timmy.

I've been writing up the adventures on Insiider as some sort of "fan-fic". The stories can be found on Insiider (one of the links on the right in the sidebar). Feel free to head over there and tell me my writing sucks. I know it does.

I'd talk about my LotR O decks, but there isn't much to talk about. Made a Rohan/Naz combo to test out both those cultures. They are very boring to play though. Brash made a rather good burdenating deck with Orcs and Smeagol - in the game I observed he added 9 burdens on one site. That was just amazing... one more and it'd be an autowin. He badly wanted to test that deck out against my non-solo Smeagol so we went for a go... where I won the first time... with the Besiegers instead of with Smeagol. The second time, he had more success, but the combo of Clever Hobbitses and Where Shall We Go followed by Not Listening was enough to keep the burdens off and the minions dead. Even something as minor as Nasty had its effectiveness increased due to the amount of Gollum cards that were in play. It was weird, but Brash is working on teching up against that so I wish him success.

Also caught up woth Xhavenstar (Michael Anthony Bayazes - don't you love a full southern name?) and shot the breeze about Modo and Power 9. Found out that there's a Prismatic format on Modo which sounds like a rather stupid thing. Also, found out that LotR O has a leg up over Modo in the sense that it has paid tournaments once every 3 months or so. The flip side of course is the Modo promise to let you have dead tree versions of the cards if you complete a set. Oh well. I'm just in it for the fun anyways, or that's what I tell myself.

-+@ Sleep, Caradhas @+-

Mmm... sleep.... sounds so tempting.

No, I haven't been working on CCGW stuff for the past few days... just chilling with stuff, and not a lot of it is CCG related.

A few quick points:

* Timmy got Hoth up today. Hooray. Someone should post it on the SW forums.
* Martin gave a bunch of people access to VTES. Hmm...
* I think nipa is still waiting for a bunch of stuff from Ed. Heh... give him a week or two.
* It's Friday... let's see what will happen today.

A B5 player from gEngine sent me a picture of his wedding. Heh, I know you don't send pictures of things like that to everyone so I really feel honoured and flattered. I spent most of yesterday talking to Brash from LotR O about stuff. Guess I'm building bridges or something.

Anyways, there's a lot of hate and malice running around the LotR forums. It's funny reading some of them and the debates that are raging about "rotation". Oh well. The idea is to have fun...

Sleep...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

-+@ Roll of Thunder @+-

I almost titled this post Moment of Respite, but Roll of Thunder was more appropriate since I get to talk about... Bowling. Don't you just love it when a CCG has enough cards that provide good titles for every appropriate occasion? Hallmark should learn a thing or two from CCG card creators.

Well, there isn't that much to talk about bowling. Was brainstorming about AIs and how to make stuff interesting and all that... it's gonna turn out to feel less like a bowling game and more like a real game IMO... well, that is if I get to code it that way. I scractched the surface but then decided that I really didn't have the time tonight to do anything meaningful, so I stopped after tweaking a few minor things in the gML.

What I did spend my time on tonight was a MND update, which was to put in the new SP card Therra, now renamed Fiergo (after Brian Duron, aka Durango) into the game. And while I was at it, I changed out the in game font to the actual font that 2i uses for the cards so that well... it will look good... if only the engine gets to handle it properly. Something to complain to Ed about anyways... and with the help of nipa, I just did that on the forums.

I axed a shepherd today because he hasn't shown up for his last 3 tours. I wonder why people sign up to get free games when they can't even make it for their tours. Oh well, gone is gone I guess. Really...

I also posted some really thought provoking (read trolls) on Insiider today. One of the post flamed 2i for the false hopes that they impart to the players which when those hopes don't materialise causes said player to lose hope, not only in 2i, but in the entire game. I don't think that is helping the game. I also flamed Drakk for his weirdly posted reply which seemed to be an attempted correction that might badly affect the status of the game if implemented. I don't know though... his English is at a rather weird level and I don't think he was fully awake when he posted that.

And as to LotR, remember when I said I was waiting for the shoe to finally drop on my first set? Well, decipher has decided not to just drop the other shoe, but it seems they are trying to drop an entire herd of cows. What am I talking about? I'm talking about their decision to ban, not one card, not 10 cards, not one set, but 3 entire sets or one whole block in February. Sure, they hide it under the guise of "rotation" but even their press release admits that it's mass banning of three entire sets, and I quote:

"Additionally, this change will immediately reduce the number of individual cards on the X-list. Rather than remembering a list of 30 cards, it will now be seven cards and all cards from The Fellowship of the Ring, Mines of Moria, and Realms of the Elf-lords, which are easily identifiable by their collector number."

The X-list, of course, is the list of banned cards. You can read the full article here.

Martin and I discussed VS system today. He tends towards games that are very MTG in look/feel while I don't really go towards that sort fo game. I guess VSS is a good compromise in between... a bit more MTG-flavoure that I would like though. The game is a bit predictable IMO, and that's what Martin seems to like. He doesn't like too many variables 4 turns into the future, which is something I seem to thrive on. I guess that's why I prefer the games that I do and he prefers the games that he does.

Tomi and I are hashing about the styles of coding... and I think I've sort of summarise it as nipa-school and Martin-school and both of these are diametrically opposed to each other. I lean towards the nipa-school with some exceptions... attachment being one where I prefer the Martin-school. I think I would say I'm rather centrist. The people Martin's mentoring, naturally leans towards his school of coding. So with that in mind...

<-- nipa-school Martin-school -->
nipa - Ricochet - Novelty - Bruce - Martin
Talking about Martin, he's really into VTES testing now and he's got his alpha playtest team working with him. I guess people are just excited that VTES is going online. Tomi has decided to do Duel of Ages after ToJH, which is apparently ready for beta, once Ed gets on to that sometime ... I have no idea when. Otherwise, things are still moving slowly... the bottleneck being Ed IMO, but hey, that guy has got his fingers stuck in too many pies.

Talking about Ed, he seems to think that I favour automated tournament support. Not true. I'd rather have no tournament support at this point in time since none of it is supported properly. Priority for tournament support should be after, not before, fixing the save/resume game defect, after, not before fixing the rankings, and after, not before adding collections. Automated support should be something way down the line... in the future, not a "now" thing. But what do I know?

-+@ Evil Smelling Fens @+-

I wanted to post this yesterday, but blogger apparently was being stupid again, so I had no chance of posting anything. urgh. I hate days like those. And no, the title of this post isn't of any reference to jackalope.




Three Core cards "today", two magi and a relic. Art credits, left to right as usual: Szankovics, Hillgrove, Szankovics. Therra is a SP magi, the other 2 are for TG. And I guess that's the last of the Szankovic art that I have (thanks Nick). My muse is also rather muted for the time being, so I guess it's time to say a temporary farewell to MND card making and it's back to game coding for me.

I feel the urge to flame on Insiider today. Someone wants to start up the stupid discussion of ressurecting the game again. Urgh. Been there, done that got the T-shirt. Let's move on people, nothing to see here... until after (and if) they get the cartoon up and running. People have been getting posts from Lisa saying that the funds have been appropiated for the cartoon, but they haven't even lined up an animator for it yet, let alone a network to air it. My suspicions - it's going to be a huge failure. Oh well, if only 2i would die a decent death rather than attempt to haunt the game time and again with positive mumbo-jumbo which when they dont' materialise discourages the hardcore and worse still, makes them look like a jackass for having faith in 2i. Oh well.

Had a great idea for Bowling today - gutterballs! It'd be rather easy to code in as well. I'm glad I'm holding off coding the game, because I need to ferment the game in my head to make sure I am able to code into it things that would set it apart from the other dice games out there. I don't really want it to be a Yahtzee clone like Kismet though. Hence the brainstorming. I dunno though, I doubt it'd get played much, but as I said from the onset of this, this is just something for me to wet my toes in (i.e. to test the waters) for dice games... hopefully it'd lead to other things.

-+@ Cast Into The Fire @+-

Well, it's the weekend and my muse was randomly pulling strings, so I got a few more cards done than I would have expected. Below are Rayalon Fiend and Kyndle, and the lastest card I've just done, Speag Strangler.



Art credits, left to right as usual: Werner/Gilette/Holmberg, Szankovics, Werner

Yes, that's the first piece of Szankovics in this set, and I think that's a rather fitting image for Kyndle. I couldn't get the Rayalon Fiend to appear more fiendishly, but oh well, it's the best that I can do, unless I get new original artwork. I also started on Core, despite saying that I'd finish the original 5 regions first... the reason being that I was redoing SP and one thing sort of lead to another and I ended up making the first Core magi and relic for this set. I'll post up the pictures tomorrow, together with Therra, the latest SP magi. I've also got Mike (DarianMoon on Insiider, mikula on gEngine) to start work on a Naroom Relic. His work isn't anything grand, but an arrow should be relatively easy to do, hopefully.

So that brings it to 47 cards. 5 more to the halfway mark... not too bad I think, but halfway means it's only half done... a lot more work needs to go in to finalise stuff, particularly for the image-desert of KT, Weave, Paradwyn and d'Resh artwork. Likewise SP needs 3 more images - Shadow Bograth, d'Resh and Orothe to finish up the images for the set. I guess that means it's time to go a-hunting... or more precisely begging for artwork.

Oh and something special has happened. And no, I'm not going to say anything about it for today... maybe next week... I'm told the same thing might happen then as well.

-+@ Out of High Air @+-

Here are the cards from yesterday.


Artist credits from left to right: Strom/Whyrl, Holmberg/Werner, Holmberg. The Arderial magi is originally Yuriko by Whyrl. I did one more card yesterday - Kyndle, and today I got Rayalon Fiend done. I'll post those up maybe tomorrow with whatever new card I'm doing, probably Underneath so that I can finish it. I can't believe that Underneath would be finished first, but Cald and Arderial are also one card behind. Orothe and Naroom have 1 difficult card each and as such would be harder to finish. I guess after Underneath, Cald and Arderial is finished, I'll move on to Core while finishing up Orothe, Naroom and Universal. I'm on the 44 card mark, 8 more to the midway mark. This is getting exciting. I'm slowing down to 1 to 2 cards a day though since I'm running out of readily usable images. It's a pity.

-+@ Incognito @+-

Didn't work on any images today... or yesterday for that matter since it's past midnight for me, but here's the 3 that I haven't shown yet.


Art from left to right: Holmberg, Holmberg, Holmberg. Well, the latter 2 with edits from yours truly. The first one is actually a pre-production picture of an Underneath magi - Tryg I think - but since that image is so vastly different from the current image, I thought it would be a good idea to reuse it... that and the fact that I'm desperate for artwork.

There's also a list of the cards that's been shown here. I posted it backdated so that it won't show up as recent posts, but you can see it here. It has all the TG and SP artwork that's been done to date. So that's 39 cards. I've just worked on 3 more cards making it 42. I think we might be able to make 50 by sometime next week. Who knows...

Oh and nothing special has happened yet. Maybe it's delayed. Oh well.

Someone from Central Europe got this in their booster:


Must have been lucky to have got that mix up. That's actually a promo for Black Riders, the next LotR set. Well, I've already shown two, here's the third. I guess quite a few people are waiting with bated breath for Black Riders. It will be something that will either make or break the game - if the new Shadows sides get sucky cards again, then I'm afraid that the game will go on a downward spiral... well, it's already there, but that will probably hasten it.

-+@ Reckless We Rode @+-

As promised, here's Animite Crystal and Magic Mushroom from yesterday.



Art credits (left to right): Holmberg, Holmberg, Holmberg/Nov.

Well, I'm down to doing 3 cards a day... maybe less. I did the Fire Grag today (which is really the demo image with art from 2 other cards and some editing), Nasty Nalo and Disassembled Construct. I'll post the latter 2 tomorrow probably with one more card. I'm off for the weekend so I'm not doing any cards.

I passed the 35 card mark yesterday - that's the one-third mark. The next significant number is 52 cards, which is the halfway mark and since there is 39 cards done, there's only 13 more to go till then. Those are going to be hard though. I'm gonna be hard pressed to find images for Cassi and Kyndle, and the image for Relic Trick is going to be one of the toughest ones on the list. The universal spells - Recount, for example, isn't far behind the hard to find art list. Oh well, it has to be done somehow.

Modified more of my non-solo Smeagol deck. People are getting warmed up to it, but it's not top tier or anything. The cards restrict that so so much. I should be looking at alternate ring-bearers I guess, but none can beat Frodo with 10 (or 12) base resistance though. Well, that's what deckbuilding is all about, I guess. It's a pity I don't even have enough of the common cards for the fellowship side of gollum to build a decent deck.

JC sent me a PM today asking for the 3D version of the blue halberdier. I didn't realise that it was missing from the list I sent him - so I redid it and sent it to him. I hope he's happy with the result. He also sent me the "art" for the "cardback" for the game. The image would fit nicely with Hyborean Gates I guess :) Boris Velajo, eat your heart out. I've got get that loaded up later since it goes to quite a number of places - to the engine where it's used as a card icon, to the forums (where I have set up a category for it yesterday) and to Go Fish which of course has it as a card... although I don't think I'll include this particular cardback in the game.

Oh and something special hasn't happened yet, but I'm keeping my eye out on it. Maybe later today... or tomorrow.

-+@ Don't Look at Them @+-

Which CCG has a card with the title of this post? That's an interesting card I would think.

Anyways, as I mentioned, I like posting up the cards here. Makes me notice what's missing on them... like the starting energy on the Aurora Xyx. Fixed that earlier. Also did 3 cards today - Animite Crystal, Phrup Jar and Magic Mushrooms - three relics. I have decided to concentrate on the first 5 regions and Universal for the time being, only because there are more "art" on these regions and also because they have the least amount of cards in the set.

The choice of cards for today is deliberate. The middle card is the Promo for Elder's Legacy. Artwork by Holmberg. It's really not part of Tainted Glimpses. The other 2 cards though has something... common... well, quite a few things actually. One of them is that they are actually montages of 4 different pieces of art, or in the case of Phrup Jar, cards.

Forest Dew has the artwork from the promo version of Sap of Life (Artist: Christopher) and the jar is from Essense of Naroom (Artish: Holmberg/Vega). If the background looks familiar, that's because Hoctne uses the same background on her card in a slightly different position (artist: Werner). The ground bit is from a Magam drawing by Holmberg.

The common thing between Forest Dew and Phrup Jar is ... you guessed it, Essense of Life. That card has been used to recreate the jar. The background is from Jaim (Artist: Holmberg) and the ground is from Algae Band (artist: Nov), the phrup is actually from Traitor's Reach - it's the Grotto Phrup (Artist: Holmberg).

Tomorrow I'll show you the Magic Mushrooms (no pun intended) and the Animite Crystal. Both are "easy" crops of existing stuff so there's nothing to write home about there. Also played my first MND game in ages. Was royally beaten, but it was good practise for the game. I haven't been playing with top tier decks there for ages too - guess I better start redeveloping them with the new EL cards, now that they are "finalised".

And as to gaming, I redid my non-solo Smeagol deck today to include the Sting that exerts frodo to give Smeagol +2 strength and to swap out Glorifindel and Sam for the Shadows starter Gandalf. I must say things work much much better that way - gandalf eliminating minions before they can skirmish and Smeagol taking out whatever that gets through. It's fun to play, but by no means tournament level yet. It's a pity I don't have access to the more powerful rare Gandalf cards, but oh well, I can make do with what I have access to.

So after gaming and working on MND, I don't really have the time to scan Hyborean Gates or to code Babylon 5 or Bowling. Urgh, and I've got another distraction coming up as well. Urgh! Urgh! Urgh! I better put that off and finish up Bowling and Babylon 5 first before I move on.

Checkers has had lukewarm response, not that I expected any response, but it's got some games in. I wonder how many of those were due to me. I think only one of two of them was due to me checking the interface, but at the way things stand at the moment, that's like half of the games played this month.

Rage has had 2 articles posted on the engine about the fan stuff. I haven't read them yet, but I'm not a huge Rage fan so I think I'll pass. The Doomtrooper tournament is also in full swing - Cactus, lucal, stormcloak and Kapa seems to be the main players and they had the numbers up by a bit - I think it's a good idea and they should really have more of that.

And something special is suppose to happen tomorrow. Not here, but on the engine. We'll see how it goes.

-+@ Bound to its Fate @+-

There seems to be quite a number of people looking for Wildstorms Cards here. Sorry, I haven't started my Stormwatch custom expansion, but it'll be here sometime next year. At the moment I'm working on the custom MND cards for the custom set titled Tainted Glimpses, and some of the cards are posted below. If anyone wants to play either Wildstorms or MND, please click on the CCG Workshop links on the right for more details.

Well, first up, as promised, the 6 cards I did yesterday after the blog.




Artist credits left to right, top to bottom: Novelty, Werner, Holmberg, Werner, Katura and Holmberg/Werner. One of the most useful piece of artwork I've got is the Weave one. That has spawned all 3 of the 4 Weave custom cards in EL - Weave Path, Savannah Hyrenand Weave Homestead... as well as Weave bulb above and Tainted Blades below... and has provided the backgrounds for Wawek (EL) and Halla (TG, above). I don't think I can use it for anymore full art cards, but I'm sure I can use some of it for background art somewhere.

In case anyone is wondering about Cwm, it's going to be a poison creature. Now a cwm (as I understand it) is basically a lava tube - it's a geological term of some sort. Naming a flying creature that might seem a bit bizzare, but hey, every custom set done by me has to have some funny name with an actual meaning - that's how the cards Chimera, Charybdis Wellisk and Warrada, Simulacrum all got their names in EL.




And here are the last 6 of the Taint spells, Tainted Leaves was retouched today, Tainted Peaks was done yesterday. Artists, as usual left to right, top to bottom: Holmberg, Holmberg, Werner, Werner, Allan and Werner. Actually, the piece of Orothe art is probably the second most used art for cards - art was used for Algae Band and Aquatic Warlum in EL and Tainted Tide above. The image used for Tainted Peaks isn't actually a MND thing from 2i, but then again, neither is this custom card set. That image is obtained from one of his "Elemental" series of images which has been exhibited in art galleries in the midwest. Of course, it's also been published ... not as an artwork, but as part of MND's background on gEngine (as it was then) in page issue 68 of Scrye, February 2004. I guess it needs to be immortalised as a custom card now.

I haven't done any (new) cards today, but I might do some later. I'm keen to push past the 34 card mark - i.e. to have a third of the set ready to be adapted to the engine. Art though would be the hard part, but that's always the case.

And on a totally unrelated note, I think I'm coming into my own on LotR O. Some kid (OK, he's not technically a kid) actually gave me a Rare card for free, not because I'm "Novelty from CCG Workshop", but because I'm "Novelty, the guy on LotR O". What's even cooler is that I have got my first groupie... or stalker, or whatever you want to call it. Some guy with the handle of TripleJ has been observing all my games, though I have no idea why. I asked him about it but he avoided my question. I guess the idea of playing top level decks with a bunch of common and starter deck characters must really seem like a good allure to some, perhaps people like TripleJ. Who knows. Yes, I realied that I have avoided decks with rare characters (or even uncommon ones) for some weird reason. I have been picking up the commons and starters and have been wielding them to be a force to reckon with. Sorta cool actually. Built a Non-solo Smeagol deck today for the first time and wiped out a Ninja Gollum deck. That was cool, but only because that's the worse decktype against Smeagol. I'll have to try getting that deck paired up with Uruks +1, Morcs, Burdenating Naz and swarms.

I previously thought that there were only 2 ways to win in LotR - run to 9 or kill your opponent. I just realise that there is a third way - it has been there for quite some time, and I've seen the decktype, but never really thought about it as a different "way to win" until today when I built the decktype. It's overwhelming the ringbearer - a lot more difficult if it's Frodo, but the advantage of overwhelmnig with burdens is that Sam can't take over the ring. There seems to be 2 decktypes - the more popular Nazghul burdenating decks, wich uses Enduring Wraiths and the Witch King from Shadows, and what I built today, a new Orc shadows side whose focus is to add burdens to overwhelm the ring-bearer, but could also swarm and do beatdown depending on the draw. The burdenating part of the deck is the sneaky part as I found out today. I had a huge Beastly out and my opponent had his focus on it, so he didn't pay attention to the tiny stealthy burdenating orc who added a burden during regroup and won me the game. Rather cool. I shall have to think how I can make it more... efficient.

And whenever I start talking about Timmy, it seems things happen with him. He appeared in the chatroom today asking me how to convert excel to text. Well, the process I use to produce the result that could be used in the gML isn't that complex, but sadly, I wasn't around to answer his questions, so nope, no Hoth for anyone today. Oh well.

Ah, I hear my A Game of Thrones starter calling me for a game....

-+@ Memories of Darkness @+-

I have just finished templating Smoke Vashp, and it's shown below. Background was from a desktop download from the official site, the creatures, believe it or not were made completely from the Thunder Vashp card, but edited heavily. Also attempted a Rayalon Fiend, but decided that it was too unprofessionally done, so I scrapped it. Maybe my muse would be more helpful tomorrow.


Artist credits, left to right: Holmberg, Holmberg and Holmberg/Sato. I also did another shadow magi yesterday after my post, but it didn't make the cut here. Note the Shadow magi is in Shadowsfall Promo, the other two cards are in Tainted Glimpses.

Well, I usually hate images bleeding off the "window" to the rest of the card, but Kowek was calling me to do it so I did. The end effect is cool, but it's annoying to put text into the text box, because now it'll have to wrap around the hand. For those of you who want to see the original Kowek art, I'll post it below. The actual name of this character isEgenor or something like that I think.



I like posting up the cards here though, I usually notice weird things that could do with a change... earlier I updated Heedle, Tainted Snow and Hoctne because they all had some minor detail I had to look into. Well, with Tainted Peaks (also not shown, maybe tomorrow) that's 25 cards done and we are at the quarter way mark. The remaining 75 cards will probably take ages to complete since I'm out of readily usuable artwork.

OK, my muse siezed me while writing the above and guess what? I did 6 more cards. I'll show them tomorrow, but they are the Weave magi Halla, the Weave Relic Weave Bulb, the Cald Poison creature, Cwm and the Cald Relic Furnace's Heart and two Nar magi Kellus and Uloron. Three more and I'll be a third of the way to completion.

I also have to figure out an icon for the set. I think the evil eye art from EL might be a good candidate for the icon. I know it's reusing stuff, but I guess I'm borderin on the desperate for now.

Still haven't done B5 or Bowling or Hyborean Gates yet. I don't have the time for them yet. Maybe this weekend, after I've let my MND muse run its course. I'm sure I'd be more than ready to either do Bowling coding or Hyborean Gates scanning by then (and hopefully, some quick B5 updates as well). Someone was asking about B5 yesterday as well too. Eep. I better get a move on.

Timmy though hasn't been doing much on Star Wars - there's been a slow chorus of people asking for Hoth. Well, we'll see what he gets up with there. Who knows? With the addition of Hoth things might move upwards for the game. I just hope it's not going to take another year for that update.

Bug was saying that he knows how it feels to have games perpetually in development yesterday when I had a chat with him. He's still got Chobolo and Rock, Scissors, Paper in development. Well, he's more busy with the engine though. Ideally, he should be doing a co-Lead on those games like what he did for PAD (if the co-Lead can stand working with him on a game - and I hear rumours that nipa has interests in RSP.), but we'll see what he does there. Afterall it's not as if there's a long line of people waiting to play those games... unlike VTES, Dragon Dice and Duel of Ages.

Played some LotR Online today - built a Hobbit deck with Smeagol and Gandalf that is playable, but not great. Oh well. Also built a nice burdenating Orc shadows for it - that's more fun if I can get it off. I should try that with my Dwarves to see if it makes a better impact!

I'm also getting a lot of people asking me to trade for the R+ I got from my box of reflections. Some of those people are really not worth trading with though, they flip-flop every few hours. I find that trading with people either from GAB or with a GAB thing is much much better though. Maybe all my future trades for real life LotR cards will be from GAB members... I'll probably reject everyone else who sends me a request.

Can you believe I'm still sorting out LotR cards? Urgh. Time consuming. I need to find a more efficient way of doing this... which reminds me, I wonder if cardhaus has any reflections ready to order. I need to get more card boxes anyways... maybe tomorrow...

-+@ A Wizard is Never Late @+-

I was suppose to do scanning today, but a different muse has gotten hold of my uh.. whereever muses gets a hold of ... and I was really more interested in churning out MND cards today. So...



Artist left to right, top to bottom:

Whyrl/Strom, Goodman, Goodman with Werner background
Zastrow, Reed, Goodman, with Holmberg background
Novelty with backgrounds by Novelty/Holmberg, Whyrl/Strom, Liam

As you can see, the Heedle isn't as good as it could be. Oh well. I also made a 10th card, which isn't shown above... and I'll be going on to make Weebo Minor after this post. So with 11 cards today and 12 yesterday, I'm well past the 20% mark and am almost reaching the quarter way mark for this set. The first few cards are always quick, but the last 10% is going to be agonising slow... say about a month or 3 to complete. Oh well, such is the way of making custom cards.

Did I mention I saw Martin and JC back on the forum and engine respectively yesterday? I think that's good news. Hopefully things will get a bit more alive there. Also, someone is trying to organise a DoomTown: Deadlands playing time. I say more power to him.

Roberto came back (from I have no idea where) and signed up again as a shepherd. Hmm... he's also downloaded Wildstorms and is asking people to play Go Fish. I guess that's good. Oh well. It's a pity he dropped off the face of the earth for a while...

-+@ Habits of Home @+-

I just hate it when I spend about an hour typing out a blog and an error means it's not posted. Grrr.

I spent the whole weekend working on MND - finalising the cardlist for Tainted Glimpses for starters. It has 100 cards and there are 3 promos - one for EL and two for TG. There are two "subsets" of cards in TG, and the "tainted" cards are shown below.





That's just 6 of the 12 spells. Artist clockwise from top left: Goodman, Holmberg, Holmberg, Werner, Goodman/Werner, Goodman/Werner. The other subset are the 13 poison creatures. These two subsets together makes up more than a quarter of the set. The rest of the set is a nice jumble of cards though that hopefully would be able to spark interest in the community. Technomagus (Carl) did the Volcanic cards, Malovis (Mitch) did most of the Nar cards and Lord Pic (Mark) came up with most of the Paradwyn and Kybar Teeth cards. Lugan though had about a quarter of the card in the set and the remainder were done by myself.

Hunting down art for these cards isn't easy. I was all over the internet yesterday and today. ROMzombie and Holmberg's sites were some of the best, but I also did find Whyrl/Strom (Klynn's artist) page of artwork as well (see link on the left). For those cards that are a little more simpler, I guess I'll have to draw them at some point. I've posted Pineedle a while back. I did Heedle (a Lord Pic card) yesterday and that took me ages to draw... and it still doesn't look right. I guess me and drawing just aren't going to match. I'll post that card up when I have a few more cards drawn, but don't expect them to be really good... because they likely won't be (Pineedles was an exception).

I played my first War Block draft today on LotR Online and lost all my games. Shows how well I do in draft. I haven't been that hot in constructed as well. I guess I just need to learn how to play with the new cards properly and to make sure I know enough strategies to play the game. Still, I did win a Shadows booster since it's draft release weekend and it's +1 prize support this weekend.

I noticed that Checkers was available to the public yesterday... when it went public I have no idea, but yesterday is as good a day to record it as any. It also means that the at least one public game every anniversary record is maintained which is good.

Things seems slow to me on the engine though. I guess people are getting preoccupied with things like holidays and stuff. Nevertheless, Tomi has been busy plugging away at his games and with Doomtrooper getting all the interest, it must be fun for him. I just saw Martin (online) back from his holidays, and I know he's got two licensed games to deal with. He should be buried up to his ears with work for the engine. Mark is still working on Summer Camp slowly but gradually, and it seems he has 3 original games in tow. Wow. Talk about being productive. No ToJH or FZOO up public yet though. I thought those games were ready even before I started work on Checkers. I guess Ed hasn't got to them yet. I also haven't heard from JC since I sent him the "no frills" version of his board game that I coded. I wonder what happened to him. Maybe he's on holiday.

I know Ed has been busy with the engine, or at least I think he has been. He talks of ripping things out and that scares me a little since there is a tendency to break things that way. Well, I guess we just have to wait and see what he comes up with next.

And as for me... well, I somehow doubt I'll be able to keep up with my planned November schedule. I've already missed the Babylon 5 deadline since I have been working on MND this weekend. Hopefully I'd be up to scanning Hyborean Gates starting tomorrow... all 400 + cards. I have no motivation to do Bowling as well. It's an interesting game, but somehow I feel so worn out as if I've been run over by a tank and am flat like a mat on the floor. Maybe I need a break...