-+@ Hades @+-

Another word for "Hell"?



Art Credits:
Paradise Hyren: Burke/Whyrl/Strom
Ancestor's Tooth: Nov/Holsten/Werner/Gillette
Rehlya's Scythe: Gillette/Holmberg
I templated two of those yesterday, the third is an interesting crop. I never thought I'd use that particular corner of Ardit/Darunia as a background, but the palm tree looks rather good for the hyren. Ancestor's Tooth is a bit ghastly - who'd want to have a tooth on a stick? - but it works. I actually think I did rather well drawing the molar. Rehlya's Scythe was fun to do. The whole twirling through air effect is something new to me, and I'm rather pleased with the effect.

No new cards done today. Yesterday I had to force myself to look for a good picture for a rather cool Bograth looking background I had, but I decided I didn't want to force it, because the good manips are the ones that comes naturally. I didn't want to recolour an existing image or chop bits from them too, so those will have to wait. However, all TW images can now be seen at the Custom Card site.

Today marks the start of the Double Jeopardy contest. Tom was so interested in it having missed out on Keeper's Questions that he posted an entry just past midnight. Hmm... OK. I wonder if it'll get anything interesting - it's hard enough designing a double-double, and I'm not talking about cheeseburgers. The ad for it is also posted up on the CCGW site - I'm not spamming anything this month though.

I was just figuring out how many custom cards have been made for gEngine, here's the breakdown:
EL: 50
SP: 12
TG: 100
TG promo: 3
KQ: 4
TW: 72 to date
DJ: 7 + 5 alternates
Total: 253 cards. Not a lot there, considereing that there will be 3 full blown custom sets out there. I wonder how the other custom sets compare. B5 has 133 for Anla'shok and 144 for The Vorlons. According to Tomi, the Doomtrooper expansions are 108 cards each, with the exception of Heresy which is slightly less. The WS Legacy expansion has 90 cards and about 150 "other cards". I guess the MND card sets are "about right".

I just had a look through the monthly statistics of the games played and B5 has been getting played quite a bit, back to its usual rate of about 100 games a month or so. I wonder who's playing though, and what they are playing. There's a 2-player game going on right now which is interesting. Perhaps B5 is one of those "summer only" games?

Star Wars is getting massive play, and there seems to be more and more people paying for it. I wonder what draws them to it. Probably the mass of cards. I wonder if the player committee has been taking note of the game online as well. Hopefully they have.

VTES is the other game that's apparently going strong. I don't know for sure, I only look at the numbers, since I barely venture there without garlic or steak (sic). I'm glad the server is still up, I'll have no idea how to reboot that even if I have to. Apparently people are giving away their accounts to other players to beta test. Well, those sad people are going to get stuck after the beta test me thinks.

Origins is up and running and I wonder how things are going. Someone should really come up with the idea to broadcast their experience at a gaming con live over the internet or something. I wonder what new games, if any, are premiering there...

I did have to update my Origins prediction on the plates post. I think most of the predictions were exceeded... well the original predictions anyways. I made new ones for the Anniversary as well. Speaking about the anniversary, I think I best start thinking about the top 10 of the year soon.