-+@ Voodoo @+-

I assure you, black magic this is not.



Art Credits:
Twilight War by Werner/Gillette/Goodman
Harp of Time by Vido/Nov
Keeper's Quest by UIEvolution

All 3 cards produced today for the upcoming Twilight War. One of them is the Univeral card for the 100 card set. The other 2 are promos that's going along into the set as well. With these cards, the only 2 images left for TW are the 2 d'Resh ones and that's 98% of all the card images done so far for Twilight War. Things are moving along... and moving along faster than I had expected.

The harp took way too long to colour and looking at it now, it doesn't hold a candle to what an image for a card should be. Ah well, it will have to do. The pencils is by a new fan artist who draws excellent with pencil on paper, but who haven't coloured anything yet. Based on that image, I'm not sure I want to colour the rest of his pencils though - I doubt I'm doing his images justice. The nightvision image for Twilight War by contrast too about 5 minutes to do and I really do like the effect there. Of course, it's an existing image so things were much easier there. And for the first time, an image from a computer game actually made it on a card. That's the Keeper's Quest opening screen from the game of the same name. I had to edit it slightly to remove the "Press Start" notice, but it doesn't look too shabby overall. I'm happy with the images though and they should be going up onto the engine next year.

I'll also have to go back and fill in the promo for Shadowsfall, since that is the only expansion without a promo at the moment. I wasn't going to do a promo for the promo expansions, but DJ sorta scampered that and now that I've done KQ, I might as well go back and do SP. Haven't found any images for that yet, but there's no rush... if anything the promo for that will be going together with Ancient Enemy, which is 2 big expansions away (after TW and EF).

The Custom Card site also had an update, if only to add on the above 3 cards. Moved the old news to the Old News section as well, and next year, I'll probably have to move the old news to the 2005 news archive. The other thing on the website is a notice for the Springfield MND tournaments - that's still going on with a moderate group of people which is good.

Things are beginning to pick up for MND though and people have asked me if I'm printing the custom cards - the answer is no, and even if I were, I can't make money off them because that's just wrong. There's nothing stopping someone from printing the cards out, sticking them onto some spare commons and using those in games though.

The two big things on the engine is the release of VTES in a couple of days time... that's going to be fun watching a huge number of people play the game finally - and it's all for free as well during the first month. That's just so awesome. Hopefully the WW people are satisfied with all the work that Ed and Martin has done.

The other thing that's been going on at the engine is that the Experience Points system have finally taken off. People are being drawn to games like Wheel of Time just for the free tokens. That's especially good for exposure for the game. Mark has added XP to some of his games as well and that's another good thing IMO. The current list of games with XP according to the WGO are Aquarius, Endeavor, Grave Robbers, Fluxx, Summer Camp and Wheel of Time.

On a quick note, are CCGs dying? WotR laid off 15 middle management personnel - probably some restructuring fo sorts, but that's not going to inspire confidence in an investor. AEG has had trouble releasing L5R and Decipher has cut down to a core product of two games. When some of the biggest names are shedding excess baggage, one has to wonder what's happening in the industry.

Nevertheless, there's a number of new games being announced for next year. Battlestar Galactica by Wizkids, World of Warcraft by Upper Deck and Godzilla and Stargate, both by Comic Images. I'm looking forward to Stargate out of those 4 mostly because I wonder how Comic Images is going to pull the game off. BG though might prove interesting as well.

And my top picks for this year's games would be Anachronism by Tri-King games and Full Metal Alchemist by Joyride. Neither are doing rather well though, but both have a hardcore group of players to keep the game going. Hopefully, one or both of them will get onto the engine soon.