-+@ Spotlight @+-

I wanna turn my attention on a few things, but first:



Art credits:
Twee Twunk - pencils by Joe Araiza, colours by myself, background by Matt Holmberg
Falling Weebo - image by Epoch, background by Rich Werner
Dust Primat - image by Justin Zastrow, background by Rich Werner

Three more cards for AoD, with the first AoD non-promo expansion promo. Twee Twunk was included just to finish off the starting card for a particular magi just in case that this expansion ends up to be the penultimate expansion. (I'm not saying that it will be, I'm saying that it might be, but nothing is certain these days.)

Design hasn't started on these cards though, mainly because I'm still waiting for 2 more images for the expansion before the green light for design to start can be given. I have just finished colouring one of the images for this expansion today and have written another blog about it. The image is posted further down. It was a good image to colour and I did learn quite a few things by colouring it as mentioned in the other blog. I guess I had fun colouring it, but I'm sure the response to it by Joe would be ... well, gushing is the word that comes to mind.

I have actually been templating cards for what was formerly known as Fallen Hour. Formerly doesn't mean it's cancelled. It means that I've renamed it to something a little more . It's now known as Final Night. Tada! Yeah, I know that's a rip-off from something that Batman was associated with and now it seems more onimous. Does that mean that this will be the final MND custom expansion? Who knows? I'm not saying either way because I don't really know.

Anyways, the expansion will be 130 cards, down from the 150 in EF. I've shaved 2 cards from each region and added 4 cards to Universal to give it the final count, although not all 130 cards have been templated. I think as of yesterday, the count was about 70-odd cards done, which is above the 50% threshhold I set for meself to start a custom expansion, so the expansion will be going ahead, if only very slowly (because we are still focusing on playtesting EF and designing TW).

Yesterday I added A Cure for All Seasons for playtesting and decided to do another KMW trick by delaying the announcement until I had the time to do the announcement properly ala Ed. I think Martin actually misunderstood what I was saying in this blog and seemed to have made a rather nasty (especially by his usual French standards) remark there. Oh well, there's a response there that I hope will clear things up.


I managed to squeeze in a game of LotR yesterday and had fun with my Smeagol sneaking to site 8 against the huge besiegers. I think it was a bad match-up there. I didn't win it with my fellowship side though. Gollum didn't even appear until site 4 and was quickly dispatched by the Dwarves who were also busily discarding my deck. Shelob only showed up on 7 and with some bad plays by my opponent with the assignment, I finally overburdened the ring bearer with Gollum and Heavy Burden. I had fun. I hope I didn't drive my opponent away, instead I hope it inspires him to build a pure Gollum culture deck like mine.

I've also been busy updating my MND site. It's weird to be able to pick up the pieces and just go on like that even after such a long break. I had to tweak a few things of course, to bring everything up to date, especially on the custom cards, but I also added a few scans and stuff to keep the non-custom card people happy. I'll need to go advertising it soon again, just to get my counter to go happy again.

And I can't believe I have a super-secret project. OK, not so secret project now. Coming to a gatlingEngine near you soon!

-+@ Legendary @+-

Well, because it's coming to an end soo...



Three more cards from Treachery and Deceit. This will be the penultimate expansion from Decipher for the game as announced on their site. The online game will last for an additional 3 years after that date up till the end of June 2010 as announced by WA, but that was probably forseen sometime back that it won't go on forever. All those people who have sunk hundreds into the game will well, get little to no physical returns from the game. It is a sad day.

Still I had my fun playing the game and I learnt quite a bit of CCGs in general and design in particular. Regional enforcement for starters, careful use of denial (and no, that's not a river in Egypt), caution with magic bullets, addition of counters, fun with the opening up of new avenues and strategies and a whole slew of things which I'm sure I'll take with me as I progress on. There's also gameplay experiences as well and I think there will be games I'll never forget, including overwhelming a Sauron with Merry. Those were the days. I think I will probably write an article somewhere about that... lessons learnt designing cards by playing LotR or something like that.

While I'm on the topic of designing cards, I have finally made TW public today. It'll be custom legal next month, but it's now playable on the engine by the general public. Will anyone even notice it? Probably not, and I don't think I'll organise a tournament around it for publicity. I guess this is going to be a low key release. I haven't made any announcements - I'll probably do that later this week (that's borrowing a page from VTESO).

Riding piggy-back on the back of that is that EF Nar has now been adapted for playtesting online. I think that will get noticed somewhat by the playtesters and hopefully they'll enjoy the arctic cards and the freezing cards. I can't wait to read my first review fo the cards. Naroom is next and I'm still hoping that can be done before the end of the month.

Meanwhile on the engine, the Rage tournament has kicked off and the Shadowfist league event #2 is ongoing. Those are the only 2 active tournaments at the moment. There's quite a bit of activity on the Rage and Shadowfist forums, which is a good sign. The numbers for both games are also up for the month - in SF's case, it's overtaken VTES... but who knows what sort of numbers it'll be at the end of the month with the free VTES passes.

I'm still keeping an eye out on DoA and GRfOS @ Ludoholic, but neither seems to be moving much. I guess the respective coders are busy with other issues to have much time to work on these games. Capitol still seems to be the more popular game there as opposed to Urland, but that's not saying a lot since there's only 2 games there. It'd be nice to add a few more there, but oh well, this month was VTES month. Maybe next month.

I finally ran into a good Star Gate deck today - well, it was rare-ful, which is why it's good. I couldn't even get more than 1 mission completed which sucked big time, but then again, that's because I'm only playing with a starter game. I was tempted to buy a pack or two, but since having gotten burnt by LotR, I decided I'll hold off and enjoy the game with what I have. Afterall, it's not going to last forever, and when the engine shuts down, all I'll have left would be memories...

-+@ Elder Stone @+-

Coz this is a post about Kybar's Teeth...



Art credits:
Zastrow by Zastrow - I couldn't resist naming a creature after an artist. He's probably gonna tell me to rename it or something.
Tuft Yajo by Werner/Gillette/Goodman
Flint Cragnoc by CyberIsland/Holmberg

You can see the last image at Cyber Island Studio. No, this isn't the studio producing the animated cartoon which will be 26 episodes long and will be done by Cookie Jar and Daiwon in South Korea - see this press release from them. The cartoon will be shown in September presumably on CBC in Canada and Kids WB south of the border. For those outside anglophone continental North America, well, start writing to your local stations if you wanna see the cartoon.

The above art, by the way, is for Ancients of Days as usual as I attempt to finish off the last quarter of the images for the 100 card expansion. And guess what? This month alone, I've gone from 79 to 98. Eek! That's fast. 2 more left and then all the images will be done. Wow. That's rather fast. I still remember when I was finishing the last few expansions that the last 10 cards or so seem to take forever getting the images. This time though, they were just going bang bang bang bang and out the door. Heh, I prefer it this way. The last batch I did were 5 d'Resh cards and one of them is shown above. I think I did the Tuft Yajo a week before and the Cragnoc a few days before that. The last 2 is going to be a pain. I need to locate 2 magi images for Nar and d'Resh. I've already sent messages to a few people, but haven't yet had any response from any of them. Well, I guess there's still time. I wonder if the designers are still rearing to go...

The other less impressive thing I did over the weekend was to get EF KT up and online for playtesting. It's still a bit painful typing in and adapting cards and then checking to see if everything works. I remember the days when I was fervent enough that doing it for an entire expansion of triple the size was no problem. These days though, what with a Sword of Damocles hanging over everything, things seem to be rather... uncertain. Anyways, hopefully the playtesters will come up with their thumbs up and there's nothing more than minor text mistakes. I saw Bobby doing some testing earlier today - I don't think he had a good matchup though.

Of course I also had to do the announcements on the News section, just to make it seem as if things are happening on the site. Well, it is, but not everything gets announced which is a pity. And while I was there though, I decided that I needed to finish up the ad images for EF, so I made a whole bunch of ads and since I enjoyed the process so much, I created a bunch of ads for AoD as well. Some of them are cool, some, not so, and some are funny, as Tomi commented on the Flying Carpet d'Resh ad on the front page.

The other ad I had to add to the front page a few days late was the KMW expansion for VTES. No need to create a new ad for it this time thanks to me grabbing the logo off from the site a few months back. The story is this: it was added on time (or a day later for me), but was not announced because Ed wanted to be the first to announce it. It must be some alpha male thing or something. So I just let him have his day in the sun and only updated the News page after he's done his spiel about it being added and a free pass being given out, yadda yadda. Yes, I mentioned a free pass. Now head over to the Online site to get started.

My ad hoc game group decided to call me for dinner and a gaming session over the weekend, so I went armed with... no games! Wow, it used to be I had to force the games down their throats. Now they are the ones who are not only purchasing the games but is trying to force it down my throat. Whee. Ed's job is done? We played 2 games of TtR, of which I won the first and then got ganged up on in the 2nd which I lost. But that was the second game of the evening. I was first introduced to the game of Saboteur, which is a card game, but a "pathfinding" game. It was OK ... there isn't too much strategy to it and like most other card games, sometimes it plays itself. However, having said that, it'd be a good game for pbw though... Anyways, I think next time I'll bring along A Game of Thrones...

-+@ Vampire Blood @+-

because I'm gonna talk about VTESO and blood in this blog?



Art by Annette Burke. Just wanted to show more pheygrins that Ms Burke has done. All 3 cards will be in AoD and that expansion will be Pheygrin heavy, but I'm gonna guess it'd be well liked by the general MND public because the art is good and the Pheygrins usually have great mechanics. I really need to finish getting images for this set since design is gonna start next month... maybe I'll just have to delay it until all the images have been sourced.

I finally got the d'Resh EF cards to the playtesters yesterday. That's a long delay I know, when I should be a few more updates into it by now. KT is next then Nar and Naroom, and I hope I can get all of that in before the end of the month. What also needs to be done before the end of the month are the TW cards, but I think it's almost ready to go.

What was not ready to go was Third edition on VtES Online. Instead it's been scrapped and replaced by Kindred Most Wanted... a whole month later. I wonder what's the buzz by the fans that's going on about all this - there are already complaints that the support was lacking, yadda yadda, and now this is the first time that a deadline has not only been missed but has been skipped as well. Hmm...

Also interesting is the fact that Ed's going to do away with the engine and to go with pbw VTES. Now that's interesting. I wonder how many people would pay to use that service when it's much easier to keep track with a free pbem system. I have no idea. I also wonder how convoluted the coding is going to be for a pbw game that has things like interrupts. It takes about a month to finish a 3-player game of Capitol online and that game only has 4 turns in TOTAL. I can't imagine how long a 3-player VtES game would last if done on pbw. It's a good thing I won't know since I don't play the game.

Martin mentioned to me that he didn't realise that StarGate was the latest CCG to be created based on a TV series. Well, it's all brand new and shining and all, but I've already decided that there's something lacking from it. The game seems to be a very crude form of B5 without all the complexities that make B5 nice. At the end of the day, there's not much strategy going on in the game since it's basically a more powerful version of WAR. Of course, this might be due to the limited number of cards - only one expansion. Perhaps they'll improve it in future. Somehow though, I doubt I'd be wowed by it.

I just won a huge lot of Fast Break cards on ebay. It was rather pricey, but not as pricey as what I paid for my first (and before this one, only) lot of Fast Break cards on ebay. I can't wait to get the cards to finish off my collection. I guess I'm the only Fast Break crazie out there.

Tomi has also been trying to complete his Doom collection. Last I heard he needed 8 promos or something like that and he's in discussions to get them. I hope he gets to finish his collection. It's interesting how he can do it in basically under a year.

Ed's also been busy, mainly on Ludoholic. He's updated the page refresh things with Ajax, whatever that is, so that things now should refresh faster, apparently. I have no idea, I don't have any more live games... well, at least not until the next game is made public. Still waiting for Duel of Ages or Grave Robbers, but I think those will be ursurped by something I'm a bit more keen to play. We'll have to see.

-+@ Power of the Ways @+-

The power is in you as a 80s cartoon used to have as a subtitle...



Cards from LotR again? Only because I've been reading about them today. Apparently Decipher's contract runs out soon and there might not be a next set. So Decipher has decided to go out with a bang... a huge bang, by making cards in the next set, which is expected to be their last set, very very broken. There's already been a large ruckus raised about it on several forums, which makes for interesting reading. Apparently the only way to beat a broken card is another broken card, so that's why the set is riddled with them. That also explains why the main card designer for the set has resigned from Decipher as well. Fruit Loops!

Well, I'm glad I'm only collecting the cards. I finally finished my collection for set 6 - Ents of Fangorn to make it 4 out of urm... 13 complete. Oh well, if anyone wants to send me rare cards, feel free to check the list of LotR cards that I'm looking for at Mahasamatman. I updated the list yesterday and like each and every time I do that, I get innundated with email asking me for trades to places like Poland or Mexico. Oh well.

I did say I'll talk about the cards I got yesterday... it was quite a haul, particularly the cards from Tomi. Here's the list:
Wildstorms
Warlords
Guardians
Judge Dredd
James Bond
Marvel Overpower
Rage
Vampire/Jyhad
Middle Earth
Ani-Mayhem
Dark Age
Dark Eden
Doomtrooper
Dune
Echelon of Fire
Echelon of Fury
Killer Instinct
Netrunner
The Crow
Galactic Empires
X-Files
Red Zone
Top of the Order

All I can say is Yay, cards from both Echelons! I've still gotta sort those cards out later today, but I'm psyched about them. Kiitos Tomppa!

One thing I won't be getting soon it seems is the Kathars expansion. I hear that Spielbox, who owns them isn't allowing Rio Grande games to publish them. So I either have to shell out big bucks to buy the out of print German version or... shell out even bigger bucks to buy it on auction sites. I don't fancy doing that much work for just 4 tiles. I guess I'll pass until there's an easier way to get those tiles.

And there goes the reason I was going to get the next issue of Games Quarterly... no more Kathars... but wait, GQ itself has been sold and shutdown it seems and it's no longer publishing as well. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that Kathar wasn't going to be available next issue. I guess I'll never know.

I also took a gander at the stats on the engine and was surprised to see that MND has gone down a great deal. I guess it's because the Brazillians have decided to desert the game en mass again, now that school has started for them? Probably. Rage also hasn't been doing very well lately as well for 2 months now, but HC is trying to inject some enthusiasm with a new tournament that's pretty much a sealed deck with ante-ing. That sounds interesting, but it depends really on players to trust each other.

I saw this picture last week and was rather impressed by it:



Image by Annette Burke. It's a MND image of course. I think I named this creature a Burkey after her and her brother Daniel. I really do like this image.

-+@Movie Star @+-

Well, there are lots of those in the game below...



Those are the preview cards for the Stargate Online game, which is based on the offline TCG by Comic Images. Eventhough SciFi is cancelling Stargate after 10 years, the franchise is still going strong with Atlantis and another new series and two made for TV/DVD movies in the works... apparently. Yes, I'm a "gater" just by the info above apparently. I've also been playing the online game which is done by former WA, now SOE. I had to sign up for a WoW account to play, but I doubt I'll ever try WoW because that's almost like Evercrack to me. The physical game is in the stores in the US and Canada for over a month how... I hope I remember to send an email to Logan to pick me up a few promos at Origins this year.

And I wonder what else would be cool for "Novelty's Origin Treasure Hunt 2007"? Avatar, the Last Airbender by Upper Deck? Yeah, that would be interesting. I hope they have an interesting promo for that. Transformers 3D by WotC? I wonder if this is a CCG or something else. I'm not really interested in a tile game or non-standard looking cards (like Hexatomb or whatever that was). Eve TCG - the cards look boring, but the screencaps from the game lend it a nice space element that I'm really getting into. That would be a cool one to pick-up. And Spoils will be on my list of course. I don't really like the bright Kult images - Cthulhu did it better IMO, but that would be a fun TCG to pick up a promo.

And no one has yet guessed the CCG for last month. I'm carrying it forward to this month because well, I'm too lazy to think of a new CCG to pick titles from. I would have though that it would be easy to guess the CCGs from which I'm picking titles for last month's blogs, but apparently it's not so. Oh well. There's another month to guess.

One hint - it's one of the CCGs that I just got cards today. Remember a few weeks ago when Tomi was bored and was sorting out his cards? Well, he sent me a whole lot of cards and they've finally arrived today (amidst like 6 ebay lots). I haven't even seen the cards properly yet or sorted them, but they will get done later and will probably be blogged tomorrow or sometime this week.

What was separate from the rest though were 5 cards in their sleeves. These include the Spawn and Madman foils and the promo version of Hazard from Wildstorms CCG. Drool. The foils were from Unlimited with the white border, which means they aren't that rare, but considering that these are cards from 1996 and aren't even printed now it's like gold ... figuratively of course, although the only difference between foil cards and ordinary cards is that the logo is golden instead of black. And Hazard... it can be had for $5 on ebay usually or something like that, but it was a promo in an early copy of InQuest or Wizard (way back in 1996) so that's a little bit hard to find as well. I guess only a WS crazy like me can enjoy them. Kiitos Tomppa!

As I said, I've yet to sort out the stuff I got from the post office today, but it will include some Mahasamatman updates somewhere. That's going to be fun. The database isn't due for updating until early June though. Still, I guess I better do a once-over to make sure that everything is all nice and dandy there. And no, Stargate hasn't been listed on Mahasamatman yet.

Didn't actually get a board game this time around. I'm surprised. I was going to get Monkeys because it seems like such a good game on uh... that other site (heh heh heh). I still wanna get a few more Carc expansions too, but that can wail till GQ summer is here. That copy will have the 4 Kathar tiles for my Carc collection. I might also pick up Towers while getting that and uhm... well, I'm not getting princess and dragon... so I guess that's all the Carc sets I'm picking up for my collection.

Taling about French things, I wonder how Martin is coping with the non-release of 3rd on VTESO. I wonder if the players are in an uproar. There was a post on the main forums by the resident VTESO canuck asking if Ed was around since he apparently hasn't been replying to PM and EMs. That would be interesting to watch out how it develops. I wonder if the movie-star-looking Hungarian immigrant or the first women highness will win the battle. And no, I'm not talking about the French Presidential elections.

And while I'm on movie-stars, did I mention a few blogs ago that Mark is glad to be back on GRfOS? Well, he is, according to an interview I last had with him. He's gonna need lots of help to familiarise himself with the coding and for a change there's only one person that could help him. Poor Ed. I'm not envious of Mark though. According to him too, I'm the pbw-hater. Heh, OK, whatever. Fingers in too many pies is more like it.

There's also a whole lot of activity going on on the main engine, including the SF league which is still running, crazy AvP rules talk and a bunch of other things that really isn't that interesting even when one's moderating the forums. I guess it's interesting for the people discussing them though. I'll write up a bit more about this perhaps tomorrow with the update about the stuff I got today.

To close, here's the last (as of today) of the images that I want to showcase:



Pencils by Joe Araiza (of course, who else?), colours by myself. I am still trying to play with light and things like that (from the Kybar's sword image) and I think I only partially succeeded. I don't like the fact that the shield isn't reflecting some of the light for starters... and a whole lot of other things. Apparently Joe likes it though, and I guess that's fine since this image is for his custom cards.