-+@ Invaders @+-

I'm surprised that one of the most popular page was the one I posted with the rest of the unreleased cards. I know some of these cards have been seen before, but if not, well, here are the 4 invader cards that I made way back when.




Holmberg actually has a few nice Invader pictures on his site as well (link is on my blog to the right). Here's a nice group shot of 4 Invaders:

Invaders Group shot


That's a nice image. Here's some more of his scratch pad:

Critters 1

Critters 2
Perhaps if there are people making custom cards out there that's not me, some of these would probably make good card images! Please do make sure you ask Holmberg for his permission firsth though!

-+@ 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...

-+@ 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.

-+@ Forestry Development @+-

I like the card names in this CCG...



Art by Holmberg on all 3 pieces. That's the Kouba, a new creature type in AoD named after GoC. He seems stoked to have an entire creature type named after him. It follows from Wymitch of course, which is named after Malovis. If the trend keeps up, I'll have to create creaturetypes for Bobby and everyone else.

The final push for getting TW finalised is up and running for a while now, but I just gave it one last push in an attempt to get it ready by the end of the month so that by the beginning of May it will be custom legal and public. Meanwhile testing the playtesters are having a field day with the first 4 regions of EF... which has only served to bring up the fact that the DJ card from the expansion of the same name is still too powerful. Oh well, that will have to be worked out after TW goes custom legal.

No news yet from Martin and Ed regarding VTES, but I'm keeping my eye on it. I'm also keeping my eye on GRfOS PBW as well as it continues development. Mark has real-life commitments first though, so I'm gonna guess it's going tough for him. A new game appeared to be in development for PBW on Ludoholic as well, although it has not been announced yet. So I'll keep mum until such a time as it is public.

Anyways, today I finished up one image. This is a MND image, but it isn't for a custom card that I'm doing. It's for Joe Araiza who of course drew it. It took me about 6 hours spread across 3 days to get the completed image, and I'm still not too happy with it, but as I mentioned elsewhere, I have to let go after some point or else I'll never be able to do anything else.



Pencils by Araiza, colours by myself, grass by Rich Werner and the trees in the back by Matt Holmberg.

-+@ Stand like a Fool @+-

Happy April's Fool. New CCG for titles. The contents of todays blog may or may not be real.



Three more cards from Ancient of Days
Weird Lightning by Nick Szankovics
Duel by Kaku Watanabe
Zap by Matt Holmberg

I'm still in the midst of collecting images for AoD, and design for the set isn't schedule to start until the second half of the year, although the designers are probably itching to get started. I've recruited at least 2 new designers for the set and I'm sure they are rearing to go, although I've had to pour cold water on them a few times just to get things managable.

Meanwhile EF has started playtesting with the first 4 regions already on gEngine and the next few scheduled for the next few months. This is the first custom set that is being playtested by a select group to hopefully maximise the feedback and to prevent the unsaid negative atmosphere regarding cards that are extremely powerful. I hope it works out better.

This will probably be the final month that TW will be in playtesting, it will be made custom legal and public next month. Hopefully all the balance issues can be fixed in time. Lisan is still a potential big NPE and cards like Barak, Leader and Forest Well are hopefully fixed. I still wanna see cards like Brynn, Duwas and Chana being playtested some.

Meanwhile I've said that people who want to design their own custom cards can have a crack at it provided that they design their own sets. The same standards will be applied to those cards if they want it to be added to gEngine. 3 persons and an entire group (those crazy Brazillians) have taken up the challenge and I wish all of them well... although one person has almost partially given up. Oh well, it definately ain't easy.

Otherwise I haven't been up to much on gEngine... but that doesn't mean other people haven't been busy.

Logan finished Maul of America in February and it's now in open testing on the engine. I helped him cleaned up some of the images for that game and gave him some suggestions as to how to handle a few image issues. Of course, what I did was miniscule compared to all the other work that he's done. And there's also something inspired by the iPod in there as well apparently... His other games also had small updates during the interim. I would take that as a good sign

The Shadowfist league finally finished and the winner was announced. That was a long league but at the end, there weren't that many people playing. Hmm... The Mythos tournament players have also just got their prizes and the forums are abuzz about it... a few weeks back. Meanwhile the current Rage tournament is still ongoing, but things seems pretty slow there as well.

While I'm on Rage, Aiden made his debut at fixing up Rage for the engine. I have no idea how he did because I didn't bother looking at the coding, but it seems to work well so I'll take that as a good sign. It's also a good thing that he's doing it since he's one of the rules guy for the Rage customs.

The other game that was supposedly gonna get a new set was Ultimate Combat, but AFAIK, the cards have been added, but not the images. The PL is a re-instated Craig who seems more interested in other things than his own game. Well, I guess that's his perogative.

The interest in the sealed deck thing that nipa did for Doomtrooper seems to have died down some, but that doesn't mean Tomi hasn't been busy. His latest project though has been to update Titan for Ludoholic Real Time, and he's added the Collosal Arena rules as an option. Titan is the second Real Time game on the Ludoholic RT engine after GRfOS.

And GRfOS PBW seems to be progressing under Mark, after Ed decided to drop it for other things. I do wonder how Mark is getting along but it's a good sign that he's back and working on it. Hopefully it would be the first game that's available as both PBW and RT on Ludo.

Ed has been busy updating Capitol and working out the bugs of Urland in between trying to code for Duel of Ages. I like the images of that last game and he seems to have been making good progress on it, although bug fixing for VTESO and the main engine seems to also be eating into his time.

Talking about VTESO, Martin added another expansion in January and the 3rd Ed is scheduled to be added over the next few weeks. The number of games played there remains strong especially with the new cards being added. I'm sure that would be keeping Martin busy for a while...

Meanwhile in the real world, I have been getting a large number of Ticket to Ride games under my belt recently and it has been interesting. It's surprising how such a simple game can be so strategic and interesting to be played. The other game that I have been playing some is Carcassonne with just the base set to understand the rules. That is fun, but seems to take a bit more work than TtR.

-+@ Rally Squad @+-

Is that what the Scoobies are?



Nope, not the Scooby Doo ECG cards, but these are from the fan made expansion for Mythos. I like these cards, they are well made and they are funny too. Hopefully they'll get on gEngine with a release event like a tournament? Nyaah... according to Alex, all he wants to do is to get on and play and not much else.

Not much going on the engine at the moment - the Rage and Shadowfist tournaments are still running but both are going up to the end of the month. I'm not involved in either though so I have no idea how things are going, but there's quite a bit of traffic on the Rage forums and I'm sure the Fist mailing list is probably busy as well. Only goes to show that someone organising a tournament or two can spice things up.

I went to the Ludoholic forums today and was surprised to find that Capitol has gone Now Playing. Wow. I think Ed is really really really excited about it. He's taken 6 years of experience (and abuse?) working on the engine and translated that into a really great job on Ludoholic. There's a steady stream of gamers there and I think it's about time I said adieu to the site for a while (at least until he starts adapting something interesting like YNDT or something). I added an announcement to the main page of CCGW stating that Capitol has gone Now Playing, but I wonder if that will excite anyone there.

What has been exciting is that Barathaum is getting all its info up and running on the wiki even before the game starts adaptation. Wow. Between the creator and myself, we have gotten the page up and the rules up, and since that is open source, hopefully people will drop in to correct spelling mistakes and grammar and what not. It's the first game that I'm using the wiki as my source material as well... well, in as far as the rules and general infomation is concerned. That reminds me, I need to ensure that the board is mentioned in the rules somewhere as well. The example of play that I read is not there too... hmm...

I finally moved over the Paradwyn and Underneath cards to the public viewing forum for player comments - forgot to do that earlier in the month. Worked a bit on the Universal cards, but wasn't too keen on them for the time being so rather than script subpar cards, I decided to leave them for another day. I helped Mr. Burke out on his cards as well. The solutions aren't perfect and playtesting is definately needed for the new versions of the two TW cards. That's getting there... slowly.

I created a rather nasty Evil Men archery deck today with a pure Hobbit flipside. It is doing rather well against the poor casual player as I'm taking out their fellowship with my archers while my hobbits cancel the skirmishes, discards the minions and just run and run and run. I didn't think it was such a good deck, but I haven't faced top level decks - Smeagollum and Castamir for example - yet. At least I'm enjoying the games. Can't say the same for my opponents though... poor them.

I played my first Mega game of Ticket to Ride today... online that is. I can't start the 1910 games because I don't have the software for it, but some other player did and it took me ages getting on. It was new, exciting and difficult as people were blocking each other trying to get to where they though they needed to go. I didn't win the game, but it was fun building from Washington to Atlanta, for example, to claim the 4 points.

-+@ Ego Boost @+-

I kid you not, that's actually the title of a CCG card.



Art Credits:
Solar Firagon by Nick Szankovics
Weave Pheygrin by Annette Burke, with background by Rich Werner
Core Firagon by Nick Szankovics

You saw it here first, 3 cards from the next (maybe) MND custom expansion tentatively titled Ancient of Days. Like all expansions, I need to get the images for at least half (i.e. 50 cards) before the set goes ahead. That will be a challenge for this set even more so than the last. I went into the last set (Twilight War) knowing I had more than 30 images. I'm going into this with less than 20. So things aren't really looking up, but there's still time and where's there's a Will there's a Grace?

I templated about 6 cards yesterday for AoD, the 3 above being some that were templated. I'm currently at 23 cards with images wich is barely a quarter of the way through... and this is the easy part of getting and templating images. I have no idea where else I would be getting the images, but oh well, I'm sure it can be done.

Before I go any further, lemme explain why I chose today's card title (Yes, that is a card in the CCG that I've been picking titles from, and I thought it was particularly apt for today). I was on the engine today, just hanging out watching people play some games, when in comes this guy with maniacmadmax as his nick. He went ballistic when he saw me in a good way, of course, and thanked me for keeping the game going singlehandedly. Heh, as if I did such a thing. I told him it was a group effort, yadda, yadda, but it did make my head a few inches bigger. It's not everyday that I get praised like that. I guess there are some people that are just appreciative of all the hard work that has gone into the customs.

And let's do a quick run down of MND custom expansion in reverse order, since I've already started off with AoD.

I still haven't done anything for Cure yet, although I'm glad I waited since I'm getting rather good ideas for the cards. This will be the first time in a while that I'm designing a Naroom magi and I hope it won't be too much of a disaster this time around. Daniel offered to help me with the design (I think he secretly wants to monopolize the Naroom card design) but I have yet to decide if I will take up his offer. Probably sometime after I've scripted out the rest of the Exodus Flight cards...

Exodus Flight is still being previewed for comments and I think the set is shaping out great. 9 out of the 13 regions have been revealed, and 2 more will be out for comments next week/month which would mean the last 2 region would only get out for comments in January. I still haven't written most of the Weave and Universal cards, so that would need to be done before January, and that also explains why those regions won't be ready by December. The plan is to start adapting the cards onto the engine by February for playtesting.

I just completed the text for Double Jeopardy today and uploaded the gML to the engine. That means there's 6 new cards available for play, although the cards are still technically in playtesting. I'm gonna wait for the complaints about them being broken and/or underpowered (well, complaints can only be about one or the other, nobody ever says anything if the cards are just right) over the next few weeks. Fun! Not!

Twilight War is still in playtesting and I think it's almost ready to be made public. I have set the ambitious date of February for it, but realistically, I'll probably hold off till May to make it common with the other 2 sets before it (Tainted Glimpses in May 2006, Exodus Flight in May 2005)

I need to start updating the Tainted Glimpses and Keeper's Quest promos with a printable version soon. Those would have to go up on the website, and probably a pdf version for download for anyone who wants to print them and play with them. That's gonna take quite a bit of time that I won't probably have until about March or so. Oh well.

Talking about the website though, I think I'm behind on the calendars - not that many people are downloading those. I also received all the scanned copies of the Book of Ages from Patrick last week and he expects them on the website ASAP. Nopers, I simply do not have the time to do it any justice at this point in time (and my html skills are rusty anyways - I still code everything in a text editor, so it's a pain). I have no idea when I'll get to them.

Insiider has died out completely... slightly later than usual, but dead is still dead nevertheless. The RPers are talking about taking their RP to someplace else (LJ, I think) to "finish" it and there hasn't been any posts other than trading stuff for a while now. That makes the Custom Card forums the most active MND forum out there now, with CCG Workshop's MND forum coming in a close second. The MND Yahoo group is still alive as well, and can probably compete with the CCGW MND forums as being the 2nd most active MND site.

Cookie Jar Entertainment finally released an image of the upcoming animation, and in my book, it doesn't look promising. The cancelled computer generated animation looked much better, although the animation quality probably won't be as good. But then again I'm not the target age of the cartoon, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge. There's still no announcement yet that the cartoon has been picked up or will air anywhere, but based on the fact that it was just sold this year with half a season, I'm going to guess it'll only start showing the earliest by Autumn 2007 since it's too late to be shown Autumn 2006 or as a mid-season replacement in Spring 2007.

There's more MND stuff, but there's also some other time. I know this is just item 1 of the things I said I'd post yesterday, I'll just have to do some of the rest some other day.

I'd like to end by thanking Martin for that comment on the last post that White Wolf has been bought by the EVE people. I read about that, but since it didn't affect me, I promptly forgot about it. Well, things are now up in the air about VteS and EVE both targetting the same market... will they halt the production of one of those CCGs? Who knows?

-+@ Sudden Illness @+-

I think I'll continue the CCG for the rest of this month...



Final Twilight cards for a change. These are from the Ashcans which I will have to add to the engine once I finish colouring up two more images. I did one the other day, but I guess it wasn't in time to be included in the Ashcan release. Oh well, it'll definately be added into gEngine anyways.

Otherwise though, what I have labelled as "Entropy2" internally has been added onto the engine. Apparently 3 of the cards aren't finalised yet so those will be changed some time in the future. I'm a bit surprised though because the cards are available for sale as pdf versions already. Hmm...

The other thing has been this player from Poland has been after me to add in the Atmosphere cards onto the engine for AvP. He has been so enthusiastic that he's been getting the images and matching them with the text and creating all the new cards for me. Heh, hold the horses! Well, I really want to properly template the existing cards before I add any more cards, so I got him to send me current scans of the cards - proper 300 dpi ones - so that I can blank them properly to template them. He has. The next step would be to blank them, then do the templates properly, match the fonts, cut out the images and reassemble both the old expansions in addition to adding in Atmosphere. I have no idea where I'll find the time to do that, but I shall have to do it soon if I wanna keep his interest I guess. He and his one other friend has been going crazy with the number of games - the game is being played rather regularly now and I guess that qualifies it for some "frills".

Ed has been really good and has got Armageddon setup for me. The problem is, I haven't had the time to actually complete it and place it on the engine. Argh! I really need to get this going at some point though, but I just don't really have the time for it at the moment. The card art also haven't been finalised for all the cards, but I have got the spoiler and the rules and everything so one of these days, I really have to sit down and sort everything out. One of these days... I have no idea after or before I start revamping AvP.

Ed's also been good on a number of fronts - notice that Titans: Arena is back up on the engine? Well, he went to the game creator and got his permission to host the game on the engine so now it's back up. Hooray - that's one removed game that's now back on the engine. I guess the Netrunner fans and the Harry Potter crazies can start their campaign to get their games back on the engine now...

Since the cat's out of the bag, Ed has recently been working on a play by web (PBW) site called ludoholic.com . I've been busy on there playtesting (well, more play than testing) the interface and the programming of Capitol. I used to think that the Capitol adaptation on the engine was wanting. The PBW version is so much cooler, with the rules in a convienient form and the moves easily understandable, stackable counters and a point and click interface. Sure, the last thing isn't available on the engine yet, but hey, it's motivation for Ed to add them at some point in future... I think. Capitol is mostly done now, Urland is next on the list as is stated on that page so things are moving fast.

Everyone it seems is caught up in the craze. I saw Kev requesting to do Monkeys for PBW instead of the engine on the forums, and I know Logan and Mark are both also looking into adapting games for PBW. I guess I'm just the only person who isn't jumping with joy (or frustration?) about the whole deal, but I already have enough on my plate... if you can't already tell from the above.

The end of last month was crazy... eventhough I've streamlined my CCGW responsibilities, there was nevertheless a multitude of other things to do as well, mostly MND and thus nothing to do with CCGW. There's the calendar which had to be done. I can understand how Holmberg used to be up to at least a week late with them. They aren't that tedious to do, but it does take time to do them. And just because there's space for a mid blog picture:


That's available for download as a desktop image too.

And while tweaking around on a couple of pages on the custom card website, I discovered I had to update the status of the custom cards... and once that was done, to update TG and KQ up to the EL and SP standards. Eep! That's a huge load of work, and I've been steadily toiling away at it. SP received it's printer friendly pdf around the beginning of the month and KQ last night, with the remnants of EL. So that's less than a score done, a century more to go...

TW is still in playtesting and has been joined early this month by the first card for DJ and P2C. There's already been a tempest in a teacup (sorta-pun intended) with the first DJ magi and I added the second DJ magi last night. I wonder what will happen there. Perhaps people will fall in secret love with it or perhaps things will get frosty (no, not forestry). Who knows?

The MND players, as a collective, or should I say the vocal part of the collective have been calling for power escalation to be implemented on a number of cards. I have been wondering why that is so. Perhaps it's just inherent - people just want the best for the short term, not realising the worst that can do in the long term.

That DJ magi was added as part of the Summer League tournament which has sorta died out I guess. That's a pity though. I guess people only played for the prizes and when the prize runs out, there was no point in playing. That's a good thing though, people shouldn't be pigeon-holed to play something they didn't want to play I guess, but as it has shown, it means that they are being rather abusive (game wise) towards the newer players. Ouch. I haven't seen a new player last for longer than three months yet. Oh well.

Meanwhile, things continue to go busy with the cards in development. EF is firmly on schedule with 3 regions going out for comments at the beginning of the month and the other regions getting prepped for it. We've sorta changed the way this works and the designs are not so much in isolation now and hopefully, this would result in better quality cards being designed.

I've also started the AoD/AE image collection process and the subsequent templating to go along with it, and that is an even slower process. But then again, I guess the priority there is low. People have been coming to the forums asking to contribute... well, the main prerequisite for that is their capability to stick around for the long term. As I said previously, there aren't too many of the long termers recently. I guess people are just too much into the instant gratification thing... or at least the instant thing.

I was talking with Nate about this the other day, and he pointed out to me that he's experienced it as well on the forums he frequents. People (and by that he means underagers who are vocal on the forums he frequents) want the thing and they want it now, but they have no idea what to do or how to do it, because almost everything in life is done for them. Apparently he has written some sort of guidelines thing that's a must read on one of those forums. I've gotta remember to ask him if I can read it anytime soon.

And it's round about September/October, which means Tomi gets more time to spend on the engine... Doomtrooper got another custom expansion, and I know he's busy with the latest expansion that's in the work, but that's not the only game on the engine that got Tomi's love. Kult and Dark Eden and I think Mythos had minor tweaks as well, and of course, as mentioned above, Titan's back. Remember the Titans gets new meaning now!

It's nice to see a Shadowfist league has started up on the engine headed by a guy I know from LotRO. I guess his creative energies has to go somewhere and since LotrO is down, a SF league seems the next best thing? Julien has been forced to update the cards and stuff which is cool - at least SF is getting some attention, even if Zev is now focusing on Conan/Star Gate/whatever.

Oh and I got a huge load of cards the other day - a box each of Black Rider and Bloodlines and two each of Voice of the Storm and Nightmare Dawn. The latter 2 were mostly for making real world custom cards while the former 2 I got because they were really really cheap. I expect it'll get cheaper! Nevertheless, it does take time to open packs, sort cards and the like. That takes time too, which is one of the reasons why I haven't blogged in a while...

-+@ Magical Wings @+-

I wish I had those...



Art Credits:
Indgo by Whyrl/Strom
Meadow Celphet by Werner/Gillette
Winter Cure by Whyrl/Strom

I got bored of looking at the VteS cards, hence a new blog, which is long overdue as well. Martin guessed the CCG from which last month's titles are from... I'm sure he'll be able to do it this month as well if he tires.

I finally finished templating all the cards for Exodus Flight. The last one was Indgo, as show above. That brings the total to 100 out of 100 cards templated... design of the cards is also underway, with not-so-long and not-so-ardous debates about the merits of various things. I guess people are getting into it. There's still a long way to go.

The card on the right, is part of the Cure for all Seasons promo set of 4 cards. Yup, this is the first review of it anywhere online... I think. I have an idea for the set, but really that would be done after people have finally decided what to do with EF. By people, I mean me.

I added to the Custom Card site "printer-friendly" sheets of MND custom cards in pdf for people to download and print. Those were fun to do once the template was done. And I've recently come into contact with a really good laserjet colour printed, and have been going bonkers converting the custom cards into actual physical cards. I couldn't locate any cardstock (300 gsm or more) so these are printed onto paper, then pasted onto spare MND commons (so that I don't have to print the cardback). Then I have to carefully cut along the edges and for the final touch, to paint the borders with a black marker to make it look nice. Two of the cards are shown in the video below.



The card on the right of the screen is actually Liriel from ND. At the resolution of the video, it seems that everythings not distinguisable. One can only tell that it's a custom when you hold the customs up to a magnifying glass to see the individual spots printed by the printer - it's not as smooth since there is some compression and reduction involved in the printing process. Nevertheless, it's not as significance for normal use. Next up, binding them up.

So what have I been doing online? Well, it's mostly to do with the design of the MND cards - EF and P2C, and of course, the playtesting of TW, which is currently up on the engine. It was down for a couple of days, but after some really hillarious posts, it's been put back up at the request of the majority of the vocal players.

The August calendar for MND has also been made public at the beginning of August. I have no idea if it warrants a mid blog picture, but I'm going to post it anyways, just to make it MND overkill.


On the non-MND front, I finally got the promos, aka Novelty's swag treasure hunt, from Origins, half a world away. I'm rather pleased with the cards though. Thanks again Logan for everything!

CCG Armory finally came through and sent me an invoice saying that they have sent my stuff. It's by UPS so I'm going to expect at least a month's delivery - yes, it's probably that slow, not that UPS delivers bad service, but they are half a world away and they depend on a lot of other people in between me and them. I can't wait to get the cards though.

Oh and Decipher has previewed the next "set". No, it's not Rise of Saruman, but some Wraith set which consists of 6 cards. Yes, 6 cards. That's it. They must be milking the franchise for all it's worth. One of these days I'll probably put up the images.

I went into LotRO and AAOTCG to find them both blank. I hardly see anyone on the latter, although I did play a game or two of LotRO on and off this month. There aren't that many players now though, and the decks are wearing thin due to the lack of cards.

What's the next game I'm going to be coding for CCGW? That's a good question. There's always too many to choose from and not enough time. That, plus the fact that I have to maintain all my existing games as well. But the engine going free for legacy games have been good. At least they are all being played now.

-+@ Blood of Giants @+-

Whoa, gory, just for the VTES-themed blog...



That's 3 cards from Legacies of Blood, the 9th VTES set and the 4th one that will go online this 15th. I won't be surprised if Martin has finished adapting all 350 cards by now and is only waiting for time before it goes up. I wonder if Ed will be back by then from his holiday to see the 4th set going live. That's an interesting thought.

I've also prepared an ad for the main engine for the expansion... not that it's great or anything, but I got bored of the gunpoint ad that we've been using for VTES announcements for a while so I thought I'd create a new one specially for Legacies.

I hung out at the VTESO forums earlier reading a few posts here and there. It seems a bit... gloomy there, but that's just me. At least gloomy is better than the ghosttown feeling one gets at the CCGW main forum these days, unless of course, it's the Rage forum, which seems to be happening these days. At least it's still getting posts now and again...

I haven't announced it anywhere else yet, but I've already begun designing the EF cards. Well, not just me but also the regular gang of card designers who did such great work on TW. There are a few new faces as well this time around, and I hope they can fit in with the rest of the team. I created a hidden forum specially just for the task so that now I don't have to bother with PM or emails, but instead, it can be posted at one place and everyone can have a look at it. Well, everyone that has access to the forum that is.

Talking about TW, it seems to be quite a hit. The addition of the 100 cards seems to have brought out the pool of players who are beginning to explore the other custom cards. I saw a game with the Aurora Xyx today and Mitch was rather pleased to see someone playing a casual game with a Puddle Arboll. Small tiny baby steps as Mitch would say, but that's a good thing. Hopefully this will open the avenue for more people to play with the custom cards.

The one bad thing about the engine recently is that the MND room is ... well, not down, but extremely laggy. I have no idea what's causing it, but I suspect it's one of the three new tabs - the game wall, the wanna learn tab and the tournament tab. Probably the latter since that's been the buggiest of the lot.

I've been playing quite a bit more of TtR recently, although I'm beginning to tire of it. Well, too much of a good thing, as the saying goes, might not be good or some such. I plopped into the LotRO room to find Chris Tubman in a game. Apparently he just got a bunch of online cards in a "clearance" sale and was busy making decks. There was a fun hobbit deck too which I definately enjoyed watching him play with it. Otherwise though the game seems dead and there are no new announcements as to when we'll get to see Rise of Saruman online.

Talking about LotR, I recently ordered some cards from CCGArmory.com. Martin found the site and asked me if I have purchased anything from there to which I answered in the negative then. Well, Martin, if you are reading this, I did buy some cards from there now, so I hope it'll arrive. I think I bought a booster box each of Bloodlines and Black Hunters which were on sale with 65% off or something stupid like that. I guess the game is dying if there are no demand for the next to last expansion of cards. I didn't see the latest expansion there though.

I also purchased the A Game of Thrones boardgame while I was there. I have no idea why, but I really, really like the Westeros map used there. It was a definate improvement over the LotR Risk map of Middle Earth. I was also reading the rules for the boardgame and was surprised to find out that it seems almost like a CCG to me... well, with the 2 expansions in the offering, I'm sure it can be customisable and collectible as well. I'm rather looking forward to it.

And while I was looking, I found a website that used to offer a beta version of the boardgame. It's put on hold apparently and is no longer available. I wonder if FFG got to them and closed down the site. We'll never know.

The other online site I found was for a game of Killer Bunnies by Playroom. It is free, but you have to like teach 3 new games a week or something to play, pretty much like the Shepherd system or something like that. Well, the Shepherd system doesn't really work so I have no idea how they are getting that to work on their site. I didn't bother downloading the client for the game though, but I did post in the forum in response to some guy who were requesting for it.

The same guy also complained that "Dungeon Dice" wasn't adapted yet. As far as I know, that Yu-Gi-Oh dice game isn't in the list of games to be adapted, and neither does CCG Workshop has permission for it. Perhaps he got it confused with "Dragon Dice" which is a totally other game. Who knows?

Tomi did a quick James Bond update recently, but I've also noticed a marked increased in the number of people playing the 2nd newest game on the engine. I hope that is a good sign and that they will stay around to play more of the game.

I'm enjoying the "calm" in the meantime though - sorta waiting for 2 other games to materialise. I'll probably start on one of those sometime next month. I still have to put in some effort on Urland and YNDT to get them up to scratch, and modifications to B5 and AvP. Well, this is more to remind me to do something. Perhaps I'll do some AvP for the remainder of this month... who knows what might happen...?

-+@ Chain Reaction @+-

Why? Because I have just started the Chain Reaction...



Art Credits
Jore Cub by Essence
Bwisp by Vega/Holmberg/Nov, backgrounds by Strom/Whyrl
Athik Shell by Nov

Three more cards from EF... I think I only have 2 more that I haven't shown on my blog yet. After that I'll have to move on to Cure, then AoD/AE. I finally found the owner of the image I wanted to use for the last EF card, and am now waiting for permission. Hopefully, I'll be able to use it because it's an awesome image by Whyrl.

I finally added the last 2 regions for TW onto the engine. There were a number of people who went "Finally!" when I made the announcement in the chatroom. The chatroom has also been rather busy as of late with a handful of people there at all times, or so it seems. Must be because it now no longer costs to play... but probably also because people are curiously testing out TW.

Adding those last 2 regions has just set a whole series of events into motion, but that's currently hush hush sorta.

I have also updated the Summer Tourney's prizes to include adding cards to gEngine for the monthly winners and a whole new custom relic for the winner with art by myself. I wonder how many people will bite the bait. The tournament went dead as soon as the game became free to play. I've advertised it on the MND @ CCGW blog and on the FPNews so we shall have to see what's happening there.

Meanwhile Mitch has finally finalised the last DJ card... well, the next to last anyways, as the last one will be finalised in the tournament that will be held during playtesting. The card text have been up for review for a while now, but things are also going slow there. Well, I guess we will have the time for that soon enough, but I think people are even more excited about the DJ magi than the remaining TW cards.

Oh and I made a few more ads specifically for the FPN... mid post image coming up. The one on the left is the Naroom image for TW, the one on the right is the 2nd DJ ad that I made. The other one can be seen at the top of the FPN.


And I think that's enough MND for this blog.

I read Mark's blog about Ticket to Ride and I know Ed have been raving about it as well, so I took the opportunity to see what they were talking about. I managed to get a few games in today. On the first pass though, I went blegh, this is boring. 3 or 4 games later, I began to see the strategy involved in playing the game and my opinion of the game rose a little. This would be a good 1 hour game to play with little kids...

Mark has barely posted except that one blog about the evening of Day 1. I'm awaiting the rest of his blogs. I wonder what else they are playing. It seems to be only boardgames. I wonder if he plays A Game of Life?

Logan has just got back from Origins and has a whole lotta stuff to tell. I'm awaiting for his "report" about what he played and stuff. I think that's going to be interesting at the very least. It seems he played in a lot of demos and tournaments which sounds interesting. Apparently he said he met Kev there at Origins!

I asked Martin about those symbol things on VteSO which apparently are the clans or factions or something like that. There are about 30 of them apparently. I wonder if Ed is going to show all 30 on the website. Heh. Oh and the new expansion that will be going in in less that 2 weeks? That has 350 cards. Ouch!

I think I'm finally getting into my CCGW groove and I wonder what should I be tackling next... AvP and B5 both needs an update of sort, but with the loss of the forums, I have no idea what I promised to do on them now... YNDT and Urland also need a fresh look at a few things, but again, I have to dredge those up from memory... blegh!

-+@ Inspired @+-

New CCG for this month... last month's was from Anarchonism (I think) and the month before that was from Auto Assault OTCG.



Art Credits:
Athik Little by Nov, background by Strom/Whyrl
Spore Xyx by Nov, background by Strom/Whyrl
Glowing Korrit by Nov, background by Essence

I think I can do better than that, but it's tiring doing top-notch work. Still, I don't think these images are too shabby for a custom card set and I'm rather pleased with what has been drawn so far. All 3 are for Exodus Flight, the expansion that is after Twilight War.

I drew the Glowing Korrit just before this... it was supposed to be a Crystal Korrit, but I decided that I could do glowing better than crystal, hence the name change. That is card number 149 out of 150 for EF, the last card is a Nar magi and I'm working on that to obtain permission to use a really great image. Watch this space.

Twilight War continues to get added to the engine for playtesting, and thanks to the game going free last month, the whole thing became like a carnival on speed. People seem to can't get enough of the custom cards and have been playing with them as they get added. I guess that's a good sign. Two more regions to go to be added to the engine, and the Naroom players are already almost begging me to get them added. Well, when I get the time seems to be my mantra, although I hope to get them up before this week is out.

Double Jeopardy has also moved on apace, as I have confirmed the text and have published it for review. Not many people have said anything about it yet though, which is a pity, it does need more comments before I'm going to add it onto the engine. Perhaps a link from the CCGW forums will do the trick.

So TW (100 cards) for playtesting with all regions added in July, I'm going to guess DJ (8 cards) at about October and hopefully EF (150 cards) by about February for the draft versions of the text. And after that of course is A Cure for All Seasons (4 cards). I've still got to draft those cards out. That should keep me busy until God only knows when. I've also restarted sorting images for AoD/AE, but that will take a backseat for a while until DJ has gone to playtesting...

And of course there's Project Second Chance, a MRP custom card set that will attempt to "power up" cards from the earlier sets which are little used so that they'll see more play. It's just something special on my part to make new custom cards without actually making new Custom cards. Phew.

And in between all that there has been tournaments (one just ended last month), contests (again, one just ended last month, and that I've yet to judge the winner), website updates include the brand new calendar for July 2006 as picture below. Mid-blog picture coming up:


Finished working on WSS2 a while back to much celebration and jubilation. It got tried out a few times as well, but it's not a CCG, just a glorified war game of sorts. Still, it is cool to have a custom set for a non-CCG card game.

Martin and Ed have been busy toiling on VteS and in about a couple of weeks or so, another new expansion will join the online cards for play. That's good news for the players, and hopefully it'll draw in more players. Stability shouldn't be an issue to worry about since it seems rather stable these days and it's also gonna be free to play for 3 months, so hopefully that will draw in players.

I was waiting with bated breath for MoA or Crystal Authority to go public before Origins. It was not suppose to be. AFAIR, both had minor debugging issues which needs to be fixed before they can go public, but like all of us, there's just way too little time to do the debugging. Oh well.

Origins is here though and unlike last year, I think I got a good haul of promo freebie cards eventhough I didn't go. NECA was giving out nightmares and there were also free cards from demos of BSG. Poor Logan had to sit through a demo of that... he probably enjoyed it though. I hope he gets back soon...

-+@ Evanescence @+-

Yeah, the rock band, but also a card, but from which CCG?



Yup, more Nightmare before Christmas Cards. Two of the cards are from Christmastown, the one in the middle though is from the Mayor Starter Deck which I have just opened. I have the other 3 starters sitting in their wrapping as well, and I guess I'll get to them one of these days. While at the store though, I also got a booster pack of AvP, Tomb Raider, Monster Rancher and two of Recharge for my cardback collection.

Titles for the past two months were from the Auto Assault (Online) TCG, which I'm still playing when there's nothing better to do. The player pool is getting better though as my sole starter deck has been taken down a number of times now, although I must say I did put up a fight with it as best as I could with the one deck I have available. I can't believe how many people are playing with rares in their decks these days - spend enough money on the cards and you can probably build a good deck to beat my starter.

I've been working on WSS2 today, getting the images all done. I really should have done them sooner, but there's just so many other things to do as well. Anyways, all that's left of the cards would be to code them and to add them to the engine. Perhaps next weekend... perhaps on Monday? Who knows when my mood will bring me?

I also have to finish coding up the TW cards for MND onto the engine. People are requesting for them, although I do wonder why. It's not as if the cards are great... or are they? I have no idea. The thing is though, they were designed by a few people out there, so I guess those people want to see the cards they designed in play on the engine. Or something. I haven't been working much on it though.

MND tournaments are still ongoing and there seems to be a large player pool out there. More than 20 games have been played in this "summer league" so far but I guess that's normal as it's close to the beginning of the month and people are flushed with tokens, particularly after all the prizes that were given out in the last tournament. This is the first tournament that would last more than a month though, and it's already showing up the defects in the tournament tracking software inbuilt to the engine.

The other tournament that's going on the engine is the Rage one, where this month people has actually played tournament games, as opposed to last month where no tournament games were played. I do hope Rage makes a comeback of some sort for the second half of the year.

One game without tournaments this month is Doomtrooper. Last month though, the players were flushed with the tokens I gave out for the April tournament, but since there was no tournament in May, there's no free tokens this month for them so I wonder if they'll become token-needy again, and will the total number of games drop for this month. It should be interesting to follow.

Oh, I guess I should mention that there was a SWD fan-expansion added to the engine a while back. I wonder if people are playing with those cards. Christoph seems rather busy though with other things, but he's still keeping track with the SWD players.

I have been talking to Nate recently and he's PDF-ing the "new" cards. I was just pinging him about the free cards that was supposed to come my way. Yeah, I get paid in card for artwork submitted to Final Twilight. I think it's a good deal... so does Nate too, he's still asking me for art and stuff. Yeah, when I get more time.

I was also looking at City of Heroes CCG and Robotech CCG today. The former seems interesting, the latter didn't attract me too much. City of Heroes would be another CCG that's based on a MMO, Auto Assault was one, but the most "big name" MMO to lend itself to a CCG is probably World of Warcraft. I've not looked at WoW yet though, and I don't think I'd be interested. It seems something Martin would be interested in anyways.

I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but there's one more thing to mention - I've been fleshing out more games on the CCGW Wiki recently, much to Ed's annoyance. Obsfucating the list perhaps?

-+@ Zero In @+-

as in focusing...



Art Credits:
Squak by Holmberg, background by Holmberg/Werner
Iger by Shipman, background by Nov
Wiscon by Zastrow

3 more from EF, that's almost the rest of my library. Very soon I've got to get the remaining 6 cards done and then get ready to get people to do the design for the cards. I wonder if anyone is up to that at this point in time. We shall see though. While I'm on the subject of EF cards, Essence just did one recently which can be found at MND at CCGW blog, which is why I'm down to 6 instead of 7. 5 more underneath creatures and 1 Nar magi to go and then the cards can start their design life.

I just realised that after making the May calendar, I did not post it up on the custom card website. Oops. The website is getting slightly neglected though, and I'll neglect it for a while until about the end of the month when I put up the June calendar together with May's. I should also probably add some more content there, but there's only so many hours a day, and there's so many other things to do... like add TW cards to the engine.

I just added the 6 Orothe cards today, bringing the total up to 26 or something like that, barely a quarter of the TW cards. I hope to get everything done by the end of the month. Minor automation stuff is still being added to the game and I'm going slowly to ensure that people get used to the changes.

I still haven't announced Cure for all Seasons yet, that's probably going to wait until TW has gone online fully for playtesting. And then, of course there's DJ to go as well. *sigh* It's a good thing I'm on a hiatus. Yay for the hiatus.

Tournament-wise, things are looking good for MND. This is the first month that 2 tournaments are running concurrently and there seems to be interest for both of the tournaments. The regular monthly tournament has got over 20 games played, if the results are to be believed, and I've started a play 3 games with me tournament with the custom cards. We shall see how many games I end up playing. If the response is good, I might even continue with it over summer.

I also did some WSS2 images today. I finished the 'Cats and SW backs, but there's still a whole lot to go. Hopefully I can get the rest of them done before the end of the month, at least that's the target.

I have been playing a bit of Auto Assault (TCG, not the MMO) with my one and only starter deck. I have no idea if people see the starter deck and get complacent or something, but I've been winning most of my games much to the embarassment of my opponents, who all seem to have a good subset of rare cards. It seems weird though, that they should have all these cards and not know how to use it.

Nightmare Before Christmas released the Christmastown expansion just recently I think. I haven't been through all the cards yet, but it seems promising. One of these days, I've got to find an avenue to play the game. I think it's going to be simple, yet fun, but sadly, I haven't found anyone to play with yet, online or offline. Oh well.

I'm still waiting for the announcements of the Star Gate CCG that will be released this year... maybe. Apparently the Shadowfist guy is in charge. I wonder whatever happened to Shadowfist though. Did it die out? Hmm... I guess I'm just ignorant.

And I have no idea what other PLs have been doing on the engine. Things are pretty much quiet at the moment, although I'm sure it's just the calm before the storm that will be Origins. Ed is still busy working to stabilise the server - hopefully, we'll get the stability soon.

Someone also contacted me for infomation about providing art for Final Twilight. I have no idea how that went other than the fact that I gave Nate's name and email to the artist. Nate seems pretty happy about that though. Perhaps we will get some more cards soon.

Anachronism Online is one thing I want to look at in detail. I signed up ages ago, but have yet to get a game. One of these days...

-+@ Infuriate @+-

betcha I'm doing that now with the titles... carry over from last month... guess the CCG.



Yes, 3 more cards from WSS2, and I finally finished cropping these cards this week. And what a long week it has been, but more on that further down. I finally realised how to get rid of the camera flash showing up on the cards, but it meant that I had to take the photos in daylight. So the last batch was done that way. Some of them still has the reflection of the camera on the cards (stop looking at Copycat's boobs, yes, that's a reflection of the camera), but otherwise, the colours should be better than the washed out reflected glow of the camera's flash.

So that's the front of 63 cards cropped, named and ready for coding, now I have to do the back of the cards. Hopefully, that will be quicker than the front since that is just a basic scan (it's not chromium, so there's no need for the camera, it scans normally) and then more cropping, naming and what not. After that the cards can be coded into the game and WSS1 will have a new expansion, hopefully by the weekend, but realistically speaking, be prepared for it next week instead.

That was Monday. Tuesday was a whole different kettle of fish.

Daniel was online Monday where I happened to corner him and chat about life, love and other mysteries. Well, not the love bit, but definately the other two. One of the by product about that chat was that I finally got permission to finalise Chess Wars and adapt it to the engine. So yay. First off was the draft rules which got cleaned up and modified slightly to make it more presentable. The rules are on the wiki which makes things a whole lot more easier.

Next up was to get server permission from Ed to modify and upload the game, as well as to get him to put the game back up on the main server. That was simply toggling a few things on for me, and by this time, he should be used to it since this is the 20th time or so he's doing it specifically for me.

The hard part was actually coding the game itself. Daniel has done some preliminary coding, when he was last a PL. That was 2003. OK, 3 years isn't a long time, right? Well, with respect to the engine it is. The huge gulf between that and even my most basic "no frills" game was obvious - any of my games is definately miles ahead in terms of technology in the adaptation. I had to add a background, and pretty up the display images for the game, then automated setup and a few other simpler moves. Then I moved it beyond my "no frills" by adding in Pay and Play. With that it was ready for the big leagues, or at least public testing, and that got released on Tuesday as the 93rd game on CCG Workshop and the 80th game currently available. (It pays to be the person who keeps track of these things.)

One thing I would like to point out though, is that during the process, it was a pleasure to have... well, firstly a really up to date developer's guide thanks (mostly) to Logan. Logan, together with Ed and to a lesser degree Mark has been keeping the developer's guide really, really, really comprehensive and user friendly. But more than that though, I had Logan and Ed online at the same time I was coding that (all 3 hours, which was all it took to convert the 2003 version to a 2006 "presentable" version), and their help, in real time was invaluable. I think that would actually be the best way to train a new person to be a PL, but that would mean Ed would get really, really busy if that was so!

And I needed an ad to announce the new game of course, but I didn't really wanna spend way too much time on the ad. So a quick picture and some word art in photoshop and a rather monochromatic image was created. Yeah, I shouldn't quit my day job to go into advertising.

Of course, a new public game meant oodles of updates on the wiki and I spent most of Wednesday at that task. While there though, I took the opportunity to change out some html tags to the native wiki format which makes thing look even better, and easier to edit. Live and Learn, or as some people like to tell me, QBE - Qualified by Experience.

While working on the wiki though, I realised that a Go Fish update was definately required for a few things and that also got done on Wednesday. The update was timely too as it allowed me to add in a few more cardbacks into the game that aren't just black cards. I reckon that there's way too many black cards in that game, so I'm trying to dilute them out.

So, that's 3 updates in a week and it's only Thursday, I've done a lot haven't I? Well, actually, there's more.

It's the end of last month and the beginning of this month though, so there were oodles of end of the month things to do. Game statistics had to be recorded, analysed and updated. The data is public on the website (well, the raw form is anyways), but the collated data that I've been recording for... well, a while now... is only kept with me. I'm not even saving the analyses anymore, I just give a quick summary to Ed and whoever's interested at the time I'm actually working on them and move on. The thing is though, the analyses doesn't result in anything at the end of the day, so I guess that's why nobody bothers.

Then there were tournaments. I had to close out the April MND tournament, which was won by Freigabe with 6 games played. Not a large number of games, but the total overall number of games played for the tournament has been holding even. Tokens had to be given out, results has to be posted, things like that. The usual boring tournament organising stuff.

Then I had to start the May version of the tournament. Rules had to be posted, the corresponding entry on the engine has to be created, the announcements made, yadda yadda. Same old story. While making the announcements though, I went through the old ones and updated those as well, namely the Rage tournament, and... well, that's it. I have no idea if the Doomtrooper league is even going to go on this month and I haven't (yet) heard from Thomas regarding who to give out tokens to for last month.

And while I was on the MND forums, I gave the Weave creatures a twirl and designed 2 of them for TW. I have no idea if it is me or if nobody really "gets" Weave, but people were complaining that they were too overpowered and underpowered... uh... so I guess that makes them balanced? I still have to do the magi, the relics and the spells, though, and hopefully that should be going ahead soon. The creatures basically fit the defensive weave subtheme, and I threw in the weave bulb/homestead combo into that as well. The other cards will have to cater to creatureless (a direction that Weave's heading into even before the company went belly up), the "Weave" effect itself, manipulating the discard pile, cald hate and uh... well, I don't think I can do junjertrug or any other creature type, which is a pity though. I'll have to see what else I can throw in there.

Before I go though, I just want to say that I bought my first booster pack of Magic the Gathering over the weekend as an impulse buy together with a starter deck of the Naruto CCG and a Japanese CCG that's called (as far as I can make out) Masked Super Dragoon. Borrowing from an Airbus advert... "Will wonders never cease?"