-+@ 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...

-+@ Sucka @+-

Fooled me once, shame on you, fooled me twice, shame on me.



Art Credits:
l'Cust by Zastrow, background by Holsten
Swalb by Katura
Trem by Zastrow

Three more magi for EF, and I do really like these magi. The first two seems dual-magi-ish though, which I suppose can be a problem for card design, but we'll cross that bridge when we get there I suppose. I continued and did a creature image today - it's a manip and not a new image, but it took absolutely ages to complete. I'm glad at the end result though. Since it's also an RP card, the RP version can be viewed on Insiider. So that means there's 7 more images to go, 6 Underneath creatures and a Nar magi.

I spent most of yesterday developing the list of changelogs for the Public CCGW wiki. It was a challenge creating a table that's visually appealing and organising the data so that it makes sense to someone who's looking for infomation and I think the end result isn't too shabby.

It's a holiday weekend for some people, and I'm guessing those people are busy coding away, either on their games or on the wiki, or even the website. Mark is still trying to get at least 2 games done before Origins and at the rate he's going, he'll probably get to do that. Logan is busily gearing up to get all the bells and whistles going for LMS. Those two of them have been doing crazy stuff and hours to get everything done by Origins.

I had a talk today with Tomi about card design. It seems DoomTrooper is suffering from a "runaway combo problem" where players with Uber decks can setup the game to win in one turn by playing a series of cards that combos to gain the required amount of victory points. Those aren't easy to stop though, particularly if one is new to the game, and every game seems to boils down to who can get their runaway combo to trigger first, which makes things boring. Perhaps that is why the number of games played for Doom, particularly over the tournament, is down.

I played two games of Auto Assault today with my two different decks. Basically, those are just "put whatever that's cool into the deck" decks since the deck building rules are not available anywhere. I won both the games against the same deck, using the same strategy, even though the decks I was playing with have different strength. I guess playstyle is important at the end of the day. Mine was to assault missions to win the game, while keeping my opponent on his toes by damaging his vehicle. The game seriously needs more answers to some of the problems, but at the moment it works and is semi-fun, so I guess it's good to go.

-+@ Brick @+-

That which makes things heavy.



Art Credits:
Mink by Beth Zyglowicz
Zeith by Beth Zyglowicz
Golizar by Mark Chmielewski

Three more magi for EF, I have been concentrating on the magi recently since I have to do major work on the rest of the other 7 cards. I did Golizar and 2 others yesterday and another 3 the day before that which means I have all but one magi for the expansion done. Considering that this is a 150 card expansion, as opposed to the usual 100 card expansion, there's quite a few more images that needs to be obtained for this. And the summary below:

Exodus Flight: Still collecting images, the status (for images) of each region are as follows:
Arderial: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Bograth: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics. COMPLETE
Cald: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
Core: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
d'Resh: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics. COMPLETE
KT: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. COMPLETE
Nar: 1 spell, 1 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic. NEED 1 magi
Naroom: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 3 relics COMPLETE
Orothe: 1 spell, 2 magi, 8 creatures, 1 relic COMPLETE
Paradwyn: 1 spell, 2 magi, 7 creatures, 2 relics COMPLETE
Underneath: 1 spell, 2 magi, 2 creatures, 1 relic NEED 6 creatures/relic
Weave: 1 spell, 2 magi, 6 creatures, 2 relics Need 1 creature/relic
Universal: 2 spell, 1 creature, 3 relics COMPLETE

I have yet to update the webpage with all the magi, I suppose I can do that tomorrow or something, because I spent most of today working on the MND updates. The expansion though, is still on hiatus, but has 8 more images to go to get the images complete.

TG now has finalise text and if there are no more comments will be tournament legal starting May. Ditto with KQ promo. Hopefully, that will get more people interested in the tournaments. The KT cards for TW went up at the same time, as requested by Bobby as his "reward" for having the best deck in last month's competition, but I have still to finalise the Weave cards for TW. I'm not in a hurry to do so though, although, I should do it before the month is out. Also, Cure for All Seasons probably needs to be spoilt this month as well.

Those weren't the only things that got added online, a whole bunch of defects also got fixed, not to mention a couple of new things on the online game. One of the things I'm rather happy with is that there are now more colours for cards in the browser and deck manager so that I can afford to differentiate between the Custom cards and the Playtest Customs. The Japanese Promos and the Unreleased Cards also received new colours so that when deckbuilding, it's easier to see at a glance what is the status of a particular card.

Last month's tournament had 20 games played that counted, and another 7 more that didn't count. Which isn't too bad for a tournament. This month's tournament is Highlander format and it's interesting to see the type of things people are doing. There's already a significant number of games that has been played, which is normal since it is the beginning of the month. Hopefully more will be played.

Now that MND is done for the month, I should probably be looking at some other game for the rest of the month. I think focus should still be on YNDT and I'm wondering if it would be possible to do a mini-map for it. I think more of the cards can also be automated now that the engine is more powerful. It's definately time to look at it again anyways.

Tomi has been busy with his games, Doomtrooper got updates, and word is that he's making more custom cards. 108 cards is what he's looking at. I wonder where he's getting the images for all of them. Mythos and Tomb Raider have also had updates recently - he seems busy working on his games which is a good thing.

Logan has also been busy with LMS, new boards and tweaks and all sorts of good stuff. The rules page is being updated to a wiki version specifically for the engine and that is continuously being worked on as well. That is so cool, but I'm sure it's lots of hard work. I suppose MoA will begin after all this is completed.

Mark updated Aquarius earlier this month, and he's still busy working on CA and Attack to get them out in time for Origins. I hope he's doing OK on them at the moment. He's got all sorts of crazy but clever ways of tracking things and he's busily coding away.

Martin had Final Nights up on schedule and is to be praised. Thanks to a free month's worth of free pass that Ed gave out just before the month was up, the number of games played has skyrocket there. Games there are healthy... I wish the same could be said of the server.

Ed has been busy tracking down that server bug, but I think he finally managed to fix it today with Logan's input on various things here and there. Hopefully things will hold steady after this. The update/upgrade of Mille Bornes that Ed did a while back was a good thing as well... play went up for March on that particular game and it's probably due to his great work on that game.

Play was down for Doomtrooper though, despite (or was it because of) a tournament and although the tournament is still going on this month, there's even less games being played. I wonder why. On an unrelated note, Thomas has decided to call it quits as a PL due to other things happening in his life, and if he reads this, know that I wish him well.

I've been playing a lot of Auto Assault lately, mostly to just kill time. It gets boring after a while and the lack of all cards to build decks is probably what I don't like about it. The other thing that I don't like is that the deckbuilding rules are still non-existant which is a drag (no pun intended). Still, it's a good game to kill time... if I can find players to play with.

Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for Stargate and BattleStar Galactica CCGs to be released. The latter is supposed to be released next month, but I wonder if it'll be delayed in time for the cons. Perhaps I'll find out during Origins.

Oh, and last month's titles were all from Portable Adventures. It's a new month, so titles are from a new CCG. I'm getting into a stage where I can't remember which CCG I've quoted from, so I think this might be a repeat, but maybe not.

-+@ Telling Secrets @+-

Won't you like to know what I know?



Art Credits:
Skywalker's Tunic by Beth Zyglowizc
Crystal Chisel: Pencils by Jeffry Ransom, Colours by Nov, background by Alison Strom/Whyrl
Draught of Life by Nov, background by Holmberg

Draught of Life's was today's image. I'm really enjoying these one image a day things. I couldn't believe how much the image reminded me of a Keeper's Quest card, the colour scheme, the grass thing, the red blob, the universal card template. It's giving me a good feeling overall drawing that red liquid in a corked bottle. Fun too. The first time I tried to colour glass and it didn't end up too shabby.

And because it's a slow day, I'll use this paragraph to talk about the other card I drew this week that's shown above. Crystal Chisel was originally drawn by Jeffry, but like all his images, they were coloured with crayons and pencils. So I took his image and recoloured it and that was the end result. There's a blog entry about it too.

The custom cards took a huge step today - Project Second Chance just got into its second phase for some cards. What is Project Second Chance? Project Second Chance is an MRP project that attempts to upgrade underpowered cards by grafting onto them additional text to make them more potent. Will everyone playing online be forced to use them? No, the PSC cards will be clearly marked as such and players can have a choice to either use them or ignore them. Some CCGW tournaments though, will mandate that PSC cards be used instead of the official versions. When will we get to see PSC cards on the engine? Each individual PSC card will be added as soon as it is completed - the process is list (get listed on the forums), vote (majority voted to be in the project), design (new text), add (to gEngine).

Well, today is the last day of the March tournament and it seems that there is a clear winner. I've seen some rather good decks from Bobby and GoC as well. I have no idea who to award the extra tokens though. And next month's tournament already has 2 signed up participants. There's also been a huge amount of games played this month, despite (or because of) it being the first tournament with the unfinalised TG cards. It's been interesting though.

I've been talking about hotpoints (not hotpants!) with Mark and Logan for the past 24 hours on and off. It seems I'm some sort of hotpoints expert at this point in time - I'm not! The one game that I rewrote for it is in such a huge shambles that I don't even dare release it to the public. However, I did point both Mark and Logan to the pitfalls and suggested alternatives that they either didn't think of or didn't know existed before. Hopefully that will help them on CA and LMS respectively.

One more day to Final Nights. Will it be released a day early today? or later than the April 1st date? After all, the announcement did mention "around" which introduces some element of vagueness (Ed is learning how to be vague after all the times unexpected delays have come to bite him in the tush). Nevertheless, it's still interesting to speculate and to see what will happen.

I didn't manage to catch a game of Auto Assault today due to the lack of players, but that CCG is shaping up to be really really interesting. They are still working on things - changing cards, tweaking text, small minor stuff that doesn't detract from the overall experience of playing the game. Can you tell I'm hooked? I'm looking forward to their adaptation of Anarchronism now! Curses (or Praises) to the great and mighty Eddie for suggesting that I try out the game.

Did I mention that we have one fewer PL these days? Time to update my records now. It's also the end of March and Ed did force me to write a whole slew of reports every quarter. OK, I exaggerate again, it's only 1 report. So time's a-wasting blogging...

-+@ Six Pack! @+-

which sounds like a lot... sometimes finishing it is a chore, just like the other stuff I do...



Art Credits:
Dirt Levitation by Nov
Duplicate by Holmberg/Werner/Shreve/Nov
Weave Wall by Werner/Nov/Holmberg

Well, three cards I created this week, and each one of them had their fair share of difficulties. I like how Dirt Levitation turned out, and it's simple because it was done by me. I don't claim to be an artist as such, but I'm happy with the end result. Duplicate was hard to get the final result as I had planned it in my head. Getting the creature was the easiest of the hard parts. Then there were that moving effect and a whole load of other issues. The end result isn't too shabby taking everything into consideration. The weave wall above, is a version 2 of the art. I originally did something, but I really didn't like what I had drawn, so I had to scrap it and restart again. I like this result better, more than 50% of that was drawn by me so I'm happy with it.

I updated the website with everything and a whole load of other things there as well. Tournament announcements, custom card projects, the whole enchilada. April is shaping up to be a busy MND month as well. Ah, there goes my hiatus! As promised though, the April MND Calendar is shown below. The large version is available from the Custom Card website, and can be used as a desktop image.


I managed to create a new HumAliens ad for the Promos yesterday. I like the new ad, but only because it's a ripoff directly from the official site with text added to it. I've got to make a few more ads these days once I get the time.

There aren't too many other things to take note of today... then engine is experiencing a weird logout bug for a while now. It seems to be elusive so far. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon. 2 more days to April 1st, will Final Nights make it on that date? And will there be a game made public before the end of this month? Well, only time will tell...

So, I was playing Auto Assault again today. It's fun. The game mechanics is new, but it'll get old fast though, unless the cards keep it lively. They still have a lot of material to make cards from there so that shouldn't be a problem. It's a bit dead at the moment though due to low publicity since it's still in beta. But it's playable, it's fun, the graphics are cool, the background music is great and most of all it's not buggy, but there are a number of Bugs to choose from, including a few modified VW Bugs.

April will also be the release date for the Christmastown expansion for Nightmare Before Christmas. I'm looking forward to that. I wonder how that game is doing. It's NECA's first CCG and I do want it to succeed. I'm still looking forward to the Stargate CCG as well. Two things to look forward to this year. I've got to ask people to pick up freebies for me...

-+@ Grounded! @+-

but only to race!



3 different CCGs there... the last one is Star Chamber's card.

The middle one though is one of the three St. Patrick's Promo given out in LotR Online during the St. Patrick's Day tournament. I didn't join that one, but I won't mind testing out this card... if I can somehow get 4 copies of it. It's a pity that won't be soon. Threatening Merry with Rangers is a fun little deck, but it dies too soon, particularly in the beginning when neither the rangers nor Merry can take out the big minions. The problem with that deck initially is that it's a big spender, adding way too much pool to the game in the beginning, which is a pity.

Someone said I should support WA more by trying out their new game, Auto Assault, which is in beta, so I did. That first card is from this game. I really did enjoy the game though even though I've only been playing for less than 24 hours. The card design can be better I guess, but the online implementation is a feast to look at. The graphics and sounds and background music just create the ambience which makes playing fun, eventhough I barely won half the games I played. I look forward to playing more of it.

Meanwhile though, the hubbub on the HumAliens Yahoo Group finally translated into something tangible for me - Rick sent me all 10 Promos that were missing from the engine. Well no longer. I have added all of them just today so all printed cards are now on the engine. The scan quality isn't great, but I'm going to guess that players would be happy to be able to see the subpar image and use it in games.

The rest of the day has been spent working on another card for EF. I redid the image for Duplicate today, but decided not to post it yet until some other day. Then there were a whole load of other stuff for MND - tournaments, general posts, stuff like that which will bore the pants off everyone else. Eventhough I'm supposedly in "hiatus" mode, I'm still doing as much as I was before the "hiatus". Oh well. I still have to update the website soonish for the April Calendar. Work to do, more work to do.

A couple of days until the end of the month as well, which means I've got to do a whole lot more maintenance stuff. Also, it's getting closer to the day that Final Nights will be released. I wonder if Martin is in a frenzy. Ed and Logan are getting into the LMS act and they are both getting the support for the game up to scratch. Yay for them. And I'm getting ready to see Mark's first game of the year go public... and probably a surprise announcement from Kev...