I Have Arrived in Australia

I have arrived in Melbourne, Australia. I know I wanted to post this as soon as I got an Internet connection working, but I decided that I should go walk around a bit first before I started enjoying blogging again as well as chatting all over. :D Don't expect a long post or photo posts. The next few days will be spent scouring the city of Melbourne for goods I need to live comfortably. I've actually been splurging a little on food since I didn't eat much on the plane. For the most part, I've kept to a budget of around AUD 6 per meal. I can imagine that the number will keep changing until I settle down into a proper pattern.

In a way, Melbourne doesn't feel so far away from home. Kinda feels a little bit like Malaysia, maybe. :P

Crazy Idea: Natural Spring

Since I told you I was going to make some crazy set for the fun of it, I've come up with quite a few cards in Magic Set Editor. :PWhile it's probably breached the one hundred mark or something, I've deleted some impractical ideas, deleted some multicolored cards, redesigned or consolidated several series of cards. For now, I've designed everything in a cycle, meaning that the set is most obviously going to be imbalanced since I don't have any experience whatsoever in designing sets to be balanced, good for draft or anything like that. I'm just going to do a series of cycles, some of which are not really cycles with a specific theme, but they are certainly cycles during design.

Here's a card from one of the cycles:

The idea was to make a cycle out of each basic land. This card was originally a "Land - Plains", then I realised that making the cycle to have basic land types would make them positively broken since anyone who managed to get two lands in this cycle could pull off an infinite chain of gaining life (and some other effect) with another land of this type (over many turns at the cost of stunting your mana development). So, it was either I cut the land type or cut down on the ability. I obviously wanted the effects on the other cards to stay.

Gaining life for free is cool for casual (regardless how much), but the more powerful cards in the cycle would be drastically affected, like the blue one, which is the most powerful (at least at this point in time, since I'm still considering whether it is too powerful). The land originally required you to return a land type of enemy colors, but I found that wasn't flavorful since why should enemy colors help you? :D

The net effect if you return a land for the untapping and the effect is stunting your mana growth slightly (unlike playing the guildlands of Ravnica, which actually still develop your mana). For example, playing it on turn 2 will still net you 2 mana, which means it won't stop your turn 2 drop. Unfortunately, the following turn, you end up with 2 mana again. Of course, the original version of the land isn't broken at this point, it's just broken when you go further into the game when you can continuously stunt your mana growth (because you don't need any) to gain a massive advantage over your opponent in the long run, since the effects on these lands are uncounterable.

The ability to continuously reuse the blue one at the cost of stunting your mana development was way too undercosted, so you can imagine what got cut since I wanted to keep the cards cool. Of course, that being said, this will probably be the second last or last post before I depart for Australia and become disconnected for a while. :D

It's Going to Be a Busy Few Weeks

This week, I'm packing a lot of stuff, so I won't be blogging this week. It is likely I might not blog next week either because I will be busy getting things sorted out when I get there and my Internet connection might not be ready yet. :D Check back in the week after next week for updates. I should've squeezed one out by then, hopefully. I'm also upgrading the blog to Wordpress 2.0.1 today, so bear with the few bugs if you see any. :D

Sick, Tired and Idealess

I'm currently sick. I've got no fever, but I feel weak and tired. As a result, I've been struggling to think up a post, of which I have none. So, I've decided to just post a card that will never see print regardless of the mana cost and environment as it is so broken, so powerful, so abusive, that'll it'll make the Power Nine become the Power Ten, break every format in competitive and casual Magic, make any deck into tournament material, and is the result if power creeps upwards into a mad spiral. (I'm pretty sure everyone knows which card this is, I'll just make it more broken than it should be. Everyone knows how to fix this broken card, and everyone knows why it shouldn't be printed. :D)

(I even made a deliberate mistake. :D I'm so sick and tired I don't have the energy to make a nice Photoshop one this time round. I'll just whacked it together in Magic Set Editor. I'm thinking about getting down and designing my own set for fun during the holidays when I have time.)

Budget Mono-Black Control

I was looking for a deck that ran Arena, and would probably depend entirely on Phyrexian Arena to win games. I found one as I was looking through Chris Romeo's articles. You can read the last in the long chain here: From Right Field: Big Bottom (Smell the Glove Even More, Part III) I found that this deck was perfect to test whatever decks I were going to build. If it couldn't stand up to this budget deck, then it probably wouldn't stand against far more powerful ones either. I didn't like the final version of his deck, because it was probably far more powerful, far more reliable and of course, far better than the second last version, which I did build.

The deck itself uses eight rares: 4 Phyrexian Arena and 4 Night of Souls' Betrayal as what I would call the deck's power base. Being a budget deck, it only run two win conditions: Genju of the Fens and Consume Spirit.

Yam knows very well how it is like to be beaten down by a Genju of the Fens, since he played the deck. I'd actually tested the deck far before I brought it to play against him to see if I could tune the deck even more. Unfortunately, I'd have to say Chris Romeo did most certainly hit the nail with the build. I don't think I see any budget way too improve it against a casual budget deck.

I'd have to say the deck runs completely off Phyrexian Arena. It's close to impossible to win faster decks if you don't play a Phyrexian Arena. Night of Souls' Betrayal also shined against any sort of deck. On its own, it can completely wreck weenie strategies as well as a Meloku. The deck runs loads of removal, meaning it shows how card advantage will eventually win you the game. By drawing double what your opponent is drawing, you can handle practically every creature in his hand with one of yours, leading to many one-for-one trades in the long run.

The kind of removal is, of course, what you can find: Kiku's Shadow, Hideous Laughter, Cruel Edict, Darkblast and so on. In the long run, your opponent will run out of cards, and your hand will still be full. This eventually leads to a situation where your ever looked down upon Genju shows its stripes and begins to takes large chunks out of your opponent's life count.

(I'm out of ideas for now to write on a little longer. I'll probably come back and edit this to add more. :D)