Toy Soldiers

2009: For the past month, I've been jonesing for a miniature wargame. Minis are relatively expensive, but they count as both a toy and a game, so it's like, double good. For all its flaws, I loved Mageknight, and I wanted to find something that would scratch the same itch.

I was well primed, then, when Mage Knight: Destiny's Soldier caught my eye. I'd passed over it before, due to it getting tepid ratings. To be fair, the biggest complaint seemed to be that the poor tutorial made for a steep learning curve - but I already know how to play. So, I gave it a go.

It's pretty good! The action and fatigue system is relatively unique to Mageknight, and is a good change of pace from the usual j-S-RPG. The old complaints about melee have been heard - apparently MK2.0 introduced a couple of univeral melee abilities that give more balance. Time limits and special scenarios keep the game fast and fresh. On the other hand, the graphics are a little old, and there's no multiplayer. The stylus controls are intuitve, but spottily programmed. My biggest problem though, is that these little plastic men are, in the end, just virtual - it doesn't count as a toy.

It's good nostalgia. I'd put hours and hours into Mageknight... if Tesla didn't keep grabbing the DS to play this:

How I met my minis

Let me tell you about Mageknight.

It was 2002. Pat and I decided to get into Mageknight. Back in those days, XP still was more of a hobby shop than a PC cafe. Greenhills had not yet been razed, and there were still hobby stores on the fourth floor for card and plastic freaks. Me, Pat and my brother would go to Arena and stare for hours at the shelves full of little plastic minatures. At first, our priority was just to get a playable army as cheaply as possible, so we happily bought anything that was cheaper than 2 pesos per point. This is pretty much the same as deciding to buy cheap Magic cards with high casting costs. It gave the result you would expect: armies full of bad, overcosted figures. But back then, it didn't matter so much to us, as long as we got to play. Most of the time we would just hang out at UP. Between my Quantum Physics and her Instrumentation classes, we'd go behind the CS library for privacy and pit Troll agains Werewolf, Tree Elemental against Steam Golem.

After a while, we did end up playing competitively. I'd spend a lot of my online time on the old MKRealms forums, buying cheap singles. We bought Dragons and Giants. Played 2000 point armies. Pat actually paid for and managed her own collection, playing in tournaments with more cutthroat armies than I did.

Unfortunately, the problem with Mageknight were obvious even then. Ranged units were priced only slightly higher than melee units, even if in practice, the melee units would get shredded before they ever got close. Turtling was superior strategy; it was not uncommon in tournament games for time to be called without a single attack. Internal playtesting was a joke. It seems that Wizkid's solution to the dominance of long range was to make even longer ranges. Bigger, and bigger, and bigger.

It all came to a head when they released a new base set, named simply Mage Knight, known colloquially as 2.0. We were given a choice: Play a better game, but know that all of your old figures are obsolete, dead plastic. Or, quit, take your figures home, and never buy new product again.

We quit.

Racial Tensions

[Magic]

I really like Tribal. I like the synergy and combat, much much more than 5-color goodstuff decks (hence my antipathy towards Alara block as a whole). It wouldn't be a stretch to say that one year after, Lorwyn is my favorite Magic block - the organic evaluations in limited, the tribes of constructed, the semi-classical setting.

Over the holidays, I made decks for the eight races of Lorwyn block. The goal was not to make finely tuned winning machines, but to make decks that were fun and balanced to play against each other - good fillers for boardgame night.

Last week, I got to try them out with Cels, Jem and Pat. I'm happy that everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, even if the decks needed more tuning - although part of that is because two headed giant plays pretty differently from 1v1. (As an aside: Pat loves 2HG)

Let's Magic!

The Pit

It's easy to order things online.

Too easy.

Shit like that is why I don't want to have a credit card, really.