EDH Hidden Gems: The Age of Urza, Part I
Recently, I wanted to dive into the backlog of Magic the Gathering cards to see if I could find any overlooked or undervalued cards to include in my games. The catalog of cards is 22,502 different cards ever printed as of today, so I needed some way to whittle it down to something more manageable and ended up filtering it to cards that were legal in EDH, had never been reprinted, and cost less than a buck (Here’s the scryfall search for anyone wanting to look for themselves). This resulted in a slightly-more-manageable 8,796 cards, so I started digging.
This first section is the Age of Urza, which are the cards from original Mirrodin or before (Basically all pre-Modern cards)
Knocking out the cobwebs
Long time no see!
Around the time of the last update, my partner and I ended up needing to move due to a job change. This was followed up with a job change of my own to match the new area, several promotions and a busy schedule, a masters degree, a new house, a global pandemic, and various sundry miscellaneous life events.
In the meantime, I’ve been designing games, wrote a book (Hardwired: Indicator Lights), designed multiple custom Magic the Gathering sets, migrated (reluctantly) from D&D 4e into 5e, and started to dip my toes a little into learning music and art.
No guarantee the future will contain any sort of order, but I’d like to start by using this space to host some articles on hidden Magic the Gathering gems, so stay tuned for what’s in store!
Tangent: Kambanchi and Buystarter
So in an effort to try and become more organized and structured in my game design life, I’ve recently started using Google Keep as my web homepage, encouraging me to finally keep to-do lists and such. While I’ve theoretically had a to-do list as a recurring Outlook reminder, and Outlook has a great Task functionality, a recent spate of listening to the Board Game Design Lab podcasts (fantastic website and series, btw!) encouraged me to not only do this, but to use a psychology trick in the process: putting lots of small, almost effortless tasks on the list, so tackling the occasional big object feels like a continuation of my momentum rather than trying to roll the boulder up the hill from scratch.
It is sooo much easier to complete the last task on a list of 20, then to complete that task all by itself. True story.
The Monday Game: Blite
Another game design, and the first in a while! Thanks again to Boardgamizer for the awesome game-generation website!
The Unused Prompts
This one is just…bland. The constraint is somewhat interesting, but the Mechanics and Theme combine to make a game idea that seems like dry toast.
This one is just begging, screaming on hand and knee for a cheesy 80s cartoon villain title of “SERPENT MASTER” and cheesy low-detail cartoon art. Building it to basically be a spoof of 80s cartoon shows, with players building their MEGASNAKE and trying to build the longest snake and either avoiding or attacking other snakes, depending on how many heroes or villains you have in your group. Damn; while this one’s not the winner this week, this is a damn strong idea I’d love to revisit eventually.
Long-belated update!
Heya everyone,
My apologies for such a long delay since my last post. Life has become insane in the last few months, and I’m currently in the process of packing as my wife and I will be moving to an entirely new state here in just a week!
So, a quick update on the progress and status of various projects, below the cut:
Friday Project Update
Hey folks,
Firstoff, many apologies for the radio silence this month. I’ve had a large load of time-consuming work to deal with, and unfortunately that and other stresses have meant I haven’t had a lot of free time for post-writing.
However, that’s not to say nothing is being done; quite the opposite in fact! I’ve been fortunate enough to be working with my dad in developing the professional-level art for Holy Press. While I’m still working on getting summer game playtesting group together since my primary playtesting group evaporated for the summer when school let out and the undergrads went home, the art is coming along beautifully, and I’m really excited for where the game is rapidly going.
Hopefully by the end of summer, the art creation will be complete, and presuming I’ve been able to get in blind playtests by then and refined the rulebook to iron out any remaining rule inconsistencies or fuzzy areas, Holy Press will be ready to purchase at the end of summer. I’ll also be pitching it hard to as many different eligible companies from Cardboard Edison’s Compendium as I possibly can, so (fingers crossed) I might be picked up for professional publication/distribution!
An example of an Act tile. I am excited beyond words about all of this
For now, though, I’m going to be probably posting a bit less often as I work through the last of the time-intensive work projects and stress factors. While I’m on vacation next week, the following week I want to make sure I touch on the idea of Buystarter, and why I’m really excited about the idea of using that for RPG and wargame publication moving forward.
Until next time. Cheers!
Impressions: Warhammer 40K 8th Edition
For those who might not have heard, games Workshop has announced the dawning of Warhammer 40K’s 8th edition, and have a FAQ up before the ruleset has even dropped (an unexpected occurrence they even lampshade in the FAQ itself). I’ve previously left my thoughts and impressions leading up to and following the release of Age of Sigmar, but I wanted to touch on what my impressions are of the upcoming 8th Edition (I’ve seen it jestingly dubbed “Age of Emperor” as well) and how I think it will stack up to AoS and previous editions of WH40K.
The Friday Game: Quartet of Hours
Apologies for the quiet week! I’ve been doing some creative writing, and didn’t manage to quite coordinate to get in a playtest of Mistgore last night. Next week will see game testing resume as normal, ideally, and I’m hoping to get some blind playtests going for Holy Press and Green-Circuit Mercs, so their rules can be refined to the point that they’re only waiting for final art for production/publication!
Today, I’m going to get the game design I meant to do earlier up! We again return to good-old Boardgameizer for the design prompts.
The Unused Prompts
To be honest, this one is just too open-ended. I feel like this is possibly a solve-a-maze game but with hidden or partial information, but not sure and not really feeling that the prompt “grabs” me. That said, given the constraint a perfect name would be “Sneaky Buggers.”
I don’t know what it is, but the idea of math and word games tends to give me hives. The Theme and Victory condition here don’t help much either. Presumably there could be a game somewhere in here about trying to lie in a classroom vocabulary test and basically other players trying to sabotage your efforts to BS through the test, but again it doesn’t really grab me.
Friday Project Update: Green-Circuit Mercs
Just a small update: I had a chance to playtest the newest iteration of Green Circuit Mercs with my loving and long-suffering wife, and a minor miracle occurred:
“Hey Mikey, he likes it!”
While she normally is a fan of board games, she’s markedly less so for card games, especially competitive ones, so already there were two strikes against it. In addition, I am absolutely terrible about explaining my homebrew game rules to others in a logically concise and coherent fashion, and she is a very competitive and precise player: this was another strike, as it can often end up with me accidentally forgetting a key rule that throws a game into turmoil.
Still, after a slight bit of eyebrow-raising during the initial rule explanation, we hopped into it and she grasped it straight away, and proceeded to almost steamroll me. I lucked out with an aggressive early game that managed to provide the Tech cards to supplement my Cyborg deck and help me win more bids than I otherwise would have in the late game. After it was all said and done, I won by a relatively-narrow margin, and she said she had a lot of fun. The only dislikes she had against it were just with the competitive and card-focused aspects of it, which again were issues with the game style as a whole rather than specific mechanical issues with GCM.
Overall, I’m incredibly excited. Now all that’s left is getting some blind playtesting in so the rulebook can get refined and streamlined; I’m also looking to do the same with Holy Press, as I have a relative who has offered to do artwork for it for free!
Hopefully there will be more of that to show off in the coming months, but until then I at least have two games basically ready to get fine-tuned and published! I’ve joined Cardboard Edison’s Patreon, and this gives access to their Compendium of game publishers looking for submissions. I’m incredibly excited to be able to submit my game to multiples of these, and while a game design contest is all well and good for publicity, this might be an even better way to break into the industry and start to make my name known.
Anyhow, that’s it for this week. Next week tune in on Monday for the next Boardgameizer design, and the next iteration of the Alien Ambassador rules. Cheers!
Friday Update: Green-Circuit Mercs playtest results and ClikB8
Sidenote: Whoooops. This was supposed to be posted last Friday, and I completely forgot about it sitting in my drafts.
So I had a chance to try Green-Circuit Mercs yesterday evening, with the new player-specific decks and the revised Threat values. I have to admit, I was incredibly nervous going into it: previous GCM playtests had left me a bit discouraged and worried that I was going down the wrong rabbit hole for how to address the previous issues with enjoyability of play.
It went fantastically.
The Basement Scientist 