The Thinking Gamer

Vintage Rotisserie #2

2010-10-10T23:41:18Z

Saturday afternoon 8 of us gathered at Wizards of the Coast for another session of Live Vintage Rotisserie draft. Click here to read about my first foray into this format. Vintage Rotisserie is not going to be fun unless you've been playing Magic for a long time, but if you have been then it's pretty awesome. I wound up going 6-1 and I've already clinched first place with a tutor-iffic black combo deck that might be one of the best decks you can realistically hope to draft in the format.

Here's a link to the draft. Most of us had done at least 1 of these before and I thought the quality of the draft and the decks was a lot higher this time. I did a fair amount of thinking after my first attempt and I knew I did not want to try to draft one of the "type 1" decks, as you just can't get enough of the broken cards to make something like Storm or Stax work consistently. My goal was to get into an archetype where no one was competing with me for cards and where the card pool had enough redundancy and flexibility that I could react to what other people were drafting. Part of me wanted to draft an aggro creature deck, and I was toying with the idea of first-picking Skullclamp as a signal for folks to get out of my way, but a) I strongly suspected that the pendulum had swung and a bunch of folks would want creature decks and b) I was having a lot of fun thinking about Reanimator. The more I thought about potential archetypes the more it seemed like artifact decks would be plagued with inconsistency, blue decks would be plagued with competition for cards, and I either wanted a beatdown archetype all to myself or I wanted Reanimator.

Once I drew up a Reanimator template and saw how well the card pool lined up with it, I was pretty sure that's want I wanted to draft. As long as no one else went heavy black, I could spend the early rounds grabbing my share of fast mana, tutors, and broken cards. Then it should be easy to grab 5-10 fatties, 6-8 reanimation spells, 4-6 ways to get fatties into my graveyard, 6ish utility/disruption cards, and I'd still have room for a 4 card back-up plan. I went into the draft with a list of cards in each of those categories that no one else would want and I figured I would either splash blue or green. The blue plan was contingent on how the first few rounds of the draft went. In theory I figured I could grab assorted power, extra tutors, and if things went really well I hoped I might be able to take the Time Vault/Voltaic Key combo (and Tezzeret), which I knew would be awesome with all the tutors I intended to draft. (In retrospect I don't think there's enough room in the early rounds to establish yourself as a black mage and also grab those cards so I'm glad I wound up not trying.) The green plan was to take Survival of the Fittest and Fauna Shaman as two of my ways to get stuff into the graveyard. I could then use green mana acceleration critters too, and both Living Death and Recurring Nightmare would be much better as reanimation spells. This was the way I was hoping things would play out, but it required Survival to last until about round 10 plus it wanted there to be no competition for green mana creatures. Anyway, I also had "audible into Ernha-Geddon (a la Pikula)" and "audible into CMU Blue" as back-ups plans, but Reanimator was definitely my focus as the draft began.

Everyone in the room seemed to agree that the best 3 cards are Black Lotus, Sol Ring, and Ancestral Recall in some order. The good news about an early pick is that you get one of those cards. The bad news is that you have basically no ability to stake out an archetype or send a signal. You just take the one of those 3 that fits your preferred archetype and then hope things work out. Mostly you have to wait until the second round and see what has happened before you get to interact with the draft.

Zac Hill took the Lotus first and seemed to be toying with storm combo for a couple of rounds. However (as he and I discussed later) if you take the draw-7's with your early picks then you won't have any fast mana or any other broken cards. First he wheeled Strip Mine and Dark Confidant (the one good black card I did *not* want ) and then he wheeled Chrome Mox and Mox Diamond. If everyone shied away and the various draw-7's slipped into the round 6+ range, I think he would have moved in and tried it. However, the Timetwister went two picks later and the Time Spiral went right before his 6th round pick so instead Zac decided to go heavy black disruption. He wheeled Duress and Thoughtseize, which were cards I very much wanted, but it would have been thoroughly unrealistic to imagine myself as the only black mage, so fair enough. He wound up with the efficient aggro creature and disruption side of black so after fighting over the disruption we weren't competing for too much else.

Dave Guskin took the Ancestral second overall. He then took Library of Alexandria and Mana Drain in the late 2nd and early 3rd. I liked this plan a lot as I think you can draft a really nice mono-blue control deck in the format even while competing for cards. There have obviously been a ton of counterspells printed over the years and there's enough control magic's and artifact removal spells that you can draft something that templates pretty closely to the Draw-Go style decks that were so good in the late 90's. (Also, Zac almost won our previous draft with a deck along these lines.) Dave was looking good with Force of Will in the 4th and then it's hard to blame him for grabbing Tinker in the 5th round, but he had no artifacts and all the really good ones were gone already so that might actually have been a mistake. He then seemed to get distracted a bit by shiny baubles like Time Spiral, Mind's Desire, and Memory Jar (admittedly a juicy Tinker target but only really great if you have the right deck around it). From there Dave wound up going aggro-control with assorted Faeires, Psychatag, Shadowmage Infiltrator, a really late Thada Adel, etc. Maybe I'm just biased by my fond memories of CMU Blue, but that's definitely what I would have done in Dave's seat.

Mike Turian (who was playing the format for the first time) took the obvious 3rd pick Sol Ring. He'd mentioned to me that he was tempted by White Weenie so I'm sure he was disappointed that the Mox Pearl went right before his second round pick. He took Mishra's Workshop, which made a ton of sense to me at the time. It's incredibly explosive and the fact that he's getting it 14th overall indicates that no one else is trying to run a heavy-artifact strategy. He then got Tolarian Academy in the 3rd round and Mana Crypt in the 4th, which have to be exactly what you're hoping will slide into those rounds if you're headed this way. He wound up with some blue cards and then when Balance became too tempting to ignore in round 16 he added white. Overall his deck had some big artifact dudes to attack with and some artifact control elements and some white control elements as well. As I write this he's 2-4 with one match left to play, which is obviously a bit of a surprising record for a Hall of Famer. I'm still trying to figure out how much of that is unfamiliarity with the format (it definitely takes some getting used to both the draft and the play of the games, and I know he lost multiple really close 3-game matches) and how much is the inherent inconsistency of the artifact archetype. When he draws the Workshop his deck is amazing, and he demolished me in two straight games where he had access to 5 mana on turn 1 both times, but I think this archetype needs to be drafted in such a way that it can win without a lot of early mana acceleration (not that I have a good idea how to actually do that).

Aaron Forsythe drafted 4th and he sent the first pick Skullclamp signal. He then took the last Mox (the Pearl) in round 2 and Enlightened Tutor then made a lot of sense in round 3. Fastbond-Wasteland-Crucible of Worlds gave him some pretty scary potential, and his 10th pick Survival of the Fittest ended my dreams of splashing green. Interestingly, Fauna Shaman then went two picks later to the other green mage and neither one of them was in a position to do anything exciting with them, After that Aaron settled down into an Elves archetype that he didn't seem super happy with at the end of the day. It was a bit schiziophrenic - wanting to be both a beatdown deck and a combo deck and not being able to do either plan well enough to win consistently (he's currently 3-2). I know Dave had also sketched out an Elves archetype before the draft, and it does seem like that deck wants a lot of cards that no one else wants, so it's probably still a viable archetype. The trick is probably to figure out what other packages of cards have good synergy with it.

I drafted 5th and my first big decision might have been the most important: Mox Sapphire or Mox Jet? The Sapphire is the better card (as blue has better cards than black and blue also benefits more from getting an extra early mana), but I knew everyone would know that so taking the Jet over the Sapphire would send a powerful signal and hopefully the folks downstream of me would stay away from black. In retrospect this worked out spectacularly well. The draft wound up with only one other person playing a meaningful amount of black (plus Guskin splashed in some gold cards and the Bitterblossom). In round 2 I took Mox Emerald, both because I wanted more fast mana and because I still had "splash green" as my plan A. (This turned out to tip over a bunch of dominos as Forsythe wanted the Emerald but settled for the Pearl and Turian wanted the Pearl but instead went Workshop, not that I saw any of that coming when I made the pick.) With the fast mana gone by round 3 I set about solidifying myself as the black mage: Demonic Tutor, Yawgmoth's Will, Vampiric Tutor, Mind Twist, Dark Ritual, Necropotence. The Will isn't great in Reanimator, but it's still a card I was happy to have and mostly I didn't want to leave it on the board as something that would tempt someone else into black. Necro is somewhat similar in that it's less powerful than you think, since you can't access it reliably enough to build a "necro deck," but it's still plenty good enough to play, especially at the low price of an 8th round pick. (It would have been a lot better in Zac's deck, fwiw, but he would have had to take it on that first wheel where he declared black and let me have Duress or Thoughtseize instead.)

This was about when the Survival and Fauna Shaman went. I had already been leaning away from the green splash anyway since there were multiple green drafters plus so little competition for black that mono-black began to seem viable. The blue drafters were already taking stuff like Thirst for Knowledge so the pickings looked slim there as well. I took Painter's Servant, figuring i could let the Grindstone slide for a while and that 2 card combo would fit my deck really well, especially after I spent my next few rounds scooping up the rest of the decent tutors (Imperial Seal and Grim Tutor). I publicly declared my intention to draft reanimator with a 12th round Buried Alive and the rest was easy. The most interesting things that happened late were that I had to draft what I feared were embarrassingly bad discard outlets, but Putrid Imp and Sickening Dreams both turned out to be great. Last Rites also seemed good enough. Meanwhile while randomly looking over the cards on the table I stumbled across Dark Depths and suddenly remembered that the Vampire Hexmage combo not only exists, but would be absolutely perfect for my deck. I'll give you my decklist once I finish talking through the draft.

Greg Marques took Time Walk 6th overall and got a bit of a gift when the Sapphire was still there at #11 overall. He took Mana Vault and Jace with his next two and wound up adding green to his deck relatively quickly because he knew he wanted to play with Trygon Predator. The resulting brew had some really exciting moments, including Channeling out Emrakul three different times.

Dwayne St. Arnauld took Time Vault 7th, ending my delusions on that front pretty early. He then locked up the combo by taking Voltaic Key at #10 overall (and Tezzeret with his next pick). There's been a lot of debate in our group about when to take the Key. Last draft Aaron took Time Vault first but tried to float the Key and I took it in round 5 to pair with my Grim Monolith et al. I actually wonder if you took the Key first, would anyone else even want the Time Vault? In any case, you probably don't have to take the Key in the second round, but I think you have to take it by round 4 or you risk losing it to the artifact-heavy deck. I like the way Dwayne's deck turned out a lot. He's got decent control elements, a bunch of artifact tutors, and he's got the High Tide pieces in there too. He only had time to play 4 matches before he left, but he won 3 of them (losing the third to me). Everyone other than he and I has at least 2 losses already.

Mons Johnson had the wheel and to the surprise of absolutely no one, he signaled Goblins by taking the Ruby and the Wheel. From there he was essentially drafting by himself (with the exception of a few removal spells). The 8-9 wheel seems like the obvious place for this to happen and that's how each of our two drafts has gone.

Here's the current standings (we got through about 70% of the matches before breaking up around 9pm):

Randy 6-1

Dwayne 3-1

Aaron 3-2

Greg 3-3

Zac 2-3

Mike 2-4

Dave 1-4

Mons 0-2

And here's how my deck turned out:

Reanimation spells (6): Animate Dead, Dance of the Dead, Necromancy, Life/Death, Exhume, Living Death.

Zac grabbed my Reanimate (and I think ran it main to reanimate anything juicy that he knocked out of opponent hands), which was annoying, but 6 was all I needed anyway and I had a 7th (Dread return) in my sideboard. Note that the first three were my highest priority since they allow for the Worldgorger Dragon combo.

Tutors (5): Demonic Tutor, Vampiric Tutor, Imperial Seal, Grim Tutor, Beseech the Queen.

I also drafted Insidious Dreams and Diabolic Tutor, but decided they were both too slow to run. The biggest revelation to me about my deck from playing it was how amazingly powerful it was to be able to tutor up whatever I needed to fix any given hand, so maybe those actually belonged in the deck. Demonic Consultation was tempting as Consulting for 1-of's is better than most people think, but it's still obviously risky so I decided against.

Ways to get stuff into the graveyard (6): Entomb, Buried Alive, Putrid Imp, Sickening Dreams, Last Rites, Bazaar of Bagdad

I also drafted Cabal Therapy since you can target yourself, but then quickly realized how hard it would be to hit an opponent with it so decided against. I really wish I had gotten Thoughtseize since it too can target you. There were several games where i was on the draw and just declined to play any cards so I could discard a fatty. In retrospect, I actually think I was supposed to be choosing draw in order to set this up. I had at least 3 hands that I had to mulligan which would have been great if I was drawing first and could discard a fatty on turn 1.

Fatties (7): Grave Titan, Platinum Angel, Oona Queen of the Fae, Worldgorger Dragon, Stormtide Leviathan, Terastrodon, Iona

i also drafted Bogardan Hellkite, Angel of Despair, Sphinx of the Steel Wind, Akroma, It That Betrays, and Emperor Laquatus. It was a lot of fun to just keep drafting all the best fatties of all time, and drafting this many also made sideboarding fun as I got to think about which fatties were the best against each individual opponent. Each of them made it into the deck at some point with the exception of Laquatus, which was just a draft error. (I needed somebody that I could sink infinite mana into when I pulled off the Worldgorger combo and hadn't thought of Oona until someone pointed out her existence after I drafted Laquatus. Oona is both a) hard-castable in my deck and also b) exiles the cards thus beating anyone running reshuffle effects (like the one on Emrakul). I'm really not sure if 6, 7, or 8 was the right number to have in the deck and I had games where I had too many and games where I had too few so i was probably about right. Grave Titan did win one game by getting hard cast. Iona is obviously the best one to reanimate alone. Worldgorger got me at least two instant-win's so I do think it's worth having (though note that it does need help ... you have to either have an instant speed kill with your infinite mana or be able to switch to Oona as your [Animate Dead] target to break the loop and then kill them with infinite mana).

Disruption/Utility (5): Mind Twist, Yawgmoth's Will, Necropotence, Damnation, Nevinyrral's Disk

I probably should have run Darkblast main (I think I could have turned a game loss into a win if it was available to Entomb for (versus Mesmeric Fiend and other weenies). I never actually cast the Disk, but the Damnation was excellent. I had more creature removal and more discard in my graveyard, and would tailor these slots based on my opponent. I also took some hosers relatively early in the draft since I knew a) i was competing for them (unlike my main deck cards) and b) I knew I could access them with tutors. Engineered Plague was the first of these, then Pithing Needle, Null Rod, and Infernal Darkness.

"Back-Up Plans" (4): Vampire Hexmage, Dark Depths, Grindstone, Painter's Servant

The way my deck actually played it was like I had three different combos (these two plus Fatty-Reanimate) and I would just shuffle up my opening hand and figure out which one I was playing for in this particular game. Hexmage-Dark Depths is so ridiculously mana efficient that it usually became plan A if I drew either half plus a tutor.

Mana Acceleration (3): Lotus Petal, Lion's Eye Diamond, Dark Ritual

The Lion's Eye was a mistake as it's too narrow. It's good with Yawgmoth's Will and it's ok to sac as a response to a tutor, but that's about it. I kind of which there was more fast mana available to me in black, but it just doesn't exist.

Land (24): Mox Jet, Mox Emerald, Cabal Coffers, Urborg Tomb of Yawgmoth, Swamp x 20

My deck was much faster than I anticipated and I think Coffers was actually a mistake. Meanwhile Urborg was particularly useful in draws that included Dark Depths or Bazaar of Bagdad as those two lands are *much* better if they also tap for mana. The other hidden advantage of my deck is those 20 basic swamps. We did a 65 round draft and gave folks as much basic land as they wanted. If you spent a lot of your draft picks on lands then you didn't have nearly as many picks to spend on sideboard cards. 20 swamps means I had a 25 card sideboard and I was usually swapping in 5ish cards per match. I'm not sure I took full advantage of this opportunity, but it's worth noting as an advantage to going mono-color in the format.

Rd. 1 I played against Mons and his goblin raiders. (Yes, he's that Mons.) Both games were fairly lopsided. In game 1 I chose to play for turn 4 Damnation instead of turn 4 fatty (in case he had enough burn to kill my fatty) and that took all the steam out of his attack. Stormtide Leviathan came out a turn later while I was still on 14 life and then Platinum Angel started attacking alongside the big fish. In game 2 he double mulliganned, but I think I was in great shape even against a good draw. My hand included both Sphinx of the Steel Wind and two reanimation spells so I used my Imperial Seal to go get Sickening Dreams. It allowed me to both wipe out his first two goblins and also put the Sphinx in the bin so I could animate her on turn 3. I promptly drew into an Entomb and Akroma was also in play by turn 5.

Round 2 was against Dwayne. I got to go first in game 2 and I had Putrid Imp, Stormtide Leviathan, and Life/Death in my opening draw. His turn 2 play was Isochron Scepter imprinting Memory Lapse, but with an 8/8 already in play on my side it was a little bit late. In game 2 he apparently had his Time Vault combo ready to deploy on turn 4, but we didn't get there. He tapped out for Preordain and then Time Vault on his third turn against my board of Swamp, Bazaar of Bagdad, and nothing else (with Vampiric Tutor as the only card in my graveyard). I informed him that he was dead, as I had the Worldgorger in my hand along with a Swamp and the Animate Dead that I had tutor'ed up. With Bazaar in play I was sure to find the Oona as some point in the cycle so that was game.

My third opponent was Dave and my deck was way too fast for him. Both games involved 20/20 indestructible creatures coming into play on my side really quickly, including a draw where I just drew both pieces (no tutors necessary) and also drew Mox Jet so I could deploy the entire combo by turn 2. He had dreams of breaking stuff up with venser, but things just happened too quickly and venser never got online.

After Dave came Zac. I took two mulligans before game 1 and he grabbed my Grim Tutor with Mesmeric Fiend, but I still almost won this game. This is where i wished I had Darkblast in my deck to Entomb for, especially when I followed up Entomb by top-decking Buried Alive. I then drew into a Damnation but he had Hymn to Tourach to knock the tutor out of my hand before I could untap. Any top-decked reanimation spell would still have been good enough, but none showed up.

Game 2 was a tough one. He had a nice draw with some aggression and I was tight on mana thanks to his Strip Mine when the following decision came up: I have Darkblast in the graveyard (but no fatties). My hand includes Grave Titan, Last Rites, and Life/Death. If I top-deck a third land (or a Mox) I can Last Rites him, discarding a fatty to reanimate on the next turn and knocking any answers he might have out of his hand. However, if I dredge back my Darkblast and hit a fatty then I get to animate something right now. So I get one draw at 20ish mana cards or I can flip 3 cards hoping for one of 7 fatties. I think I was right to decline dredge and hope to draw mana, but when Akroma turned out to be my top card it definitely stung a little. She's a completely blank draw, but would have been the best fatty in my deck to reanimate against him. Things went from bad to worse when he played out Leyline of the Void on his next turn, essentially turning off my reanimation engine forever (since I had sided out my Disk). I did finally draw a third land but had no action until I drew Demonic Tutor. I figured out that my only chance to win was to tutor for Dark Ritual, hope I drew swamp #4 on the following turn, and this would allow me to hard-cast the Grave Titan that was the only thing of value left in my hand. It worked! I drew the land that time and with the Titan in play along with enough zombies to block and trade with his attackers, he was drawing very slim and I mopped up a few turns later.

Game 3 was another nice one. He kept Swamp, Lotus, Hymn, and Withered Wretch with no other lands, which seems entirely correct to keep. I felt good when he Hymned Iona and Worldgorger Dragon out of my hand, seemingly doing me a favor, but he then played out the Withered Wretch. I had Sickening Dreams in hand so in theory I could kill the Wretch, but after having been Hymned there weren't many cards left to pitch. I decided to play the game for one of my other combos and save my cards (one of which was a Grim Tutor). I don't remember which combo ended up killing him, but he took quite a while to draw land #2 so I was under very little pressure.

Against Aaron I killed his turn 1 creature with turn 2 Sickening Dreams and then reanimated something saucy on turn 3. In game 2 I skipped my first turn in order to discard a fatty only to have him tutor for Tormod's Crypt. I had my Pithing Needle so he blew his Crypt when I played Needle (i randomly named Skullclamp). Luckily I drew into another discard outlet and had a fatty in play via the graveyard by turn 4 despite his Crypt. He did win two of the fun games. One was because i was a chicken and didn't go all-in on Terastrodon. (If I had turned all of my own land into 3/3's then I would have won, but instead he played Imperious Perfect and suddenly my 9/9 ground pounder wasn't so exciting.) The other fun game involved him getting Squirrel Nest / Earthcraft at the same time I got Dark Depths / Hexmage. I was going to fly over an infinite number of summoning sick squirrels for the win, but he top-deck Reveillark (or maybe it was the land for Reveillark) and suddenly had a chump blocker that could also tap (after blocking) to start the avalanche of squirrels.

I took game 1 from Greg with a super-quick Marit Lage token and he responded by taking game 2 in spectacular fashion, before I even played my first permanent. He went turn 1 mana vault (off a forest). I skipped my turn 1 so i could discard a fatty (with a reanimation spell in hand). He went turn 2 Flood Grove into Bribery ... for Iona ... naming black, of course. I didn't have enough turns available to play out a Disk even if it was on top of my library, so I scooped. In game 3 Iona decided to play for my team. He's two color, but all his answers to a giant flier were blue so that pretty much iced it.

Against Turian I mulliganned and he played Mishra's Workshop, Sol Ring, and Smokestack on his first turn. I was able to respond with a turn 2 Last Rites (thanks to a Mox), discarding two and setting up whatever reanimation spell I was hoping would come off the top of my deck. He showed me Su Chi, Wurmcoil Engine, Juggernaut, Land, Island, and Aether Spellbomb. It was at this point that I looked into the standings and verified that, yes, I had already clinched first place even if I lost this match. He said he was in love with his draw even before he top-decked the Workshop on turn 1. His game 2 draw may have been even better: Mana Crypt, Zuran Orb, and Mox Opal let him Thirst for Knowledge and set up turn 2 Processor (for 7) *and* Balance, saccing both his lands to Zuran Orb so I would be down to 2 cards and no permanents while he had access to four mana and a Processor. Totally sick draw!

There you go -- probably more detail than any of you wanted, but I continue to find this format fun to think and talk about. After my first experience I thought the format might actually be about fair decks, but the deck I drafted this time was definitely not playing fair. It's been a while since I got to feel like I broke a format, but that's how I felt yesterday. We're probably running it again next Saturday. Time to try to break it again!

Vintage Rotisserie Draft Report

2010-09-23T05:14:10Z

I went 3-4 in my first of what will hopefully be many Magic Vintage Rotisserie drafts. I did the thing I normally do with any new game - I charged ahead and made a bunch of mistakes, but saw a lot of them about 5 minutes later and I'm now eager to play again.

For those who don't know, Vintage Rotisserie is a Magic draft format where there's one copy of every card ever printed available and you gather 8 people to draft those cards in a 60-75 round snake format. You then play a full round robin of matches with those decks. In our particular case, we did the draft live and I think this was an incredibly good innovation. All the previous drafts I've heard about have been conducted via email and/or Google docs and they drag on for many days where everyone is constantly annoyed that whoever is on the clock hasn't picked yet. In our case we enforced a 30-second shot clock, drafted 60 cards each (which accidentally turned out to be 59 cards each), and the whole draft was over in about 2 hours. (!) To facilitate all of this we were gathered around a big conference room table at Wizards that contained most of the cards that were expected to be drafted. Most people spent most of their time between picks walking around the table to see what was still available, plus once you picked something the card was conveniently right there to pick up and put into your pile. (You were also free to go "off the table" and draft something different, which mostly came up when you were drafting an archetype (like Goblins or Merfolk).) Major props go out to Dave Guskin for organizing the whole thing. It worked shockingly well. I actually had 6 of my 7 matches played by the time I called it a night around 1am, and as of the next afternoon it sounds like most people have already finished most of their matches. Anyway, I highly recommend the "live" variant of Vintage Rotisserie, especially if you can set aside an 8-10 hour session to complete the draft and play all at once.

Here's the link to all of our draft picks. When you study this, please do keep in mind that we were playing with a 30-second shot clock. Every one one of us is confident that we made lots of mistakes, and some cards went way later than they should have. I feel particularly bad for Dave Guskin because for the second half of the draft he was recording all of our picks on his laptop instead of spending his time thinking about his own picks.

Greg Marques began things by taking first pick Necropotence, which even he knew was not a card that should go that early, but he wanted to send a signal. That part of his plan worked pretty well -- everyone got out of his way and let him draft the mono-black reanimator/disruption deck that he wanted to draft. Unfortunately, things didn't work out all that well for him and I believe he only has 1 win.

Dave Guskin went second and took Black Lotus. He then took Mana Crypt and Mana Vault 15th and 18th over all. When Timetwister and Tolarian Academy fell to him with his next picks he was well on his way to the fast mana / storm combo deck that I think he had in mind the whole time. The competition for those cards is pretty severe, though, and I in particular hurt him by drafting the Memory Jar and Mind's Desire after he tried to float them for too long. Atter the 'twister he wound up with just Windfall and Meditate for (significant) card drawing. He had a couple of nice tricks for generating nice storm counts (Hurkyl's Recall or Rebuild with all his artifact mana was decent, and he pulled off High Tide / Palinchron more than once) but his deck just wasn't consistent enough and I'm not sure he's won a match yet.

One of the big lessons of this format so far is that the "clever blue decks" are really hard to win with. They're very tempting as they do have the most broken cards, but I'm not sure there are enough of those broken cards to feed even two drafters, much less the 3-4 that each draft seems to have. Based on our results and the other results I had heard coming in, creature-based aggro decks have been winning pretty consistently. Of course, as always, draft is self-correcting. If multiple people fight over goblins then goblin decks will suck too. The real key to the format seems to be finding an archetype that's powerful enough, but that no one is fighting you for.

Mark Globus went third and took what I think is the best card in the format: Sol Ring. He then took Mishra's Workshop 14th, Strip Mine 19th, and proceeded to draft what he called "mono-grief": an almost colorless artifact-based deck full of disruption elements like Sphere of Resistance, Smokestack, etc. His deck was good at annoying people, but not super great at actually winning the game. Last I heard he was 2-2.

I had the 4th pick and I showed up fully intending to draft a creature deck, but I felt like Ancestral Recall was clearly the right pick in that spot. I see the format as having an obvious top 3 cards (Sol Ring, Black Lotus, and Ancestral) and somehow one of them was still on the table 4th, so I took it. It's still a plenty flexible card, anyway, so I would definitely make that pick again. For my second round pick (13th overall) Tinker was still on the table and I couldn't imagine that there would be much competition for the Darksteel Colossus. I figured my already at least slightly blue deck should just have an "Oops, i win" combo included (plus I liked the way this all set me up to draft the various blue tutors) ... so I took Mox Jet. (!?) Like I said, the 30-second shot clock plus no prior experience means these drafts are full of mistakes. Moxes are really good, and I don't think it was bad to take that one there, but I saw how consistently great Tinker was during my matches and I now believe if you're already blue and/or artifact-y that it's probably better than all but the Sapphire. Of course, Tinker came back to me 6 picks later so I wound up with the best of both worlds.

I almost got another gift in the 4th round, but Forsythe took Yawgmoth's Will with the very last pick before mine. I'm pretty sure that card is supposed to go early than round 4 as it's probably the single most powerful card in Vintage, but then again Aaron wound up putting it in his sideboard so maybe it's just too hard to abuse it in this format to justify a much earlier slot. With Tinker already in my pile and most of the good artifact mana gone, I then took Grim Monolith 4th. Looking at the spreadsheet, I think Tolarian Academy might have been a better pick but this format is really tough ... Academy without a density of quality artifacts would obviously suck. My next pick was Voltaic Key, which is good with my Monolith + Tinker package, I figured I'd probably get more stuff (which I did), plus this kept it away from Forsythe's Time Vault, which was particularly scary with Tezzeret also still on the table. I then felt great about Metalworker in the 6th round and had my direction for my draft: base-blue big mana and artifact brokenness. I screwed up the 8th round by taking Darksteel Colossus at least 20 rounds before I needed to, but my next 10 picks all look pretty good to me in retrospect: Mystical Tutor, Mox Diamond, Ancestral Visions, Mindslaver, Memory Jar, Goblin Welder, Personal Tutor, Mind's Desire, Thirst for Knowledge, Lotus Petal. It's possible that I should have snuck Academy Ruins in there somehow, and I felt bad for not noticing that Time Spiral was still on the table until round 10, but I have no real regrets about those picks. (Still staring at the spreadsheet.) Maybe 'Slaver is another one I could have waited on ... Fact or Fiction in that round would have been nice.

One of the tricky things going on was that I felt like I was pretty squeezed with Guskin drafting a Storm deck that wanted many of the same blue cards I did, plus I thought Globus would want my artifacts (though it turned out he had such a different artifact deck in mind to go with his Workshop that we just weren't competing for much), plus there were two other blue mages on the other end of the table in BDM and Zac Hill who between them were scooping up all available permission spells. In retrospect, though, I think I navigated the first third of the draft quite well. While I sat down intending to draft an aggressive deck with creatures, I think I was right to wind up in the colors and theme that I went into. Before I talk about the places I think I punted (those places being the middle third of the draft and the last third of the draft ) I think I'll introduce the rest of the players.

Aaron Forsythe drafted 5th and I think his draft is really, really interesting for trying to understand this format. He took Time Vault in the first round. He then took the Pearl 12th and Balance 21st. The Vault and the Balance both wound up in his sideboard. So did his (previously mentioned) 4th round Yawgmoth's Will. Meanwhile, despite putting 3 of his first 4 picks into his sideboard, he's 5-1 and 1-1 in his last match. If he wins game 3 versus Worth Wollpert then he wins the whole draft (on head-to-head tiebreaker over Zac Hill). With 3 of his first 4 picks in the 'board! Basically, after realizing that there were too many of us trying to draft clever / broken decks, he audibled into Doran. The other two aggro decks had been pretty firmly established by this point as Goblins and Fish so it was really the perfect move. All the green, white, and/or black monsters that he wanted were available (including Knight of the Reliquary falling all the way to an absurd 24th round selection.) The only match Aaron has lost was to me where I pulled off turn 3 Tinker-for-Colossus in game 1 and then turn 3 infinite Banefire in game 3. The first one is not atypical for my deck full of tutors, but game 3 felt like a pretty flukey/lucky draw and never came together that fast in any of my other matches.

Zac Hill had the 6th seat and his picks were also quite interesting. Zac has done a couple of these and clearly has a more evolved sense of what actually matters in the format. After taking Time Walk in the first round, he took Jace, the Mind Sculptor 11th overall and Mana Drain 22nd. He wound up with a really sweet mono-blue control deck full of a good curve of permission, most of the control magic effects, nice artifact-based creature removal, and the 'Oops, I win' combo of Grindstone / Painter's Servant. Also, Thada Adel, Acquisitor is ridiculous in this format and completely worthy of going in the first 10 rounds. Zac went 6-1 overall, losing only to Forsythe in what I'm guessing was the archetypical control versus beatdown battle that we've all been playing for 15 years now (and looks like it turns out to be what this format is actually supposed to be about).

Brian David Marshall went 7th and took the Sapphire. He then surprised and disappointed Zac by taking Force of Will 10th. BDM's next picks showed a clear commitment to the Fish archetype that he sat down prepared to force: round 3 Daze, round 4 Remand, round 5 Aether Vial, and round 6 Vendilion Clique. He was competing with Zac for permission, but they had such different archetypes in mind that I think they both wound up happy. All in all I liked Brian's strategy and his deck looked like a lot of fun to play. He thoroughly smashed me so I was a bit surprised to hear that he was just 2-4 overall.

Worth had the wheel, which seems like a really good spot to be in one of these drafts. You get to see what everyone else has signaled so far, plus you get the opportunity to send your own signals loud and clear with double picks. I was not at all surprised to see him signal aggro creatures with Ruby plus Skullclamp. With his second wheel he got to take Wheel of Fortune plus a gift of a 24th pick Mox Emerald. He took the good burn with his next few picks, Goblin Lackey in the 10th, and the rest was pretty easy. I suspect that the only cards he took that anyone else even wanted were the Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast (which he took in the 18th and 23rd rounds). I damn near beat him, but he blasted my turn 3 Tinker in game 2 and my turn 4 Mind's Desire for 6 more or less whiffed in game 3. Of course, "I almost had him" is what almost everyone says after playing against a good goblin deck, right? The only person who actually did beat him was Zac, thanks in large part to a game 3 Chill (a card that had been haunting Team Deadguy for about 13 years now). If Worth beats Aaron in their looming third game then Worth is X-1 but loses to Zac on head-to-head tiebreaker. If Aaron beats Worth, though, then Aaron wins the tourney since he beat Zac.

All in all I felt like my deck was "almost good." Like I said before, I still think my first 20 picks were mostly reasonable. The problem is that I then decided to fill things out with cantrips (so I could thin the deck and draw my tutors/broken cards more often) and random mediocre artifact mana (figuring this would let me play some of my expensive cards even without broken things going on to cheat them into play). It turns out that neither one of these plans actually works. The opportunity cost of spending my time cycling through cards like Spellbombs and Baubles was way too high, and Signets just don't provide enough mana acceleration to play things like Stroke of Genius or Mindslaver for any real value.

Instead of going all-in on the broken elements of my deck what I should have done was to have a plan B that was capable of working on its own. I think I could have build an artifact-creature aggro deck with stuff like Arcbound Ravager, Atog, Megatog, Su Chi, Juggernaut, Myr Enforcer, etc. This would provide plenty of fuel for Tinker and Metalworker if I drew them while also giving me game in my other draws. Attacking and blocking would have been very relevant to pretty much all of my losses and my Covetous Dragon was quite good in several games so I know that basic strategy can work well.

The other thing I messed up at the end of the draft was just forgetting some basic picks. I should have drafted artifact removal at some point and I just plain forgot. Rack and Ruin crossed my mind at one point, and it was still undrafted at the end of the draft, but somehow I found myself losing to Mark Globus's Chalice for 2 ... twice ... with no way in my entire deck to even bounce it for a turn so I could play out Grim Monolith plus Power Artifact for infinite mana. I also should have drafted Inkwell Leviathan as an alternate Tinker target (I would have won game 1 versus Globus with a quick Tinker draw, but he answered with "Crop Rotation for Maze of Ith"). Finally, I definitely should have placed a high premium on Muddle the Mixture as it's the only way in my colors to tutor up Power Artifact, but it just never even occurred to me until BDM drafted it in round 41.

Despite constantly kicking myself for all the mistakes I couldn't see until 5 minutes too late, I had an awesome time. This is a really fun format for anyone who's been playing Magic long enough to know most of these cards, and I don't think anyone has really figured out how exactly it works yet. We know some stuff now, sure, but if everyone starts drafting beatdown decks then being the one clever combo player, or the one heavy artifact player, should be absolutely amazing. Plus in addition to having quite an interesting draft format, the games tend to be really cool too. Highlander decks make for lots of diverse scenarios without nearly as much degeneracy as normal constructed Magic.

Mostly I just hope I get to do this again really soon.

Elemental: Almost Awesome

2010-09-02T05:29:38Z

If you're the type of person who wishes there were more games like Civilization then you should check out Elemental: War of Magic as it's basically Civ dipped in fantasy sauce. That probably sounds like a dig, but I actually intend it as a compliment. There aren't nearly enough turn-based strategy games coming out for my tastes. I even spent some time last month looking into DOS emulators so I could get Master of Orion 2 up and running.

Elemental is quite ambitious. In addition to the typical "4X" mechanics (explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate) it also puts you directly into the game as a hero unit complete with an XP system, a spell-casting system, and the ability to recruit more heroes to your cause. In addition to the typical play-versus-AI game it's also got an RPG-style campaign mode plus a full suite of tools for building mods and new scenarios. Throw in various AI difficulties and a ton of customization options and its clear that Stardock believes in supporting gamers like us.

I really want to love this game. I love civilization building games, I love leveling up, and I love turn-based strategy. However, there's a lack of polish here, especially in the core user experience, that prevents me from endorsing it whole-heartedly. I've played 4 games versus the AI plus the first chapter of the campaign and I'm still not sure how to efficiently navigate my way from turn to turn. In fact, I'm pretty sure the functionality changes once you get a lot of units onto the board (presumably due to some subtle bug). In addition, I find the end game tedious. Getting from won positions to actually winning the game took me hundreds of turns where not much was going on.

My real conclusion is that Stardock believed there was a huge difference between coming out a month before Civilization 5 and coming out a month after. It's hard to blame them ... because it's true. They probably would have gotten my 50 bucks eventually, but I would not have jumped right in if I was distracted by Civ 5 (which I am sure I will be a month from now).

Elemental has a ton of content and refining all the different aspects of this game will take a long time. Stardock seems committed to supporting the game long-term, and even the current version is already pretty good. If you're a turn-based strategy junkie who is willing to learn the quirks in a not-quite-perfect user interface then go ahead and buy Elemental. It's already plenty fun enough for you to enjoy for the few weeks left until Civ 5 comes out. The rest of you should probably wait for a few patches and/or some killer user-generated content to come out.

Inception Explained

2010-08-02T13:14:00Z

I've seen Inception twice and am contemplating a third viewing. It's a great movie and if you haven't already seen it then you really should stop reading and make plans to go see it. (Also, SPOILER ALERT ... obviously.) If I do go see it a third time that will make it the only movie I've seen 3 times in a theater other than the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which really doesn't seem like it should count.

As most (hopefully all) of you know, Inception has the basic plot of a heist movie (meet the protagonist, gather the team, pull off the caper). It's made awesome by director Christopher Nolan's super-smart landscape of shared dreaming and dreams within dreams, plus a spectacular ending that is designed specifically to make you think about what the hell is actually going on. For me the key to understanding what's really going on lies in the title of the movie. Who is the real target is the "Inception?"

The straight viewing suggests that Fisher is the subject of the inception, the top falls over, and Cobb lives happily ever after with his kids.

However, there's a fair amount of evidence that Cobb is actually dreaming for much, possibly all of the movie. Why else would he be the only one who brings elements of his own subconscious (aka Mal) into the shared dream? Plus what the hell is going on with that chase scene in Mombasa where the walls of the alley become too narrow to squeeze through? In this reading, the top never falls over at the end and the whole movie is actually an attempt to implant an idea into Cobb (something like 'don't grow old alone, filled with regret' which is repeated to him several times by several people). Here's the trickiest part of this interpretation, though: Who is implanting the idea? Is it his crew/friends who want him to let go of his guilt over Mal? Or is it actually Mal- who was right to commit suicide and is still alive in the real world.

I think if the top never falls then it actually has to be Mal making the inception attempt because she's the only other person who has touched his totem (the top) and the top falls over at several points during the movie. Based on the logic of the movie, only she could fake that. The most interesting aspect of this line of thought to me is that at the end of the movie Cobb DOES NOT CARE whether the top falls over or not. He walks away. He's embracing that reality with his kids whether it's really real or not. (Which can be interpreted as the inception to 'not grow old alone full of regret' taking hold, but not in the intended way. Kind of like Nolan's film Mememto in that the lead character tricks himself into being happy.)

The third way to view the movie, and the one I like the most, is that we - the audience - are the subject of the Inception.The movie is essentially an allegory about filmmaking, and the director has shared his dream world with us so that we can fill it with projections from our own sub-consciousness (including this conversation). On this reading, the movie is deliberately ambiguous and consistently supports multiple interpretations. Note that if you stay until the end of the credits the Edith Piaf music starts and the credits end abruptly in an attempt to give the audience a kick to wake them up, so this is clearly at least part of what is going on.

If you buy my argument that we (the audience) are the real subject of Christopher Nolan's inception then here is the interpretation I want to project onto it: the end of the movie is a dream, and the top never falls, but most of the movie was exactly what it suggested it was. Saito's only way to make good on his end of the bargain was to send Cobb "home" in a dream.

I'm not sure the evidence actually supports this reading, though. The best analysis I've heard (some of which is below in the postscript) supports some combination of reading #2 and #3, and the idea that the whole movie is a dream. However, the thing I keep getting stuck on is that final scene. This is not a super subtle movie (see for example "Ariadne" - the guide from Greek mythology who leads Theseus (Cobb) out of the labryinth (maze)). If Nolan closes on the spinning top, then it seems like it should matter whether or not it falls. But if the whole movie is a dream then whether or not it falls isn't actually a reliable sign. I do think a lot of the power of that final scene is the fact that Cobb walks away - after an entire movie of obsessing over whether he was really awake (including a scene where he watches the top while holding a gun, presumably planning to shoot himself in the head if it doesn't fall over), Cobb no longer cares. His catharsis mirrors Fisher and he's ready to move forward with his life and be happy. Maybe the subtext is Nolan telling us that we're not supposed to care whether the top falls either, but we all clearly do care and he set us up to care.

At the end of the day I think things are deliberately ambiguous and much of the point is that we're supposed to populate the details of Nolan's dream world for ourselves.

Post Script: I've spent a fair amount of time talking about the movie with Mark Rosewater. He's convinced a) that the film is entirely a dream and b) the film is really an allegory about film making. Here's a cut and paste of my recent exchange with him:

Here's the link: http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/49059535.html

In short:
Cobb is the director
Arthur is the producer
Ariadne is the writer
Eames is the actor
Yusud is the technical guy
Saito is the money guy (aka the studio)
Fischer is the audience

After reading this and several interviews with Nolan, I am hands down convinced that he set out to make a movie about film making. The moral is that it doesn't have to be real to have an impact on the audience. The inception is the effect a good movie has on the audience much like this one.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Mark

I'm not sure that this is precisely what Nolan "set out" to do, but the parallels are certainly there and many are deliberate. That link is also worth following if you want to read more.

One last thing -- the second time I watched the movie I had the distinct feeling that the opening scene isn't actually duplicated at the end of the heist section. I think they might have mirrored all the dialog, but switched around which characters said which lines. (If that scene really does happen two different times, rather than just having the opening of the movie foreshadow the denoument, then this would lend massive support to my theory that the end of the movie is Saito implanting the idea in Cobb that he can go be happy with his kids.) Anyway, I had the same impression that something was just a little bit off that Leonardo DeCaprio seems to have on his face throughout the rest of the movie (the plane ride, clearing immigration, etc.), until he hears his kids and then decides he doesn't care any more whether anything is wrong. If someone could either confirm or deny that those two scenes are actually identical, I would appreciate it.

Thinking Gamer Video Game Decade in Review

2010-01-04T07:22:32Z

Keep in mind my perspective as you read this. These are not (necessarily) the best video games of each year, but rather the best *thinking games* for digital platforms. (I'll throw in my opinion about the most important / influential / best video games from time to time, but they'll be limited to honorable mentions.)

     2000 - The Sims

I'm never quite sure how to categorize The Sims. It's always labeled as a "strategy game" in video game market research reports, but it doesn't really have winners or losers. I've always counted Dungeons & Dragons as a thinking game, so I think I'm supposed to count The Sims too. Meanwhile, there can be no doubt that this was an incredibly well executed and wildly popular game.

Honorable mentions: Diablo II, Counter-Strike.

What an amazing year. Diablo II is still the best action RPG of all-time, and was my own guilty pleasure game for many years. And Counter-Strike (which is technically a user-generated mod of Half-Life) showed people how poplar an online multi-player shooter could be (a genre that still dominates the industry to this day).

     2001 - Party Poker

I could just as easily have given the nod to Poker Stars, which was a bit better polished at the time and is bigger today (plus Paradise Poker pre-dates both of them), but it was really Party Poker and it's aggressive marketing that launched the online poker boom. No one in the video game industry seems to talk much about online poker, but I'm not sure why not. They're games for digital platforms that make tons and tons of money, right? They also fundamentally changed the landscape when it comes to thinking games and thinking gamers. Suddenly it was possible to directly apply your gamer skills to making money.

The Magic: the Gathering Pro Tour was a nice dream, but the truth was that only a couple dozen guys could make enough money to live on and nobody was getting rich. Kai might have had a $100,000 year once, but the typical good years were in the $50,000 range with $20,000 very much in play. Don't get me wrong, that's a hell of a lot better than flipping burgers (even before you count the fun of traveling the world and hanging out with cool people) and it's a lot of money when you're college-aged; but it's not really a career. Most of the really great players eventually find something more lucrative to spend our time on. Meanwhile it's really tough to stay on top of the game unless you're devoting all of your time to it, so the Pro Tour winds up with a steady stream of hungry 20-somethings rising up and dominating for a couple of years before they grow up and move on.

Anyway, the poker boom provided a way to pursue the whole "gaming is way more fun than getting a real job" thing while having significantly more earning potential. The World Poker Tour launched in 2002 and things really heated up when Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker in 2003. Not only did he provide an "anybody can win" story that the media adored, but he also won his entry fee in a PokerStars satellite tournament, thus attracting a lot of "dead money" to online poker as his "turned $39 into $2.5 million" story was told over and over again.

A funny thing happened to the Pro Tour with lots of its players turning to poker. Very few of them stopped playing Magic. Magic became the game that they play for fun after grinding out a living playing poker. Just because there aren't as many opportunities to win money playing Magic as there are in poker, doesn't mean it's not the more fun game. Dave Williams is probably the most visible example of this -- he's been a very visible poker celebrity ever since finishing 2nd in the WSOP in 2004, but he's also continued playing Magic the whole time ranging from late-night drafts in Vegas with other Magic/poker cross-overs to a steady string of money finishes on the Pro Tour to tweeting while in Europe about the crappy WiFi that won't allow him to play Magic Online. My favorite Magic/poker cross-over story, however, is Gabriel Nassif. Nassif has managed to stay one of the best couple of players on Magic's Pro Tour for the entire decade while also making the transition from "omg this is a lot of money for a 16-year old" to "my poker ev is better, but I still love Magic."

There were some other decent thinking games in 2001 -- Kohan was an intriguing take on how to do a real-time strategy game that didn't require great twitch skills, and Advance Wars really moved the tactics genre forward -- but from my seat 2001 was the year that online poker changed everything.

2002 - Magic Online

Magic players used to stop playing once it became inconvenient to find opponents to play against. Around the time they graduated college, or got married, or had their first kid it became hard to make time to head down to the friendly local game store and Magic became a victim of these lifestyle changes. Ever since Magic Online came out, however, that just doesn't happen any more. Now there's always a new draft about to fire and the 10pm draft after your kid goes to sleep can be followed by the midnight "bad idea" draft. The product definitely has its flaws and it's not hard to imagine ways it could be a lot better, but if you compare life as a Magic player nowadays to life as a Magic player before 2002, things are just more awesome because Magic Online exists.

This isn't a Magic decade in review, however, so I want to talk about Magic Online in the context of other video games. I'm pretty sure it's the #2 turn-based strategy franchise of all time. Civilization has made more money, but I don't think anything else has. I'm still bound by an NDA that prevents me from discussing the details, but it's not hard to triangulate off of publicly available numbers and project a lifetime revenue above $100 million. That's not in the same league as Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, but it's still quite a respectable number, especially for a PC-only title. I wonder sometimes whether the mainstream video game world realizes how much money Magic Online has actually made.

In addition to proving that a turn-based strategy game can make real money, MTGO also proved that the digital object sales model can work. This may not sound like such a big deal nowadays with everybody's facebook wall littered with posts from social games that make their money that way, but back in 2002 it was still very much an open question. Many folks gathered at industry conferences and discussed the reasons why the so-called "Korean model" couldn't work in the States. Well it did work. Magic Online obviously had all the advantages of its relationship with Magic (built-in / captive audience, known great game-play, etc.), and it's never done a particularly good job recruiting new players into Magic (every MTGO player, to a first approximation, starts out as a paper Magic player), but within the context of Thinking Gamer awards there's nothing wrong with that. Everyone who likes strategy games will try Magic at some point and most will love it.

     2003 - Galactic Civilizations

Kind of a weak year. I almost gave the nod to Madden '04 because they re-did the engine behind their franchise mode, which is essentially a stand-alone football simulation game with a fair amount of depth and re-playability. (Madden itself is the kind of game that used to make me jealous of people with high dexterity scores, but as I've grown to embrace who I am as a gamer I go straight to the franchise mode, sim all the games, and play what amounts to a gigantic, well-flavored spreadsheet game.) Meanwhile, the most innovative game released in 2003 was almost certainly Defense of the Ancients (DotA) - the mod of Warcraft III that has become so wildly popular that multiple AAA-sized projects are now coming out which attempt to recapture that gameplay within a "real" game. DotA is too much of a dexterity game to get the nod from me, though, so I'm calling out a solid new franchise developed by Stardock. Stardock has also turned into a nice home for various strategy games and genres that the big publishers don't seem to care about and their Impulse digital distribution system has much of the same functionality as Valve's much more heralded Steam.

     2004 - Oasis

Like some of my board game choices, this one may be biased by the fact that I currently work for Mind Control Software. That said, I was not around when they developed this game and it did win several indie game of the year type awards. It's essentially a civilization-style experience boiled down into about 5-10 minutes of turn-based strategy goodness.

Honorable mention: Others seem to like the Total War series more than me, but from what I can tell 2004's Rome: Total War was the best of the series. Oh by the way, this was also the year Blizzard unleashed World of Warcraft on an unsuspecting world.

     2005 - Civilization IV

A really nice step forward for this venerable franchise. Civ III (which came out in 2001) was quite bloated, with an accumulation of new mechanics and new ideas really weighing down the game. With Civ IV they finally started cutting stuff away, eliminating the extraneous baggage so that the underlying awesome gameplay could shine through. I had thought that Civ II (which I spent many an all-nighter playing while in college in the early 90's) might have been the peak, but Civ IV was genuinely better. I also enjoyed Civ IV: Colonization, which uses the Civ IV engine to play out a New World scenario where you work for one of the European powers as they seek to colonize America and you win by seceding and then winning the revolutionary war. It's less open-ended, but the base game can sometimes take 10-20 hours to play so it's nice to have a more compact experience.

Honorable mention: Guitar Hero launched rhythm games as a mainstream phenomena and the first truly new genre added to the video game landscape in about a decade.

     2006 - Galactic Civilizations II, I guess

Hopefully somebody will post a comment with a better suggestion as I don't think Gal Civ is worthy of winning two different years, but turn-based strategy remains a niche in the video game world and there have been some dry years ...

Honorable mention: Wii Sports. The innovations continue over on the more mainstream side of the industry with the launch of the Wii and the introduction of motion controls to console gaming.

     2007 - Desktop Tower Defense

I know this wasn't the first tower defense game, but it was the first one that hooked me. It also gets credit from me for bringing Kongregate to my attention as a website full of free games worthy of checking out semi-regularly. I will always remember the first time I played it when I had the flash of insight "OH! I build a MAZE!" and to this day I don't particularly care for the fixed-path tower defense games. The challenge of figuring out how to build the maze is the best part of the genre, in my opinion, and DTD is well balanced, well executed, and damn close to the platonic ideal of this genre.

Honorable mention: Speaking of new platforms that make significant amounts of new content available, Xbox Live Arcade started coming into its own in 2007, with digital versions of a couple of tabletop classics (Settlers of Catan and Carcasonne) among the highlights.

     2008 - Braid

Playing Braid remains one of the most jaw-droppingly, mind-blowingly awesome experiences I have ever had with a video game. The time-manipulation mechanics are brilliant and the level-design is incredibly clever. Multiple times I would find myself just staring at the screen thinking, shaking my head in amazement, and knowing that the answer was there if only I was smart enough to find it. It is crystal clear to me that this was a labor of love for Jonathan Blow and the extra years he spent tightening and polishing it really show.

2nd place: Civilization Revolution. Civ Rev is by far the best game in the almost 20-year history of this franchise and it would have won most of the years in this decade. It's essentially a slimmed down version of Civ IV designed specifically for console and handheld gaming, but that's "slimmed down" in the sense of "I am so much healthier now that I've lost 100 pounds." The challenge of porting the core experience onto devices that don't have mouse/keyboard really inspired the designers and developers to ask themselves what actually mattered and the resulting game has all the strategic depth and strategic fun of a 20-hour long Civilization session boiled down into a game that can be finished in just 2-4 hours. It's the only game on Xbox where I have fully 1000 gamerscore.

Honorable mention: If you play (tabletop) Dunegons & Dragons, you really should check out D&D Insider. The Character Builder is exactly the tool you've always been hoping for (with every rule from every book and every issue of Dungeon and Dragon magazine coded into it) and that plus the Compendium make prep time a pleasure instead of a chore. I can no longer imagine building a character any other way.

     2009 - Drop7

If you're a thinking gamer and you have an iPhone then one of two things is happening right now. Either you're smiling and nodding knowingly or you're going to trust me and go straight to the app store and buy this game. It's a fairly simple game ("Tetris meets Sudoku" is the best description of it that I've heard), and the presentation is pretty sparse, but the strategy involved is remarkably deep. Hardcore mode is the best way to play as things get interesting right away and there's just the right amount of randomness so that it's replayable, and you can catch a lucky break, but you are also convinced that skillful play is what really matters. My only tiny complaint is that I really wish they would track a running average of your last 20 games. It tracks high scores and average score (and if you put in your facebook info then it will let you compare high scores with friends), but with 500+ games under my belt it's hard to move either of those numbers now.

Other 2009 finalists: Fieldrunners is a nice "build your own maze" tower defense game for iPhone. Duels of the Planeswalkers is a really nice way to play Magic against an AI, especially if you're still learning (or re-learning) the game. (It's currently only on Xbox Live Arcade, but is supposed to come out for PC and PSN in 2010). Plants versus Zombies is a bit too easy for my tastes, but it's turn-based strategy done with all the quality and polish that you can count on from PopCap.

Honorable mention: I also quite enjoyed Dragon Age, and definitely recommend it if you're looking for a single-player RPG experience.

     Decade in summary

My top 5 are Magic Online, PokerStars, Braid, Drop7, and Civilization Revolution. They're so diverse that I'm not sure I know how to rank them relative to one another. Online poker has had by far the most financial success of these five, and has changed the lives of many thinking gamers by providing them with a source of income. However, at the end of the day poker isn't as much fun as the other games on this list so it can't win. Braid is probably too small to be game of the decade. It's an awesome experience, but once you've solved it, you've solved it and you probably aren't going back to re-play it. Drop7 seems like it might be a bit too small (and a bit too unpolished) to win as well. Civ Rev didn't win it's year, but I do find it interesting that I'm still playing Civ Rev a year later whereas I'm not playing Braid any more -- it does have the virtue of being quite re-playable. I even downloaded Civ Rev for my iPhone so I could work my way through some of the scenarios that I hadn't gotten to (something I don't recommend unless you already know how to play Civ because the interface is about two notches worse on an iPhone).

All of which leaves me with Magic Online. I'd feel better if it was a better polished product, or a product that I could recommend with a clean conscience to folks that don't already know how to play Magic, but even with those flaws it's still an awesome addition to the life of any Magic player. And Magic is the best thinking game of all time.

     Looking forward

Well that's my take on the decade in video games. Things were a little dry for us thinking gamers in the middle of the last decade (and the early years were saved only by MTGO and poker), but now there are a bunch of new digital distribution platforms available where publishers and/or game designers can profitably target a niche audience like us. Of the 10 games I called out from 2007 - 2009, only one of them (Civ Rev) can be purchased at a brick and mortar store. Things are looking up and I'm excited to see what the 20-10's have to bring!

Board Game Decade in Review

2010-01-02T06:49:00Z

Here's my take on the best board games of the last decade, broken down year by year:

     2000 - Carcasonne
A really good game, and a truly innovative design space to explore as well. It's no longer in regular rotation for me, but Santa brought "The Kids of Carcasonne" for Kira this year and I highly recommend that variant for anyone with a budding gamer who's 4-7 years old. It's easy to learn and no reading is required, but it's got a surprising amount of depth of strategy -- enough to keep things interesting for parents too.

     2001 - Transamerica over Risk 2210, I guess
Nothing I saw when searching through Board Game Geek by publishing year really seems to have stood the test of time. I've heard that Risk 2210 is quite a good variant, but I've never actually played it myself and it's a Wizards of the Coast design so my info could easily be biased. Meanwhile, Transamerica is fun enough that we still bust it out every once in a while at the ongoing WotC R&D board game night.

   2002 - Puerto Rico
This was ranked #1 for many years on Board Game Geek and with good reason. The action-drafting mechanic is really clever and the strategies in the game are quite deep. It's been recently edged on Board Game Geek by a game that does the action drafting mechanic a bit better in my opinion (Agricola) but you've got to give Puerto Rico credit not only for being the best board game of 2002, but also blazing a trail for future game designers to follow.

     2003 - Amun Re
A bit less heralded than many of the others on this list (it's only #57 on the 'Geek), but I for one really enjoy this game and our circle of gamers considers it the go-to game when we have 5 people who want to play. I think it only truly shines with 5 players, but if you've got 5 then it might just be the best game of the decade.

   2004 - St. Petersburg (over Ticket to Ride)
I have played a ton of Ticket to Ride (esp in various digital incarnations), and it was a fine choice for Spiel des Jahres in 2004, but when given the choice I choose to play St. Petersburg just about every time. A few of the cards from the original game were overpowered or underpowered and so we now use the versions of the Mistress, Observatory, and Academy that came with the 2008 expansion; but we don't use any of the other stuff from the expansion. With those few "development" tweaks the base game remains a remarkably deep, re-playable game that clocks in a good bit under an hour even at 4 players.

     2005 - Vegas Showdown (over Railroad Tycoon)
This could be the a Wizards of the Coast bias, but I think Vegas Showdown was quite a good game. It's the only one of the WotC-design Avalon Hill games that I actually like, so I can't be completely biased by having been there all those years. I still break this out and play it from time to time, both in person and over on GameTableOnline (where you can even play against an AI), and I enjoy it with 3, 4, or 5 players (which is actually a bit unusual for me). Meanwhile, I did want to call out Railroad Tycoon since I think it's quite a well-done train game. Probably the best train game of the decade, assuming you have a good space for setting up the massive board (edging out Ticket to Ride and Thurn and Taxis).

     2006 - Through the Ages
I have been playing the hell out of this game non-stop since I was introduced to it early in 2009. It is quite long (figure 90 minutes per player unless everyone really knows what they're doing, and even then it's still 4 hours for a 3-player game) and it is both complicated and unforgiving (unlike most other civilization-building games you cannot ignore military ... if you fall behind you will get crushed and never be able to recover). However, the hard-core gamer side of my crowd seems to agree with me that it is remarkably well balanced and the way in which you shuffle the decks and then draft the cards works out to give it a shocking amount of re-playability. I've now played around 50 games of it and I continue to be surprised by the ways in which games can evolve. A lot of the skill in the game is being able to improvise and take advantage of whatever opportunities the game has randomly presented you with. In that sense, it actually reminds me a lot of Magic (which I still consider to be the best strategy game of all time), only if Magic games took 4 hours to play themselves out.

     2007 - Agricola
A truly great "thinking" game and totally worthy of the #1 spot on Board Game Geek. It's got a lot of "fiddly bits," but I wouldn't cut any of them even if I could. The mechanics are tied together really well and this game shows once again how much re-playability you can get from shuffling a deck of cards and then dealing out some of the resources randomly. Interestingly, the German game critics who award Spiel des Jahres every year for the best "family style" board game called out a separate category for "Complex Games" so that they could acknowledge how good this was with a special prize.

     2008 - Dominion
Pure awesome, and I was glad to see it win Spiel des Jahres. The idea of constructing your deck on the fly by buying cards each turn that you then shuffle in so you can draw them on future turns is really brilliant. I wish the expansions were able to live up to the promise of the base game, but so far they have not. So far most of the cards in the expansions just make the game more complicated, which I guess might make some people happy as the original card set can start to feel like a solved puzzle if you've played it hundreds of times, however my advice is just to stick to the base game and to introduce it to all of your friends. If you're reading this blog then I'm sure all your gamer-friends will like it and even some of the ones who don't normally like games will probably like it too.

     2009 - Smallworld?
Here's where I'm supposed to end the blog entry by crowning a winner for the year that has just ended, but I'm not sure i have anything compelling to say. The Agricola expansion that just came out (Farmers of the Moor) seems really good, but I've only played it a couple of times and I'm not sure an expansion is supposed to qualify as the best game of the year (though this one might be a special case as it changes the game dramatically and the new game seems to be really good). Vlaada Chvatil's latest game (Dungeon Lords) has me pretty excited, and it does have a 2009 publication date according to the 'Geek, but it has yet to be distributed in the States so I haven't played it yet. I guess Smallworld is the best new game I have played this year. It's got some flaws (primarily that it's vulnerable to politics because using table talk to convince your opponents to attack your other opponents is very powerful), but the flavor is awesome and the mechanics are definitely fun as long as you aren't taking things too seriously. It you like multi-player Magic then I highly recommend it, but if you hate multi-player Magic then you probably won't want to play it more than 2 or 3 times.

My top 3 overall for the decade would be Dominion, Agricola, and Through the Ages. TTA is my personal favorite, but the ordering of which I want to play at any given time changes completely depending on who I am playing with, how hard-core they are, and how much time we have to play.

There you go, the decade in board games from the perspective of a thinking gamer.

Great day for spectating

2009-11-07T22:33:00Z

Between a the final table of the World Series of Poker, a Magic Grand Prix in Paris, and a couple of good college football games, today is shaping up to be a day full of checking in on the TV and the computer in between playing games with Kira.

I'm actually quite torn when it comes to (American) college football's lack of a championship game. On the one hand the gamer in me is horrified at how patently unfair the whole set-up is. It feels wrong that you can run the table without even getting a chance at winning the title, plus the lack of a playoff or a real national championship game both feel like lost opportunities. However, I have to admit that the set-up makes me much, MUCH more interested in every random weekend of games. If they actually had a playoff system, there's no way I would care about a random Iowa game on a random weekend in November. Without that playoff system, though, I was delighted to find it on ESPN 360, stunned to find out that Iowa's come-from-behind miracle-maker at QB was out injured, and watched much of the 4th quarter attentively as their national championship dreams ended.

Now I might have watched Alabama - LSU anyway since I went to school in the SEC (at Vanderbilt) and still follow SEC football and basketball reasonably closely, but the BCS implications raise the stakes significantly and turned it into must-see TV for me. All in all the fact that their system is patently unfair somehow works out to make it more compelling to watch. While I do love "March Madness," I also know in my heart that I watch very little regular season college basketball. And if there's enough people like me (and I suspect that there are), then can you really blame them for not having a playoff?

As far as the Grand Prix goes, I'm disappointed to see that martin Juza just got eliminated in the last round of day 1. 1961 players makes it the largest Magic tournament of all time, which is certainly a cool storyline to follow, but I feel like Martin has caught a couple of bad breaks this season and deserved to catch a good one here (esp. with Watanabe not in attendance). For those who don't follow Magic, the Player of the Year title is almost certainly the most prestigious title given out each year. Juza is in 2nd place despite being DQed on a pretty bad judge call late in a GP that he was poised to make Top 8 in, plus going 6-0 on day 2 of another GP only to discover that he missed Top 8 on tiebreakers because they weren't running enough rounds (a rule that has already been changed as of Paris). Anyway, seems like a really quality player and if he doesn't catch those two bad beats then Watanabe's 9-point lead would be much smaller, and possibly completely gone.

The WSOP always sucks me in as well. I think Magic is a more pure test of gamer-skill than poker, but the fan in me loves all the history and context around the World Series. As I type this Phil Ivey is chipping up nicely having risked moving his chips all-in once without getting a call already. I think they're playing down to 2 today and then they play the heads up battle late Monday night / Tuesday morning so that they can broadcast the final table Tuesday night on ESPN without having had the result scooped by that day's newspapers.

The winner gets $8.5 million dollars, but Ivey apparently has enough side bets going that if he pulls this off he would win another $6 million! In a weird way that actually means he could win more than the $12 million that Jaime Gold won a couple years ago, which is still the record for the biggest tournament payout ever (across any sport ever, if I'm not mistaken). I have found pokernews.com to be the best site for following hand by hand updates. I'm tempted not to follow it so that Tuesday's broadcast will be more dramatic, but they cut so much and I enjoy knowing the details of who is playing tight versus who is opening a ton of pots so I think I'll be refreshing all day.

And that's just Saturday! Tomorrow has day 2 of the GP plus I'm in two fantasy football leagues plus I still have to figure out who to take in my NFL "suicide pool" (where you must pick one winning team per week but you can never reuse a team). We're down to 5 people and I still have the nice, safe Indianapolis Colts available to me, but there's never going to be another week where Seattle is an option (they're decimated by injuries again this year, but they're hosting the dreadful Detroit Lions). I think I'm going to split the difference and save the Colts for later by picking the Falcons over the Redskins.

Looks like an in-person Through The Ages game is coming together for Sunday evening, plus I've got a couple of late night Dragon Age sessions to look forward to so it's going to be quite a fun weekend of not actually doing anything consequential.

Gamer Life Update

2009-11-04T07:39:00Z

What follows is a fairly stream of consciousness run-down of the games I've been playing for the last couple of months.

Through The Ages (TTA) has almost certainly been the thing I have played the most. It's essentially Civilization turned back into a tabletop game by Czech board game designer Vlaada Chvatil. It's not for the faint of heart (clocking in somewhere north of one hour per player), but it's remarkably well designed and well balanced. Well, it is once you know what you're doing anyway. The way in which you draft cards from a shuffled deck gives it remarkable re-playability, but only if you've learned that falling behind on military means almost certain death (the game is quite unforgiving if you fall behind). Lately my crew has been playing via e-mail using a Vassal module of the game in addition to playing it live. I've even got a spreadsheet now with our last ten results and counting. Mike Turian is the best - probably not a surprising result to anyone who has tried any form of drafting game against him.

Agricola is still in heavy rotation as well. Once I invest the time it takes to learn a game, I like to keep playing it. As a result my favorite games tend to be the ones with sufficient randomness in the set-up that each game is unique. That way, you learn some over-arching truths about what matters or what sorts of strategies tend to do well, but you're forced to improvise essentially every single time you play. Magic has this characteristic too -- you're constantly learning new tricks that you can apply int he future, but you can never learn enough to just play by rote memory. In Agricola there's a nice core mechanic where you take turns deciding which action you want to do (somewhat similar to Puerto Rico, but with more options available). The real depth, though, comes from the deck of Occupations and the deck of Minor Improvements. You get a hand of 7 of each at the start of the game and much of the game-play comes from trying to maximize those resources while also reacting to whatever your opponents have put into play.

I know an Agricola expansion came out at Essen last week. It looks like they made some fairly major changes to the core mechanics. Has anyone played it yet? How is it?

Congrats to Donald X. Vaccarino and Dominion on winning Spiel des Jahres, by the way. That's a great game that I can recommend to just about anyone. The only thing resembling a complaint that I have about it is that the first expansion seemed a bit too busy as compared to the base set. I haven't had the chance to play the second expansion yet. Hopefully, he finds his voice and keeps this game fresh and vibrant for years to come.

I've also been dabbling in iPhone games pretty consistently. Drop7 remains one of my staple games, by the way. I know I recommended it before but it's really quite a nice game for anyone who has ever enjoyed Minesweeper, Tetris, or Sudoku. I kind of wish there were new goals to shoot for (a weekly friends leaderboard would go a long way toward keeping me invested), but even just trying to up my all-time high score and my average is enough to keep me playing in spare moments.

The other infatuation I had was a surprising one to me: I Dig It. It didn't seem like something I would like, but Richard Garfield recommended it so I tried it out. In retrospect I still don't understand exactly why i liked it, but I definitely did. I completed both the campaigns modes (each of which takes several hours of accumulated play, and that's after you figure out the basics and stopped accidentally getting yourself killed). The idea is that you have some sort of funky bulldozer that goes underground and digs up various valuable things - ores, gems, alien artifacts, etc. You start with a small gas tank, a tiny cargo hold, crappy radar, and an engine that overheats if you go very deep into the earth. As you dig stuff up and sell it, you can improve each of these things in what amounts to a fairly clever twist on the usual RPG level-up mechanic (flavored totally differently, and feeling totally different, but tapping into that same emotional love we all have of seeing our stats get bigger). It's more than just bigger numbers, though, you also feel more powerful. the kicker for me is that on top of all that there's this coolness that comes from building your own tunnel system. It's like a weird form of emergent gameplay -- I'd never really thought about the most convenient way to dig mine shafts, but it was fun.

One game that I want to like is Dungeon Hunter. It looks like a fairly slick Diablo variant, and I played a ton of Diablo II back in the day. It's got nice graphics and seems to have all the action RPG goodness you'd want. I get occasional framerate issues on my 3G (which probably means it's great on a 3GS and bad on the original iPhone). My real issue, though, is that I'm stuck. If anyone knows where the hell the exit is from the Thamos Catacombs, please tell me.

In terms of tower defense games, I've played several lately. The Creeps has a cute mechanic where you have to attack the land around the track so as to clear spaces for future towers. Decent, but nothing earthshattering. Defender Chronicles is probably the tower defense game I have liked the most since finishing Field Runners. I like what they've done with altitude as an important consideration and it's well polished in addition. However, I lost a lot of interest in it once I realized that it's a grinding game -- you have a hero who levels up as you play and it means that when you're having trouble with a level you probably just need to go beat the earlier levels again so you'll be stronger. Yuck. I want my tower defense levels to be self-contained puzzles that require me to be clever. Meanwhile, my office-mates at Mind Control all seem to love GeoDefense. I'm not sure why it failed to grab me, but the fact that several of them really love it means it's probably the one to check out if you only check out one of these (esp. since it has a lite version).

I've also been playing some with Zendikar on Magic Online. It seems like a decent draft format. It's quite fast, but I like the return to normalcy that comes from have 1 and 2 color decks, where it matters that you can read and send signals during the draft.

I've also played a ton of games with Kira -- my 5-year old daughter. That's probably a subject worthy of a blog on its own, though. Suffice it to say that she's now old enough to think strategically, which is super fun to watch evolve, and Pokemon is teaching her to do math.

Work Life Update

2009-11-04T06:17:00Z

I feel a little bit bad about neglecting this blog for the past few months, but it's actually mostly a good thing. It's a sign that my brain has been occupied with my job and I've been able to channel my excess mental energy into Project Mind Twist. I'll follow up shortly with a different entry about the games I've been playing lately, but enough people have been asking me how the project is going that I figured I'd just post about it.

As I posted here, Mind Twist is a free-to-play turn-based strategy game designed by Richard Garfield and developed by Mind Control Software, where I work as VP of Business Strategy (a job which is equal parts business development, product strategy, and Mind Twist). Living in Seattle and working for a company in California is not the ideal set-up, but I love the project and I love the people I get to work with so I'm pretty happy all in all. I wasn't sure how much I would like working from home 2/3rds of the time (and flying down to the Bay Area and staying in a hotel the other 1/3). It turns out I'm not a huge fan. I can see why some people would like the freedom to sleep in and not have to take a shower right away in the morning, but I for one prefer going into an office and being able to feed off the energy of all the other people. Working from home I feel a bit out of touch and it's just a little bit less fun. Like I said, though, I love both the project and the people so I'm not giving up the job. On the other hand, I also like my Seattle-based circle of friends, my house, my daughter's school, and my wife likes her job so I'm not moving. Meh. It's not quite ideal, but it's still plenty good.

Working for a small company is pretty different than working for Wizards/Hasbro. Mind Control is very nimble and very talented, but there's always this danger looming a couple of months away that we could just plain run out of money. The way an indie dev studio works is you have one or more "work for hire" projects where some bigger company (usually a publisher) is paying you to make the game they want made and then you use the profits from that game in order to fund the game you want to make. That's the way Mind Control has operated historically, but now in addition to pursuing work-for-hire we've also been looking for investors who believe in our business plan enough to invest directly in the company. Along those lines I'm delighted to report that we'll be closing an angel investment round later this month. It's not enough money to keep the company solvent all the way through the launch of Mind Twist, but it's enough to relieve the stress that comes when you are in between work-for-hire gigs.

As far as the project itself goes, we completed a successful "pre-production" period and we have a prototype that's playable on both iPhone and PC (including one against the other) which we believe demonstrates that the game design is good. I'm actually quite impressed with how deep and re-playable the game is. I mean, I knew it was Richard and I liked it when he first described it, but it's worked out even better than I thought it would. The game has now been in full development mode for a while and we're far enough along to start thinking about how our Friends and Family Alpha is going to work, and whether we can get it up and running before the end of the year. Edge Online did a nice interview with Richard and I last week that you can read here if you want more info about the game.

I guess that's the update. Cool project, cool people, cool job, and I feel pretty good about my role in helping the company raise enough money to bring Richard's latest vision to life.

More Hall of Fame thoughts

2009-07-23T04:01:00Z

Miscellaneous thoughts and things I have discovered as I finalize my ballot for this year's Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame:

One guy who is getting some attention that I haven’t mentioned before is Masashiro Kuroda. He’s got an impressive 121 points in just13 appearances, by far the highest points / PT on the ballot. To be fair,though, he’s got 7 GP T8’s factoring in there and his median PT finish is just103^rd. Brian Selden is much more impressive to me if you want ashort-career guy: 3 T8’s and a win in just 14 PT’s attended, with a median finish of 37^th. That’s the 3^rd best median finish on the ballot yet somehow this guy only got 1 vote last year?

Meanwhile, if you want to go by raw play skill, Neil Reeves and Baby Huey (aka William Jensen) deserve a lot of consideration.

Mark Justice’s median finish of 28.5 and his 4 T8’s in just 18appearances continues to impress me, by the way. And some would argue that his true peak actually pre-dates the Pro Tour. (Justice’s 3-year “peak median”finish is an insane 13^th. That ties him with Finkel for the best of all-time. The next highest in the history of the game is me at 18^th,but I didn’t attend enough events to qualify based on the way Wizards is currently calculating the stat. Kai is next at 23rd.) Quite simply, Justice was The Man for those first few seasons.

OMFG I knew I was voting for Kamiel but a median finish of36^th across *45* Pro Tours?! Unprecedented. Karsten at 47^this the only other guy among the 15 on the ballot with 35+ PT’s attended who even finished Top 70 at half of their events. Budde’s median finish was 42^nd (in 42 events). Finkel’s,when elected, was 52^nd in 47 events. Most folks have a couple year stretch where they are awesome and then a couple years where they are hanging out enjoying their ride on the train. Kamiel just stayed consistently great for most of a decade.

Shvartsman – median finish of 92.5. I know the 21 GP T8’s look impressive, but he traveled to a lot of GP's where he was the only American and this was an era where the Japanese were not yet good enough to compete and win on an international stage.

Long – Imagine if we had a time machine and could go back to the beginning and convince WotC to spin Mike as a face rather than a heel. Now imagine that WotC had spun Olle Rade as Mr. Sketchy (which would not have been hard to do, especially given his talent for recognizing the inconsistencies on the backs of Magic cards that used to plague WotC’s print runs). Their HoF fortunes would be reversed, right? Long has become the poster child of all that is evil, but I think his reputation is probably worse than he deserves. He certainly embraced that reputation, encouraged it, and used it to his advantage; but it’s hard to blame him for cooperating with WotC’s attempt to make the Pro Tour into compelling theater. We all want the prize money to keep flowing, and ideally to grow, so we all tend to cooperate with whatever PR initiatives Wizards is trying. For the early years of the PT Wizards was hoping the game could have mass appeal and that the Pro Tour would become a spectator sport. They desperately wanted the PT to have compelling characters that could appeal to even non-playing spectators and they applied a number of lessons from professional wrestling to their promotional efforts. Are we sure they were wrong? When push comes to shove I actually can imagine myself voting for Long, though I haven’t done so yet and as a point of principle I don’t think I’m going to consider it unless the iconic “white hat” (Chris Pikula) gets voted into the Hall first.

Everyone with 300 or more lifetime pro points has gotten in on their 1^st ballot appearance. That’s good news for Antoine and Kamiel, not that they need it as most ballots I have seen discussed publicly seem to include them both. (By the way, did you know that Antoine’s brother Olivier Ruel is now only 23 points behind Kai for #1 all-time?)

Since year 1, only one person with less than 200 lifetime Pro Points has been voted in: me at 126. And I’m a pretty weird case, as I’m sure lots of the votes I got were based on my overall service to the game from inside Wizards R&D, inside the commentary booth, etc. Justice and Pikula both have 133, and Long is at 191. That said, both Rade and Comer got in below 200 (198 in Comer's case, though I think it was like 192 or 194 when he was voted in). Mostly I think the early years of the PT are both more influential and also had fewer Pro Points in the system but for anyone being added to the ballot now you pretty much need 200 or you aren't going to get serious consideration.

Justin Gary. The case lives here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/HallOfFame.aspx?x=mtgevent/hof/06ballot1aand basically comes down to this: how impressed are you by 8 consecutive Top 32finishes when only one of them is a Top 8? How about 11 T-32’s out of 13 PT’s?Personally, I’m pretty impressed.

A sneak peek at next year: Nassif finally gets officially coronated. Saito seems pretty obvious as well and then after that it looks like an interesting collection of specialists and/or short career guys and/or we get to find out how deep into the Japanese invasion of the PT the line for the Hall of Fame is going to be drawn: Akira Asahara, Eugene Harvey, Rich Hoaen, Anton Jonsson, Shu Komura, Katsuhiro Mori, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, Shota Yasooka, etc.

Announcing Project Mind Twist

2009-07-21T07:44:00Z

The official press release announcing the collaboration I put together between Richard Garfield and Mind Control Software is going out today. In addition, there's a spiffy new website to promote the game plus you can now follow us on twitter (@TheMindTwist) and/or become a fan on facebook. Finally, there's an exclusive interview about the project on Gamasutra with Richard and Mind Control's CEO, Andrew Leker.

The short version of all this is that I now have a job at a kick-ass independent video game developer called Mind Control Software and Mind Control is in the process of expanding their Orbital platform infrastructure technology in order to be able to do everything I've ever dreamed of wanting to do with a multi-player online strategy game. The Richard Garfield-designed, free-to-play-but-with-microtransactions-we-hope-you'll-want-to-buy project (aka "Mind Twist") will be our first release, but there are other games in the pipeline as well.

Mind Control, by the way, is a 33-person studio that has spent the last year building Vector City Racers, which is a casual car-driving MMO built in flash and targeted at 6-12 year old boys. The engineers have performed what sound to me like miracles in order to build a real-time 3D game in flash, and get it from green-light to open beta in less than a year, so I know they can handle this one. The trickiest bit is that right now we're funding Mind Twist internally, out of profits from Vector City Racers. We'd rather have an influx of cash so that we can pour more resources into Mind Twist and get it out sooner. My current job is to try to find someone to give us that money ... so if you happen to know (or to be) an angel investor or a venture capitalist that wants to invest in an online game/platform play, please do drop me a line as I've got a rock-solid business plan I'd like to share with you.

As for the rest of you, I'll do my best to keep you updated and I'm sure I'll eventually be fishing here for willing guinea pigs / beta testers.

Celebrity Apprentice

2009-07-17T03:15:00Z

(Pardon the dated-ness, but I was in some conversations about this last weekend and now I have a compelling urge to set my thoughts down somewhere ... which is the whole point of having a blog, right?)

So I was really enjoying the Celebrity Apprentice this season up until it turned into wrestling. I thought Trump was running a skill-game. Sure he made the occasional decision based on dramatic impact / ratings (usually keeping a controversial contestant around for a couple shows longer than they deserve), but in the end it seemed like by and large the best players won. However this season the best player, by far, was Annie Duke and yet in the end Joan Rivers was crowned victorious.

As far as I can tell, Trump just plain decided that he wanted Joan to win. She's a friend of the family, she's contemplating a reality TV career of her own, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure she and her daughter Melissa were just playing characters for the entire length of the show. Joan and Melissa (and the editors) did their best to turn Annie into a heel, and I can kind of see why Annie might rub some people the wrong way, but from my seat it was Joan and Melissa who were just embarrassing awful people. Annie was brutally effective at winning pretty much constantly, and she was also pretty consistently professional, especially in the board room. Meanwhile, Joan's attacks were personal, uncalled for, and her dismissive attitude toward poker players as a class pissed me off. Like I said, in retrospect I think Joan must have been playing a character the whole time ... I just don't believe she's really like that.

The point where I starting to suspect something was rotten was an episode about two-thirds of the way where Joan was a project manager for a task where each team has to auction off jewelry. Joan's team lost, which is always a very dangerous occurance for the PM, but Trump never even seemed to consider firing her. The loss got blamed on their jewelry selection and so the young, pretty professional golfer woman (Natalie Gulbis) who did the selection got fired, but here's the thing: Joan knew exactly what kind of jewelry should have been selected (big, dangly things that would show well on a runway), but she never gave that information to Natalie. She delegated a task that she knew how to do to an unqualified person without giving that person any guidance. And this loss is Natalie's fault? I'm not buying it ... and I was genuinely surprised, at the time, that Trump did buy it.

Like I said, I thought I was watching a skill-game. Previous seasons have featured some really smart game-playing, from the woman who won a Central Park taxi-service challenge by figuring out to sell advertising for the side of the taxi to Gene Simmons who broke the format wide-open last year by figuring out to hit up his rich friends for donations.

In the end, though, this series seems to have degenerated into merely another reality TV show. I feel sorry for Annie as I don't think she ever figured this out. In the last minute of the finale Trump does his summation and looks at her and says "Annie ... I think you know what I'm going to say." Her eyes lit up and she leaned forward with a big smile expecting to hear good news ... only to have Trump rip off his mask and reveal Vince McMahon. Oh well, I don't watch professional wrestling and I guess now I don't watch any reality TV either.

Galaxy Trucker

2009-07-17T00:42:00Z

Marc Leblanc turned me on to this board game. He's one of the superstars at my new company, Mind Control Software, and he's also the kind of guy who walks around with an encyclopedia inside his head that seems to contain every game ever made, whether tabletop or digital. For example, here's the actual conversation where I learned that this game exists: I was singing the praises of Through The Ages. It's long and definitely not a game you want to try with your more casual board gamer friends, but totally worth the 1+ hours per person in my opinion. I blogged about it a bit here and it's still in heavy rotation with the hard-core part of the Wizards crowd. Anyway, I described it as being by "some Czech game designer" and he responded "Vlaada Chvatil?" I said I thought that sounded right, and he told me I should try Chvatil's latest game: Galaxy Trucker.

In Galaxy Trucker you first have to assemble your spaceship out of Carcasonne-style tiles that have things like engines, guns, crew quarters, and cargo bays on them. Then everybody's ships are subjected to a (somewhat) random collection of obstacles as they fly around and try to collect cargo to sell. The flavor is actually pretty awesome and as a generator of cool narratives I like the game a lot. There's also some really cool mechanical elements in the game. However, as published I'm not actually a fan of the way the rules work.

The problem for me is that the ship construction itself is actually a twitch game masquerading as a thinking game. The rules for ship construction work like this: You can only have one tile in your hand at a time and once you place a tile onto your ship then you can never move it. All the tiles start out face-down and anytime you like you can pick one up and turn it over. If you don't attach it to your ship then you put it back face-up and anyone else can then take it for their ship. So what this turns into is a mad scramble where you're constantly scanning all the rejected face-up tiles and looking for the perfect one. Furthermore, whoever finishes first gets a head start in the obstacle course portion of the game, which is a pretty nice advantage. Did I mention that after you start building your ship you're also allowed to look at some of the hidden obstacles that you'll be flying through? There's just way too much information there for anyone who hasn't played the game dozens of times to parse.

Ship construction seems like it could be (should be?) this cool experience of min-maxing various aspects of your ship given some random resources and some (but not complete) knowledge of the hidden obstacles to come. But in practice it's a twitch game. How quickly can you grab tiles, parse their consequences, and attach them to your ship? I'm being a little bit unfair, since the game does reward quick-thinking rather than pure twitch, but the whole experience just felt really bad to me. Robo Rally is probably the most similar game I have played but Robo Rally is better in that a) You don't have to track what cards your opponents are programming (or choosing not to program), b) you don't get punished for being the last person to decide how to play out the turn unless you take significantly longer than your opponents (which seems fair to punish), and c) there's more randomness in resolution such that you aren't punished nearly as badly for making mistakes.

I think I would like Galaxy Trucker a lot more if each player got dealt a random selection of tiles and then had to construct their ship out of those. Now you can't accomplish everything you might want to (so you don't have to feel bad about not being perfect) and now you don't have this wonky interaction with your opponets that gives a huge advantage to experienced players.

All in all, Galaxy Trucker has enough cool elements that it could be a game I really like, but only if you replace the twitchy ship construction phase with something more like a "sealed deck" experience. Meanwhile, the game is nothing whatsoever like Through The Ages, which is pretty impressive and means that Vlaada Chvatil is a name well worth remembering.

My Hall of Fame Ballot

2009-06-27T19:09:00Z

Wizards should be releasing the ballots for this year’s ProTour Hall of Fame any week now. I think this year is a “catch up” year. There are 2-3 obvious HoFers who are on the ballot for the first time (Antoine Ruel, Kamiel Corneleissen, and probably Frank Karsten) but after that I think we should allbe debating which old-timers deserve a spot. From my seat, that conversation boils down to Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz, Chris Pikula, and Justin Gary. You could make a case for a few others (Billy Jensen, Scott Johns and Mark Justice in particular) and folks will make cases that I don’t personally believe in for some other fine folks (Pat Chapin, Antonino De Rosa and Alex Shvartsman), but here’s the way I see it and the way I’m voting:

The case for Chris

I like that the Hall of Fame is about more than just results. Chris had a decent career as a player - 3 PT Top 8’s, 4 GP Top 8’s, an Invitational win – but there aren’t enough slots available to let in everyone with that resume. Instead the case for Chris is all about the tremendous impact he had on the game as a personality and a community builder. I made this case in my year 1 ballot, and upon re-reading that I’m really happy with it. It’s probably one of the best things I ever wrote about the Pro Tour and I’d encourage you to go follow that link now.Seriously, I want to say all those things again, but I’m not going to be able to write them any better. I’ll wait.

In addition, we have an opportunity this year to try to right a wrong on Chris’s behalf. Lots of folks (myself included), think it was a mistake for Wizards to take away his Meddling Mage art when they reprinted the card. Let’s give Chris a ring to replace it with.

The case for Steve

Pop quiz time: Who has more lifetime Pro Points – Mike Turian or Steve OMS? (The answer is Steve, at 237.) Who has more Grand Prix Top 8’s –Dirk Baberowski, Ben Rubin, or Steve OMS? (Steve has more than those two combined, 3 to 6 to 10.) How many people have finished Top 4 in two different Player of the Year races and then failed to get voted into the Hall of Fame? (Just Steve.)

I guess folks are looking at the mere 3 Pro Tour Top 8’s on Steve’s resume and deciding that somehow doesn’t measure up, but that just seems short-sighted to me. If we decided to make a big deal about finals or semi-finals appearances then his 3would look really good (he’s got a 1^st, a 2^nd, and a 3rdin his three Sunday appearances). Meanwhile, if we were including Junior Pro Tour results in these stats then he would look even better.

Mostly, the case for Steve OMS is that for about 4-5 years he was one of the best couple of players in the game. He’s a bit overshadowed by his buddy Jon, but it was Steve who taught first the east coast and then the Pro Tour how to draft. It was Steve who won the most Grand Prix when Jon,Steve, and I became the first players to start traveling internationally for them. And it’s Steve who is the most deserving of a catch-up vote for the ProTour Hall of Fame this year. He finished 7^th, 10^th, and 7^ththe last three years so I think he’s got a very legitimate shot this year.

The case for Justin

If you liked my year 1 ballot and you’re on a roll, here’s a link to my year 2 ballot as well. I think it’s decent, but I’m not as proud of it, especially since my statistical argument against Justin Gary is just wrong. The stat I was grasping for but failed to find at the time is “peak median finish.” Median finish seems like a good way in theory to judge which players were consistently good rather than which caught the lucky breaks necessary to put up a bunch of Top 8’s. However, median finish is dragged down by all the times guys will show up for Tour after their prime is over just because it’s fun to hang out and play. That shouldn’t somehow make them *worse* candidates, right? So take everyone’s best 3-year run and look at their median finish during that run … and Justin Gary in his prime is revealed as one of the best on Tour with an outstanding peak median finish of 25^th.That’s actually better than all five guys who got voted in last year, and the only person on the ballot with a better run is Mark Justice. Meanwhile, he’s also got two US national team appearances, including an individual win for himself and a team world championship.

Justin is competing with Karsten for a spot on my ballot right now. Their resumes are pretty similar with 3 Top 8’s each. Justin has the US Nationals performances but Karsten has 30 more lifetime Pro Points (280 to250). I suspect that Karsten’s writing and community building efforts will ultimately get him the nod, but I want to see the official WotC stats and listen to what others have to say about this year’s ballot before I finally make up my mind.

Randy Buehler’s Ballot:

Antoine Ruel

Steve O’Mahoney-Schwartz

Kamiel Corneleissen

Chris Pikula

Justin Gary / Frank Karsten

Bejeweled Blitz Addiction

2009-06-19T22:22:04Z

I am completely and thoroughly addicted to Bejeweled Blitz right now. BB is a slick mini-version of the classic match-three game that PopCap has put onto facebook in an effort to advertise the full version, along with their other games. It's pretty simple: score as many points as you can in one minute, but the genius part comes from all the ways in which they're using facebook.

Having been both a Magic player and a Magic developer, I already understand how effective "organized play" can be at getting you sucked deeper and deeper into a hobby. It's both aspirational (in that you get the chance to try to be the best at something) and inspirational (in that going to an event and seeing how many other people are also playing this game makes you feel like you're part of something big and important (rather than just wasting your time)). I think a big part of what's going on with Bewjewled Blitz is that online games are finally starting to figure out how to take advantage of social networking in order to tap into those emotions.

The first and almost certainly the most impactful tactics they're using is that they have a leaderboard that shows you how your best score for the week stacks up against your friends list. This is a mechanic that Who Has the Biggest Brain also uses pretty effectively - "There's no way that {so-and-so} is better / smarter than me, I'll just have to play some more and take up my rightful place higher on the leaderboard." This is probably the most impactful improvement to high score board technology since coin-op Asteroids machines first gave gamers the opportunity to pretend their initials are A-S-S. The smart things they've done within the game include a) not showing you your rank with respect to the whole world, b) only tracking your single highest score (not your average or anything else that accurately measures skill as opposed to effort), and c) wiping away the scores once per week so things start over regularly. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in to everything facebook can do, like sending trash talk to your buddies, posting badges on your wall, and bragging about your high scores to your news stream audience. Ron Foster called me out by name when he hung 180k on the board last week, and I definitely plan to enjoy myself when I beat that mark.

This week they pushed a new batch of features that are definitely working their magic on me. Now they're tracking how many times you get each of the badges (25k, 50k, etc.) and they've got a system so that you level-up when you accumulate enough copies of each badge. Leveling up doesn't mean anything other than bragging rights, but it doesn't need to. Making your numbers bigger can be its own reward. (Does anyone know if Gygax invent the level-up mechanic? Or did D&D merely popularize it? It's got to be the most powerful, impactful mechanic in the history of gaming, right?)

Those of you who haven't played the Blitz variant of Bejeweled are probably wonderign what all the fuss is about, and what on earth Bejeweled is doing in this particular blog. I've thought about that some myself, too, and I think what's going on is that I really enjoy the way BB tests my ability to think quickly. The one-minute time limit makes it a very fast-paced game (and the zero-level strategy is to make matches as quickly as possible), but at the same time it's not actually a twitch game. It tests and rewards my brain's reaction time, but not my dexterity. The faster I can think and notice things, the more points I get. This is for me a stark contrast with FPS and RTS type games, where it doesn't matter how good my ability to think strategically actually is, I can't score points because I'm not nimble enough with the controls. Meanwhile, one-minute of sustained concentration can actually be a nice little adrenaline rush.

I don't seem to be the only one who likes it. 81 of my 360 friends have played this as some point with 30+ routinely earning badges every week, and I think it's only been out for a couple of months. According to facebook stats, it's got over 4 million players per month (good enough for Top 25 status amongst all facebook apps) and over a million playing it each day.

I hope PopCap is happy with it, because i want them (and others) to continue doing good quality work like this. Their monetization plan seems to be just to drive folks to their own website. They don't have any ads up except for their own stuff (well, none in addition to the ones facebook themselves always add to the page anyway). As far as their own stuff goes, I do in fact now own a copy of Plants Versus Zombies which I don't think I would even have been aware of if they hadn't tacked a preview video for it onto the front of my BBlitz experience one week.

The forums are now open if anyone else needs to admit any of their own addictions ...

Garfield on Games

2009-06-11T07:23:00Z

Richard Garfield has started a blog – Games With Garfield. So far there are two podcasts (where he is joined by fellow Wizards alumni Skaff Elias and Tyler Bielman), an intriguing outline of a methodology for reviewing games, and a description of a 52-card card game. Assuming he keeps at it, this should become a compelling stop for me as I browse the internet.

Podcast 1 – Cooperative games

The opening “tabletop gaming news” section is a bit rough. They clearly haven’t found their voice yet. However, the stuff on cooperative games is really interesting. These are big-brained guys trying to understand what makes games tick. Pandemic is fun, but their critique of it and all cooperative games is dead on: one player can play for everyone. They discuss several ways to solve this problems … I had never thought of role-playing as a solution for this particular problem, but it does actually work. I also hadn’t really thought of time pressure as the primary way that computer games solve this problem, but again their analysis seems spot on.

Most of their conversation lives on a meta-level – the conversation is about game design, not game strategy. That said, I strongly suspect that most strategy gamers would find this stuff interesting.

Podcast 2 – Variation in set-up

I really enjoyed this one. Hearing Richard talk about Cosmic Encounter and how his experiences with that game inspired his design of Magic is still inspirational despite the fact that I’ve heard the story several times before. Listening to these guys discuss Dominion’s family tree is also cool. The Magic and D&D stuff is awesome, but then they take on golf … and Skaff’s take on miniature golf is even awesomer.

Their discussion of the way in which variation in set-up gives games replayability sheds light nicely on the distinction between Agricola and Le Havre that I have been attempting (less articulately) to make in previous blog entries. Agricola is like Magic in that you get a random hand of cards to play with and that can send each game in a very different direction. Le Havre, on the other hand, has much less variety in the way you set things up. Sure there is some, and it’s possible that I haven’t played enough to appreciate how impactful the small differences actually are each time, but I doubt it. Le Havre seems more like Bridge – it’s not precisely identical each time you play, but the diversity / replayability pales in comparison to Magic.