Magtheridon's Lair Preview

So UDE has put up Magtheridon's Lair previews. It looks sick, and super hard to beat. I don't know much about the actual raid in the computer game, but if it's anything like the card game version is, it sounds really rough. There are no stages to this raid deck like there was with the Molton Core and Onyxia's Lair raid decks. UDE looks to have another unique gaming experience on their hands.

Make sure you hit up all the articles it looks amazing.

In Other WoW TCG News

The feast of Winter Veil Boxed Set is sold out. I picked up a few, one for myself and some for Christmas gifts and it's a great set. You get 12 exclusive cards(which are awesome), one pack of each set that came out in Year 1, and a really cool holiday themed deck box. Get down to your local hobby store and if you can get your hands on one do it. Cause once they are gone they are gone.

HOLY SHIT! Servants Of The Betrayer!

Those of you who have followed the blog know I am a huge World of Warcraft fan, and that I play the card game quite regularly. Well the next expansion is Servants of the Betrayer, and while it's a ways away they spoiled a card today.

HOLY HELL! What the F is a Traitor hero?? I can't wait this block is going to be fantastic. They are even capping the block off with a Black Temple raid deck. BRING IT ON UDE!

Before I Put The Laundry Away..

So that's some fucked up shit about Peter Moore huh? I can't believe that. I liked Peter a lot as the face of Xbox he did a great job last week at E3, and even handling all that warranty shit. You will be missed Peter...have fun at EA.

For you card game nerds Magic 10th edition is now in stores, and I am dying to get my hands on some, but honestly my crew just doesn't roll with Magic. Oh well, maybe when it hits Magic Online I'll pick some up.

I played some Gears of War last night and man there is no better feeling in online gaming right now, then chainsawing a human opponent in half. It's simply breathtaking. I was playing ranked games for a while last night, and getting my ass absolutely handed to me. So tonight if I jump into Gears I am going to play player matches and see if the competition is a little less stiff.

However, my friends have been playing Rainbow Six Vegas like every night for many many hours. So after a couple of rounds of Uno and Texas Hold 'Em I might jump into Vegas and save Gears for another night.

Hey! Add me as a friend on Xbox Live! I need more friends. My gamertag is Uglyorgan just drop a note saying you look at the blog and I will be more than happy to play some games with you. If I have time between games I have something to post, otherwise I am going to leave it for tomorrow, either way, talk to you soon.

177-Summerfest Aftermath

Alright here is my review from last night's hot, sticky, sweaty, not all that great Summerfest. I will say that I did like the Marcus Amphitheater however. It's a pretty good place to SEE a show, the sound however, sucked bad.

I can't give a blow by blow set list to you unfortunately, but I can say that I had never seen The Hush Sound until last night, and I thought they played very well. The problem with the concert was that the bands were way too loud, and vocals were unintelligible for the opening bands. The only band that sounded good was Panic at the Disco.

The Academy who I love to death(and refuse to call The Academy Is...) played almost the same set they did on the Honda Civic Tour with William even doing the same segues into songs. The only difference here was at the end they smashed their stuff.

Gym Class Heroes who I was most excited to see sounded like shit. It wasn't there fault, but if I hadn't already known the words to their songs there was no way in hell I would have been able to tell what they were.

 
After a way longer wait then between the other bands Panic at the Disco came out, and I had seen them on their tour back in November and I was dreading them coming out and doing the same show. The first thing I noticed is it looked like they were setting up as a four piece, not the six piece I saw back then. The band then came out to like a weird remix of the Intro track on "A Fever.." and launched into "The Only Difference..." and the whole set was played fast, and heavy with none of the filler the additional musicians brought with them on the fall tour. It was great, I was really impressed with the way they played. Brendan ran, jumped, and rolled all over the stage I feel like he really figured out how to be a frontman without needing dancers and circus clowns all around him. The whole band was on, and really impressive. The two highlights were of course a new song which had Brendan at the piano, I can't really describe the song other than it kind of swelled a bit at the middle before coming back down. I doubt if it makes it onto the album it will sound how it sounded last night, but you never know.

So besides Panic's impressive performance, and The Academy breaking everything it was a typical "arena" concert with overpriced food, screaming girls, and shitty sound. Oh well I'm sure the 15 year old girls didn't notice.

So there you go. Today's been a pretty miserable day I've just been sitting around teaching myself how to play VS. System. They just released an online version of it, and so far I suck bad. Although I must admit I haven't bought any cards yet, and my deck is just made up of the X-Men/Brotherhood starter they give you. It's worth a shot though if you are at all interested in playing VS.

164-That's No Cardboard Moon

So I was at Target yesterday and I picked up two packs of Star Wars Pocket Models, at first I was turned off by the $4.99 price tag, and the fact that they didn't have the power up pack(the equivalent to a starter deck), but I said what the heck and bought em. First of all you get an impressive amount of stuff in the pack. Six cards, 4-8 ships depending on which rarity they are(uncommons and rares take up a whole card where as the smaller more common ships can be loaded 3-4 per card), the rules, and 2 of WizKids' famous micro dice. Now, my only big gripe about the game so far is that putting together TIE fighters will make you want to stab kittens in the throat. I broke 2 of them trying to put them together. I highly suggest keeping some glue with you. Also one of the bigger ships had a small piece that went on top of it, and it was impossible to put it on without almost bending the ship in half. There were some other pieces that were very difficult to put on. Basically putting some of these ships together was a bitch to put it lightly.

On to the game, I was only able to play the 2 pack variant. The game moved fast. We just flew our ships into each others home zone and took shots at each others objective. I can't fully review the game until I have 20 stars worth of ships and a 30 card deck, but I will say that even this small 2 pack variant was fun. Bravo for having a neat pick up and play game. ALSO the ships look bad ass, much much nicer than Wizards Transformers 3D battle game, which I own some, but haven't played yet. So if I ever get more ships and cards, I will definitely be playing some games, and will review the full game. So far though WizKids is 1 for 1 with their new releases, and HaloClix is sounding better all the time. I predicted it a few months back, and it looks like it's coming true. I'm crossing my fingers for you WizKids.

137-World of Warcraft TCG Through the Dark Portal

Tomorrow marks the first day Through the Dark Portal the second set of cards for Upper Deck's insanely popular World of Warcraft Trading Card Game is legal in tournament play. While I can't guarantee what the constructed field will look like come tomorrow, I can tell you that as far as the casual environment goes this set has gone off like a nuclear bomb. Every card feels like a power house, every card begs to have a deck built around it. Some of the new flip powers(especially the two new Warlocks) are absolutely mental. We did a bunch of play testing last night and between pets and traps Hunters continue to be a total powerhouse. Warlock abilities are no longer going to just be annoying they are going to be lethal. Mages will be able to do more damage in a single turn then we could have ever dreamed possible for insanely low costs.

If you were new to the WoW TCG I would maybe say skip Heroes of Azeroth all together, if not for the fact that two sets work together flawlessly. In constructed tournament play I can't wait to see the combos people make to create absolutely devastating decks. My Warlock deck which just a little under a month ago I claimed was finally done, is now back on the drawing board thanks to the new Horde Warlock hero and the Epic ally Lady Sylvanis Windrunner....which I just traded an entire 30 card preconstruct for.

I can't speak highly enough about this game and we are only about 3 weeks away from the Molten Core Raid Deck which my group can't wait to get our hands on. The WoW TCG just keeps on trucking and hopefully we can enjoy the ride for years to come.

135-Ugh...

So why I go away for so long I am not sure. Well actually I can tell you where I have been.

AZEROTH bitch! Yes..I FINALLY have my first level 60 character in fact as of Sunday he is level 61. So that explains a good chunk of my absence. I finally got into Outland and wow...it's like playing a totally different game. Things actually seem like they are happening around you, and you really do get a sense of storyline and drama. I'm a big fan of Outland so far and I think I have really only seen about 50% of Hellfire Peninsula.

Also we have kept on trucking with the card game out here. A couple of weeks ago a new set titled Through the Dark Portal hit the shelves and I will do my best to review it in a couple of days.

I'm keeping a Twitter now as well...you can see it on the left. Think of it as text messaging for the blog. By the way I totally ripped off the idea from Major Nelson.

Speaking of Xbox 360 I beat Crackdown and am putting that disc away until May 16th, and have FINALLY started to work through Gears of War. You can check my progress on my Gamercard which like the Twitter is to the left.

So I'm back...I'll be posting things again and I think this sums up everything.

134-Onyxia's Lair Tournament Packs

Are now available. It's limit two per address/account. So I bought my two. They go for 4000 points a piece. Yes, that is 40 packs for one Onyxia non-foil, pack of cards. I honestly don't mind. Spend em if you got em.

127-WoW TCG News

So if you have cracked open any packs of the World of Warcraft card game you no doubt ran across points cards. In each pack of boosters is a card worth 100 UDE points. Up until now those points weren't really good for anything. Until just a few days ago when UDE put these hot Yeti Tokens up in the store. A pack of 3 for 1000 points. Sure to go great with your Are We There Yeti? quest cards.

Now this coming Wednesday we get what all of us hardcore tournament players have been waiting for. Onyxia Tournament packs, which are identical to the Onyxia Treasure packs except that the cards are non-foil. Which is fine by me, cause frankly I just need 4 Nemesis Skullcaps and 3 Cull the Weaks for playing. They don't need to be all sparkly.

Also today UDE announced that their touring tournament Darkmoon Faire will start in May and will hit Chicago in JUNE!!! Be sure to check out the bad ass EA of Infernal.

Very exciting stuff for WoW TCG fans, I should be hitting up a tournament this weekend, I will be sure to let you know how it goes. Should I bring my hunter rush...or some Warlock DOT?

121-WizKids Could Dominate 2007??

So if 2006 in gaming belonged to anyone it was Upper Deck Entertainment. Vs. System, and Yu Gi Oh continue to dominate much of the TCG landscape that is not Magic: the Gathering. Vs. System is considered to be the pinnacle of competitive TCG play right now, and Yu Gi Oh keeps hooking kids in like a guy in a van telling them they have a bike in their basement. Then in October came a two headed ogre named World of Warcraft. The game was sold out for over a month and the regionals tournaments attracted thousands of players around the world. In 2007 WoW could easily overtake Magic's spot as the number one Trading Card Game.

2006 was an awkward disappointing year for WizKids Games. My return to gaming as you might recall was inspired by WizKids' HeroClix game. A game that I thoroughly enjoyed, but found that there was almost NO support for it. I would routinely show up for tournaments in my area to find I was the only one there. I even went to a HUGE pre-release tournament that had 32 players, and I slowly found out that most of these people had been traveling from one pre-release to the next all day. So this wasn't even 32 people from the same area. WizKids was clearly having some problems. The company is owned by Topps, yes that Topps the baseball card company. See WizKids was on top of the world with their Dungeons and Dragon's inspired Mage Knight. They then snatched up the license from marvel to make HeroClix. The game was a smash hit. That's when Topps stepped in and bought WizKids. WizKids then added MechWarrior to their arsenal and they felt unstoppable. WizKids then started making lots of sorta hard to get collectors pieces and suddenly HeroClix and MechWarrior were games for collectors and the player base began to drop off.

2006 did not start off well for WizKids. Then a company wide reorganization began. Then the CEO stepped down. The way MechWarrior is made is now completely different. Taking away the random boosters and instead replacing them with everyone knows what they are getting "Action Packs". There were more mis-steps and embarrassing situations for WizKids in '06, but in 2007 they could be the studio to beat.

"Jim, how could this be!?" you may ask. I will tell you....HALO AND STAR FUCKING WARS! That's right WizKids will be making a HaloClix game they are calling Halo ActionClix and a trading card game that will combine punch out cardboard ships and trading cards for Star Wars.



The Halo game is going to be fucking enormous, instant sell outs and the ultra rares and collectibles will be going for huge money on Ebay(think Leeroy Jenkins). The Star Wars game could pick up a nice head of steam now that Wizards of the Coast's god awful Star Wars TCG has finally died. You know ships like Slave 1 and cards like Boba Fett are going to be in the ultra rare category and end up fueling a huge demand. This game also has the potential to be a blockbuster. So watch out in 2007 for WizKids they may have fucked up in 2006, but '07 could be a return to form.

112-So What Happened?

Alright after over a week of hype where the hell is Jim with his Time Spiral story. Well....things....didn't go as planned. Here is what was SUPPOSED to happen this weekend.

9am-Get to tournament and register for 3 tournaments. The main events on Saturday and Sunday and a side event on Sunday.

10:15am-Start main event.

3ishpm-End main event.

3-4pm-Start side event.

7ishpm-End Saturday events.

7-8pm-Meet up with Jennifer for dinner.

9-10pm-Go back to hotel

Wake up in the morning and do Sunday's tournaments.

Well my friends this did not happen. I got to the tournament on Saturday no problem. Made it there about 9:15...plenty of time until the start. I signed up for the 3 tournaments. Well tournament number one ended up not starting until after 12. By 4pm I had only played three rounds and had a losing record(1-2) with a losing record you can't win prizes. So I decided to cut my losses and just start my side tournament rather than play the additional two rounds. Well I was told it might be HOURS until my tournament starts. Not an hour or half an hour, but many hours. I said screw this, and got my money back for the other two tournaments. That's right folks all the hype and I didn't even finish the main event. I backed out after three rounds.

There is a look at two of the packs and the tournament pack packaging. It's pretty sweet.

There is just a few of the cards I got. Well what do I think of the set? Well in this limited format it's kind of iffy, but man it's going to make things funky in constructed. I already have lots of ideas for these cards when they become legal.

Ok so in my last blog I said that I had some annoucements for the site. The first thing you may notice up on the side is an AIM link. I have a new AIM name that goes with the site, and you can chat with me anytime.

Anytime? Like anytime? Yes! I bought a new cell phone and it has mobile AIM and so anytime I have my phone on me I will be available to chat it up. So feel free to say hi, and talk about nerdy shit with me. The phone also has a camera and some other neat features, the reason I bought it is to keep in touch with the site at all times now.

That's a pic of it, it's bad ass I love it.

Speaking of loving things. This is my new sweatshirt. I want to be buried in it.

109-Time Spiral Prerelease Week: DAY 3

Yeah, don't get too excited the Magic The Gathering website is down so no card preview today. I did spend part of work day dreaming about the cards I have posted and what kind of decks I could build around them, and if they would work or not. I'm a nerd what can I do. So sorry no card previews, but hey, if you are going to the prerelease let me know. Shoot me an email or leave a comment.

108-Time Spiral Prerelease Week: Day 2

Alright Day 2, and man have you been following the updates? Such cool shit. Including this guy..

Holy crap...THIS is the card I want to build a deck around. Can you imagine direct damaging this thing to KILL your opponent. I want that to be my next constructed deck and if I can pull one during pre-release I am going to try my hardest to build a deck around. So awesome.

WHA?? A black beatdown deck? Yes, Sahr makes a black beatdown deck possible. I mean maybe there has been before and I missed it, but pulling this guy in a Limited format and then filling your deck with nothing, but creatures would be a great deck to build this weekend. It's number 2 on my list of decks I would want to build.

Yeah....Shadow....AND Flying. What's up Mr. Unblockable a huge card to pull this weekend. I see lots of ideas for Shadow/Flying decks.

See you tomorrow.

107-Time Spiral Prerelease Week: DAY 1

So as you may or may not know this weekend is the Magic The Gathering: Time Spiral Prerelease tournaments, and yes I will be at my local tournament this weekend, hopefully you will too. So to countdown to the big weekend I will show off some of the cards that Wizards of the Coast has previewed over on the Magic website. Offer a tad bit of commentary and then cap things off on Friday with the Time Spiral Prerelease Primer article(yes I am going to rip off the WOTC site for content this week). Also on Saturday and Sunday I will be armed with a camera and high speed internet to let you know how I did, what I saw and show off some of the cards I got. It should be fun. Let's do this.

YES! Slivers are back. Slivers are the creatures that help each other out by giving "All Slivers something something", you can bet there will be tons of Sliver decks at the tournaments.

Buyback is back as well...see Time Spiral....back in time? Making sense? It should be fun to pay those high casting costs in constructed to get those cards back, but I don't think there is going to be a lot of Buyback in Limited, oh well I will know on Saturday.

Yup, Flash becomes the name of a mechanic that has been around for a while, and Teferi does things one better by making it so that your opponent can't play instants, but everything you hold IS an instant. Should make for some great deck ideas.

So there you go. Day 1 of Time Spiral Previews....see you tomorrow.

106-Buncha Little Stuff

So I am on day 2 of 7 for working this week. Yup, a weeks straight of work. I'll explain why all the overtime tomorrow. When I start.....MAGIC THE GATHERING TIME SPIRAL PRE-RELEASE COUNTDOWN!!! Yup, all next week mixed in with anything else I am going to be talking about, I am going to throw in lots of stuff from the new Magic set "Time Spiral". See next weekend is the pre-release tournaments, and I am going to both days of it, and that is all I am going to say for now.

Speaking of Magic, on Friday I went out to play again, and if you recall last week I went 0-3...well I came home ripped that deck apart, built a new one. Spent two days tweaking it, and after all that this week I went 2-1! Yup, I still gots it. Of course I could have just been incredibly lucky. The first game I destroyed some dude who is like supposedly super awesome, then I got murdered by the kid who would go on to win for the night, and then I had a tense final game that saw me winning 2-1. There are some things I can do to the deck to make it a little leaner and a little meaner, so I am going to slowly work on that over the next couple of weeks. I wont be playing this Friday to make up for the Time Spiral filled weekend I will be having.

Nintendo announced all the details on the Wii on Thursday, and it's a tad pricier than I thought it would be coming in at $250, but with a game bundled in and all the cool motion shit, I'm still going to pick one up. November 19th, really isn't that far away.

I have a couple more comics to read and I will come back and discuss them, so hang tight it shouldn't be too long.

101-Friday Night Magic Pt. 2

Well on Friday I headed out to that other store to play Magic. The good news was that it was a sanctioned Friday Night Magic location. I came in dead last and still walked away with one of the "random" prizes. Everyone else was playing super monster combo decks that set up win conditions and then knocked me down. I had a deck that barely carried a theme(sacrifice). The bad news was that all these kids at the store were like aged 15-20ish. I still had a good time though and they sold packs for cheap so I picked up four more packs of Coldsnap. I am going to sit down with my cards today and really study them. I think I am going to go with a W/U deck. As much as I love R/B I don't think it's a winning combo. I didn't play against a single B deck on Friday. So with that said I am going to go try to put together a winning deck to run next Friday.

098-Friday Night Magic: The Aftermath!

So as you may have read on Friday I was heading out to a local gaming store to play some Friday Night Magic The Gathering. Well as it turns out there were people there and I did get to play 3 games(1-2) I didn't win any prizes, but I still had a good time, and must say that I haven't really lost it in the 3 or so years I have played an actual physical game of Magic. I am however going to head out to a different gaming store NEXT Friday and see if it's any better. See they play Extended at the local store and I like playing Standard, but I will see how it goes. Getting to this other store is going to be some work. So maybe just going to the local one and dealing with the extended format will be what I have to do.

I went to the comic book store today(more on that later) and they were having 25% off Magic cards so I picked up five packs of Coldsnap and pulled some great great cards. Today I am going to sit down and see if I can't hash out a decent Standard deck and then maybe later in the week try to crank out a good Extended deck.

So like I said I will be playing again this Friday, just different store. I'll keep you posted.

095-Friday Night Magic

My journey into geekdom began about 12 years ago, when some friends of mine were playing a game called Warhammer 40,000. It was an overtly complicated, way too expensive to explain to the average human being kind of game. We loved it though. Spending entire weekends playing a single game. Staying up all night discussing strategy and reading through the rule books. We would talk about games past, and what we would do in the next turn. After a certain point though, your army is complete, and you have done everything you can to trick it out. We needed something new, a new addiction. We fell into the same trap lots of people did, we started playing Magic: The Gathering. Now...you either fall into one of two camps...you used to play Magic and remember it fondly or you have heard of it. Magic was poised to be something huge, but it all kind of fizzled out when Pokemon came out. Well in the aftermath of Pokemon there are still a large group of people who play Magic. In the time between I stopped playing and now, the friends I played with went away and new games took it's place. Then a few months ago something happened. I read that Wizards of the Coast was going to make a sequel to the greatest Magic set of all time. Ice Age. It's called Coldsnap and it's all it took to get me foaming at the mouth to play one of the greatest games of all time again. So I headed out to the local gaming store and saw a board that said they have Magic games on Friday and Saturday nights. Now for those not in the know, Friday Night Magic or FNM has been a tradition in M: TG for many years, however TONIGHT will be the first time I attend an FNM. Yes I went out and bought a few boosters of Coldsnap and fashioned myself a couple of decks. I am ready to get back out there and play some Magic the Gathering. My hopes are that soon I will play at the pro level. The payouts and perks for being a Magic pro player are pretty insnae. Now is definately the time to get back into the game. Needless to say I am very excited and will post about how I do out there tonight.

093-Alright, Where Were We

So Upper Deck released Demo Decks for the World of Warcraft card game a couple of days ago, and you can bet your ass I grabbed a couple. Yes, I have already played a game with em. Yes, it's a great fucking game. Yes, it's pretty much everything I wanted it to be. With one minor complaint/exception. Your hero which is the centerpiece of your deck, CAN'T attack without a weapon. Basically your hero the card which the game centers it's world around is defenseless unless you get him/her a weapon pronto. Of course if your Hero could attack easily the game would actually crumble under it's own weight. Why? Cause Allies are the actual focal point of the game. Yup, your deck will be CRAMMED full of allies. Allies that "protect" your hero or will draw away the fire of your opponents allies. Personally after just a short amount of time with the 1 on 1 PVP portion of the game I think the real magic in the WoW TCG will be the Raid decks. Where five friends get together and four of them play their hero decks while the other one plays "the dungeon" it's a bit much to get into right now, but I think that's where the fun of this game is, but we shall see. The first raid deck launches three weeks after the main set.

For those who were wondering about Jennifer and her surgery, well everything is ok. She recovered nicely and what they removed wasn't cancerous.

Ok how fucking awful was the Video Music Awards last night. Holy shit, first of all it felt like it was thrown together overnight. Seriously there was stuff that didn't even work. Like they would announce something and then thrity or fourty seconds would pass and nothing would happen. Jack Black didn't host as much as he would come out and do like a Jack Blackism and then announce the presenter. The only highlights were Panic! At The Disco's performance, them winning Video of the Year(!!!!) and Fall Out Boy taking Viewer's Choice. I would also like to point out that about this time last year I predicted Panic's success.....you know just saying. I think MTV needs to take a year off from their phony award show.