Speaking of DrawGo Radio, that’s something that still surprises me at its growth. My time has become more and more of a premium, so starting with episode 14 Steven will be taking over as podcast editor, which should go well since he’s the recording industry major and I’m just general electronic media. I’ll be focusing more on the background and doing production work for the site, including a complete overhaul of its layout and an update to a much more… user-friendly feel. I’m also moving closer to campus so even though I’ll be there on average around ten hours a day, the proximity should actually free me up to do some real work on game reviews again, and maybe even a separate podcast or video series there. I may be deluding myself, however, because in addition to my part-time job at the university library I’ve taken over as online editor at the university newspaper, which is like a part-time job except, because of school policy, I can’t accept pay at two different positions on campus so it has to be volunteer (and yes, sadly, working in the library pays more than working on the paper).

So anyway, DrawGo Radio and The Gates of Rashomon. They’re both getting some fairly dramatic rebuilding, and a bit more attention to content quality, if all goes to plan. Not that I’ve really been disappointed with what’s come beforehand, but I think I may start just writing and requiring everything in AP or the best approximation possible. It’s really stifling, but it’s also efficient… I’m still trying to find the best compromise.

So anyway, that’s the state of things; seemed as good a time as any for an update.

DrawGo Radio #7

Speaking of ad-supported, it looks like we might just have our own website up and running in the next few days. I’ll keep you informed, true believers.

I got nothing.

In all seriousness, if you don’t mind a little more “serious business”, you can also check out the social media and marketing journal that has kept my blogging attention this semester here. I’ll eventually collapse it and condense it with The Gates but being in a position where I had to start something new yet have regular content updates, I was forced to split, albeit temporarily.

As an aside, people still ask me why I chose Blip as a distribution channel, when we’re an audio-only podcast; well, we’re working on changing that. Will we be recording the whole show in video? Not likely… there’s just too much editing and too much need for retakes if we have to worry about visual continuity as well as audio. What I am trying to do is, well, learn my Adobe software more effectively; I have to confess, I started out with zero experience in the actual production and editing side of all of this when we started a few weeks ago, and that’s part of the main holdup for any of our technical delays: I’m usually trying to learn how to do something, mostly on my own. I don’t mean that as excuse, but explanation, on why the show is so slow to “evolve”, yet simultaneously can make large jumps in production from one week to the next. So what all this means RE: Blip, is that I do hope to be able to add in some “video”, albeit stills with card images, decklists, etc., while we may also record live video at future events that will be available in the video-only releases at Blip.

What’s the next step for us beside that? Well, actually… I’ve considered a few possibilities. I would like to upgrade our equipment, for one; we use a Sony digital recorder with a single electret condenser for recording, and then I process and edit on my old portable Sinbox. What I would like to have is something more like a multi-channel input with a set of lavaliers… Something to pursue for the future. If you’d like to improve the quality of your experience, of course, you could always contribute via that little Donate button on the right there… But I’d like to find more tangible means of reward for showing support, so I’m not a huge fan of the button. Still, if the spirit moves, have at it; same if you just like what you’ve read here and want to see more.

Anyway… yes. Some links:

DrawGo Radio on twitter.

You can also find us on Facebook, where we will be adding photos and you can discuss the show with me and the other hosts.

Creatures
Vampire Lacerator x4
Bloodghast x4
Gatekeeper of Malakir x3
Vampire Hexmage x3
Vampire Nighthawk x3

Spells
Bloodchief Ascension x4
Lightning Bolt x4
Burst Lightning x4
Quest for the Gravelord x3
Terminate x4
Blightning x4

Land
Swamp x8
Mountain x4
Akoum Refuge x4
Dragonskull Summit x4

Haven’t tested at all, probably won’t get to, but it seems fun. Maybe a little less FNM than the previous version, but also clearly more expensive to build. I started off with a Grixis slant, but tilted back over towards a more Sligh build. (Oooooold.)

]]> http://sinistergrasp.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/drawgo-radio-pilot-episode-001-well-fix-it-in-post/feed/ 1 Sinistergrasp http://sinistergrasp.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/there-will-be-blood-there-will-be-a-bloodswarm/ http://sinistergrasp.wordpress.com/2009/10/10/there-will-be-blood-there-will-be-a-bloodswarm/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:33:10 +0000 Sinistergrasp http://sinistergrasp.wordpress.com/?p=226 ]]> I actually managed to play in a Constructed event last night, with a deck I built Thursday evening, played a match with, and finalized before the start of last night’s tournament. So rough, to say the least, and it showed in my play performance; the majority of my losses were directly from blatant play mistakes and oversights from not having complete familiarity with my cards or abilities. RTFC indeed, more than once I missed a Bloodghast on a Landfall trigger (losing a game that was a win otherwise in one case) while it was halfway through the event before I remembered that Quest for the Gravelord grows with every creature death, not just mine (though that was exactly why I added it to the deck, I got caught up in my own death effect interactions I basically transcribed my own creature death as a requirement onto it). And so by the few cards (and the less than subtle title of this article), it’s probably obvious what archetype I was playing: Vampire Aggro.

Yes, this deck currently has a lot of controversy; many competitive players dismiss its viability, marginalizing it as a Timmy Tribal theme with no staying power. From my perspective, I wasn’t entirely sure that it would work out, but even I sometimes suffer from nostalgia or dementia (take your pick) and decide to try and make something old new again, and the Vampire tribe stands upright and demands some Suicide Black attention. Do I think the archetype can win a Pro Tour? Couldn’t say. What I can speak to is its ability to have real lasting power against control, which surprised me and made me consider whether this was really an Aggro deck or might qualify for something more along Midrange classification. The greatest advantage with this deck is that everything is fast, everything is quickly and easily a threat, and so the opponent has to answer everything, which works to your advantage because every time something of yours is answered, you’re still likely gaining some kind of resource advantage due to the low cost of your spells or the interplay of your various triggers.

Creatures
Vampire Lacerator x4
Gull Draz Vampire x3
Bloodghast x4
Gatekeeper of Malakir x4
Vampire Hexmage x3
Vampire Nighthawk x3
Malakir Bloodwitch x2

Spells
Bloodchief Ascension x2
Quest for the Gravelord x3
Feast of Blood x2
Sign in Blood x4
Hideous End x2

Planeswalkers
Sorin Markov x1

Artifacts
Blade of the Bloodchief x3

Land
Swamp x16
Crypt of Agadeem x2
Piranha Marsh x2

Total = 60 cards

Sideboard
Black Knight x4
Vampire Hexmage x1
Deathmark x3
Doom Blade x3
Tendrils of Corruption x2
Rise from the Grave x2

The sideboard was a bit of an afterthought, from lack of preparation time, and it shows. And to be perfectly honest, my overall record was 2-2, but I really did give up that many critical moments with play mistakes (hence why I classify myself as casually competitive). So aside from the inevitable K-bombing I got last night, I want to single some cards out, in no particular order:

Bloodchief Ascension – Amazing. You read the card and its potential seems rather obvious, but it’s really hard to judge the impact of suffering a player-aimed Vicious Hunger from every card you play until you actually face it. This card alone gives you a mid-game and further; I underestimated its value but still managed to get one activated in the first four turns in a lot of games, and it reshaped the contours of the entire game. Path my Bloodghast? Vicious Hunger. Crack a fetch? Vicious Hunger. Day of Judgment? Vicious Hunger… and possibly much worse. It’s hard to overstate what this can do for you; I was hit with three Cruel Ultimatums almost in a row one game, and due to this card came through the other side and would have actually still won (to which my opponent agreed) if I hadn’t scrubbed out on a Landfall trigger with my Ghasts the turn after the third. Finally, there’s just a particularly malevolent pleasure you get when activating this by targeting your opponent with Sign in Blood; not a tactic I would commonly recommend, just always remember it’s an option, especially if you push their hand size over the top while doing so.

Quest for the Gravelord – Also particularly brutal, in addition to the possibility of a fairly quick 5/5 for one black, more importantly he is your insurance policy against mass removal, potentially allowing you to over-commit to the battlefield in order to force the opponent to answer something or be overrun.

Sorin Markov – I do like him, and he really is on theme for the deck, but I don’t think he stays. He has good interaction with Bloodchief Ascension, and his second ability is a definite keeper if you run into an early lifelinker that gets hard to control, but his strengths are too situational and the games he wins for aggro would most likely have been better served with another Bloodwitch. He probably fits well into a slower build that uses Vampire Nocturnus, but that’s just not this deck; a game changer but rarely a game finisher.

Vampire Hexmage – The Planeswalker Slayer; that’s what everyone knows her for. What many overlook is that she is two mana for two power with first strike, strong against another aggro deck. Give her a Blade of the Bloodchief, and while you’ll be diminishing the value of offering her to take out a planeswalker, a large first striker that takes control of the battlefield seems a fair trade.

Bloodghast – When he goes to the graveyard, move him to the top, put a die on your library, whatever you need to do to remember to Landfall. Feel free to throw him into the mill, his easy resurrection combined with all of your death triggers makes him a prime candidate for feeding your other effects.

Gatekeeper of Malakir – Your new best friend. A lot of current decks-especially with the ease of getting land into play-angle towards a big finisher instead of a consistent, prolongued struggle, and a lot of these finishers have shroud, protection, or some other ability to make them more durable, and this makes all that bluster and bravado for naught. There should almost never be a time when you need a body on the field more than you need to kick the Gatekeeper into play; as innocuous as he may be, he probably does the most work towards your game state of any of the creatures in this deck.

Malakir Bloodwitch – Another creature I sorely underestimated going in. The life swing is nice, even if it’s only a point. More importantly, you can plant a Bloodwitch on the table and she will stop a Baneslayer cold until you draw into a more direct answer. Give her a Blade, and she can rapidly become too much threat to handle; by default, she cannot be stopped by Lightning Bolt, Path to Exile, or Doom Blade, and pushing her merely to 6/6 will probably be enough to finish most of anything she might face you couldn’t otherwise handle.

Blade of the Bloodchief – This is currently worth about a quarter, i.e., a trash rare. Get them. Their low cost to play and equip lead to great versatility at all stages of the game; a common trick that worked well for me would be to equip the Blade to a creature I didn’t want to risk just throwing away while sending in something disposable like a Bloodghast. Block, and the creature I wanted to protect is suddenly a credible threat. Take the damage, and I move the Blade over to what I just attacked with after combat to deter forcing me to chump block. Creatures are going to be dying a lot; either yours or theirs, and every time you can get an essentially free permanent +2/+2 that doesn’t move with the Blade. That’s another important aspect of the Blade; the creature receives counters instead of the artifact, so while you can’t just make a fresh summon an immovable monster, what you can do is “spread the love”, as well as make sure the Blade has an impact even if it has to leave the field. Other interactions to watch out for are being able to offer up your Hexmages and even feed a Gatekeeper to itself if you need to take a gambit on putting all of your eggs into one unblockable basket for the win.

Now, after the event last night, I’ve come to a new revision of the deck. I haven’t had a chance to test it, but with the results I had, I think I have a handle on some good directions to go. I had zero mana problems, even with my four CIPT lands; I even had multiple one land openers and powered through for wins, and now that I really think it over, my slowest start of the night came from a three land start. Not to mention the games where my Bloodghasts would get Pathed; the Crypts of Agadeem were an interesting experiment, but needing four creatures in the graveyard to get any benefit just makes them too ineffective. However, the Piranha Marshes are just fine; those one life stings add up when the game starts slowing down. I feel I could almost gamble with eighteen lands and still come through okay, cutting the Marshes entirely for a couple of the one-drops I’m cutting; possibly for a later revision.

As I said above, Sorin is gone, because he’s either irrelevant or bomby in this build, and that’s just too much variance. On the other hand, I always like to see a Malakir Bloodwitch, and that even drops our curve a tiny step. As it stood, it would take the tenth draw before you could reliably break a 50% chance of drawing six lands, and even with Sign in Blood’s help, that’s too slow.

Finally, I want to go up to four on both the Quest for the Gravelord and Bloodchief Ascension, because these both almost disproportionately punish the opponent for interfering with my goals while the only way they would be useless to me is if I’m already failing at those same goals in the first place. That may sound like win more, but it’s more like win better. To accomodate these replacements, I think I’ll sideline the Guul Draz Vampires. I had already dialed back to only three because drawing them early isn’t terribly beneficial beyond being a body that can get or feed counters, and their ability really walks the line between win more and win better. On the other hand, less bodies for the mill may end up noticeable, and this move leads directly into another change that I’m not sure is entirely for the best, so like I said, sidelined, but not removed from future consideration.

The last decision the Guul Draz removal informed is the use of Feast of Blood. I actually never played this once last night, and after playing enough games, I have to ramp up to four to be able to draw one with any consistent hope of it not being dead in my hand, or I have to cut it entirely. Don’t get me wrong; it’s an incredibly powerful spell. For two mana, you can destroy with no restrictions, and even get four life out of it, which helps in light of probably dealing with your own self-inflicted problems. The two restrictions working against it are Sorcery speed (not that much of a problem, you’re primarily removing blockers, not attackers) and the need for two vampires. Life gain is actually more useful than the credit it receives, as Magic uses an initiative shifting play design structure, so the value of not losing while simultaneously still winning is valid because they are not as mutually exclusive concepts as players generalize. Because of this, I think sideboarding four of these for the aggro match-up is the way to go.

So that leaves two slots. From my vantage point, I see two possible cards to go in: Doom Blade, or more Hideous Ends. Doom Blade keeps our curve, and replacing the current Hideous Ends with Doom Blade plays even faster. On the other hand, Hideous End costs only one extra mana to knock an additional two life off, and as an Instant, you can feed your Bloodchief Ascension during the opponent’s turn while also getting the life loss in and removing a blocker. It nudges the curve up, but I think it’s worth it for the actual and potential utility.

Now comes the sideboard. Nothing I post can really be concrete, here, because your local meta makes all the difference. Still, big control with Sphinxes and Angels is running around a lot here, so I’ll play accordingly. Gone are the Doom Blades and Tendrils; four of Feast of Blood and another Deathmark come in instead.

With that, here’s the new build:

Bloodswarm

Creatures
Vampire Lacerator x4
Bloodghast x4
Gatekeeper of Malakir x4
Vampire Hexmage x3
Vampire Nighthawk x3
Malakir Bloodwitch x3

Spells
Bloodchief Ascension x4
Quest for the Gravelord x4
Sign in Blood x4
Hideous End x4

Artifacts
Blade of the Bloodchief x3

Land
Swamp x16
Piranha Marsh x4

Total = 60 cards

Sideboard
Black Knight x4
Vampire Hexmage x1
Deathmark x4
Feast of Blood x4
Rise from the Grave x2

I’ll test that out next. If I didn’t mention a card, it doesn’t mean it’s not noteworthy; the Nighthawk, as an example, is Bolt-bait, but it must be answered or it will do serious damage to the opponent’s game state. And Vampire Nocturnus? He might work, but he seems almost like a red herring… I can certainly see his ability to lead a blowout, if he sticks and if there’s a black card on your library and you have a small army, but that’s a lot of trouble for an Overrun you can Path that’s otherwise a 3/3 for five. I just don’t see him as necessary in a tribal build, lord that he may be, but I think he can do some great things with the right deck built around him.

And there you have it; my first constructed event since States last year, but maybe there’s something to gain here. I’ll try to keep updated if anything else develops with the deck.

According to the report, some parents are just ecstatic over the new law. Why wouldn’t they be, as they’re getting official byes for their potential failures in properly educating themselves and controlling access to the media their children access?

Okay, it’s Venezuela… not getting to play Halo probably isn’t high on the governmental grievance list. Still, it’s always chilling to see these bans and censorship of media push through (pun intended). I could proselytize over the reasons why, but it’s a nontroversy that some irrationally still consider a debate, that being that violent video games instill these negative values in children. Personally, my adolescent development was filled with games of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, but my urge to brutalize my fellow man is less about Ken spin-kicking Ryu in the face repeatedly and more about the persistence of indefensibly stupid ideas as grounded, proveable reason. However, this constant desire is easily supplanted by the fact that I am not psychologically malformed by my media, even though video games were a constant fixture in my life when it supposedly counted most. But don’t just take my word for it; studies that have been cited as so-called evidence have, been repeatedly proven to be non-contextual instances of intellectual dishonesty, or even outright fabrications.

But as Carl Sagan once said (and Donald Rumsfeld more recently made common vernacular), the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. To add a little balance to my spin, we should pause to consider that successfully crossing the uncanny valley just might push us into territory where these fears are credible. The problem I see there is that this adeptly-named “valley” is less like the distance between two locations on earth and more like the distance between two galaxies; it’s theoretically possible, but the visual detail along with the behavioral and intellectual dynamics are so far and away from modern technology that it’s not too practical a contingency to plan for just yet. However, I could very much be mistaken; games like Lionhead Studios’ Project Natal presentation Milo may just be the first of many waystations on the journey across.

Ultimately, regardless of how peaceful or violence-torn your country is, media censorship is not the answer; instead, it’s a scapegoat to distract the masses from an incompetent government that approves unreasonable legislation. It’s a sign of a failure of the people to assert their rights whenever their government intervenes to protect the citizenry from itself; it’s pretty terrifying to imagine living amongst those who actually look to and encouraging their government to behave this way.

And so, I send you his way: Black Flower Music