Kevin is Right! Football: The Secret Best Gamer Hobby

What if I told you about half of my gamer friends ignore the best game there is?  It is a game that has more strategy than Magic, more tactics than X-Com, more excitement than the most tense dice rolls in D&D, requires more physical skill than Starcraft, and despite being over 100 years old, challenges the top minds in the game to bring out new innovations all the time.  Now, what if I told you that game was football?

Some of you get it.  There are some of you that don't.  Every year, right around this time, I fall right off the edge of the traditional nerd Venn diagram.  I have friends say to me, "Dude, I don't get it."  I start cosplaying as my favorite football player, and start breaking down film instead of watching MTG Draft videos.  Do I miss being a nerd?  Not even a little bit.  The reason is this: I'm in full-on nerd out mode.  Let me show you the game for jocks and meatheads in a whole new light.  Let me show you the game of football.

Vince is Bad at Legacy

This past Sunday I played in a Legacy Magic tournament at Mighty Titans Hobbies and Games in Landing, New Jersey.  It was the store's first Legacy tournament ever.  Because there was no established metagame, I expected a lot of "fair" decks to show up, such as RUG Delver, Maverick, Deathblade, Goblins, etc.  This in mind, I sleeved up an old-school mono black list known as The Gate.

The Gate

Creatures 3 Abyssal Persecutor 4 Dark Confidant 4 Gatekeeper of Malakir 4 Vampire Nighthawk Spells 2 Go for the Throat 2 Umezawa’s Jitte 1 Sword of Fire and Ice 3 Cabal Therapy 4 Hymn to Tourach 4 Innocent Blood 3 Duress 3 Bitterblossom 2 Liliana of the Veil 1 Darkblast

Lands 17 Swamp 2 Wasteland 1 Bojuka Bog Sideboard 2 Dread of Night 2 Manriki Gusari 2 Thorn of Amethyst 1 Engineered Plague 2 Nihil Spellbomb 1 Perish 1 Darkblast 1 Dystopia 3 Surgical Extraction

The plan is simple: blow up the board with all your removal and grind out card advantage with Dark Confidant, Umezawa's Jitte, and Bitterblossom.  As you can see my sideboard was prepared for enemy equipment and combo, The Gate's two biggest weaknesses.

Round One - Jeff playing U/W CounterTop with Helm/Rest In Peace

Game 1- I keep a greedy one-lander with some one-drop action, and don't see another swamp until he lands Jace, The Mind Sculptor.  Did I mention this deck sucks against planeswalkers?

Game 2 - A bit more competitive, I lead with hand disruption in the form of Cabal Therapy and Hymn to Tourach, but I run out of gas, Jeff gets the Counter-Top combo online, and I'm dead in the water.  0-1

Cube is the Answer #3 - Put this in your cube and draft it.

Here are a few interesting card recommendations for cube. Please note that I don’t necessarily subscribe to the “strictly better” philosophy when selecting cards. I like unique and/or synergistic cards that have the potential to be game-changers. It’s a lot more fun than limiting yourself to some stock list you found on a website. By all means, look to the masters for inspiration on cube design. In fact, if you’re not reading articles by the likes of Usman and Anthony from The Third Power podcast, you’re doing it wrong. Read up, listen up, and get inspired. Just remember, your cube is your baby. If you want to let that baby fling slimy cheerios all over your friend’s living room, that’s fine. Just have some good reasoning behind it. (Note: if it’s my living room, that baby better be wearing a full set of plate mail, because I will return fire with fucking catapults.)

A lot of cubists have written this guy off as “overrated”, “not good enough”, or “not Primeval Titan”, but I loves me some Ruric. He does everything I want a big dumb creature to do in R/G : attack, block flyers, and hose control players. Think about it. If Fat Ruric can get through just once before your opponent kills him with removal, he just did 12 damage. Hell, even if he never gets through and ends up eating a removal spell, he still nugs your opponent for more than a quarter of his life total. And here is the part everyone forgets: the noncreature spells in question don’t even have to be removal. Rampant Growth? Take 6. Brainstorm? Take 6. Azorius Signet? Take 6. Mox Sapphire? Lol.

The poor man’s signets. Has KevinLoadedDice been drafting your cube? If so, you’re probably tired of ‘tasting the rainbow’. If you want four and five color control to take a chill-pill, replace your signets with these guys. They are still very playable, just a little more fair. Plus the draw ability is really nice in the late game.

I don’t understand why everyone gets butt-hurt over land destruction. Resource denial is and always has been a legitimate part of the game. And in a format littered with dual lands, I’d argue that some form of mana disruption is absolutely necessary. Unless of course you want to watch control mirrors all fucking day. Just look at all these fun Dust Bowl interactions!

You can:

-Tutor it up with Primeval Titan or Weathered Wayfarer

-Destroy a Maze of Ith to clear the way for your army of durdles

-Attack greedy mana bases (eat it Kevin)

-Feed your Life from the Loam engine

-Feed your Worm Harvest or Raven’s Crime

-Keep Land Tax active

-Go absolutely bonkers with Crucible of Worlds

Season 2 Ep. 7

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Let’s PucaTrade one of our Cast Members for Eric Freytag 

Loaded Dice Cast is joined by Eric Freytag, Founder of PucaTrade, and, apparently, podcasting genius. The whole gang gets together. First we discuss Attackturkey's new Das Keyboard Mechanical keyboard. Next, we get to go deep with Eric on PucaTrade, gift economies, Magic Trading and how you, the idiot dumb enough to listen to this podcast, can get involved with supporting someone actually doing something with their life. Next, in honor of the just recently passed fat man fever dream that is the NFL Draft, we paint the picture of a world where Super Heroes exist, and are drafted into their ultimate purpose:  Entertaining you for money. We draft Super Heroes onto our NFL teams, and match them up. "Excelsior!" says Roger Goodell. Finally we talk about the recent dust up regarding some interesting and challenging art in Video Games and Comics, and what to make of it. Special thanks to Eric who absolutely killed it in this podcast.  We hope everyone listening, new listener or faithful follower enjoys this one. We feel it is our best effort yet.

 Oh, and in case you're wondering, completely NSFW language.

Puca Trade's IndieGoGo   

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Cube is the Answer #2 - The Pet Card Trap

In the first installment of Cube is the Answer, we built your cube.  You’ve run some drafts, had some fun, but your work is not done.  Its time to trim the fat.  The most important part of maintaining an awesome cube is cutting the cards that just don't work.

Next time you draft, have a notepad handy.  At the end of each pack, ask your playgroup what card was picked last in each pack.  List these cards on your notepad, and look for repeat offenders.  Cards will end up on this list for two reasons:

1.  They suck - the power level is way too low.

2.  They’re good in the right deck, but your cube does not support said deck.

If you’re a lazy shit and don’t want to take notes, you can even ask your playgroup about which cards are under-performing.  Trust me, they will be happy to tell you.  Magic players are bitchy like that.

Most cards that fall under reason #1 are the pet cards.  These are cards you play with for irrational reasons.  Maybe you used to love playing with the card as a kid, or you particularly like the art, or cards with Rampage: 2 remind you of your dear Aunt Tilly.  Whatever retarded reasons you have for including these cards in your cube, they’re probably not good ones.  Pet cards are a trap, and you need to cut them.

"Its a pet card!"

Remember, if your group isn’t having fun drafting your cube, they won’t want to play it anymore. Cube drafts can take two to three hours.  Think about how much streaming porn that is.  Don’t make your friends waste their precious fap-time on your shitty pet cards.  

Piracy in Magic, and why Cockatrice Exists

Thanks to everyone who listened and gave some feedback on the previous podcast, I learned that some people still didn't agree with my point of view about piracy and DRM.  So I'm taking advantage of this blog to attempt a longer form explanation of my idea.

Because of the nature of digital goods, there is the incentive and ability for independent actors to distribute the digital good closer to the actual marginal cost.  These independent actors are called pirates.  They spend a smaller fixed cost uploading the digital good, and charge only skeevy ads in the sidebar of your favorite torrent site, plus a bit of goodwill.

The obvious reaction to this argument about piracy is that possible doesn't make it right. And I'll admit, that's actually a tough reaction for me to work through.  But here's the rub - it's not just possible, its inevitable.  There is an incentive to pirate, and there is nothing that can ever completely stop a pirate from doing so.  If it's video, I can always point a camcorder at my screen, and upload that video, completely separate from the original file.

So the best way to handle piracy is to acknowledge it is a competitor.  The music industry has done so, and is now more profitable now than it was before Napster, and music is still pirated, and distributed for free on youtube and similar sites.  The cost to buy music has gone down significantly, but its decreased to somewhere very close to the marginal cost through marketplaces like iTunes, Pandora, and Amazon.  Which brings me to another notion, the notion of multiple aspects of a price.