The Minotaurs

Last week I wrote a piece on a pre-built Magic: the Gathering deck I had been trying out, Voracious Rage, and stated how it had been saving me from getting embarrased against my work mate. I have now had a good chance to play with this further and to have a go at refining it to improve its performance.

I have played a good number of games using this deck against my colleague's mono-red aggro deck, and so far the win/loss ratio is roughly 50%. The original decklist is as follows:

Lands (25)

• 14 Mountain
• 11 Swamp

Creatures (22)

• 2 Borderland Minotaur
• 3 Deathbellow Raider
• 1 Fanatic of Mogis
• 2 Felhide Brawler
• 1 Felhide Petrifier
• 1 Insatiable Harpy
• 2 Kragma Warcaller
• 1 Minotaur Skullcleaver
• 3 Pensive Minotaur
• 1 Pharika’s Chosen
• 1 Rageblood Shaman
• 2 Ragemonger
• 1 Spawn of Thraxes
• 1 Warchanter of Mogis

Other spells (13)

• 1 Cast into Darkness
• 2 Flurry of Horns
• 1 Lightning Diadem
• 2 Magma Spray
• 1 Pinnacle of Rage
• 1 Rollick of Abandon
• 1 Searing Blood
• 2 Spiteful Blow
• 2 Starfall

The first area for improvement I saw was the lands. I simply decided to drop two each of the mountains and the swamps, and replaced them with 4 Rakdos Guildgates. This makes a nice, straightforward fix to try and limit the chance of not getting the mana needed. It helped that I had 4 Rakdos Guildgates in my collection not doing anything.

I found that the creature list was pretty good, but perhaps a little too thinnly spread, in that there are lots of one's and twos. Also, there are three creatures in the list that are not minotaurs, and several minotaurs that are expensive for what they give you (Warchanter of Mogis, i'm looking at you).
There are a few of really key creatures to how I play the deck, and those would be the Rageblood Shaman, the Ragemonger, and the Kragma Warcaller. These are creatures I am looking to add duplicates of to the deck as they add good value for their cost and synergise well with the other minotaurs.

One area where this deck has really started to shine, compared to the previous decks I was playing, was in its Instants & Sorceries. The cheap removal spells, the Magma Sprays and the Searing Bloods, have improved my chances of keeping my life total high enough to get the minotaurs going. However, amongst these spells there are some that are very high cost, and this limits their usefulness: a good example of this is Lightning Diadem, which has a converted mana cost of 6 for 2 damage to one creature and a +2/+2 to another, at Sorcery speed. Many of these high costs spells are areas I am looking to improve, and hopefully replace them with lower cost removal spells.

I currently have an order placed for plenty of new cards to (hopefully) improve this deck. When I have those, and I have changed round the cards, I will post the new deck list and let you know the results from play.

Back from the GEF

Well, after a long weekend, with a day off either side of it, I am back from my weekend LARPing and ready to write up all about how I managed to achieve all the aims I set myself in last weeks blog post on this topic, except... none of them were really fulfilled quite how I wanted. The weekend was rather interrupted by the fact that we lost the Saturday to the weather, and in fact bugged out back to Burton to keep dry (and play another session of Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, which I will write about later), and we did not return to site until time-in on Sunday morning. With this (poor) excuse out of the way, here is how I did regarding my aims.

The VKP at the GEF 1114 (photograph courtesy of Kren Cooper)

1) Join the Healers Guild

Flat out didn't do it. I managed to enter the guild tent once (to collect my power cards on the Friday) and didn't set foot in there again all weekend. Pretty much a poor show on getting that aim achieved I am sure you will agree?
With none of the rest of my group being healers, and with me being pretty poor at going out and making myself known with strangers, I just didn't get the keen to go and join up. This really is something that needs working on I think.

2) Go Monstering

Two for two here: as a group or individually we didn't monster once. Again, a really poor show I think. I am going to take the easy way out and blame the weather, as we missed all of Saturday and so were keen to make up for lost time on Sunday playing our characters. This, coupled with some enthusiasm for the main battle Monday meant we never got around to making ourselves useful to the refs. We gave a brief try Sunday morning, but after an hour or so of there being nothing going out, we wandered off to the beer tent for the afternoon.

3) Getting Myself Known

 Well, I could probably make a small claim for making myself useful rather than known. In the Lions wall during the final battle on the Monday I did at least manage to keep our faction battle commander on his feet with a few timely heal spells for the first half of the battle. Whether or not he would remember me again if he tripped over me is highly debateable however. In light of this I guess that's three aims from three that haven't really been achieved.

Holding off something big and nasty in the Lion's wall (photograph courtesy of Kren Cooper)

With a spectacular rate of failure on the personal aims front, I can at least make claim to having spent more time in character this event. We spent a good deal of Sunday chin wagging with some Honeybadger beastkin, and we also spent some fun moments joking about with Squad D of the Lions (thanks for the good humour there guys). All in all it was an enjoyable event, even if we lost a day due to the weather. I am looking forward to (heopfully) making the Gathering later in the year. Maybe there I can actually achieve one or two of those aims?

Larking about LARPing

So this weekend is the Lorien Trust's Great Erdrejan Fayrem the second mainline event in the LT's season, and the first one I will be attending. I always look forward to these events as a great way to spend time with my friends, relax, and get involved in some roleplay. However, there is just one problem with that list of three things: the roleplay. I will freely admit that I suck at it. I find it difficult to get into my character and stay in character for the whole weekend (or even one whole day of the weekend).

With the above in mind, I am going to set out this weekend to try and step up my roleplaying and see if I can do better. The leader of my group (Scrat, leader of the Valendian Knights of Peace) has a strong character identity and a good idea for a group identity (a disparate bunch of vagabonds an thugs, prepared to get our hands dirty so that other Lions don't have to). I think if we actually play up to this and make ourselves known, we would all enjoy the weekend more and feel less like we exist on the periphery of our faction.

I have some actual aims I would like to achieve this season, and the first of those would be to join up with the Healer's Guild, seeing as I am a healer. I think this might give me a chance to get to know people in character and expand my horizons. The second aim is to get out monstering some more: this means that for an hour or two I don't play my character but hand myself over to the plot team for use as an NPC body, most likely to get hacked to bits multiple times. I have often found this can be some of the most fun I have over the whole weekend and I feel like I should do more of it. The third aim is slightly more nebulous: it's to get my name known around the faction a little. I think that hanging around the centre of camp, rather than our own tents would help this one, so I may suggest it to our group. I may get none of these aims done, but at least I have some to work on.

The Valendian Knights of Peace: From Left to right are Scrat, Aurelian, Sable and.. dammit forgot George's IC name!

I hope that we get better weather tahn the reports are offering right now, and I plan to take some photos of the goings on, to do a post about them in the next couple of weeks. If anyone reads this and sees us in the field, then come say hi, there will be drinks in it for you I am sure! Enjoy your Bank Holiday weekends (if you are in the UK), I know I will.

Fumblings with Magic

So along with running various table top role-playing games, I'm also a keen (if casual) Magic: the Gathering player (much to my wife's exasperation). I have dipped in and out of it since the late 1990s, but got back to buying cards with some regularity last year, along with learning that buying single cards is actually one of the best ways of rounding out a deck. I am hoping to get a post out ever other week at least on this subject as I have a lot of fun with the game, even though I realise I am pretty terrible at it.

Recently I received a pre-built deck for my birthday. I know the opinion of many MtG players is that the pre-built decks can be junk, but this one seemed pretty good. Its called Voracious Rage, and its one of the Journey into Nyx decks: it focuses on minotaurs and is a tribal deck. When I opened it and had a flick though it looked pretty cool.

My new deck, courtesy of my brother.

I finally got chance to play it against a colleague on my break at work, and I found it plays pretty well. He has a Standard format red aggro deck that, if I am honest, beats down on me with alarming regularity. I am hoping that all of this losing will teach me to be a better player/deck builder...
However, this new deck actually did quite respectably, and allowed me to hold my own. I can see that there is certainly room for improvement, but I may have the basis of a decent deck. Its my aim to actually take myself along to a Friday Night Magic at my FLGS some time soon, but I haven't yet plucked up the courage.

I plan to add some single cards to the deck to try and refine it, and I like the Minotaur theme to it, so hopefully if I pull together the cards I want I can improve my fortunes against my regular opponents and finally pluck up the courage to show my face at FNM.

A new campaign is launched

This last weekend I launched what will hopefully prove to be a new, long-term campaign with my regular gaming group: this is Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil

This lengthy adventure, written by Monte Cook, way back when D&D 3.0 was released is something I have been hoping to run for a long time. Now finally I get my chance, and will be running it using the Pathfinder rules set. In future posts I hope to detail my adventuring party's progress through this, and also at some point I hope I can (with the player's permission) detail who the characters are in this.

The town of Hommlet

For now the characters are set up in the small town of Hommlet, with rooms at the Inn of the Welcome Wench. Their plans are to head out to the old Moathouse, a small fort around 10 miles from town. Two of the party, Bronath and Kielle, wish to visit as their father was involved in the original battle against the temple's forces at Emredy Meadows, and they want to retread the sites of his famous adventures. Despite the best efforts of one of the fellow patrons at the inn to join them, only the four colleagues will be going to the Moathouse, and it is expected to be little more than a sight-seeing trip.

So what's this all about?

So this is my blog all about roleplaying games, Magic: the Gathering, Live Action roleplaying and an assortment of other interests I have and want to get thoughts of written down and out for folk to read.

Seeing as this is my first ever blog, it's likely to be a bit rough (in fact very rough to start with) so if anyone does read this feel free to comment and critique, I'd appreciate the input.

I have been playing RPGs for twenty years now, most of them as the GM (Games Master) and for a good while now (about 18 months) I have been wanting to write a blog about my experiences and I finally have a good excuse to do so! This weekend, with my regular gaming group, I started a new campaign: Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.I intend to update this blog regularly with progress reports through this campaign, and expand my topics as I go.

For an introduction, I reckon that will serve as a succinct introduction, and I will get onto real content in my next post.