Tag: xerent

  • My Little Pony TCG Primer

    For the last few years, every single front page article on GoodGamery has revolved around Magic: The Gathering™ in some way. We’ve touched upon some serious Magic stuff over the years. We’ve done real card previews, in-depth strategy guides, indulged ourselves in Magic poetry and artwork. Now, when you’re reading this, the Magic: The Gathering™ (MTG) content streak has come to an end. In fact, below this paragraph, the article you are now reading will not be related to MTG at all. Ready? Come follow us into the exciting realm of Equestria™, and another trading card game published under the Hasbro™ brand.

    Card

    The My Little Pony™ (MLP) collectible card game is based on the popular cartoon My Little Pony™: Friendship is Magic™. The TV series debuted in 2010 and quickly gained the hearts of not only little girls, but those of grown men and the older ladies. A preview version of a trading card game was showcased at BronyCon 2013, and now the full version of the game has been out for a few months. Need we mention that the game has been a smashing success?

    Basic concepts

    Each game of MLP represents a story of playful ponies who make friends with each other. Players (or “friends”) employ acts of friendship in order to gain victory points. At the beginning of the game, players shuffle their decks and draw seven cards. Players then take turns; the first player is determined randomly in the opening game. To gain victory points, players must subject their friend (opponent) to fun, which mainly is done with loving ponies or direct fun. Players can also use event cards to change the conditions of the game or play troublemaker cards in order to prevent oneself from having too much fun. After all, if you have too much fun, and your opponent gains 20 victory points – he or she wins the game!

    During most rounds, players will play ponies and let them make friends with each other during the challenge phase. During this phase, ponies set out to love and tolerate each other – and each pony has a love stat and a tolerance stat. The loving player will announce his or her intent to go forth and love with any available ponies, and the tolerating player will announce which ponies he or she will tolerate those ponies with. Then the ponies have fun with (or strictly speaking, “put fun on”) each other. The love and tolerance stats of said ponies are then compared, and if a pony receives more love than it can tolerate it is loved to death and put into that player’s discard pile. If anypony is not tolerated by another, it will go ahead and let the the tolerating player have some fun. The loving player then gets victory points equal to those love stats.

    Card

    Most cards are played by paying their friendship costs. When you play a card that has a friendship cost, you commit an act of friendship. There are six types of friendship, and each friendship is associated with a color and a pony from the mane cast of the MLP show. Each of these ponies are associated with a unique element of harmony, which means that each friendship has its own characteristics with unique strengths and weaknesses. Friendship flows from resources, which are turned sideways (exhausted). There are six basic resources – one for each friendship and color. By utilizing these resources (turning them sideways), players use the friendships of generousity, kindness, honesty, loyalty, laughter and magic for paying the friendship costs of the cards on hand.

    White friendship

    Rarity is not only a description of how common a card is, but a fashionable pony. She represents the element of generosity and white is her color. Sometimes giving to others can prevent one from having too much fun, and this phenomenon is called fun prevention (though since having too much fun will cause your opponent to win, this is a good thing). Being fashionable, white tends to be protective of itself, and also values order and etiquette highly. White friendship excels in turning troublemakers, as generosity and friendship will win over the toughest foe.

    Card

    Hoity Toity, above, is a typical white card, and one of the most inspired fashion designers in all of Equestria. Being strictly fashionable, he does makes sure that players don’t have too much fun.

    Yellow friendship

    Flutteryshy is the kindest pony in all of Equestria. Her color is yellow, which represents the spirit of kindness. Yellow friendship flows from love for critters and animals, and everything else that dwells in the forests. Yellow card effects include pump effects, where ponies and critters gain a sudden love boost, and lots of animals. Yellow friendship yields contains the most powerful, though uncomplicated, ponies and critters with the greatest love and tolerance.

    Card

    Famous for it’s ability to surprise players during faceoffs, Giant Kindness is sure to cause great amounts of fun being inflicted on other ponies and players, as well as ensuring that the targeted pony isn’t loved to death by too having much fun.

    Orange friendship

    Hard work is the tagline for the farm pony Applejack, and orange is her color. Representing the element of honesty, she keeps things straight. This might mean turning or unturning cards in play, and being a bit of a control freak (which little farm gal Apple Bloom can readily verify). Applejack will interrupt friends and ponies and tell them to think over what they’re doing, and will not hesitate to stop them from doing silly things.

    Card

    Apple Harvest is one of the more powerful orange cards, and demonstrates the power of hard work. Orange friendship is also the friendship of card draw, because true honesty is always rewarding.

    Blue friendship

    Represented by cool pegasus pony Rainbow Dash, blue is the color of winning. Rainbow Dash will do anything to win, and so will blue. Sometimes this means that blue will hurt others or steal things, and blue is also fond of pranks and enjoys being in a position of power and admiration. Though when it comes down to choosing between your friends and winning, blue will always put the spirit of loyalty to one’s friends first, and then win.

    Card

    Sometimes enough isn’t enough, and a sonic rainboom can enhance the friendship of loyalty by 300% in an instant. Interestingly enough: In the prerelease version of the game, this card was called a “friendship source”, but this was later changed. We think that’s pretty cool anyhow.

    Pink friendship

    Pinkie Pie’s color is the color of fun and it also represents the spirit of laughter. Pink wants to act on its desires quickly, and doesn’t to think ahead of consequences. Pink favors quick and direct fun, as well as pranking other ponies and forcing them to deal with the unexpected. Pink is also the color of chaos, and sometimes too much fun can hurt itself and others randomly. Though in the end, pink will always put friendship first.

    Card

    Pinkie Pie loves a good party, and certainly parties will cause everypony to have lots of fun. When Pinkie enters the dance floor, she turns it into one hoof of a disco inferno.

    Purple friendship

    Purple is the sixth color, and it’s the color of magic. Purple also represents the spirit of friendship, because friendship is magic. Purple friendship plays with the fabrics of Equestria and is able to manipulate time and space. This means that you and your friend will be seeing time-traveling cards, cards placed outside the game, reversed turn orders and additional game phases. Yes, unicorns can do that. Twilight Sparkle is a unicorn (at least in the first three seasons of MLP).

    Card

    Yes, this is Twilight Sparkle, first and best student to princess Celestia and later in the show, a princess herself. Obviously reading lots of books will cause all players to draw cards.

    Card types

    As you would expect, there are a number of card types in the game with special properties, rules and purposes. We’ve briefly mentioned most of them earlier, but let’s dig in deeper in each card type.

    Resources are non-friendship cards, meaning that they don’t count as acts of friendship when you play them. Instead, friendship flows from resources when you exhaust them (turn them sideways). Resources don’t have friendship costs, but you only can play one each turn during the main phase.

    Card

    We’ve previously mentioned that playful ponies are the mane excitement in the game. But we haven’t mentioned that ponies can have powerful abilities and keywords, such as Derpy Hooves (shown below) has. Derpy is a pegasus pony, so she can fly. It has implications for how she can interact with other ponies – and in this case, it’s obvious that Derpy can’t be tolerated by everypony.

    Card

    Events are things that happen that have effects on the game play when they are played. The card text specifies when the card can be played; at any time, or during the main phase.

    Card

    Troublemakers are cards that bring in trouble into the game. This might be useful in some cases, we guess, or Hasbro wouldn’t had put them into the game. We like Discord anyway, so why not? Getting rid of troublemakers can be a hassle, though. The friendship of generousity is the most successful at this, with cards like Distroublemake.

    Card

    Maneswalkers are powerful ponies that walk across the plains of Equestria. They don’t participate in play like ordinary ponies, but count as friends and have special abilities that are activated by adding or removing points. A player can choose to challenge a maneswalker with loving ponies, and if anypony puts some fun on the maneswalker, she loses that many points.

    Card

    Next time

    Text about the next article, where we dive deeper into enchanting problem cards and give a tour of My Little Pony Online (MLPO).

  • Chinese Counterfeits Force US Treasury to Revise Bills

    The recent stream of extremely well forged dollar bills flooding all markets has forced the United States Treasury to take action. On January 16th, a new bill design was presented to representatives of the press.

    “All dollar bills have been given a copyright notice that really stands out to the viewer,” a spokesperson stated. “The darn Chinese counterfeiters won’t be able to miss it!”

    You’ll also notice a little silver oval in the bottom center of the portrait of old Franklin. That’s a new unique holofoil stamp that the US Treasury will be applying to all rare and mythic rare bills going forward.

    “This stamp makes those bills feel more special, as well as guarantees authenticity,” the spokesperson said. “Certainly the Chinese can’t create holographic stickers and insert them into cardboard.”

    dollar_big

    measures to the bills does not come without new costs, however. To finance the increasing costs for printing these bills with added security measures, printing operations have been outsourced to a large company in the Tianjin province (天津市), China.





  • Microsoft Acquires Magic: the Gathering Brand, Announces Magic 8

    REDMOND, Washington – Jul. 25, 2012 – Microsoft Corp. today announced their acquisition of the publishing rights to the trading card game Magic: the Gathering from Renton-based Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro Corp. “It seemed like a natural fit,” said Don Mattrick, president of the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. “We’re in your living room with Xbox, in your tabletop with Surface, and now, with Magic 8, we can be on your tabletop, too.”

    Starting with Magic 8, the new Metro card layout will replace the Modern card frame. The design follows the other products in the Microsoft tablet-top experience. “We’ve designed Magic 8 to give you instant access to your stats, your abilities, and the information you care about so you can spend less time searching the card and more time doing what you actually want to do. We’ve made rules text a first-class citizen. Playing with the cards is fast and fluid, with updates to card text happening in real time,” Mattrick said.

    Magic 8 represents a reimagining of Magic from the cardboard to the experience,” said Tina Gaffney, a spokesperson for the Magic 8 team. “The Magic 8 designers have had a ball making it. Will the players have a ball playing it? All signs point to yes. But don’t worry – we’re not neglecting our online players. Magic Online and Duels of the Planeswalkers for Xbox will support a fully-integrated experience with Magic 8. And we’re planning some backend improvements to Duels of the Planeswalkers for Playstation and Steam that should bring those players’ experiences much closer to playing Magic Online today.”

    The Magic 8 Consumer Preview is set to release in September, with a full release planned in December. With Microsoft Surface integration for each card, the MSRP of a Magic 8 booster pack is expected to be $69.99 – well under the price point for Apple’s recently-announced iMajica trading card game offering. The Good Gamery staff are thrilled at the news and will continue to report on new developments as they flow out of Redmond.

  • Avacyn: Spoiled

    Now and then, GoodGamery publishes real preview cards. In 2010, Wizards provided us with a preview card, Quag Sickness. In 2011, GoodGamery provided our own joke preview card, the random dual land generator. This year, the world will end. However, before that, we have received a new preview card from Wizards. This card is from Avacyn Restored, set to be released sometime soon. Let the spoiler season begin!



    (This card has, of course, been generated randomly for your convenience by the Magical Avacyn Restored Card Generator. To share this specific card with other people, click here and use the share link at the bottom of the page.)

  • I’m glad our next set is Dark Ascension

    by Fake Mark Rosewater

    Monday, September 5th, 2011

    Here at Wizards of the Coast, our work – like the work of Sir Isaac Newton before us – is all about experimentation. Whenever we introduce an exciting new idea, we are testing the waters to see what works and what doesn’t, and what we can rehash further down the line. The ‘free spells’ mechanic in Urza block was a huge success, so we revisited it in New Phyrexia. Increasing planeswalker complexity and utility with Jace, the Mind Sculptor didn’t cause any problems, so we decided to push forward with the five-ability Garruk Relentless, who requires a degree to operate correctly.

    With Innistrad we attempted the largest experiment of all, the Magic R&D equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider: double-faced cards. Although St. Richard Garfield originally intended to use card-backs as a means to differentiate between expansions, for the past eighteen years the reverse of a Magic card has been considered sacred ground. Imagine if we could unlock the full powers of both sides of a Magic card – that’s 100% more design space then we’re currently using. In this economic climate, that’s exactly the kind of efficiency-increasing solution we need to be coming up with.

    Double-faced cards, of course, have been hugely successful. Meeting with a glowing community reception since they were first spoiled, DFCs have consistently smashed any misgivings that might have been initially held with regards to issues like shuffling and drafting. The fact of the matter is, the idea of a CCG that uses a standardized card-back to conceal information is antiquated. I have previously stated that Innistrad is the beginning of a seven-year plan; by the end of these seven years I hope for every card in Magic to have a completely unique card-back.

    We understand that this will be a lot to take in, so rather than leap right in with flip-morph-transform cards that have a card from an entirely different CCG on the reverse, we will be introducing staggered changes to the card-back over the next few sets. Dark Ascension brings us the first and most obvious addition: Color-coding. Starting next February, all card-backs will be subtly recolored to indicate rarity.

    I could talk for pages and pages about how great an idea this is, but it might be more interesting for you if I answered a few of your questions instead! Here, then, is the official preliminary card-back FAQ!

    What about opaque sleeves?

    To properly accommodate the new card-backs, we will regrettably be forced to disallow the use of opaque sleeves from all Magic tournaments. If you really don’t want to go Au-natural, we are pleased to announce that our friends at UltraPro will be selling ‘booster packs’ containing eleven common-backed sleeves, three uncommon-backed sleeves, and one rare-backed sleeve. A small proportion of these packs will even contain a mythic rare sleeve!

    While I’m sure that UltraPro’s new product will be of the highest quality, I can’t afford to collect all these sleeves. Must I risk damage to my precious collection?

    We’ve got you covered – we will be giving players the option to swap their library with sixty checklist cards.

    Doesn’t this mean that all card rarities will be public information?

    It absolutely does – we feel that knowing when your opponent is about to draw their mythic bombs will add a strategic dimension to the game, not take anything away from it.

    Aren’t you worried about the possibility of cheating used marked card-backs?

    Nope!

    Tune in next time for the reveal of the next stage in the evolution of the cardback!

  • Jace proves too powerful for standard once again

    Earlier this year, the controversial decision was announced to ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor from standard tournaments. In his article explaining the banning, Director of Magic R&D Aaron Forsythe expressed his regret that Jace, who leaves the format in October, “nearly made it this time”. “Of course we were wary about reprinting a card with a history like Jace’s, but the higher power of modern standard environments allowed us to reintroduce cards like Lightning Bolt and Stone Giant last year. We thought we were ready for Jace. We were wrong.”

    Surveys taken at FNMs across the world revealed that although 68.5% of players thought the banning was justified, less than ten percent were even aware of the card’s lineage. Several local scrubs insisted that Planeswalkers were only introduced in the Lorwyn expansion until we showed them an original beta Jace.

    Jace, the Mind Sculptor was one of the cornerstones of early magic tournaments, providing a much-needed win condition for drawn-out control mirror matches. Under the original rules Jace’s ‘counts as a player’ clause meant that the card could not be countered and had to be provided with its own seat; when reprinted last year, these rules were done away with for logistical reasons.

    After a pro player tragically died of dehydration during a week-long match involving Stasis, Time Elemental, and chained Timetwisters, the DCI realised something had to be done, and banned Jace outright from all further tournaments. Jace remained banned from even vintage events due to health and safety risks until its printing last year in the Worldwake expansion.

    While Jace proved too powerful for the current standard environment, two other Zendikar block reprints of once-banned cards failed to achieve the level of noteriety they once commanded. Obsidian Fireheart originally required players to physically set their lands on fire, and its infamous ‘the land continues to burn’ wording was interpreted to mean that if a card went out prematurely, its controller could be issued a loss for failing to maintain the game state. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, remembered fondly by collectors for its confusing printed mana cost and meaningless ‘legend-gold’ frame, was briefly outlawed from tournaments after Wizards of the Coast’s lawyers expressed concerns over the phrase ‘spells with colour’. Ironically, Emrakul was in another sense one of the most racially progressive creatures in Magic, as the first card to be printed with two subtypes.

  • Innistrad Preview Week, Day 3

    by Fake Mark Rosewater

    Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

    Welcome back once more to Innistrad preview week! As promised, today we have the full versions of both of the cards that were previewed on Monday. I would like to first introduce you all to Tombstone Curse.

    What would you like on your Tombstone Curse?

    One of the most common card variants we see here at R&D have what are known as “Pepperoni or Sausage” mechanics. These are, quite plainly, mechanics where you get to choose between one of two bonuses when you cast a spell. Some people simply enjoy one of the bonuses more than the other, so they don’t get much out of making the decision, but many people are easily swayed into picking Sausage over Pepperoni if the situation calls for it.

    The part of Tombstone Curse that we are most proud of is how the Slowtrip mechanic plays into the “Pepperoni or Sausage” decision. Before we had come up with the mechanic, this card was a normal cantrip – but like its namesake, people were tripping over the second option in the ability! During playtesting it was fairly common for someone to raise dead, and then be forced to discard a card at the end of their turn due to the unexpected “bonus” of increasing the number of cards in your hand.

    Slowtrip elegantly works around this by giving you extra the card at the start of your next turn, after your mana is refreshed and you can actually do something with what you have in your hand.

    Weathering the Spellstorm

    It’s a longstanding fact that people hate playing against control decks, but it’s much lesser known that people also hate playing as the control deck. The primary reason for this is because to play it well, you have to bide your time, keeping your mana and spells open to deal with anything your opponent might try. This is made doubly hard by cheap, aggressive creatures that red and white mages like to cast to put pressure on – any stumbling over your draws or mana, and you’ll find yourself locked down outside of the house during the proverbial storm of cats and goblins.

    What better way is there to prepare for the bad weather than to put up an umbrella? Spellstorm does just this, and it does it right when you want it: At the end of your opponent’s turn. This opens up your strategy to allow 6-drops again. That’s right, this card is actually an enabler for Sea Serpents, the premier fair-weather friends of blue wizards everywhere.

    The Perfect Grave Storm

    That wraps it up for today, and I hope you enjoyed this glimpse into the thought process of R&D here at Wizards of the Coast.

    Join us again tomorrow to see what else is lurking inside this amazing new plane!