Harpy Matriarch - World of Warcraft TCG

What big... um... claws you have? Yes, we'll go with that.

The harpies are winged bird women, traditionally depicted as a large bird with the head of a woman, but in multiple card games have become women with feathers, bird claws, and practically no clothing. They're pretty much furries except with feathers.

In mythology, the king Phineus was sentenced to an island for pissing off the gods. Every day, there would be a grand banquet set up, but then the harpies would come and snatch away all the food before Phineus could taste a morsel of it. Following the tradition of people being punished until some great hero came to release them, the Argonauts showed up and solved the harpy problem. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, there is a scene that mimics this mythology, the castaways seeing a huge banquet before it disappears as Ariel arrives in the form of a harpy.

This card has nothing to do with that. It just feels like they took a random monster type and slapped it on a card. This could be a snake woman instead of a bird woman and it would feel the same. The effect is also very generic, one that could go on any card. Couldn't they have tried to match the flavor with the ability? Heck, they could have named the thing Harpy Snatcher and shown it taking something from some hero, and I would have felt the flavor matched the effect much more nicely.

Adepts of Hermes - Illuminati: New World Order

This blog is NOT part of a government conspiracy.

Illuminati was/is a card game by Steve Jackson. The game is very tongue-in-cheek, letting you play with flying saucers, men in black, crystal skulls, and everything in between. Sadly, there are select individuals who take the game far too seriously, probably because they believe in flying saucers, men in black, crystal skulls, and everything in between. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Hermes was the Greek messenger god, his side job including escorting the dead to the underworld. I have no idea who the Adepts of Hermes are, the only links I'm finding referencing the game. They're probably just some generic secret organization who wanted to sound cool. In the red seal on the card art, in the middle of the pentagram, is the caduceus, a staff depicted with two snakes entwining around it. You most often see this symbol in the field of medicine. According to legend, Hermes invented the lyre and then traded his invention with Apollo, who gave him the caduceus in return.

There are other symbols on the seal, the pentagram inside a pentagon. Since government buildings often take geometric shapes, this must be a clear reference to the Pentagon being part of the Adepts of Hermes. There is also a pyramid with an eye, which Nicholas Cage in National Treasure taught us was a Masonic symbol! It all fits, and I am certainly not being sarcastic right now. I love looking at conspiracy theories and wacky pseudosciences, just because of the rich mythology they form. I don't believe a word of it, but I still find the stories they make up entertaining.

Gordian Blade - Android Netrunner

Go Digisword!

Time for a bit of historical legend. Alexander the Great was a real ruler and part of Greece's history. One legend from Alexander's career is the Gordian knot. The challenge was whoever could undo the knot would receive great prizes, I forget what it was exactly but the story has an Arthurian feel so you would probably get to rule something. Many men tried but failed, but then Alexander came along. Alexander undid the knot fairly simply: He took out his sword and cut it in half. Nobody contested the claim, and Alexander was declared the winner. The story is often used to describe problems that seem extremely difficult or hard to solve but have a simple solution that almost everyone overlooks.

So in the future, some hacker creates an icebreaker and names it the Gordian Blade. I really like this name, as it not only reflects what the program does perfectly, but it also draws in ancient Earth myth and history. A lot of the Netrunner programs receive mythical names, because they sound cooler that way. People would buy more antivirus software if it had cool names like this. They would also buy it if instead of showing a progress bar it showed a freaking cyber sword cutting through the matrix.

Xena, Warrior Princess - Xena TCG

I am tired of talking about Theros. I've been talking about it for two weeks, going off what scraps Wizards gave us. Now that it's spoiler week though, we are being flooded with new cards. I'm going to wait awhile before tackling some of them, maybe till I actually play with them, then I will go over my predictions and see how wrong I was. Still, with Theros going on, my mind is on Greek mythology. Fortunately, Magic isn't the only game that borrows from it. Let's look at some of these cards.

How do you spell Xena's battle cry?

I absolutely loved Xena as a kid, and not just for the usual male hormonal reasons. Xena was the show that came on after my Saturday morning cartoons, and it was glorious. Xena totally kicked butt. Yes it got extremely silly now and then, but that was part of the charm, and even in those episodes Xena came out looking awesome. I mostly ignored the Hercules series, but I had to watch Xena. I am not ashamed for having watched and liked the show.


So, Wizards of the Coast (seriously) got their hands on this popular license and decided to make a trading card game around it. The game rules were part of something called the ARC system. Two other card games, the sci-fi C23 and, naturally, Hercules also ran on this system. I have no idea whether the ARC system was actually good or fun to play with. What I do know though is that the system was practically cursed, all three games living short and miserable lives. Only the Xena game lived long enough to get an expansion, and then it died after that.

So, here is what had to be a marquee card for the game, Xena herself. What's my opinion on this action heroine card. It kind of looks awful. There is nothing aesthetically pleasing about this template. The art is just a still shot from the show. While these can sometimes work, like Decipher's Lord of the Rings, here it really doesn't.

Yes, she has big numbers, but that's it. One of the wonderful things about Magic is how even the numbering, be it the card cost or power and toughness, can make a card look and feel a certain way. Cards with higher numbers felt like bigger cards, not just in terms of physical size but also the size of the effect. I get none of that from this card, possibly due to the size of the numbers. Bigger numbers (in terms of font size) make the card feel like it was meant for a younger audience. Instead of making the card feel huge, it makes it seem like they weren't certain if the target demographic would be able to read or comprehend it. It feels like they're dumbing it down. Even at Xena's silliest, the show never felt like something for preschoolers. This card on the other hand does.