Tresspassin' - Doomtown: Reloaded

You short folk ain't welcome here!

So, one thing you learn about this card when trying to do a Google search is the first part of the word is supposed to be spelled "tres" and not "tress". I'm guessing this is an intentional misspelling in order to convey an accent or a drawl. This is supported by them dropping the "g" at the end.

Flavor wise, this is a perfectly okay card. There are people on your private property you want off, so you confront them and tell them to leave or you'll call the cops. They either go home or become wanted by the law. The flavor text seems to be commenting on the scene, and becomes funnier when you juxtapose it with the image. Apparently two old people with rifles are worse than the sheriff's police.

But now we get to the art. First off, why are the criminals so short? I would say the old couple are just standing on top of something, but the proportions of the criminals seems far too off for that to be the case. Did the art description ask to depict dwarves? Then there's the colors. Absolutely none of the colors are bright, and everything just looks brown and muddy. Even the greens and blues look closer to a gray. Again, the only positive point is the humor, since you don't associate two elderly residents with pointing guns at outlaws in the old west.

Stagecoach Office - Doomtown: Reloaded

Your coach will arrive in a moment.

Stagecoach Office actually shares a name with a card from the original Doomtown, but the similarities end there. The original was an extremely powerful ghost rock engine, while this version is much more scaled back. The effect is simple but flavorful. In essence, you're calling in a stagecoach to take your dude into town, dropping them off wherever you have a stop.

The art on the other hand is not my favorite. Part of my problem is just how nondescript it is. This feels like it could be any building in town, and not the one named. You can barely even see a stagecoach in the art! It's off to left side, mostly out of frame, and the only detail calling attention to it is the wheel. I do however like the arrows sticking in the side, since that tells a little story that happened off canvas. The color scheme is also mostly brown. I understand the purpose of this palette, since we are dealing with an old west setting, but it makes everything so uninteresting and unappealing to look at.

Marion Seville - Doomtown: Reloaded

You don't want to know what happened to the guy who called him "Marian".

Marion's has a pretty simple effect, which names one of the mechanics of the game: becoming wanted. In the game, there are locations called deeds, which are marked as either public or private. When a dude has a shootout at a private deed, and that dude's player doesn't control the deed, the dude becomes wanted. Some outfits, like the Law Dogs, punish wanted dudes, while Marion's outfit, the Sloane Gang, gives benefits for being wanted. So while Marion doesn't have a standout effect, he does highlight something his group cares about. Flavor wise, I don't quite grasp how the effect works. Maybe he draws both his knife and gun when he becomes wanted.

The flavor text doesn't try any grand world building, but it does at least develop the character, signaling a pet peeve while setting up a previous incident in his life. Plus Pancho mentions that this was the "last" man, meaning there has probably been more than one previous incident. Overall though, I think the text is trying too hard to be humorous. Too be fair though, I have been guilty of the same thing with my captions.

The art has sharp linework, so everything is at least detailed clearly. The framing is nice, with the figure in the center, and the doorway centered behind him. There is also the splash of red on the bandanna, which draws the eye's attention. The one grievance I have is that behind the doorway is nothing but black. I don't want anything too over-detailed, since that would distract from the subject, but we could have had something, maybe just a few silhouettes.

A Coach Comes to Town - Doomtown: Reloaded

Santa's coach is coming to town.

So this Christmas, I got a box of Doomtown Reloaded. Awhile ago in the 90s, there used to be a TCG called Doomtown, set in the Deadlands Weird West RPG setting. It was mildly popular, but then the game folded. Several years ago, with the rise of fixed expansion games, an attempt was made to bring Doomtown back from the dead. Rules were simplified for easier, more intuitive play, and a new game called Doomtown Reloaded was released. This year, that game also seems to have folded after the game rights were returned to the owner of the RPG. So some of the cards I am looking at had counterparts in the original card game, and this is one of them.

The main difference between the original and the new one is A Coach Comes to Town used to be an event. Event cards were a hold-over from the Legend of the Five Rings, which Doomtown has many similarities to, and they took effect immediately. Doomtown Reloaded ditched this card type, and any cards they used which were originally events were modified into action cards, giving players greater control over when they activated.

The effect has remained fairly similar and flavorful. A coach comes to town with a shipment of ghost rock. If the coach arrives safely, you get 4 ghost rock. If the coach is robbed, the opponent who robbed it gets the ghost rock instead. Slight tweaks include you are now the one pulling the job, while before it was any opponent who wanted to try to rob the coach was the one starting the job. Also, when the coach was robbed, you had to pay the opponent the ghost rock, which didn't make sense since the flavor of the card was you hadn't gotten the shipment yet.

The art is hit and miss for me. I like the angle of the shot, showing the entire stage coach with your posse surrounding it. I also like how the figure leading the job stands out, with sharp, contrasting blacks. While I do appreciate the more realistic art style, I don't like the gradient filter. It makes the scene look far too red and washed out.

Because of the rules overhaul, the new version has a little more text space, meaning we get an additional line of flavor text, as one of the characters compliments and complains about Lane Healey, the scoundrel and go-to guy of Morgan Cattle security.

Johannes Broheim - Warhammer: Invasion

"I'm on a griffin! I'm on a griffin!"

I've covered several other cards with impressive mounts, so it only feels fair that I cover the guy riding the griffin. I love the art, though the background does suffer from being barely comprehensible, but it does have a neat lighting effect. Johannes's beard helps give him a veteran status, which helps with the problem Urguck had of not feeling that much higher in rank. I also love the war banner and the tassels pinned to griffin's lapel.

The one point of confusion I have is the long, stick-like object shown to the right of the griffin. To me it looks like a massive longbow, but it doesn't look attached to the griffin or to the ground. It just seems to be hovering in place. I like the effect it creates. The bow adds a greater sense of aimed direction, plus it makes the whole unit feel like the quiver of some massive weapon. I'm just still not sure what it actually is or where it exists in terms of this scene.

For rules text, you have the Hero clause again, followed by counterstrike, sans reminder text. Since this was a core set, they made sure to put reminder text on most of the cards, but there were a few exceptions, seemingly due to spacing. What counterstrike amounts to is when the unit defends an attack, it immediately deals counterstrike damage to the attacking parties. What I like most though is the final ability. In the Core Set, Warhammer didn't have a keyworded flying mechanic. Still, there are some units like Johannes who can obviously fly. I feel the final ability helps capture the feeling of flight, as it lets your unit move around very easily. And since this guy is a Hero, meaning he has the Hero limit, this makes the ability even more useful.

A Glorious Death - Warhammer: Invasion

Tis not so hard to die. Tis hard to give death meaning.

Quest cards are an odd, slow mechanic. What happens is you play a quest in your quest zone, then you send a unit on that quest. Each turn, the quest gains a resource token. This token is treated like a generic token and not a resource, so I guess they just wanted to use what tokens were at hand rather than create a whole new type of token for a small subset of cards. You can then activate abilities based on the number of tokens on the quest. If the questing unit leaves the quest, all tokens are removed and you must start anew.

The art is also odd, as instead of full color art like on regular cards, they instead use line art. The card background is a faded manuscript, so the idea is to make it look like the art was drawn on the ancient paper. There is nothing wrong with this, it's just another odd choice. As for the art on this card, I do like the belt of of faces.

I honestly like the flavor of this card. The dwarves in this set show a tendency toward self-destruction, seeking to destroy the enemy even if it costs their own lives. This card represents that mentality perfectly. The fact that it targets two units also gives it enough card advantage to justify the time spent completing the quest.

Urguck - Warhammer: Invasion

He can peel off his scars and use them to raise an army!

While he doesn't get to ride a dinosaur, Urguck still has a pretty ferocious riding beast, with horns and crooked, jagged teeth. His axe looks giant to the point of ridiculousness, but Orcs were never known for their practicality. I like how the artist decided to shake things up with the weather effects, including a dramatic bolt of lightning in the background. It makes the whole thing feel less like a typical fantasy portrait. I do wish we had a bit more cues to distinguish Urguck as an Orc leader, like maybe some underlings in the background. Other than the riding beast, he still looks like your typical over-muscled orc.

The card however does make sure to let you know he's special. First you have the little symbol next to his name. This marks the card as unique, which usually means you can only control one copy of it at a time. Second is the Hero trait. Only a few cards in this set get the hero trait, and they all come with the same rules. You have three zones in the game you can normally play units in, but you can only have one Hero in each of your zones. This again makes the card feel different from your typical mindless soldier.

The main thing I love about this card however is the game mechanic. In the game, you have a pool of resource tokens and damage tokens. From the names, you can probably tell what each token does and represents. This card allows you to use one type of token as if they were another type of token. That is actually pretty innovative and clever. It's also a healing mechanic that doesn't feel like you're healing a unit, since that goes a bit against the Orcs' flavor.

Nurgle Sorcerer - Warhammer: Invasion

The forces of Chaos extend to spelling.

There is one main reason I chose to do this card, but let's look at a few other things first. The art is a decaying humanoid with horns, a skull stuff, and sorcerer robes. With how dull the rest of the colors are, it makes the green shooting from its hand and glowing from the skull on its side really pop out. While I understand this is meant to be a battle scene, I really don't like that the background is just a dusty mess. I do however like the few discernible figures you can see among the dirt.

The ability is okay, the main thing I like is the the corrupted clause. It lets new players know that corruption is something this card and faction cares about, while also piquing their interest to look up what the corruption mechanic actually is and how it works in the game.

Now, to the main course. Look at the name of the card. Now look at the card's traits. Notice a discrepancy. In the name, the spelling is "sorcerer" with an "e". But in the trait line, it's spelled "sorceror" with an "o". I have no idea how this got past the editors, but it looks really awkward having it spelled two different ways on the same card.

Cold One Riders - Warhammer: Invasion

Welcome to Jurassic Empire!

This time I'm going to take a lot at an older card game, but not too old. It's called Warhammer: Invasion, which is like W40k except with the sci-fi trappings replaced with fantasy ones. It's one of the LCGs the Fantasy Flight Games has stopped printing new expansions for, but the game lasted for quite a while, having even more expansions than its space-based counterpart that was released after its retirement.

So I'm starting off with a card that is aesthetically awesome. What's so awesome about it? It is an elf riding a dinosaur! It gets even better. When you look at the name "Cold One", along with the icy backdrop in the art, the implication is this is also an arctic dinosaur! It is really difficult to cram this much awesome into one card.

Another thing I really like about this card is a little harder to explain, but it comes down to statistics. Say you have a two mostly blank cards, one with a bunch of 1s printed on it and another with 4s and 5s. Now say you have two pieces of art, one depicting a turtle and another depicting a dragon. On which card would you put the turtle art, and on which would you put the dragon? Naturally, the dragon would go on the card with the higher stats, because dragons are bigger, better, and more special than turtles are. When you make a game card with high stats, you have to make sure what you put on it feels worthy of those stats, and this card succeeds with that.

One final thing to mention is a strange quirk with the Core Set. While the game acknowledges that it has six main races, there are only decks printed for four of them: Dwarf, Empire, Orc, and Chaos. The other two, High Elf and Dark Elf, and left to stew until they get their own full decks in the next deluxe expansion. To tide players over though, there were a handful of cards belonging to these races printed in the set. I only mention this because that means, in the box, this card would have felt even more special, since it's a member of a rarer race.

Fairchild - Android: Netrunner LCG

Now, they have all come together.

There is actually quite a history behind Fairchild, this being the fourth card in a line that has spanned multiple sets. Before Fairchild, there was Fairchild 1.0, Fairchild 2.0, and Fairchild 3.0. How are they all connected? Let's start with something easy first: the art. Each card has art done by Liiga Smilshkalne, so all feature a similar palette and style. Now for the first three cards, each card depicts a separate figure, but here the heads of all the figures have joined together into one entity. Another quick note is that all the cards until now have be non-unique, but this version of Fairchild gets unique status, again showing the growth of the card.

Another thing is that each card serves as an upgrade of the other. The most obvious is the increasing cost and strength of each card. Even the influence cost goes up as the card gets more powerful. Next you have the first ability. With bioroid cards, most of the cards have text that allows the runner to bypass so many subroutines is they spend so many clicks, with 1.0 being one, 2.0 being two, etc. With Fairchild though, things have evolved to the point where that piece of text has dropped off completely, which really strengthens the card.

The subroutines have also evolved over time, though the last one makes some more drastic changes. Fairchild 1.0 had two subroutines that were pay 1 credit or trash a card. Fairchild 2.0 upgraded this to pay 2 credit or trash a card, plus it added another subroutine that did 1 brain damage. Fairchild 3.0 upgraded this again to 3 credit or trash a card, and added the option of ending the run to the last subroutine. But now we get to Fairchild. Now all the subroutines are about ending the run, with each one offering an alternative cost for the runner. So the first two subroutines lets you pay 4 credits, the third one lets you trash a card, and the fourth one lets you suffer brain damage. All these subroutines still call back to what came before, but they have still been completely modified.

Overall, what interests me about this card is less the card itself and more the journey it has been on.

Baba Yaga - Android: Netrunner LCG

Ba ba ya ga ga....

Baba Yaga is a witch of traditional eastern folklore. She's probably most famous for her walking chicken house, so I'm surprised the card went with something else. In folklore, witches seemed to use household objects as magic vehicles. In the Americas it became mostly the broom, but Baba Yaga did in fact use a mortar and pestle, though she still has a broom with her in the quote. As for that quote, yes, it is from a real Russian fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev.

Now as for the card itself, I find it odd the art went with depicting the mortar and pestle as opposed to the witch herself, though we at least get some menacing figures standing around it. I like to interpret this card's ability as the AI can learn and use programs, similar to how a witch uses spells. Making the program a cyberwitch, which I find very cool.

Sapper - Android: Netrunner LCG

noun: a soldier employed in the construction of fortifications, trenches, or tunnels

I've heard the term "sapper" used before, but I couldn't exactly define what it was. I looked it up on Dictionary.com, and came up with a few results. A sapper is someone who digs trenches or other fortifications. Further digging (sorry) turned up that the word "sap" can also mean a deep, narrow trench. The term is mostly used in the military, but I have heard it connected to mining as well.

Well, vocabulary lesson over, on to why I picked this card. I'm not intimately familiar enough with the game to say these things have never been done before, but they are rarer abilities. First you have the ability where if the runner accesses the ICE, they are forced to encounter it. Equally rare is the ICE has a trash cost.

The art is fine, with smooth slabs sinking into a pit in the ground, which alongside the flavor text of the card, makes me think of Dante's structure for hell. Speaking of which, how many different things are there colloquially said to be a special place in hell for?

MKUltra - Android: Netrunner LCG

I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of this card.

Recently, Netrunner's Martial Law expansion came out, so this week I'm going to look at a few cards from it.

First, the name. MKUltra was a real project run by the CIA to discover the secrets of the human mind and how it behaved under adverse conditions. In short, they wanted the secret to mind control. What's really controversial about MKUltra was less the subject matter and more the methodology. Most of the organizations and institutes involved in MKUltra had no idea what they were really a part of, and a fair number of subjects had no idea they were being experimented on. The entire thing was kept securely in the dark, and the whole incident would become the poster child of government organizations performing sinister things behind the public's back.

All that history seems to play very little in the card mechanics, but it does set the flavor of the card and conjures feelings of civil unrest against the government. Mechanics wise, this card does a few new things. You have the recursion ability, which lets you play the program back from the heap when you encounter an ICE weak against it. And the second ability starts as a standard strength boosting ability, but with the additional effect of letting you immediately break subroutines. This entire thing is also carefully worded so that it still works if you can't break a subroutine, or can't break the maximum two.

The art is nice and psychedelic, which is standard for cards depicting the virtual world. I especially think the two different eyes fit the flavor. It calls to mind the idea of government monitoring, but also the idea that the public is looking back, trying to gaze under the surface and see what is really going on. I also like how you have one eye gazing away from the player, while the other is looking straight at them. Also, we have another quote from the Flashpoint.

Tezzeret, Master of Metal - Magic the Gathering

I can't see this name without thinking of "Magneto, Master of Magnet".

Unlike Ajani, Tezzeret has had far fewer cards dedicated to him, but there are still some comparisons, mostly to Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas. I mentioned last post of the parallel between Ajani, Valiant Protector's one ability with Tezzeret's first ability, but Agent of Bolas actually has a similar ability. The difference is it only reveals the top five cards of your library then lets you cherry pick an artifact. The second ability is a downpowered version of Agent's ultimate ability, with the life loss being the number of artifacts you control as opposed to twice that number, and without any life gain. As far as I can tell though, the ultimate ability is all new to Tez, though it does make me think of Confiscation Coup, which was enacted by Tezzeret last set.

Ajani, Valiant Protector - Magic the Gathering

"Hope you have a LOT of +1/+1 counters."

Ajani Unyielding wasn't the only Ajani recently revealed. Like Kaladesh, Aether Revolt has its own Planesawlker Decks, with their own exclusive planeswalker cards.

There's honestly not too much to talk about Baby's First Ajani. It's practically the same image as Ajani Unyielding, but with a slightly different pose showing the unscarred side of his face, and the lighting is much brighter.

The first ability is an upscale version of Ajani, Caller of the Pride's first ability, with two counters instead of one. The second ability mimics Ajani's previous deck searching abilities, but what's interesting is how it foils the other Planeswalker Deck in the set. Tezzeret, Master of Metal's +1 ability is almost the same, except his ability reveals cards until you reveal an artifact, while it's a creature for Ajani.

And the ultimate ability touches what I mentioned with the last Ajani. Ajani likes you to have a big life total. Ajani Classic gave you an Avatar token with power and toughness equal to your life, and Caller of the Pride gave you X 2/2 Cat tokens, with X being equal to your life. There was also the ultimate on Mentor of Heroes, which gave you 100 life, but this card's ability is more in the vein of the first two cards. Rather than making a creature though, this one gives an existing creature X +1/+1 counters, with X being see above. And in case your opponent wasn't dead after that, the creature gains trample for a turn. It is also one of the more expensive ultimate abilities, going into double digits, but still losing to Gideon, Champion of Justice.

Ajani Unyielding - Magic the Gathering

Making planeswalkers more loyal.

It's time to breath some life into an old blog, and what better way to start than with a new card for an old character.

First note is, at the time of writing, this guy is the first preview card for the unrealeased set: Aether Revolt. Since I have not seen the full set yet, I can't tell you how Ajani fits in, other than his appearance on Kaladesh was teased with cards like Impeccable Timing.

There has been though five printed Ajani cards up to this one, so I can make some comparisons there. In terms of art, for example, he seems to mostly resemble Ajani Steadfast, with the small blue tassels. And I just realized that an anthropomorphic cat-person has attached multiple tassels to his costume. I guess his next outfit will incorporate balls of yarn.

His first ability reminds me of the second ability of Ajani, Mentor of Heroes, but it has been tweaked to reveal fewer cards but grab more of them. This card's second ability is a Swords to Plowshares, which fits considering the character. It also sort of fits the trend of previous Ajani cards. Most of the others were concerned with making your life total big, and while the ability is meant to be used more offensively, there is nothing stopping you from exiling your own creatures and collecting the life.

The third ability is where we get interesting. It is based on the second ability of Ajani Steadfast, but it has been multiplied by five and upgraded to an ultimate ability. The part of the ability I like the most though is the one that gives your other planeswalkers loyalty. Cards that affect planeswalkers tend to be rarer, both in terms of the rarities they're printed at and the number of cards printed with such abilities. So I like that this ability does something that cards don't normally do, and with the upscaled ability it makes the whole thing feel a lot more special. This ability also fits the character, since Ajani has partnered multiple times with other planeswalkers.