Jack's House - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

I get the feeling insurance premiums are really high in Halloweentown.

Time to talk starting locales. Like Outfits in Doomtown and Strongholds in L5R, this is the card you start the game with and that determines what actions you can take. Each starting locale has 3 Functions, and each turn you're allowed to activate 1 of them. Usually, the first function draws cards, the second function adds pumpkin points so you can play cards, and the third one lets you move cards.

The number in the corner is the scare threshold. Usually, you need characters whose total scare value is equal or more than the threshold in order to activate the locale's function. Starting locales all have a threshold of 0 though, meaning you don't need any characters at that locale to use its functions.

Card design wise, the starting locales are kind of boring. They're all associated with different characters, but they all do pretty much the same thing thanks to card frame restrictions. You can only fit so much text in the spaces given before it gets too tiny to read, hence the three basic functions: draw, add, and move. There are probably character cards that interact with the appropriate starting locale, but I haven't combed through the entire set yet to see if this is true. I feel like these cards could have a lot more interesting designs, and possibly functions that interact with their characters, if the frame allowed more room for text and the font wasn't so bloody big.

Clown, With the Tear-away Face - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

Tim Burton plus clowns is a scary combination.

Clowns can be terrifying. Yes, there are a lot of nice clowns in the world, but it takes very little to make a clown into a serial killer. This guy for example is a clown with razor sharp teeth. The subtitle is also unsettling. Of all the adjectives that could describe a face, tear-away should not be one of them.

The ability is that you can sacrifice him to get rid of a character 1 cost lower. I imagine what he does is tear his face off, causing the less scary character to run away with screams of terror. Even residents of a Halloween plane can be terrified of clowns! They're that scary.

Shadow on the Moon - The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG

It's that time of year, the Halloween season, which means its time to get a bit festive. The game I'm looking at though is very weird. The Nightmare Before Christmas TCG. In the game, you take 12 rounds (the twelve days of Christmas, ha ha) to build your own Halloweentown and make your own Christmas-themed creations in time for the holidays. In the end, you tally up the values of your characters and creations, and the highest number wins.

This was weird. Whether you're a Tim Burton fan or not, there is only so far you can go when basing cards off of the film. Ideas were going to run out very quickly. The second set (yes, this actually got two sets) expanded the scope by introducing Christmas characters and locales, but this only gave the game one good final breath before expiring. Which is a shame because I do like the design of the game, I just also knew it was doomed. Anyways, enough ranting. Here's the card.

How many people have the "This is Halloween" song playing in their head?

This is a Surprise card. They're the Trainers of this card universe, except the game developers already came up with an idea to limit the number you can play. This card is also not typical of Surprise cards, since this one attaches to a character, and is therefore a confusing choice to start things off, but I'm sticking with it.

So, what does it do? Characters in the game have only one number on them, a scare number. Everything including how much it costs, when different location effects activate, and how many points you get at the end are determined by this one number. This lowers an opposing character's scare by 1, making them less scary. This makes it harder for your opponent to trigger locales, and it takes away 1 point for your opponent in the end game. I like to think that you are casting a shadow over the opposing character.

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.