On the Needles 19

I think it's time for a crafting update.

Knitting

My main project right now is the Revenge of the Kea shawl, which I'm making with a navy blue sock yarn and a rainbow-striped sock yarn. I've finished six out of eleven sections, but each one is longer than the last, so I don't think I'm halfway yet.

I'm also working on a number of smaller projects, including a sock with cool zigzag stripes (pattern) and a new idea for making pants the right shape, and I have plans for gloves for a Halloween costume. More on those as they develop.

Pokemon

I passed day 600 last week. As long as the Pokemon Company doesn't release a new game this year, I'm going to finish drawing every single Pokemon by sometime next February. Today's Pokemon is number 606, Beheeyem.

Deckbuilding

This week's Lady Planeswalkers event was Core Set 19 Mini-masters. I opened Vivien Reid and a Satyr Enchanter, and made a white/blue/green enchantments-matter deck that won two rounds out of four. The surprise MVP was Psychic Corrosion; both of the rounds I won were won by surviving long enough to mill my opponents out (that is, to make them run out of cards in their deck faster than I did).

I've also modified my Elves Commander deck to be mono-green instead of green-white, with Marwyn the Nurturer as its new commander, and I've made a new Brawl deck based around Squee the Immortal and goblin tribal. There are now sixteen goblins in Standard, which is not quite enough for a 60-card deck, but I filled the rest of the creature slots with other small aggressive things. I think it will still feel very goblin-y to play.

Intro to Magic Part 3: Reading Magic Story

All this talk about game mechanics is all well and good, and it's important to know if you want to play Magic, but none of it is really why I got into the game in the first place. What drew me in was hearing longtime players talk about the stories that went with the sets, and the settings those stories happen in. In this post, I'm going to talk about what the stories are like, and suggest some places to start reading.

At a very high level, here's what's going on: Magic story happens on a multiverse of parallel worlds called planes. Most people, including some very powerful wizards, spend their entire lives living on one plane, but planeswalkers can travel between them using an innate ability known as the Spark. Most Magic stories are about planeswalkers either stirring up trouble on a specific plane, or trying to solve an ongoing problem on a plane. Or both, since the biggest social and environmental issues on any given plane are usually caused by planeswalkers.

Early Magic story was published as a series of novels, mostly set on the plane of Dominaria. I recommend starting with The Gathering Dark by Jeff Grubb, and its sequels The Eternal Ice and The Shattered Alliance. These books tell the story of a wizard named Jodah as he grows up from "awkward apprentice" to "someone who's wise and powerful enough to boss planeswalkers around." It's a fairly typical coming-of-age story for the most part, but it's solidly written, it has a number of fun characters, including the pyromancer Jaya Ballard, and it's the best introduction to the actual magic system of Magic that I've ever read.

There's a full list of Magic novels here. I can't vouch for the quality of all of them, and the books published before 1998 are no longer canon, but here are some more that may be worth reading for more context, both for Jodah's story and the current Magic story.

• The Artifacts cycle tells the story of the war between the wizards Urza and Mishra, which caused the nuclear winter on Dominaria that's the setting for The Gathering Dark and The Eternal Ice.
• Rath and Storm and the Masquerade Cycle follow the adventures of Gerrard Capashen, a distant descendant of Urza's, and the crew of the interplanar airship Weatherlight. This was the first time Magic had an ensemble cast.
• The Ravnica Cycle and the Return to Ravnica Cycle are set on the plane of Ravnica, which is ruled by ten competing guilds. I recommend these because Wizards of the Coast has announced three consecutive sets set on Ravnica beginning in fall 2018.
• Agents of Artifice and The Purifying Fire tell the stories of important moments in the lives of four of Magic Story's current main characters.

Wizards of the Coast switched to publishing official story on its website between 2012 and 2014. If you're more interested in getting a quick background in the story and catching up in time for the next set, everything you need is in their archive. The best place to begin is with the stories from Origins, the summer 2015 set, which tell the origin stories of the five planeswalkers that make up the core of Magic's current ensemble cast:

• Gideon, an indestructible order mage who's determined never to let his friends down again
• Jace, a mind mage with amnesia (he recently got better)
• Liliana, a necromancer who traded her soul for eternal youth and has been trying to get the rights to her soul back ever since
• Chandra, a teenage pyromancer who believes the government of her home plane killed her parents
• Nissa, an elvish nature mage whose home plane has been invaded by eldritch monsters

These characters all already existed in the lore, and in some cases their stories have been altered slightly in recent retellings, but the five stories I've linked to above are a helpful prologue to the characters' adventures together, which happen in the following order.

• Battle for Zendikar/Oath of the Gatewatch
• Shadows Over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon
• Kaladesh/Aether Revolt
• Amonkhet/Hour of Devastation
• Ixalan/Rivals of Ixalan
• Dominaria

Stories I've listed together are set in the same place and listed together in the archive. The continuity between bullet points isn't always as strong as I would like, but it's all worth reading.

The story of the latest set, Core Set 2019, is a series of flashbacks to the history of two more recurring characters, the Elder Dragon planeswalkers Ugin and Nicol Bolas. The flashbacks themselves stand alone, but the framing device that connects them is going to need some more context if you're new to the lore. I'll lay that out in another post.

One important thing to keep in mind when reading these stories, especially when switching between old and new stories, is an event about sixty years ago in canon (or 2006 in real time) called the Mending that totally changed how planeswalkers work. Urza did some experiments with time travel that caused the spacetime around Dominaria to break. Other planeswalkers repaired the breaks, and the repair changed the nature of the Spark. Before the Mending (as in Jodah's story), planeswalkers were effectively gods; afterward, they became mortal, their powers were limited, and it became a little easier for them to have empathy for planebound people. This made it possible to represent planeswalkers as a card type (before the Mending, they were just too powerful), and to keep the story moving from plane to plane after the destruction of the Weatherlight. It also drives the plot: some of Magic's antagonists, including Nicol Bolas, became planeswalkers before the Mending and are trying to regain their old powers.

So that's my guide to Magic story, both old and recent. I wish you all happy reading.

On the Stack 10: How I Build Constructed Decks

One of my favorite parts of playing Magic is building decks for Constructed formats, in which you bring your own deck to the event. They give me more time to think about what to put in my deck than Limited formats, where you build your deck as part of the event; and I can use all the cards I've collected from recent Limited events to do a specific thing or small set of things that I enjoyed doing with those cards at the events I got them in. Here's a brief walkthrough of the steps I take when building a Constructed deck, and some examples based on my current Standard and Brawl decks.

A good rule of thumb for a sixty-card deck is to have about twenty-four creatures, twelve noncreature spells (including Vehicles and Planeswalkers, if you use them), and twenty-four lands. I stick to these numbers pretty strictly, but they're not absolutes. An aggressive deck might have many more creatures, or one or two fewer lands; a deck whose strategy benefits from casting instants and sorceries may have a higher proportion of instants and sorceries; and so on.

When building a deck, I try to answer the following three questions in order:

1. What do you want your deck to do? What cards do you intend to use to win?
2. What other cards help you get to your win condition?
3. How do you prevent your opponent from getting to their win condition first?

Here's how I've worked through these questions while building Standard and Brawl decks recently.

Mono-black Historic (Standard) [decklist]
Note: the art on a number of the cards I link to in this section contains unsettling images of people in pain. Proceed with caution.

1. At two consecutive Lady Planeswalker Limited nights, I won games with a combination of Cabal Paladin, Chainer's Torment, and Guardians of Koilos using some variation on the following sequence of plays. (This is what happens in the best-case scenario. In most cases, my opponent will have some way to interrupt me, and I'll have to play around what they're doing.)

1. I cast Cabal Paladin as soon as I have enough mana.
2. On my next turn, I cast Chainer's Torment. It does two damage to my opponent, and since it's historic, Cabal Paladin also does two damage.
3. I attack with Cabal Paladin, dealing four more damage. This turn, I have done eight damage.
4. On my next turn, Chainer's Torment deals two more damage.
5. I cast Guardians of Koilos. Cabal Paladin deals two damage because the Guardians are historic, and I use the Guardians' ability to return Chainer's Torment to my hand.
6. I attack with Cabal Paladin. This turn, I have done six damage, and if my opponent has no way to gain life, they are now at six life.
7. On my next turn, I recast Chainer's Torment, dealing four damage as in step 2.
8. I attack with Cabal Paladin and win.

I want to be able to win consistently using this kind of sequence. Fortunately, since this is a Standard deck, I can use four of each of these cards to make sure I see them more often.

2. All the cards I've named so far have a converted mana cost of 4 or 5. I need smaller, cheaper creatures to defend myself with until I have four lands out. Khenra Eternal and Caligo Skin-Witch are good choices right now, but since Khenra Eternal is leaving Standard in October, I plan to replace it with Knights of Malice and maybe add in a Diamond Mare or two to feed some more life into Chainer's Torment's third chapter. I'm including two each of Urgoros, the Empty One and Tetzimoc, Primal Death as alternate win conditions; it's not a great idea to include more than two of each, though, because I might get stuck with multiple copies of the same legendary creature in my hand and be unable to play them. They also have abilities that will help with step 3, since Tetzimoc can destroy creatures and Urgoros either makes my opponent discard cards or lets me draw cards. It's also a good idea to include a couple of ways to bring important creatures back from the graveyard, like Recover and Memorial to Folly.

3. In addition to keeping myself alive long enough to get the cards and mana I need to win, I need to prevent my opponent from casting spells that affect me. Hand attacks like Duress (art warning: acupuncture needles), Divest, and Raider's Wake are useful here, as well as Torment of Scarabs. I'll also need ways to kill my opponent's creatures; while most of those will stay in the sideboard, I am including two Phyrexian Scriptures (art warning: lots of blood), as well as two Doomfalls, which let me choose between hand attack and getting rid of a creature. When Standard rotates in the fall, I'll have to take out some of my favorites of these cards, but I'm hoping for plenty of alternatives in the sets that will be released between now and then.

Tishana Midrange (Brawl) [decklist]

1. I love playing tribal decks. Tribal is a deck archetype where you play as many creatures as possible of the same creature type, plus cards that interact either with that creature type specifically or a creature type of the player's choice. During Ixalan block, I drafted several aggressive Merfolk decks and picked up a number of cards that support Merfolk tribal. I want to make a Brawl deck that uses as many different Merfolk from my collection as possible, and Brawl’s requirement that I only use one of each card (besides basic lands) actually makes choosing which Merfolk to include easier because I can use more of them.

 At this point, I have three choices for the deck's commander: Tishana, Kumena, and Tatyova. Tatyova isn't a great choice because she's not a tribal card, and I want my commander to represent the thing I actually want to do with the deck, which is cast lots of Merfolk. The remaining two choices both do this. Kumena is easier to cast than Tishana, but I like Tishana better for a couple of reasons. First, her ability allows me to draw cards when I cast her, which is rarely a bad thing. Second, in the story of the block, Tishana is a much more sympathetic character than Kumena, and this is reflected in how they interact with other Merfolk: Tishana draws on their strength in numbers, while Kumena taps them down to take all the glory for himself. (Remember that "I like this character better" is often enough reason to build a deck around them; that's why legendary creatures are so cool.) So Tishana will be my Commander, and Kumena and Tatyova will go into the deck with my other Merfolk.

2. Since my Commander's power and toughness is affected by the number of creatures I control, I'm going to need a lot of small, efficient Merfolk, the ones that cost four mana or less and have the highest power and toughness and best abilities for their mana cost. Merfolk Mistbinder, which makes other Merfolk bigger, is an important one to include. I'll also include cards that work best with Merfolk creatures, like River Herald's Boon and Crashing Tide, and cards that make Merfolk tokens, like Deeproot Waters. A lot of Merfolk and Merfolk-related cards interact with +1/+1 counters, so I'll include cards that add and interact with counters, like Hadana's Climb (which, as a bonus, is also Merfolk-flavored). Two-colored lands and color-fixing cards like Unclaimed Territory are also important, to make sure I can cast both double-blue and blue-green costs.

3. It's a good idea to have some removal and counterspells in this deck, especially since blue is good at both of those things. I use Crashing Tide (it's better with Merfolk, after all), Waterknot, and Cancel, among other things. Since this part of my deck involves so few cards, I'll choose more general counterspells over spells that counter only creatures or only noncreature spells, bearing in mind that they usually cost a little more to cast.

Multani Lands (Brawl) [decklist]

1. Where my monoblack deck is built around a combination of a few cards, and my Merfolk deck is built around a creature type, this deck is built around a single card: its commander, Multani, Yavimaya's Avatar. The goal of the deck is to make him as powerful as possible by accumulating lands both on the battlefield and in the graveyard, ideally attacking for ten or more damage at a time.

2. I'll include a lot of small creatures that make mana to help get my deck going. Most of the mono-green ones are elves, like Llanowar Elves and Druid of the Cowl, so I'll include Marwyn the Nurturer to get extra benefits from having lots of elves in play. I'll include some big efficient creatures with trample, to take advantage of having all the extra mana, as well as Spike-Tailed Ceratops, which blocks extra creatures. I also need spells that let me find extra lands, like Adventurous Impulse and Ranging Raptors, spells that put cards in my graveyard, like Perpetual Timepiece, World Shaper, and The Mending of Dominaria, and spells that let me play lands out of my graveyard, like Ramunap Excavator. (Notice that these cards can also bring cards back from my graveyard; I don't want to run out of cards in my deck before I win.) 

My mana base is mostly Forests, since most spells that search for lands only look for basic lands, but I also have lands that can end up in my graveyard easily, like Desert of the Indomitable and Evolving Wilds. (Note: Evolving Wilds is not worth it in a mono-colored deck unless you really want lands in your graveyard.) Ramunap Excavator will let me play lands from my graveyard, so I can recur Evolving Wilds and not miss land drops. I'm also looking forward to Scapeshift and Crucible of Worlds returning to Standard, though they're expensive enough that I may not end up getting them.

3. I'll also include spells that destroy artifacts and enchantments, spells that allow my creatures to fight other creatures, and maybe one or two that destroy creatures with flying. My favorite in this area is Broken Bond, which both destroys an artifact or enchantment and lets me search for a land.

Conclusion

As you're finishing up your deck, keep in mind that your playgroup can be a valuable deckbuilding resource. If you're not sure which cards to use, it should not be hard to find someone who can give you good advice about how to improve your decklist--and, importantly, tell you why any particular change is an improvement, so that you learn from the conversation instead of just following instructions.

Happy brewing!

On Games Gone By: Wolfenstein 3D (Apogee, DOS)

Sometimes you just want to punch a Nazi. But you don't want to get arrested for doing it for real, your computer's graphics card can't handle the new Wolfenstein games, and the old Call of Duty games doesn't make the combat personal enough. Have I got the game for you.

Wolfenstein 3D, developed by id Software and published by Apogee Software in May 1992, three days after I was born, is the follow-up to a couple of 2D stealth games and one of the very first first-person shooters. You play as William "B.J." Blazkowicz, an American prisoner of war in the Nazi-held Castle Wolfenstein, fighting your way out of the castle's dungeons and collecting stolen gold along the way. I played the first few levels of the shareware version, which is available on My Abandonware, in DOSBox with keyboard controls.

The controls are tank-style: the up and down arrow keys move you forward and backward, the left and right arrows turn you left and right, and moving left and right without turning requires an extra key press. Adding in one button for shooting and another for opening doors, it can be a lot to keep track of if you're used to simpler control schemes, leading to slower progression through the levels. (Full disclosure: the only other first-person shooter I have experience with is the iOS port of Fortnite Battle Royale, which has remarkably comfortable touch controls.) But that slow movement has a silver lining: it gives new players opportunities to practice the spatial awareness that is necessary for success in faster-paced shooters, checking around every corner for enemies.

Wolf3D's UI and level design rely on the conventions of dungeon-crawling games like Dungeon Master in ways that don't feel entirely appropriate for later shooters. The player stats are collected at the bottom of the screen, instead of spread out around the edges as in newer games, and it can be hard to tell which numbers represent what aspect of your character's status at a glance. Level maps resemble the classical "maze of twisty passages, all alike," to the point where I often got lost playing unfamiliar levels and could only really tell I was making progress when someone was trying to shoot me. At times, I wanted to pause the game and map out the levels on graph paper, but I never actually did, because I felt like the game wanted me to keep moving, and to move faster, and like taking the time to make a map would make my performance worse somehow.

The end-of-level statistics support this feeling: in addition to the percentages of enemies killed, gold collected, and secret rooms found, there's a timer that tells you how long you spent in each level. The game rewards practice: if you take the time to play each level repeatedly and learn the layout, you'll get a shorter level time. And once you're good at it, the levels go pretty quickly. But spending lots of time stumbling around Castle Wolfenstein's dungeons when you don't know what you're doing is not particularly rewarding. Especially not when you have to kill adorable pixelated German shepherds. I feel sorry for those dogs. (Note: the Sega Genesis port, which I have not played, replaces the dogs with rats.)

Between feeling lost, feeling rushed, and being forced to shoot cute animals--not to mention a list of difficulty settings that mocks you for playing on lower difficulties--there's a lot about playing Wolfenstein 3D that just doesn't feel good. If you do decide to play, make sure you read the list of keymappings carefully, and don't let the game bully you into playing on a harder difficulty than you're ready for. And maybe pause every so often to draw a map.

Rating: It's a nice lesson in gaming history, and shooting Nazis is cathartic, but if I'm not looking for one of those two things, I would rather spend my time and energy doing something else.