Alex "Gus" Gustafson

Category: Games

  • Shadows Over Innistrad Prerelease Recap

    Shadows Over Innistrad, the new block of cards for Magic: the Gathering, officially goes on sale Friday. Last weekend I got to play in a prerelease sealed deck tournament at the Louisville Game Shop to get an early experience with these new cards.

    During a pre-release tournament, each player is a given a special box of six booster packs from the new block to make a deck with a minimum of 40 cards. You also get a special promotional card for your collection, and prizes awarded to the top players. At our event each person in the tournament also got a couple extra Shadows Over Innistrad booster packs (that couldn’t be used in your tournament deck.)

    Once everyone is registered and has their pack, you only get 30 minutes to make your deck before playing the first match. That’s actually my favorite part: quickly opening up all your new cards, examining them briefly, and whittling it down to an efficient 40(ish) cards with a simple plan to win.

    I looked at going for Red+Black for the cheap creatures, some with transfrom, but didn’t have any options for a heavy hitter with those colors and couldn’t think through what my plan would be. If I had more werewolves maybe Red+Green would’ve worked.

    Three mythic rares were included in my pack. Each stood out as a potential finisher.

    Archangel Avacyn that transforms into Avacyn, the Purifier was a pretty obvious win condition. She was even on one of the event posters. Then I saw how many flyers I had overall and how well my Blue cards allowed for Investigation.

    My plan became clear: Blue+White flyers, and investigate as much as possible to help my draw and increase chances of getting Avacyn, Geralf’s Masterpiece, and my last big flyer, Reaper of Flight Moonsilver.

    avacyn.jpg
    Avacyn, the Purifier

    It’s a simple deck and wasn’t an overwhelming winner, but it was something I knew I could play. To start, I used every blue card I had then added all my white flyers. Since my blue strategy was mostly Investigation, Tamiyo’s Journal became an obvious artifact to thrown in there too.

    Tamiyos Journal would let me sacrifice 3 clues to search my library for any of my heavy hitters from the deck. Oh, and it ensures I gain at least one clue every turn too – convenient!

    After that five more white cards made the cut: Inspiring Captain, while not a flyer, is a formidable 3/3 with a buff for my whole board. Survive the Night provided more Investigation, with some buffing as a bonus. Silverstrike and Angelic Purge were my best removal spells in the whole pack (my black options were really disappointing.) And finally, Chaplain’s Blessing is 5 life for 1 mana — too good of a deal to pass up.

    Finish it up with 18 land, split between Islands and Plains, and I had a 41 card deck.

    My Deck

    Artifacts

    White

    Blue

    Land

    • Plains x9
    • Island x9

    Also in my prerelease pack I got a couple other rare cards in other colors:

    The promotional card for the event was “Foreboding Ruins,” a pretty cool red/black dual land.

    I felt good about the deck, and even looking back, I don’t think I’d change anything about the build – only my play.

    There were four rounds in the tournament, but I only played the first three as I had dinner arrangements to get to. In those three rounds, I lost (0-2), drew (1-1-1), and lost (1-2).

    I found the Investigate-heavy strategy worked pretty well. I got at least one of my big flyers out almost every game, and never felt totally hosed. I just didn’t always have ways to handle more aggressive creatures. Could’ve really used more removal spells or de-buffs.

    The sealed deck format of these prerelease events is a lot of fun. If you’re like me and don’t have a large collection of cards nor many other friends who play, it levels the playing field on what cards are available and provides a place to meet new folks for a game.

     

     

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  • Collecting Elder Signs

    image

    Just saving the world while the baby sleeps.

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  • Onyx Guardian Badge

    It was never my intention to focus on the Guardian badge in Ingress. Earning it seemed at lot more about how other agents play instead of about how you play. But around day 100 you start to get the itch that this portal might be the one that makes it all the way. Mine finally did.

    image

    Not sure if any strategy is actually key to earning the Guardian badge. I think it’s mostly luck. But I can tell you how I handled mine and maybe that will help you with problems you’re encountering.

    Low Resonator Count

    One resonator is all you need to own a portal. Further resonators will only draw more attention to it, and if there’s anything you don’t want, it’s attention. Put one L8 resonator on your portal and leave it be. This means it’s less likely to be see on the Intel map, and no one will accidentally make a field with it as an anchor.

    Recharge

    Since you can’t rely on any backup resonators, you’ll want to recharge frequently. While I didn’t see myself as focusing on the Guardian badge, I have been working on my Recharger badge so this goes hand in hand. Make your guardian candidates your first recharge then carry on with any other recharging strategy you have. Learn to quickly find their portal keys when sorted by Name (since your distance will change.) Daily recharging isn’t necessary, but is ideal.

    You may find that other agents have ‘bumped’ your portal, adding their own resonators to fill in your gaps. I never recharged their resonators, so that within a week mine was on the only one there.

    Wheaton’s Law

    Have you heard of this rule? It says “Don’t Be a Dick.” A lot of Guardian candidates are lost because player A does something player B doesn’t like, so player B makes a point to hunt down player A’s portals. I avoided doing anything anyone wouldn’t like by not playing much in the past few months — that’s not really a great strategy for enjoying a game. But I think you can follow the same principle by focusing on fielding, missions, and meetups when you have a strong Guardian candidate.

    Hunting for unique portals by playing on a side of town you don’t normally visit can be seen as crude by an agent who’s already mad, even though you’re playing with good intent. Normally I wouldn’t let something like that bother me, and I’d just play where I wanted anyway. But I’d rather avoid the conflict entirely if it keeps my 100+ day Guardian alive. No conflicts means stable portals.

    Double Up

    My Guardian was actually a pair of portals right next to each other. They both made it. However a couple times it was a close call. Never were my portals directly attacked, but they both took heavy damage from incidental XMPs nearby. Also, a couple of times one of my portals anchored a relatively large field — but not both. It never ended up being the clincher for me, but it was a nice insurance to have two portals instead of one.

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  • LARPs: The Series

    Tapletop gaming is my preferred leisure time. Some of my favorite nights with friends have been spent playing board games, and recently my social calendar has been spent playing D&D. But one of the great things about being a geek is it’s easy to find joy in others geeking out too.

    So even though I’ve never played in a LARP, the webseries LARPs caught my attention right away. Maybe not right away. Season One was originally released in February-March 2014, and had critical acclaim but wasn’t widely distributed. I started watching when it re-released on Geek & Sundry in January 2015.

    True to the Geeks

    It’s not easy to capture geek cultures in media. It’s too easy to portray the people involved as less-than-normal, making those who engage in activities like role play seem eccentric (at best) or downright strange (at worst.) But downplaying the fantasy and focusing on LARPers as just people with the normal problems of everyone else also belittles the magic the activity can provide. Some amount of balance must be struck.

    LARPs: The Series finds this balance well. The show gives equal interest to its characters who have normal drama and happen to enjoy LARP, along with letting us watch the unfolding story of the Guardians of the Eleventh Eye. Whether they’re playing the game or living their real life becomes secondary to the series. It’s more staging than anything else.

    That feeling of role play being part of real life is what makes it ring true to the fellow geeks who are watching it. It feels real because the games we play really become staging to our lives too. Sure, we know it’s a game, but playing that game with our friends becomes just as much a part of who we are as where we work or the habits we form. The story in LARPs lets that notion develop naturally for the characters and the viewer.

    Season 2

    The first season of LARPs ended with me gasping for air. I moaned out loud wanting to know what would happen next. Everyone had so much still hanging out there. It was so… awkward! In a dramatic irony way, not the socially awkward geek way you normally get when hanging out with me. But it was also so right. The story was meant to pause there.

    Season 2 picks up right where the first left off. There’s lots of tense ideas in play but the story developed much more slowly and thought-out. Every episode still has it’s amazing moments, but there’s no filler at all. The first nine episodes are just a crescendo to an amazing half-hour season finale in episode 10. All the little hanging bits of tension left for us seem to pay off. Everything works out so well, but not as we’d expect at the end of season 1.

    I cried at more than one moment.

    No More Waiting

    While we were still in the middle of season 2, I found myself actually recommending to my friends who were still uninitiated with LARPs to hold off on watching until they could watch both seasons all at once. Because the waits between episodes were really crushing me. I couldn’t wait for them to enjoy the series as much as I had, but I could tell that both seasons combined would make such a beautiful product. The remainder of season 2 didn’t let me down.

    Now is the time! No more waiting! If you’ve not watched LARPs, you have no reason to hold off any longer!

    Binge It

    I made a playlist of all the LARPs: The Series episodes from both seasons in order. So you can binge them all, start to finish, right here:

    Season 3 and the Future of LARPs

    Jon Verrall (writer for the series and the actor who plays Evan) says there’s nothing to announce for a possible season 3 yet. But there’s obviously good potential for that if you watch the conclusion of season 2.  They crowd-funded the second season, but that was before Geek & Sundry went into their new setup as a part of Legendary. Since Tabletop season 4 and Titansgrave season 2 aren’t being crowdfunded I doubt LARPs season 3 will be either.

    However, LARPs also has a different production arrangement from other G&S programming, so I could be way-off. For now it seems the best thing you and I can do to make season 3 happen is to watch the LARPs we’ve got.

    Did You Enjoy LARPs? Why not try:

    • More LARPs
    • Share LARPs
    • Watch LARPs everyday

    Did You Blog About It?

    Please let me know in the comments if you’ve blogged about LARPs: The Series. I keep my posts spoiler-free for the most part, so I’ve decided not to share too many specifics about the episodes. But I’d love to join the conversation on your site if you do!

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  • Losing Streaks

    There were two daily streaks I’ve been managing for months. One was posting daily here on my blog, and the other was hacking daily on Ingress. WordPress.com gives you a cool little notification every time you post if you’re on a posting a streak. Ingress rewards you with a badge, an award they call “Sojourner.”

    In March both of these streaks started. In December, both of them ended.

    The Sojourner Streak

    ‘Hacking’ is the primary game mechanic of Ingress. The game is augmented reality, meaning you play on your phone or tablet but to move around in the game you must move around in real life. Objects of interest in real life like art, historical markers, and churches are ‘portals’ on your phone. If you’re within range of a portal you can hack it and earn some loot.

    soujourner badge
    Ingress Sojourner Badge at 274 days

    In March 2015, Ingress got a new badge called Sojourner. To earn the badge an Ingress agent must hack at least one portal within 24 hours of their last hack. Essentially, it’s a nudge for a daily streak — it’d be odd for someone to play Ingress and not be hacking portals; play Ingress everyday and earn your badge. But the specifics of Sojourner are more than play Ingress everyday, it’s play ‘within 24 hours of your last hack.’

    Imagine your last hack was at 9am Monday on your way into work, then you didn’t play the rest of your day. Then it just so happens you arrive late to work on Tuesday, hacking at 9:15am. You’re out of luck for Sojourner because 9:15 am Tuesday is more than 24 hours after 9am Monday, even though you hacked everyday. Some folks around the internet are reporting there is more buffer than this built-in because Sojourners weren’t ending when they expected, but I’ve not seen anyone replicating that buffer reliably.

    A few days after the Sojourner announcement I decided this was a badge I could get behind. At the time I was playing for 30 minutes minimum everyday, and I have several portals less than 5 minutes walk from my home. There are lots of hacking opportunities around my other local haunts as well. I setup a recurring todo in my Wunderlist for my Sojourner hack. I installed a separate application to show a 24-hour timer since my last hack. This became a pretty easy badge: never let the time hit zero and I’ll make it all the way.

    And for 274 days, it was easy. There were a couple close calls, but for the most part it didn’t require attention or thought. I would do at least a hack in the morning and a hack in the evening and it was just a part of my daily habits. I’d have days where I’d play more Ingress, but everyday I’d at least get my Sojourner hack done.

    The streak ended on Sunday, December 6th,  because I wasn’t thinking about Ingress at all. My mind was swimming with nothing but our Dungeons & Dragons group. That focused attention really paid off. Finishing our campaign on a high note made for a great day of writing and preparation, and then amazing gameplay from the crew. But as we were cleaning up late that evening it dawned on me that I had not stepped outside all day. I hadn’t checked my phone all day; it was still hooked up to the charger from the night before. No number of notifications and reminders and systems would’ve saved me because my attention was totally devoted elsewhere. The Sojourner streak had been dead for nearly 8 hours and there was nothing to do about it.

    And I was okay with that. I’m still okay with that.

    The Blogging Streak

    The first post of what became eight months of daily blogging was published on March 26th, 2015. It was my wrap-up of WordCamp Dayton that happened about a week before. WordPress.com had started sending you an acheivement notification if you had a daily streak going on an individual blog, and Matt was pretty proud of his streak. With the recent excitement from WordCamp I decided to be more deliberate with my blogging.

    wordpress-post-streak
    Notification for 260-day posting streak

    Once I committed to blogging daily the majority of posts were pretty simple. Their value wasn’t much to anyone besides my immediate friends and family. But I also became more likely to work on that big post that takes a lot of time and really wanted to share. Those posts may only happen every other week, but before I started the daily blogging they weren’t happening at all.

    This extended period of working on my blog everyday helped me understand something that we hear from our users all the time. Blogging is helpful force in one’s life. Writing for the public to read is almost therapeutic, and it certainly helps one become a better communicator. Any time spent working on my blog felt like a net-positive, and I don’t feel that way about how I contribute to other social parts of the web. Blogging doesn’t feel like timewasting the same way scrolling through Twitter does.

    Two hundred sixty days is a long streak. About a month ago I posted that I was having hard time keeping up. Thinking up posts is getting harder, and that’s mostly because I’ve been spending most of my time trying to get things off my plate. Finishing up work projects and doing chores isn’t really great blog fodder, but it’s the best thing for me to be doing since we expect the baby any day now. That’s not what ended the streak though.

    In fact, the day my streak ended was a very exciting one for me. My creative juices were flowing and I felt good about everything. I could’ve very well cranked out three or four posts that night had it crossed my mind. It just didn’t. I did a full day’s work, I worked on my theme while watching Jessica Jones on Netflix with Amber, then stayed up late reading The Martian by Andy Weir. I slept well and woke up Saturday morning to the realization that Friday had no scheduled posts, and I didn’t so much as think about blogging all day.

    It’s especially awesome that this is what greeted me when I double-checked my site to see if I had a scheduled post on Friday:

    alton-brown-fail.png

    You said it, Alton.

    Lessons Learned

    The biggest danger to my consistency is my excitement. These two streaks were something I had no problems with developing on a daily basis for two-thirds of a year. I worked around plenty of external obstacles and chaotic, unexpected interruptions during that time – but those never broke my daily habits. It was my own interests that defeated me. Shiny objects in my peripheral vision grabbing my attention.

    Thankfully the world doesn’t end when any streak breaks. My blog is still here and all those posts are still published. My drafts are still waiting there turn. Those Ingress portals haven’t moved and I can hack any day I want. And the things I did instead weren’t bad uses of time by any means. Maintaining a streak shouldn’t cost you an interesting life, or even an interesting day.

    But it’s worth noting that for the most part – my systems worked. I’ve figured out how make myself do something everyday if I want it to be done. And it took these lessons to figure out where the system will fail.

    Going Forward

    Ingress has already started taking a back seat. I have a Guardian portal I’m recharging (which can be done from home) and I still play when I can, but it’s mostly when I walk the dog. For a fun little cell phone game, that seems like enough.

    Blogging will continue. You’re reading this post, right? But I’m only going to schedule/plan on posting on Mondays and Fridays. Anything else is gravy and I’m sure they’ll still happen, but I don’t see another daily streak as something I want to strive for. I’m also considering starting a second blog and doing a more rigorous posting schedule there, and reserving my personal blog here more for on-a-whim updates.

    I’ve had some recent successes with fitness. Maybe my daily habit tracking will switch to obsessing with that instead. Pushups and and steps replacing blog posts and hacks.

    Or cat pictures. Everyone loves cat pictures.

     

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  • Campaign Complete

    It’s like finishing a really good book.-My friend Kirsten after tonight’s game

    It’s an odd feeling to finish this campaign. Our group started playing Dungeons and Dragons together two years ago and I never would guessed it would become our regular thing. The friendships have stayed close and we all liked gaming, so this every-other-week role play has turned into the highlight of my social schedule. This campaign finishing up is ending the first chapter of my Dungeon Master career.

    Seeing the story complete makes me so proud of what we made together. So many moments paid off. Everyone was smiles and laughs at the end. Some thought they might die during the final battle. When it was all done we all just stood around in the glow of how cool it was.

    It’ll make our fresh start in 2016 all the better.

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  • Easier

    There are easier games to play than D&D. Not sure there are better ones. I’ve never had games of chess, or Arkham Horror, and any other game that I also truly love inspire me to make better stories or more interesting choices.

    I’d play for another 12 hours right now if I had the chance.

    And tomorrow I will.

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  • The Blue Sword

    Just because I’m a big bad dungeon master now, this was not always the case. It wasn’t that long ago that I was playing my first real campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. It was during that campaign I made a terrible mistake that I will never live down.

    In the story was something about a king and somehow my character ended up with a crown. It magically poisoned you if you put it on (my fellow adventurer found out,) so I never put it on, but my character didn’t realize this crown was actually important. He wanted to a new sword way more than he wanted to keep the crown. So when nobody else was around, he went to shopkeep and tried to sell it.

    The shopkeep knew exactly what it was, took the crown, threw a shiny blue sword at me, and immediately left through a trap door never to be seen again. I lost the King’s crown – which was basically the key objective we had – and I got a sword with +1d6 frost damage the glowed a bright blue. I was also dumb enough to think this was awesome.

    ice sword rittik-designs
    Ice Sword by Rittik-Designs on Deviant Art

    Now everytime I make a suggestion people say things like, “yeah! That’s cool, like that shiny blue sword!” Last night my best friend was helping me test out a possible bug on Simplenote, and he immediately used as his text “Alex is a stupid person who trades the king’s crown for a shiny blue sword.”

    We all make mistakes. With good friends you’ll never forget them either!

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  • Mini Metro

    Your life will be better with this game in it.

    Mini Metro from Dinosaur Polo Club

    mini_metro.png

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  • Platinum Guardian Badge

    Platinum Guardian Badge

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