Missed Deadline, Again.

Missed my normal deadline for Thursday. Between real life and other writing deadlines, it just didn't happen today. Thursday's update will instead go up sometime tomorrow. Sorry for the delay.

In the mean time, check out my Twitter for links to some of the content I created today!

The Future of Monday Pauper Deck Challenge

I really hope this doesn't sound arrogant...

As many of my longtime readers know, I spent over three years as the host for one of the most popular Player Run Events of the time known as Monday Pauper Deck Challenge. I stepped down at the end of Season 19, due to some major life changes I was dealing with. Today, living in a new state with a new job, it has become difficult for me even to participate in this great event.

I am very grateful for my fellow Standard Pauper enthusiast Malum who stepped in as host after me, eventually taking over for not only MPDC but the Thursday night SPDC event as well. But today, this same player announced that due to personal reasons, he is having to step away from hosting all 3 of the major PREs he has been overseeing. Malum has done a tremendous job, given the huge investment of time and energy it takes to successfully host 3 different major events, and I don't want anything I might write here to be taken as a criticism of him.

But I have noticed that participation in both of these events seems to be on the decline. Despite the fact that Standard Pauper is more popular than ever, it seems like the player base for these PREs is not growing. Where once we were debating how many rounds should be played with 40-50 players regularly participating, today the average event draws less than half that. As someone who invested a ton of energy into this event, it saddens me to see this happen.

As I mentioned a few months back, my current plan is to unveil a brand new Standard Pauper "league-style" event, where players compete for a month on their own time and schedule, then come together at the end of the month for a tournament with a suitably large prize pool and with byes dependent upon performance that month. With the great success of the Hipsters of the Coast event, I decided to wait until that event came to an end before trying to get this new endeavor off the ground. However, given the current situation with MPDC, I find myself wondering if taking back the reins of this event would be better for the Standard Pauper community, and thus a better use of my time and resources.

On the other hand, I also wonder if there simply is no longer the support for two separate Standard Pauper PREs. Could this declining participation simply be an indicator that what the community really needs is something different, rather than trying to recapture the past?

So here are the questions I would love to get some feedback on from my fellow Standard Pauper players:

1. Are two weekly Standard Pauper PREs really viable given the recent trends?
2. Can we find a reliable and skilled host or hosts to run these two events for the long term? If not, do you feel like I should try and take back hosting MPDC?
3. Is there sufficient interest for me to go ahead and get this "league-style" event off the ground, or is that simply muddying the waters further?

Now more than ever, if you care about Standard Pauper, the PDCMagic.com PREs, and my participation with the format, please make your opinion known. Thanks.

Terraria 1.2: A Brief Review

So I've spent the last 72 hours or so soaking in all the new content that was released in the long-awaited 1.2 update for Terraria. One has only to glance at the four and a half page Changelog to see that this is a massive update. Since I decided to start with a fresh character and essentially explore all the next content blind, I have no doubt that there is quite a bit of content I have yet to uncover. But I wanted to take this chance today to review what I've seen so far based on the first few days of play.

1. First off, there has been a major cosmetic facelift. Every biome has been updated with a new background and fauna. Waterfalls are now possible and can be found throughout the world. Weather is another added visual feature, with thunderstorms and blizzards. Once you have access to the Painter NPC, you can also literally change the color of any block in the game. Additionally, there are now color and texture variations among many of the common enemies, especially the ever-present Zombies. Even the sun and moon are different now! This breathes a breath of fresh air to every pixel of the game.
   
2. Along those same lines, there are now 'palette-swap' versions of the original starting ores. For each of the Tier 1 ores, you either get the original version or the new one, but not both. While there doesn't seem to be much, if any, mechanical difference between the old and new versions, it does add some nice variation from world to world.
   
3. The Biomes of the game have been radically expanded, especially the previously bland Snow biome, which now has its own unique monsters and items. The Desert now has a chance to spawn a large pyramid laden with treasures, while even the gentle Forest now has a chance for one or more gigantic trees. Deep within the underground Jungle can be found a giant beehive, while large nests of spiders inhabit underground areas. There is more to see and more to find than ever before.
   
4. Speaking of which, there was been quite a bit of discussion about one of the new biomes which is a replacement for the Corruption. It has different enemies and different mechanics than the original Corruption, but serves much the same function as the old. And like the old and new ores, a world gets one or the other, but not both. While those who wish access to everything in a single world may find this unfortunate, it increases the variation from world to world.
   
5. As far as the early game goes, travel and exploration is now easier than ever. Your character can walk up half- or single-block tiles without needing to jump. He or she can climb vertical walls with rope, or scale them with clawed shoes that seem to be a common early game loot. Your inventory space has 10 more slots, treasure chests have doubled their storage slots, and many common blocks now stack up to 999.
   
6. There are also numerous ways to obtain some of the more desirable accessories, including the Grappling Hook and Cloud in a Bottle. The former can now be made with a large cache of gems (rather than having to grind Skeletons and Piranhas to finally find a Hook!), while the latter can be found in special loot areas of the Snow Biome and the Desert Biome in addition to in underground treasure chests.
   
7. Enemies now have health-bars, and in addition to the visual variation among them, there are a host of new monsters to fight, including flying fish, umbrella carrying slimes, and spiders, just to name a few. None of the monsters seem overpowered, and seem to scale well with those that were already present in the game.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Again, just look at the massive Changelog, and you can understand why it took so long for this to be released. It's an amazing glut of content, and what's even more amazing is that all of this is absolutely free if you own the original game. You can't get better value than that!

This update is everything an expansion pack should be, and much, MUCH more. Highly recommended!

Puerto Rico (the Board Game)

Lately I've been playing a lot of Puerto Rico, which is rapidly becoming my favorite strategy board game. Board games have long been an important part of my life. Not only did I grow up in an isolated mountain community of less than 10,000 people, I also attended a small college surrounded on three sides by corn fields. Even today, when I get together with my good friends, card games or board games tend to be our chosen form of entertainment.

Puerto Rico is themed, not surprisingly, around the island of the same name during the Spanish colonial period, when survival depended on eking out a living from the land and ships were loaded with goods from the New World to send back to Europe.

The game shares a lot with the more popular The Settlers of Catan, in that you are developing a mix of infrastructure and resources that you use to convert your meager starting resources into a winning combination of points. However, Puerto Rico has a much lower reliance on random luck than Settlers does, and forgoes the use of dice entirely. Instead, players take turns picking one of a set of different roles during each round. While usually each player gets a chance to act whenever a particular role is chosen, the player who chose it not only gets the advantage of going first (and thus getting first choice of limited resources) but also gets a bonus for their action. In many ways it almost feels like running a business - growing crops and storing them efficiently, developing the island with useful buildings, deploying your workers to best effect, selling at the right time, and, most importantly, shipping your goods for maximum benefit. It's also a beautifully illustrated game, as you can see here:

Of course, one of the reasons I am enjoying it so much right now is that the game has been converted to an app on the Apple iOS, with an intuitive interface, clean presentation, and surprisingly good AI. It can be played against any variation of human and AI opponents, either on a single device or via its multiplayer mode. Here's what the main playing screen looks like:

Intrigued? Then check out the following:

1. Here's a great review from a user over at RPG.net.
2. Or, if you prefer, here is a 'How to Play' podcast covering the game.
3. The absolute best place for strategy tips is this post in the forums on Boardgamegeek.com.
4. Or, for something a bit easier to digest, check out this video with 5 tips on how to win.

If you can't tell, I highly recommend this game!

What about you? Have you ever played this game? What did you think?

Thanks for reading. See you Thursday with my initial review of Terraria 1.2!

What Story Are You In?

Books. Although some may claim that in the digital age the power of the book to influence culture is waning, I would disagree. While the physical medium of the book may no longer be the primary means by which information is conveyed in our culture, the power of books to shape and influence culture has by no means disappeared.

What is true for cultures is true for individuals as well. All of us are shaped by the way we view the world around - the story that we believe we are a part of, in other words. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, put it this way:

"[Man is…] essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’"

This quote, naturally, reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from the cinema adaptation of The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers, a book which has had a profound effect as one of the defining stories of my life:

What story do you find yourself part of?

Terraria Dark Souls Super Hard Mode, Part Two

 

A couple weeks back, I blogged about how I started a Let's Play for the Super Hard Mode on the Dark Souls Mod of Terraria. I've been making steady progress, but my timeline for completing this playthrough was thrown out the window when this little gem was spoiled on Twitter early last week:

Naturally, this announcement accompanied the release of the brand new trailer for Terraria 1.2:

That means, as of today, I have exactly one week to finish this project before 1.2 is finally released. Time to shift into overdrive!

If you're subscribed to my YouTube channel, or follow me on Twitter, you should already have seen that I have now released the first 5 episodes. But in case you missed them, I've included them below.

Naturally, once Terraria 1.2 comes out next week, I will be sure and post an initial review as soon as I've had a chance to play it. Personally I can't wait!

 

 

 

That's it for today. Thanks as always for reading and commenting!

In Case You've Forgotten

It's a good time to be a Standard Pauper player.

Once upon a time, this was just a fringe Pauper format - one of many variations of Classic Pauper - with a dedicated but small community of players. There was no Magic Online format filter, few if any articles, and very little exposure to the wider Magic the Gathering audience.

It's amazing how different things are today. In the four years I've been playing Standard Pauper, we've come a long way. There are three different weekly PREs in the format right now. There is a game filter on Magic Online, making it a far simpler task than before to find fellow Standard Pauper players. There is a growing number of writers covering the format. And proponents of the format have brought attention to the format not only a much wider audience than ever before, but even put it on the radar of Wizards of the Coast themselves. That is no small accomplishment.

Just for today's blog, I was able to pull together three different articles on Standard Pauper, none of which have anything to do with me. Each are worth checking out in their entirety:

1. A Farewell to Flickergate - Pauper enthusiast Dan Horning (known more commonly as MagicGatheringStrat) discusses the variations of the Flickergate deck and recounts his experiences with the excellent Standard Pauper PRE community.

2. Post Standard Pauper Rotation Grief Counseling - Another member of the MagicGatheringStrat website, Brennon looks at the current Standard Pauper cardpool and provides excellent analysis of what will change with the upcoming rotation. He also examines some of the new cards for Theros and what they will mean for the format.

3. Theros Spoilers for Standard Pauper - Jason Moore, a contributer for several Magic websites, examines the early spoilers for Theros and even submits a few sample decklists for consideration.

Don't miss these great articles. And don't forget just how far Standard Pauper has come.