Green! Who doesn’t love green? Hitting the ground running with ramp spells and popping out fat, trampling creatures to ruin your friends’ day! Big mana, big beasties, that’s the green way, and it’s immensely satisfying.
Columns
Welcome back, children. Today we’re talking Forged In Stone, the monowhite deck from the recent Commander 2014 release, and a surprisingly powerful deck for what’s usually ranked the second least powerful colour in the format.
Tricks of the Trade: Commander 2014: White
Commander 2014 is one hell of a set. With all of these wonderful new toys to play with, it seemed only natural to write up a set review for my adoring audience, which – by complete coincidence, naturally – required us to play the living daylights out of all the decks. The things I do for you people.
Tricks of the Trade: Commander 2014: Blue
Before properly setting out on our planar adventure, it is worth exploring what significance the concept of the planes has had in the history of Dungeons & Dragons throughout the years. As we’ll see, the planes have been present almost from the very start of the game, and have remained part of it ever since.
Walking The Planes 2: A History of the Planes in Dungeons & Dragons
3 I have an itch, dear reader. An itch I just can’t scratch. A little something that has wormed its way into my brain and refuses to leave. On rare occasions when the stars align, rivers run backwards and sundry other mystic omens come to pass, a Magic card will amble into my mind and take up residence. I am overcome by the need to do something with the card, be it fun or fair or so laughably broken that Lindsay Lohan thinks it needs help. It’s one of the more enduring and endearing qualities of Magic that even as a relatively seasoned player, sometimes I can […]
Tricks of the Trade: Can’t Touch This
1 With the recent release of Magic’s 2015 core set, I thought I’d jump on the Internet’s bandwagon good and hard to review the latest crop of potential Commanders. For the uninitiated, Commander (or EDH, for the purist) is a 100-card constructed format which pulls from virtually the entire backlog of Magic’s history1 with an emphasis on more social gaming than the usual tournament formats. It’s intended to be played by a group rather than as 1v1 duels, and – officially at least – prioritises having fun over winning. Further information on the format can be found here. Don’t be fooled, though. A Commander game […]
Tricks of the Trade: Leadership Material
Walking the Planes is a series of articles in which I explore the philosophy of the planes of existence in Dungeons & Dragons from a personal (retro-)perspective. Most of it will focus on the Planescape campaign setting, which was published between 1994 and 1998 and which is to date still the most detailed exploration of the planes in the game. I’ve always had a thing for the planes, different places and worlds beyond and above our own, hidden behind portals. The metaphorical speech is strong here. A plane is a level surface; something that happens on another plane is situated on a different ‘level’ of existence from ours, usually […]
Walking The Planes 1: Introduction
Hello and welcome to You Haven’t Seen!?! This is my brand-new column delving into the intersection of Geek and Cinema! Now, I’ve seen a lot of movies, and I consider myself an aspiring film snob. That said, there are quite a few rather important films I have not seen before beginning this project. I’ve doubtless seen movies and played games (for this is the Geek, after all) influenced by said films, and I probably know the twists and spoilerz, but the films themselves I haven’t seen. UNTIL NOW!!! So let me lay out how this is (tentatively) going to work. I will write about what I know about […]
You Haven’t Seen!?!: Ghostbusters (1984)
Welcome to Tricks of the Trade, Tom Dawson’s new column on all things good about Magic: The Gathering! To kick things off, Tom proposed one of our world-famous round-ups to lead into the unfathomably deep subject that is M:tG, and you can consider this a sort of backdoor pilot for Tom’s column.