Magic: The Gathering - Had a grab-bag draft yesterday with a mix of Innistrad, Dark Ascension, & M13 boosters randomly spread across the table. But let's back up a bit farther - the previous draft two weeks earlier was a Return to Ravnica draft where I created quite possibly the strongest deck I've ever 0-3'd with. It was Rakdos, and all 3 match losses were close 1-2 affairs, and my opponents had some good luck stabilizing. My deck was bombless but consistent at punishing slow draws, so to some extent I was willing to get rolled by good opponent draws.
This time? Utter destruction. I drafted Rakdos again - heavy Black this time but with a notable Red splash - and it had a crazy curve, was hard to block, had removal, and had some choice cards to put the game away. Of the 6 drafters, my deck was fast enough I got in games against all of the other 5. 10-0. I 2-0ed the entire table, and to be clear, these weren't pushover players (well maybe one was, but the rest were legit). Mwahaha. (On the evasion front, Tormented Soul, 2x Vampire Interloper, Highborn Ghoul, Kitesail, 3x Bloodhunter Bat. Dark Favor & Volcanic Strenth for some pump and really fast clocks. For removal, Tragic Slip, Fires of Undeath, Flames of the Firebrand, Farbolg Boneslinger. On the bomb front, Curse of Death's Hold. Toss in some random stuff to fill out the curve and be threats - 2x Torch Fiend, Liliana's Shade, Rotting Fensnake (scary with a Kitesail or Volcanic Strength or if the opponent thinks leaving 1 blocker back is safe against me!) - yeah, good stuff.)
Endless Space - I tried this during the Free Weekend on Steam. Succeeded in getting me to buy it - Master of Orion 2 with less micromanagement, cool. The space battle porn is excellent as well. I like it.
A bit rough around the edges still though - some whining:
* The "hangar" idea is neat, but there should be an option somewhere that says "if there is not an enemy fleet in orbit, auto-launch from the hangar," since that is what you want to do 100% of the time anyway.
* Being able to travel outside the gate connections between systems is cool! But... marginal, only comes up in a few scenarios at the moment. I was fully expecting Orion-esque bonus systems of the Endless home worlds to be only accessible via warp drive but protected by super-Guardians, but nope, you don't get to explore any new systems with warp drive. What. Isn't this like the entire point of the Pilgrims? (Also, with the default settings in my 2nd game but a Huge Galaxy, there were still only 2 giant "constellations" as best I can tell. Maybe I need to set the galaxy settings to "lots of constellations" to get Warp Drive to be worth more.)
* The endgame seems a bit half-baked, or at least optimized for multiplayer at the moment where you don't have time to smell the roses. No special "Mwahaha you have annihilated an empire" message, just a generic "some empire was destroyed somewhere" one? Come on, at least give me a SMAC-style "opposing leader in my personal torture chamber" image. Totally lame "you won" message at the end as well. If I'd know it'd be a boring "You won an expansion victory!" message, I'd have stopped playing spreadsheet hero 2 hours earlier and saved the cleanup of my fleets conquering the galaxy and just started my next game. At least give me some bad fanfic about how now that with the power of the Endless at my command, I will resculpt my home part of the galaxy to my very will blah blah blah blah.
* Apparently the Cravers got nerfed from their galaxy-conquering ways to play a little bit more standard than described earlier in this topic in the beta. +2 Fleet command limit rather than unlimited sounds way more sane, but nerfing their bonuses / penalties? Bah. I realize this is more balanced, but having huge strengths & weaknesses makes for more distinctive play.
Growlanser Wayfarer of Time - There's an existential threat to humanity loose, but everyone is fighting everyone instead. I'd really prefer if Our Hero was acting like a Dan Brown conspiracy type here, and everyone was treating him as crazy, rather than silently nodding as he busily participates in said wars. "Hey! We need to stop fighting and team up to defeat the invisible angel conspiracy! You gotta believe me!" (Okay I the player will take the excuse to fight a bunch of battles, but the characters could at least TRY to avoid them.) But then I've already whined about Our Hero's blase reaction to "'sup I'm back from the dead" so yeah. Also there is an extremely bland amnesiac samurai and a random fanservice catgirl I can use. Yeah whatever.
