A Wise Lesson Learned

Today I attended a small, as it only had 6 players due to the Grand Prix Lille qualifier going on, Standard tournament at Outpost Antwerp.

It would be the first time I played the format, and the very first time I had build a deck towards the current "what`s hot and what`s not" of the new Dark Ascension set, opting for a black red white deck.

The set up was as follows: Sorin, Lord of Innistrad, a heap of vampires like the Falkenrath Aristocrats and Stormkirk Captains, and a bunch of white token spells to have stuff to `feed` the Vampires cheaply while Falkenrath Nobles fed me extra life.

It sucked big time!

I lost all three games without a chance, only managing to pilfer a single round in match up two.

In match one, I faced a mainly black zombie deck that waltz over my creatures. Match two I was poisoned to death, and match three was an awesome blue green self-milling deck that threw very big creatures out as his graveyard filled up swiftly.


Oh how I wished in matches one and three I had brought my blue zombie mill deck...


But wise lessons where learned, and I came home and immediatly `uptuned` my Mono Blue deck, created a sideboard for it, and next friday and saturday I`m going to throw it into the field of battle to learn and fine-tune it further and further.



Lessons Learned:

* Sorin, Lord of Innistrad is a wanker. He never comes out to play on top of that. (Yes, i`m carving myself a reputation of never ever getting my bomb cards in hand, let alone in game)
* Build a deck in your own personality style. For me, that would mean an annoy your opponent to hell mill deck then...
* Stick with cards you know, it`s easier to remeber potential combo`s that way. Once more, that will mean the Blues for lil` ol` moi.
* Forgive powers of Blue for having not played thee. I will ammend big time.

Luckily, due to it not being sanctioned due to the circumstances, not to much harm was done as all that was on the line is a single participation Planeswalker Point for the lifetime track anyways.
And I got a booster back for my 5 euros, the Foil Tragic Slip in it is worth more then the rare Predator Ooze anyways x-D

Project Insanity week 5: Battle of the Kindreds!!!

Sunday is the big day, so I needed to get the army out for an outing at least once. I asked long time collegue clubmember Albert, our resident Dwarf, for a battle tonight, and he happily agreed to fight his brethren.




Well, it turned out we actually managed to play two games, as the first one, now labelled in my book as `the warm up` was a disaster. In turn 2 my blunderbusses failed a Panic test, ran and took the guncrew AND the huge warrior block with them, and in the end I yielded in less then an hour as I was surrounded and only the warriors rallied.




I had to take, over the two battles, 9 leadership tests in total. I flunked 7 of them, so far leadership 9 and 10...

Battle two I took the lessons learned, deployed deeper and let him come to me, while the earthshaker fired from maximum range shells into his ranks. The Hellsmith accompanying the gun was the man of the match, saving me from Misfire and the resultant eaten crew.




The K`daai on the other hand are for me personally, and my playing style, now officially the crap unit of the Legion list. As soon as those 40 Hobgoblins are painted up, they`ll be on shelf guard duty thank you very much. They did nothing but get shot to bits or burn themselves up, only achieveing the `what are those?` questions of looker by`s.

I put more then a fight in the second game, my Earthshaker molesting his lines as did my level 2 with his lore of Metal Searing Doom. But it was in the last turn that luck had it, as a scattered shot landed in the huge block of dwarfs with the general and such, and even though it had already lost some of it`s number to the gun before, it got decimated... and turned tail and ran. Under 25% he couldn`t get them rallied as he rolled a 6 or so, and to add injury to shame his cannon, which so far had survived TWO direct hits from the earthshaker... decided to blow itself up.




Not to shabby, I wonder how I`m gonna fare sunday, but with now one loss and one win, I feel rather confident of not being slammed from corner to corner at least...

... though this Sorcerer-Prophet still had some issues to settle with that Runelord

Dark Ascension Launch Weekend

So the past weekend I`ve been playing a lot of Magic the Gathering, as the new set has officially been released last friday.

The first was on the friday at Jeugdhuis Ojé in Deurne. The set there was with 6 boosters pure dark Ascension, Sealed format with no pool exchange. I managed to build a decent blue white token and spirit deck, with the Requiem Angel and a lot of human tokens.
It went decent enough, but the last two battles I was outdecked as first I opposed a green deck with 3 Increasing Savagery`s, and the last opponent sported 4 Mythics on 6 boosters!!!

Still, 8 Planeswalker points where gathered as I scored a 2 - 3 - 0 result and ended 15th out of 24 players


The second one was more frustrating on the sunday. It was a 3 Innistrad / 3 Dark Ascension Sealed, and my initial pool had nice whites like Increasing Devotion and a couple decent rares. However, this was with pool switch, and I ended up with the crappiest pool imaginable. The rares had 2 lands (Wolf Run and Drwonyard), and even though I also had 2 Immerwolves, I only totalled 3 other (were)wolves, of which 2 where the new manatapper. No option to deck build on that.
Then I had 2 Curse rares, the new white and the new black, but no other curses to build a curse deck... Only decent Rare I got was a FOIL Beguiler of Wills (excellent for my collection) which did manage to steal some creatures and won me round 4 on it`s own, but I had to settle with a cobbled together more or less flying brigade of whites and blues, with a bit of draw and a bit of `locking` like Burden of Guilt and Claustrophobia.

It was a crap pool, and I am in the end very happy (and amazed in myself) that I still managed to get a 2 - 4 - 0 result in for 9 Planeswalker points, resulting in a 22 out of 33 placing.

The promocard for the launch event was this one btw:



It seems I have found my `level` I`m at for the moment, totalling about 2 wins average. I guess that would mae me the second half of the League tables if we translate it to soccer terms, on the safe spots above relegation. Not to shabby for only 6 months of back into the game... ancient knowledge still seems to count for something at least in deck building ;)

Captain`s Log Stardate 08022012

Starfleet wants me to compile and file all reports into one bundle now, and forward them weekly to Earth Headquarters. What the Fleet wants, the fleet gets. How more liberal did things seem to go back in the 22nd century, I can`t imagine legendary commanders like Shrann being bogged down in paperwork...



Something is brewing in Romulan space.

Admiral T`nae, commander of Starbase 39, has ordered us to take the Ice Kraken and investigate an old abandoned Romulan megastation, known as The Vault. We soon discovered though that it wasn`t abandoned at all, and encountered some Romulan refugees. After opening the bay doors, we soon found out The Vault was a secret weapons research station, as a Borg Sphere was chained to all kinds of devices in there.




Further in we did discover who it`s current occupiers where, namely the Remans who are constructing a Thalaron Device, highly forbidden by all the powers in the quadrant.



We managed to escape with the data, but this let us to one of the mining moons of the Hfahir system.
A Ferengi entrepreneur named Madran runs a drilling operation here, and I beamed down with Twenty-Four to investigate. This whole base turned out to be a listening post for the Romulan Tal Shiar!



We managed to free some captive Romulan miners and steal valuable data, which after decoding seems to suggest that the Tal Shiar plans an attack on a Reman base...

On a different note, we discovered a Horta in the mines, a race long forgotten but in the records of Starfleet. The mother has granted me one of her youngs to accompany us on our journeys and to get the Horta back into touch with the current universe after their self-imposed exile of nearly two centuries...




Obituary

It is my sad duty to inform that crewman Morot died during an attempt to immunize a local colony against Synthococcus Novae. I will inform his family he died in the line of duty while giving everything he had to save the innocent colonists.



Commendations

Following commendations have been awarded to duty officers gaining critical successes in their assigned duties

Rathjen, House for receiving Reman Dignataries
T`pher in refrequencing our shield emitters
Parron to serve as a representative to a Security briefing on the Donatu sector
Vimduk for assessing Ship Battery coolant performances
T`phev and Suik for scans on Tetryon Particle bursts
Certain for running a level 4 diagnostic of the secondary weapon coils
Saik for mapping Particle Traces
Sota for charting unstable anomalies
Grebner, Gallenstein for analyzing signatures for Residual Photonic Technology
Ovem and S`pral to scan the data streams for Exobiological data
Certain for the scheduling of Hazard System Overload exercises.

And I would also like to thank the unknown crewmember who did a bit of redecorating in the lounge and displaying proudly our Preserver Galaxy Map.



Captain Aldades Tenghza Vongalazthag, USS Procyon

Following Accolades have been added to Captain Vongalazthag`s service record

* In the Garden - for visiting and honoring the history of Starfleet
* Viceroy - for defeating 500 Romulan ground troops
* Geological Surveyor - for finding a large deposit of magnesite
* No Kil I - for re-establishing contact with the Horta
* Critical Care - for treating the wounded aboard the SS Azura

Saint Seiya Myth Cloth review #33: Shaina of Ophiuchus

So it`s been a while, with all the painting, MMO`ing and Magic tournamenting going on in the Casa Moi, but that doesn`t mean I stopped collecting. Far from it, and this time I`m going to show off my latest limited edition from Tamashi nations, the feisty lass Shaina, silver saint of Ophiuchus.

Shaina has a fearsome reputation, being considered the strongest of Athena`s female saints, and fights with a violent style. She trained Cassios, who would end up fighting Seiya to earn the right to don the Pegasus cloth, and later don his life for that same Seiya as he realised that his death would cause his beloved mistress to much grief.

After Seiya`s victory, he split her mask, resulting in a terrible choice: love or death, as the rules of Sanctuary dictate. Even though she vowed she would kill him, she actually had feelings towards the Pegasus saint and nearly lost her life twice to protect him. First against Leo Aiolia, and later in the battle against Poseidon when he kept returning the Sagitarrius Arrow.

In the Hades story-arc she leads the Bronze saints that did not go to the Underworld to protect Sanctuary in the meantime. She later seems to pledge loyalty to Artemis, but her true intentions to fight Seiya where to help him regain his cloth.



Now the model itself was highly anticipated, as this would mean the start of finally getting to see the female saints in production. Marin is already in the pipeline, so now it is only a waiting game to see if Thetis will follow suit.

The model itself is elegant and nice, though cloth wise there isn`t much to be assembled. The female cloth is very sparse, with only a chest / shoulder piece, a left arm armor and knee protectors, alongside a belt. The knees and chest are metal, the rest is plastic.
You do however get two options for the headpiece: the sleek anime style one or the more curled and ornate version from the manga, which is the one I chose to put on the model.
You also have the option of building her with or without her mask, I opted for the with version (even though she has a pretty, anime resembling face) because 1. we get to see her like that most of the time and 2. I can`t have her vow to kill of all the male models in my cabinet ;)

Cassios, who accompanies the model in the set, is basically a pvc statuette, with no articulation, and I ain`t to fond of his facial expression, and face on the whole. It is a kind of `stand along` like for example the Eurydice model, but it is a nice addition to a collection for completeness sake.

All in all, I`m rating the set 3.5 out of 5, with Cassios pulling it all a bit downwards, but it was worth the wait for sure!

Decisions decisions, I`m surrounded by decisions...

Okay, so this is a tough one. I have in essence five hobbies that flow into one, but more and more it seems I have to make decisions of which one to put to the front, and which ones that will suffer the fate of being on the backburner untill a time I reschuffle and rotate them.

We all have those, and the biggest issues are of course that bitch of a thing called `real life issues` and `budgetting`. A hobby costs money, no matter how your budget is made up, and how it is for each person...

So past saturday I had a stare around in the Man Cave and thought about planning a way to reorganise and shuffle around some stuff to make it less `cave` and more `man`. And that`s when I came to this conclusion...



If I look at it objectively, I would say my `geekiness` consists mainly of five things.


1. Wargames, the Miniature kind. I have nearly 20 years of `experience` in this, I am a member of a nice club that provides me with my semi-weekly `shot` on average, BUT I also have more models still to paint then I can ever hope to achieve. On top of that, I`ve got a `little` hole in my hand, resulting in more and more models adding to that pile week in week out...
Being objective, this means I would really have to cut drastically into them, and reduce the whole cabinet to just two or three `ranges` to be fine. IF I decide to do this, I guess it would result down to three armies, namely my beloved Chaos Dwarfs, the Cathay unofficial army I`m building `cause I like the whole Five Rings and the likes settings, and my Union army. Fill that out with some cool stuff like the Gundams and Heroclix models and the occasional `wauw` model, and I should be settled.
I am probably going to do the Leagues this year for painting stuff, but no idea where I`ll be going after that with the hobby`s `intesity`. Time will tell and I will have to think long and hard about this one...

2. Magic, the Gathering. Yes, I really am back into this. Not for the competitiveness of it, but so far I have met a nice bunch of players, and like the crowd at The Outpost (a cyber cafe / gaming store in Antwerp) and at Sven`s centre Ojé. It`s a different kind of people then the ones at a miniature club, can`t really put my finger on it, but they are a tat like me in mindset outside the hobby. The other benefit of Magic is of course as I said last week, it takes very few storage space... Now I keep looking for a saint Seiya game mat to play cards on...

3. Playstation 3. Another drug, and with Saint Seiya at the short horizon, this will get bumped soonish. However, this still leaves me with a few dozen games I probably never will come around to play, let alone finish...



4. MMO`s. I love playing these, and after years of World of Warcraft, which just got to simple for me with the recent patches (it was, for me, at the height of it`s cunning with the Northrend expansion, and slid downwards after that. Subscription numbers seem to agree with me...). I loved Guild Wars and await the second edition with eagerness, but I also like Star trek Online. Being a trekkie and all, I restarted playing (I`m a life-longer anyway) it recently. Now that it is Free To Play, it will attract new people and maybe, just maybe I can get some club friends to join in as well to travel the spacelanes.

5. Geekiness. Yeah, you know, the traditional things of a gamer. Comic books, manga`s, scifi videos, books etc etc. No way in hell I`m ever going to dump those, but I really should shuffle some of them along in order to bring about the changes in interior... and I got this brand spanking new subwoofer powered Hercules soundsystem with 4 140watt boxes that I still need to be able to place somewhere decently instead of the patch up makeshift construction currently sporting them.


Bottom line is, in arpil I have two weeks off from work, so by then I`m really going to have to cut some ribbons and prepare storage boxes to put some of it all away. No matter what, this is going to hurt, if not alone for my back for all the weight that has to be shuffled along...

Captain`s Log: Stardate 06022012

Rumours are abound of a return of the so-called `2800`. Starfleet Command has given us orders to patrol the various expanses around the Federation, and look for any clues about these aliens' return. So far a sensor sweep of the Delta Volanis cluster yielded no results, but we keep looking out for them and their possible return. I guess we have received this assignment as a result of my previous experiences with the Changeling called Laas when we tracked him down while trying to establish a new Great Link in the Alpha Quadrant.



In the meantime though, we managed to get ourselves in a first contact situation with a strange race called the Sennagu. This lifeform exists as a sort of `viral cloud`, and took over the native population by accident millenia ago. This resulted in the closing down of the original species brain functions, rendering them in effect to slaves of the Sennagu.
This is however, or better was, a completely unforseen result, and their ambassador has made the promise that they will work together with the Federation to look for a possible solution to the issue.



Promotions

It seems in order to appoint Mr Yoris Prell to the position of Department Head for Tactical, so I can free up T`jell Varess for her duties of First Officer.

Commendations

A commendation should go out to crewmembers Parron, sato and Ridpath for organising a concert aboard the Procyon. Though the music was, errm, rather `special` it did do wonders for the moral of the crew.



Our next stop will take us briefly to Deep Space Nine, where the auxilliary vessel for the Procyon, the Captain`s Yacht USS Ice Kraken, has been retrofitted and is ready for use.

Captain Vongalazthag, USS Procyon

Stardate 04022012

It`s been more then a year. A frustrating year of pounding my heels, sitting grounded in Defteri space as I await news from Starfleet. But suddenly, two weeks ago, it was for some reason urgent that me and my crew would be returned to Earth Spacedock...

But finally it has arrived, I have been granted a new vessel... but first, let me tell you about the old friend that I lost.



The USS Lyntaria was a small and elegant gem. A member of the Nova class lineage, which replaced the venerable Oberth in the midst 24th century. She is a survivor, as the records of the late Admiral Janeway showed us what the little Equinox managed to achieve in the Delta Quadrant.



And she was my first command, as we set out to scour the inner regions of the Federation on various survey missions, and she held her own in battles when raiders from the various enemy factions tried to score an easy win.




Until the day we where called to Deep Space Nine. We where ordered to join a task force to investigate a Borg invasion, and the Lyntaria was to provide sensor support to the battle vessels.




It all went down the drain as soon as the Borg supercube appeared, and the Lyntaria was as good as destroyed, limping back to Defteri space after being sucked into a transwarp channel. She wasn`t worth a thing anymore, to heavily damaged to repair and Starfleet ordered her to be scrapped. And me and my crew, we had to wait for a new command or a passing vessel to pick us up.




But now the time has come. My new vessel is a thing of beauty, much larger then feisty little Nova vessel. This is the next generation of science vessels, the Luna class.



We have taken her out of Spacedock, and are now giving her her shakedown cruise.



As a legend of Starfleet from over two centuries ago used to say:

`Second star to the right... and straight on `till tomorrow`






Captain Aldades Vongalazthag, USS Procyon.

Project Insanity week 4: I did it!!!

Success! I actually managed to paint a full 2000 points army in even less then a month, even though I had a deadline for myself and a painting schedule drawn up for a month and a week to pull it off.

But past sunday the final figures where completed, and this week they got varnished, so now the army, albeit to small to my personal game taste of ages past, is ready to battle it out at the TSA Fun Tournament on the 12th of February.

I even may squeeze in a practice game next week friday, to at least having had a feel once how it is going to handle.



The final unit that needed to be completed was the `Infernal Guard with Hailshot Blunderbuss` unit, aka just the good old Blunderbusses. They work differently now, but they still can tchuk out a whole lot of low strength, high number of hits which still get `boosted` the more of them fire. A Castelland with the Hammer of Hashut and the Stone Mantle is included in the unit, as it is going to be the job of these guys to anchor the huge warrior block`s side and fight off any light troop slooking to disperse my battle line. Of course, with their Blackshard armour, hand weapon and shield as basic equipment, these guys can seriously stand their own in combat...

So that brings us to a renewed picture of the full force as the one I started the series with, only this ime it is in full technicolour.




But how do I hope I will fare? The other Chaos dwarf player apparently isn`t going to be able to make it, so that means the goal has to shift a little and now I am going to need to try and beat my archnemesis in the final placings.

Him playing Beastmen, if i can believe magazines and websites, is certainly going to help in this effort...

My goals are first and foremost to try and get `back into it`, like I`m doing with small scale Magic tournaments as well at the moment. Building up the competitive mindset again and stuffsies you know, as it requires a whole other way of thinking and playing then casual play like I did the last years. You know, not throw away units / cards with the `we`ll see what happens` mindset, as that usually just means easy points for the opponent.

Apart from that, it`s going to be a lot of chestpounding and alpha male`ing against the current TSA generation of warhammer players, as the `Three Old farts` that came back out of retirement all managed to re-collect a full painted force in a months time, while the week-to-week players haven`t...

Now if I can only find one of the Chaos Dwarf Online moderators to grant me that medal on the site for having and showing a 2000 points completed force...