'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

Playing a new card-based game at last week's pasta night, jonners99 and I were discussing how it is that card games tend to come in oversized boxes that are awkward to deal with and take up far too much space in the Bag of Games.

Clearly the solution is to split it out into smaller boxes. However these games have a lot of cards and so won't fit in your normal deck box. They will, however, fit very nicely into a MtG fat pack box...



That's got Munchkin Zombies, Boss Monster, and World of Tanks. Unfortunately I ran out of space - the Boss Monster: Crash Landing expansion doesn't quite fit, and Man Bites Dog certainly won't. And that's my only spare fat pack box as all the others actually have MtG cards in them. Hmm... how much are fat packs these days, and is it seriously worth buying one mainly for the boxes?



I also put together a bunch of dividers using the MtG plastic ones as a rough template (a forum post helpfully had some measurements). They're printed onto WH Smith premium 160gsm card (with a Canon iP2600 I used Matte Photo Paper, Standard quality, and set the paper thickness to "envelope" as technically 160gsm is out-of-spec for this printer) and seem to have come out well enough.

The only flaw in the plan is I now have a pile of rules booklets to transport somehow. Still, it's a smaller heap overall than I started with!

Time for another MtG deck!

( Mephitic Ooze )

This one I actually built myself from scratch - for comparison, here's what it looked like back in 2006. You really don't want to see the original build that ricold alluded to in the comments of the linked post - that had lots of singletons and horrific consistency, but it worked as a starting point.

It's proven to be a reasonably effective deck - as usual for my decks it's hopeless in duels, but can do quite well once more players are added and it gets a chance to build up. The primary win condition is a ridiculously overpowered Mephitic Ooze, though the various Arcbound creatures all work nicely together with their Modular ability and the Dross Golems generally wreak havoc through being hard to block.

It runs 61 cards because I really didn't want to remove anything when I picked up a Sudden Death (I think from a booster draft) - especially not the Echoing Decays, as those have proven to be very effective at creature removal (it's rather hard to save a creature when it has zero toughness). Possibly I should drop the Overseer as as nifty as it is, it's very expensive and I've got no mana acceleration (the Fiend has also proven to be a liability on occasion, when talismancer has taken control of it and used it to kill my creatures). I've generally only seen it appear near the end of a drawn-out chaos game where I've already got plenty of big nasty creatures on the table.

This may did go horribly wrong due to the cruft Word adds to tables....

talismancer's recent post reminded me that I'd been meaning to work out what state the few Magic: The Gathering decks I have are in. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of them have had sideboards shuffled in by mistake (which is not a good thing, as it messes with the card distribution and gives you a high chance of having a hand of uselessness). So in the interests of more NaBloPoMo filler, let's pick a random deck and poke it with a stick!

I have a slight advantage over talismancer here in that many, many years ago I went through all 9? 10? of my decks and listed them in Excel. Because I was a student back then with spare time I then bodged together some formulas to try and work out what proportion of the cards should be lands, and what colours those lands should be (through counting the number of colour-specific mana symbols and guesstimating a distribution based on that). Hence I have some fancy tables!

This particular deck started life as the preconstructed Morph Mayhem deck from about 10 years ago.

( Morph Mayhem )

Well this definitely has a sideboard, but it's a weird one - I have a sideboard containing all of 6 cards, and I have a deck that's one card short. And the deck's also a little land-heavy by the looks of things - the general rule of thumb is 40% land or 24 cards in a standard 60-card deck, but here I've got 26. I think that stems from a lot of my playing at SWARM where I tended to not have enough land in hand (note that the casting cost distribution isn't particularly useful here, as the creatures are mostly morphs with a cost of 3 to play them face-down - though the Dream Chisels help with that).

Hmm. I probably ought to make it back up to 60 - the Whipcorder looks like a good one to add. The cycling lands (Lonely Sandbar and Secluded Steppe) can go as in practice I rarely use the cycling ability so I'd be better off with lands that don't have a 1-turn delay built in to them, or perhaps I should just drop two lands and instead run the extra Glory Seekers? Otherwise it's a deck that ticks over nicely in multiplayer chaos games, because everything it does is a mystery and it sneers at lockdown decks - being a morph deck it can do anything interesting at *any* time (turning a card face-up can be done whenever I have priority, and as a bonus the resulting effect comes from a triggered ability and so is hard for other players to deal with). The main downside is there's no real win condition and any half-way competent deck will stomp it with ease... but that's rarely an issue in chaos games because the competent decks quickly make themselves into targets for everyone else.

Besides, using a Willbender to make someone else's win condition *my* win condition is always hilarious.

So, last week I tried my hand at some deckbuilding for MtG, and made a suprisingly good black/artefact deck, primarily designed to hit with a big, unblockable, untargetable Mephitic Ooze (0/5, +1/+0 for each artefact I control, destroy any creature it touches) equipped with Whispersilk Cloak (equipped creature is untargetable and unblockable).

Version 1.1a of the deck:

Card	Quantity	Type
Arcbound Crusher	3	Artefact Creature
Arcbound Hybrid	4	Artefact Creature
Arcbound Overseer	1	Artefact Creature
Arcbound Stinger	4	Artefact Creature
Arcbound Worker	4	Artefact Creature
Darksteel Citadel	4	Artefact Land
Dross Golem	4	Artefact Creature
Echoing Decay	4	Instant
Mephitic Ooze	4	Creature
Myr Servitor	3	Artefact Creature
Swamp	14	Land
Vault of Whispers	4	Artefact Land
Vulshok Morningstar	4	Equipment
Whispersilk Cloak	3	Equipment

A Mephitic Ooze equipped with a Whispersilk Cloak is downright evil when I have ~15 artefacts on the table, though I've done the same trick with such things as a Myr Servitor equipped with a pair of Vridian Morningstars and some +1/+1 counters. The Arcbound Crusher also makes for a good alternate win condition.

The deck's also managed a few wins in the past week. One of the more amusing ones was in a 4-way game. Player to my left folded, after getting impressively manascrewed. Player to my right got killed by player opposite, who then played a Platinum Angel. So what do I draw? An Echoing Decay, to match the one already in hand. Two Echoing Decays later, and that 4/4 angel becomes a 0/0 and self-destructs. "Oh," comes the response from across the table. Black is very good at making creatures self-destruct, especially the supposedly indestructible ones. Muwhahaha...