Eternal Analysis 015—Endurance & Stun

Endurance is Eternal's vigilance, and stun is its super-tap, but their implementation and relationship are worth talking about.

Announcement: Goblin Game 2019

Hey Artisans. Tomorrow (Wednesday, Jan. 23) I'll be running my annual Goblin Game on Twitter. It'll kick off some time around noon EST, and run throughout the day. I'll try to tag Artisans whose twitter names I know, but look for #GobGame on twitter to get more info.

Eternal Analysis 014—Ambush and fast spells

Eternal avoided making Magic's mistake of taxonomically dividing sorceries and instants: They're all spells, but some are fast and some aren't. Then they dropped the ball.

The Emperor's New Clothes & Activity Analysis

Years ago, just as KickStarter was realizing its potential in the board games market, a concept game full of blank components funded and I thought it was all a big joke. At XOXO 2018, I got to play it with its author, Jonathan H. Liu, a gamer so generous and trusting he lent out his game collection for the hundreds of strangers at the conference to borrow and play, unsupervised. Jonathan reviews game at GeekDad and, I now understand, is brilliant. As is the delightful Emperor's New Clothes.

The game comes with a scoring marker for each player and a score track, 10 cubes for each of the three resource types (dignity, gold, and gullibility), 13 role cards, a deck of action cards, three normal resource dice, and a fourth special resource die. Except they're all completely blank.

What I've Learned from Guilds of Ravnica's Mechanics (Part 5)

Please enjoy the third in a series of five guest posts from Larcent about the mechanics of Guilds of Ravnica. —Jay Treat

Lesson Five: Undergrowth and identity vs. gameplay

Green and black decks are doing quite well in Standard right now and are even seeing high-end competitive Magic play. This makes it all the more interesting that the undergrowth mechanic landed with such a thud with players. There's very little of it to be found in these decks. There are cards from Guilds of Ravnica in these successful decks, though, and there's a lot to learn about why those made the cut and cards with undergrowth did not.