Ogre’s legacy win

Posted by vroman on July 5, 2011 No comments

Despite paltry testing with this list and middling confidence, I won a 35 player legacy tourney on 7-2-11.

4 flooded strand
4 scalding tarn
4 island
2 plain
2 tundra
3 wasteland
2 mishra factory
1 karakas
1 academy ruin
4 sensei top
4 brainstorm
2 ancestral vision
4 mental misstep
4 spell snare
4 force of will
4 swords plowshare
4 stoneforge mystic
1 batterskull
1 sword body mind
2 vendillion clique
3 jace mindsculptor
side
2 enlightened tutor
2 surgical extraction
1 tormod crypt
1 back to basic
1 counterbalance
1 ethersworn canonist
1 ensnaring bridge
1 spellskite
1 umezawa jitte
1 circle of protection red
1 crucible worlds
1 hex parasite
1 energy flux

I finished 2-2 in a little 8man tourney earlier in the week, which although mediocre, told me that stoneforge was at least viable if I played tighter. I was pretty happy with how relevant turn 1 Ancestral Visions were, but couldn’t find room for all 4, since I hadn’t noticed that the mainstream stoneforge decks had completely cut Divining Top, which I find unfathomable. Stoneforge makes SDT even better due to so many extra shuffle effects. I had games where I shuffled my library with SDT on board, 2x/turn, for every turn of an 8+ turn game. With this many shuffles, drawing redundant Tops is fine, bc can just cycle them. That is retarded card selection. Will take. Compare this to the highly situational Standstill. If they have any board presence, its uncastable, and even if not, they can wait to break it in your 7+ card end-step and make it Ideas Unbound. Do you just board it out on the draw? Card advantage that only works if you resolve the first creature sounds like textbook win-more. The only maindeck oversight I regret is failing to go up to 4xFactory.

I was pretty happy with the sideboard both before and after Saturday. Putting the tutor toolbock package into the board worked fine. I took a little risk eschewing any targeted artifact removal given the liklihood of facing the mirror, in favor of a couple Surgical Extractions which seems like an unfair effect at 0. Counterbalance as singleton was irrelevant and Crucible never saw play. One of these, probably Counterbalance, is becoming Dispeller Capsule again. Spellskite was very tits tho. Every combat exchange in legacy is pretty high stakes, so having a static free method of diverting removal is clutch. And an 0/4 sword carrier isn’t the worst asset either.

Rd 1 Elves
Game 1 takes forever. His list is a little jank, with lots of big drops that frequently leave me with dead missteps in hand. Over the course of the game he draws 9 extra cards from two [green monster who draws cards] and prolongs things against unopposed UG sword via two Primal Commands. There are some EPIC combat exchanges with giant elves vs Batterskull + spot removal, etc. In the long run though, a 6/6 pro-green vigilant, lifelink Germ could not be stopped by his library in hand.
Game 2, despite the fact his list has like 117 1+2 drops, I board out all the missteps and some snares for tutors, jitte, bridge, and counterbalance. Despite seeing Banefire get milled from Sword of Mind, I don’t bring in COP:R, which of course becomes his only out when trapped behind Bridge+SDT+CB lock, and we have 5 min for game 3.
Game 3, I get t2 Stoneforge into sword UG, and do in fact mill him to zero cards only to see he boarded in Ulamog FTD.

Rd 2 Homebrew
This was a relaxing round where a Blazing Effigy was Spell Snared for the first time in the history of sanctioned magic.

Rd 3 Storm Caleb Scherer
Tight match. Caleb was unprepared for maindeck Spell Snare so I basically wasn’t in danger. By only using missteps and cliques on his discard, my snares and forces always hit the infernal tutors. In game 1, I had factory + clique on board, and tapped out for jace or something, and Caleb resolved mainphase adnauseam post-land drop. He hit a chunk of high curve stuff w no petals, so stopped at 6 life. I attacked him to 1, jaced into multiple counters and legend ruled my cliques in his draw step to get rid of a duress, so he couldn’t resolve anything.
Game 2
I board out stoneforge and equipment and 2 stps for all relevant hate. He goes for Ritual into Adnas fairly early and I force, then foolishly Surgical Extraction Adnaseam, which turned out to be his only copy. I Clique him and see a hand of 2 Cabal Rit, 2 Echoing Truth, and 2 Infernal Tutor. I’m holding 2xSnare, so let this stand. Some time goes by and I attack him to 1, and Caleb attempts to go off when I’m at 14. In the course of our counter war, Caleb is holding Tendrils, so deals 16 to me, but luckily I was holding one of the STPs I left in library mainly to handle possible Xantid Swarm or Negator sb tech. I plow the Clique and life totals are now 1 to 17 with no cards in either player’s hand. I have factory and SDT on board. I get Jace the following turn and fateseal him, though since I have to put all his card selection spells on bottom, he has plenty of opportunitys to get a tutor. I get a Force in hand, with enough mana to still attack, and hardcast it, so now I’m only dead if he actually draws the Tendrils, which does not happen in his alloted 8 turns, after using a fetch.

Rd 4 dredge Gabe Jolly
Its fun to watch them try.

Rd 5 merfolk Kevin Bopp
I keep Factory+Tundra. My Stoneforge is Forced, and Tundra wasted, and I draw not another land until he has 8 power worth of watermen.
Game 2 I mull to 6 and basically am outdrawn and thwarted at every turn.

Rd 6 merfolk Mark Mehochko
This match was essentially the reverse of the previous round.
Game 1 Mark keeps a 7 card hand of 2 drops, island and Vial. I misstep his vial and he misses 3 land drops while I get UGsword swinging, and its way too late when he casts his second spell.
Game 2 Way more interactive, I get turn 2 Spellskite, which dulls his early attacks quite a bit. Then I wait until I have 4 mana to resolve endstep E-tutor for ensnaring bridge around Daze. I think Mark did not actually have any bounce boarded in, so this is effectively the end of the game, but to seal the deal I get Stoneforge for UG sword, equipped to Spellskite, and use SDT to get up to 2 cards in hand during attack step, and back to 0 or 1 in 2nd main.

Top 8 mono black Brian Sondag
This tournament started at 1pm. I got delayed on an errand and arrived at the shop at 1:07, so was quite rushed in registering. I forgot to include Vendillion Cliques on my decklist and start the top8 down a game. I had glanced at some of Sondag’s gamestates throughout the tournament, but it didn’t occur to me that someone would play monoB, so I assumed I was up against WB, which I also have decent matchup against. Turns out without Vindicates, monoB is pretty vulnerable to Jace, which I can generally hide from discard via Bstorm/SDT.
Game 2.
He has lots of discard (turns 1, 2, 3 are Thoughtseize, Duress, Tourach) but I had t1 SDT on the play, so it never really matters. I force a Grave Titan, then STP another leaving him with just 2 zombies as his only threat pretty much the whole game. I stick jace like turn 7, which keeps the hits coming, and I have enough mana eventually to safely drop stoneforge and hardcast Batterskull in same turn to evade Duress.
Game 3
I board out the missteps for tutors and bridge and spellskite. I mull to 6 and keep pretty mediocre hand of [force, snare, 4 land]. Sondag duresses me t1, but I topdeck Visions. He Dark Rituals into T2 Nevynrral’s Disk. I land Jace t4, and with my huge infusion of cards turn 5, I get SDT, and Stoneforge equipped with Jitte, and academy ruins+spellskite. Sondag is forced to use the Disk and then resolves a Titan, but I’ve been stowing a Bridge on top of library w SDT, and just run away with Jace ultimate.

Top 4 dredge
Dream pairing

Finals Loam Josh Smith
This is really uphill battle, since none of my cards are very good at stopping his cards. If he draws Worm Harvest, I can’t win. If he resolves Devastating Dreams, I can’t win. If he resolves Vindicate on Batterskull, I can’t win. If an unopposed Crusher lives to attack, probably over. So its clearly in Josh’s best interest to play, but we have other plans, so Josh scoops to me and we take the prize back home, to organize a split at our leisure. I propose we play some number of tournament style matches of Josh’s choice and the winner chooses either:
Mox Jet
-$195*(opponent match win%) to be given to opponent
or
Force of Will
Jace Mindsculptor
+$195*(winner’s match win%) to be recieved from opponent
Josh agrees and chooses 10 matches. As of print time the score is 2-0 Josh, and to save time we decided to play all the remaining game 1s consecutively, and of those 8, score is currently 2-2. This is pretty grueling, so I cut it short and we agree to 75-25 in Josh’s favor.

Return of Mono Magic

Posted by vroman on June 24, 2011 2 comments

I last ran this experiment circa Worldwake. Since then there have been 6 or 7 new contenders printed, which mandates a revisit.

In print order:
Memnite – Obviously a top tier addition. Goldfishes on turn 4, and has major chump blocking capacity. It even draws with Turbo Slug.
Inkmoth Nexus – A very efficient manland. We’ll see how well it races.
Chancellor of the Dross – Clearly the new champion, immediately wins on turn 0, play or draw. EXCEPT! As Lee Sharpe points out, C. Dross can only deal exactly 21 damage, so Soul Spike dodges this bullet by being able to gain 8 life in response to the triggers, and then has Dross at its mercy. However, this sole weakness still leaves Dross comfortably in first place.
Chancellor of the Forge – Very aggressive. Goldfishes turn 3, but has no staying power against anything that can field some early blockers
Chancellor of the Tangle – Drops a huge Craw Wurm turn 1, which can go the distance vs plenty of decks, but is stymied by anything that can produce a creature every turn, no matter how small.
Surgical Extraction – This has a very narrow game plan that immediately wipes out the library of any card that has to use the graveyard, which there are quite a few, but has no interaction with anything else.
Chancellor of the Spires – Arguable. If these are 60 card decks, then anything that can’t win before turn 4 gets decked, unless their game plan only relies on topdecks, in which case mulling to zero gives them until turn 11.

Also, in discussion, some have suggested errata away legendary status of Rath’s Edge and Tomb of Urami just to make the tournament as broadly inclusive as possible, with minimal rules bending. Rath is pretty much just filler, but Urami is not the worst middle tier contender. Urami’s biggest weakness is damaging itself to make its creatures, which caps its maximum output, which is unfavorable for some of the attrition races. With these two there are 41 total decks. This time I will run a 6 round Swiss tournament with cut to top 8. So without further ado, Round 1 pairings:


Show Round 2

Show Round 3

Show Round 4

Show Round 5

Show Round 6

Show Final standings

Only a few surprises here. In the Round Robin version of the tournament, C. Tangle comes in 15th, but got favorable pairings and made Top 8. Likewise Nether Spirit was not predicted to make it out of Swiss. These bumped Inkmoth Nexus and Zoetic Cavern from the oddsmaker’s top8 list. Poor, poor Surgical Extraction got shat on, facing zero graveyard opponents in six rounds.

Next, because I am a huge geek, here is the comprehensive matchup chart for all 41 decks:

Show Matchups


Some interesting matchups with the new cards:
-Surgical Extraction vs Chancellor of the Forge is a draw because if Forge goes first and keeps 7, it will attack for 7, then next turn draw up to 8, attack opponent down to 6 life, then discard, and lose its library, decking before can deal lethal the next turn. If Forge instead mulls to 6, then it attacks for 6, 6, 6 and discards, and Surgical has to pay 2 life to cast anything, so dies. However, when Surgical is on the play, there is no starting hand size that will allow Forge to deal lethal before it has to discard.
-Spawning Pool is a pretty low tier contender, but beats Chancellor of the Tangle by virtue of being able to draw the game when on the draw, but when Pool goes first, its one mana ahead so will have enough to regenerate at the last moment, and then just build up a team at its leisure and attack through with regenerators.
-Inkmoth is comparable to Factory, Mutavault and Zoetic, in that it every card is effectively a 2 power attacker, and races perfectly with all of those. They can’t block, and Inkmoth can’t trade. Inkmoth is however vulnerable to Keldon Megalith’s unique ability to shut down X/1 decks.
-Chancellor of the Spires is a passive deck that has two types of opponents, decks that need a 7 card starting hand to operate, and those that just play off the top. The former are on a 4 turn clock, the latter have 11. Interestingly there are winning and losing decks under both conditions.

And lastly, group photo of the entire tournament:

Show All Entrants

Now just need Wizards to print some of these totally reasonable cards:

Show Future Contenders

Vroman, Rifleman

Posted by vroman on June 22, 2011 1 comment

Despite having owned guns my entire adult life and being well versed in their operation and technical specifics, I have never claimed to be particularly good at actually shooting. Making bullets go where you want them to is surprisingly difficult. If your expectations are something like a first person shooter game, you will be quickly frustrated that the point-and-click interface does not translate into the real world.
I am humbled by the challenge. Yet, this is changing! I’ve met some fine fellows associated with the Appleseed project who have been extremely generous with their time and expertise. My default Sunday morning activity is now going to the range with Jesse, Tyson and Derek, with as many like minded friends as I can corral.
No longer am I target shooting just for entertainment or function testing. Now I at least know what I need to learn in order to become a competent marksman, whereas in the past I’ve been metaphorically –but nearly literally– firing blindly. I am slowly grokking the NPOA method. I will single out in particular my friend Jesse Irwin is a remarkably patient and knowledgeable instructor. I sincerely intend to go to their next full weekend shoot, and highly recommend this style of training.
I have also come to the final conclusion that factory sights on the AK platform are basically worthless for anything other than suppressive fire beyond 30m. I bought a Romanian AK because I was 19 and it looked badass. Given what I now understand about the art of the rifleman, I am strongly considering liquidating my entire firearm collection and getting one of these pricey motherfuckers:

Retails at $1900!

Springfield M1A SOCOM 16

I’ve fired the full sized M1A and am comfortable with .308, but the sheer physical dimensions of the weapon are a bit unwieldy for a skinny guy like me. Standing on the firing line trying to keep the sights on target felt like swinging at a baseball with a step ladder. The compact SOCOM is like pulling an expert tango partner in tight by comparison. I’ve been shopping around and the best price I’ve found on a used model is $1600. Sacre bleu. I have always been the type of consumer who would rather buy a second hand product at steep discount and just use it until it wears out. I don’t expect things to last forever, and I would in general rather pay pennies on the dollar for second-best. So my search quickly veered towards the Chinese knock-off, which turns out to exist as the Norinco M305, and retails at a comparatively painless $400. This led me to the tragic story of how it came to be that Norinco’s entire product line has been illegal to import to the US since 2003. As wikipedia can explain in more detail, some Norinco dealers got caught directly selling full-auto Kalishnikovs to Crips and Bloods. GWB selectively sanctioned the entire company, so now Canadians can get M1As for a fraction of the price I as an American must pay. Galling!
Also, gun forums are amok with “patriots” who actually salute this policy under buy-America dogma. Face palm.

DIAF Werner Herzog

Posted by vroman on May 11, 2011 1 comment

I saw Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night. About halfway through I was trying to remember the last time I had been this bored, and I epiphanized it was earlier that same day when I was struggling on the phone with ATT for almost 3 hours. Yes, major corporations should license the audio of this movie, and just loop it instead of hold music, and their customers might be marginally more inclined to wait on the line another 30 seconds or minutes.
Let me put it another way. If a family of four is driving down the highway in a 2011 model “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” and suffers a head-on collision with a drunk driver, no worries, everyone survives unscathed, because “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is the most over-padded thing to ever come off the assembly line. Herzog intersperses his constant eye-rolling grandiose narrative prose with rambling elderly Frenchman stoner-insight quality additions.
I went in to this with the thought, which I still hold despite hating the movie, that the concept of filming the world’s most archaeologically significant cave in 3D, is solid. The documentary starts out with that promise and a beautiful shot at ground level through a French vineyard and pulls up on an epic crane to reveal an awesome river running under a colossal natural arch, which is the foreground for the cliff face hiding the cavern in question. That definitely got me pumped about spending the next 90 minutes watching Herzog show us prehistoric splendor. Unfortunately, one quickly realizes what one can’t fit in a tightly regulated cave is an epic crane. In fact, Herzog’s entire cinematographic pallete is basically pan-left/right and lights up/down, on a one-dimensional track through a cramped unlit art museum, with maybe a dozen worthwhile exhibits. So he just tries every single combination of those options, two or eight times. What Werner needed to do was realize this limitation, run his fancy rig along their little pre-built walkway, have some basic contextual narration, and just shop about 15 minutes of nifty 3D footage to science museums etc. If I was already going to the Science Center, I would probably find a 20 minute Omnimax Herzog presentation on Chauvet cave to be the highlight of the visit.
As a feature film though, this is 85% filler. Lots of freshman anthropology 101 cultural relativism and banal speculation about paleolithic life, every time ending with hushed tones of “but we’ll never really know…”, like this somehow makes their theory dramatic instead of just useless. We’ve got a limp-wristed French academic demonstrating spear throwing technique, and basically being told on-screen by the director “Please stop, you’re embarrassing yourself.” Then some literal ex-clown, relating his cave-dream diary. And some googly-eyed local eccentric sniffing rocks to find caves, because he is a perfume expert. How many caves has he found? Zero. Then they take him down to a cave found by other, real scientists, and he tells us it smells like basically nothing. Werner, I’m looking up your editor right now. Joe Bini and Maya Hawke. FIRE THESE PEOPLE. That should have been the point where you say, ok, we gave perfume-guy a chance, he has nothing to contribute, so cutting room floor, moving on.
So we have all this filler about how paleolithic people might have lived. And there’s one shining example. They find some American scientist who has sewn himself an educated-guess facsimile of a stone-age bear coat, and built a replica of a 32,000yr old vulture-bone flute they found, which he can actually play and it has some interesting musical properties, blah, blah. Fine, you want to show us scientists who are passionate about this topic? Who really want to learn about pre-agricultural human existence? Then bear-suit guy should have been the full time tour guide. He can probably show you how they made stone axes and other verifiable facets of caveman lifestyle, so fuck off to the theoreticians mewling about “religious permeability” and other pretentious bullshit. Everyone expects a line like “I feel as if I’m seeing these paintings through the original artist’s eyes”, so just don’t bother! We know you like cave-paintings a lot, because you are an artsy director who can pick your own projects and you went to the trouble of spending a year of your life making a documentary about cave-paintings. And don’t quote other people’s similar sentimentality.
Yes, I think these paintings are important and worth studying. I do not think, as a layperson, I am getting any benefit from more than a quarter-hour visual exposure and explanation, especially when it goes off topic into vague-beyond-vague emotional meandering. To be objective, these are figure-drawings. I can appreciate the skill behind them. In particular one drawing of a leopard was executed in a single stroke which very elegantly captured what attracts people to the power of big cats. That drawing would not be out of place as the model for a sports car hood ornament. Furthermore the fact these are the oldest paintings ever found is absolutely significant and worth preserving for its own sake. That said, being first does not mean best. These are simple lines, I can learn pretty much all I can in a minute each.

Shortly after we are taken in to the cave proper the local expert demands the expedition take several minutes of silence, which Werner films in real time. Thank you. This is not even the painted part, just stalagmites and shit. It almost works at raising tension, if it were any piece of fiction. It would have been a perfect moment for a flash of movement, a horrified whisper “what was that?!” and then bam! Left turn into Cloverfield-esque survival-horror, in gorgeous 3d! What a twist, because I totally believed it was a straight documentary! Herzog’s entire career can be summarized as “white people suffering in the jungle”, so this idea would be not that far from his home-turf, with some grueling journey back to the surface, probably never seeing the monster, who of course is Man. But no, no. I am merely being bored to tears. About seven subjective hours later of the same 10-12 images being analyzed to death, they construe a pathetic little cairn into some kind of significant cave-bear altar (“but we’ll never really know…”), and I’m jarred into memories of Darryl Hannah showing a lot of leg in a leather tunic, rudely squashed by frumpy Frenchwomen telling me how I can not and will not ever be allowed to see the other half of a squiggle that is allegedly a Venus figure. So there’s a stalactite with some reportedly hot minotaur action on the opposite face, but extending their steel walkway another four feet would somehow compromise a bunch of ancient bear tracks. Sorry, tour’s over. Ok, I’m sure paw prints of arbitrary age are interesting to someone, but isn’t the main draw here the cave ART? Shouldn’t efforts be made to showcase the whole reason anyone cares enough to crawl down here with cameras?

Near the end he is showing us the same. god. damn. cave. art. over. and. over. This time its the four horses again, panning from the left, the music is dying, lights start to flicker out, and…credits? Nope, now its the mating lions panning from the right, with pan-flutes instead of tribal humming. And again and again. Die in a fire, Werner Herzog.

I saw this with Josh Smith, who has a very different take.

Party tonight

Posted by vroman on May 4, 2011 No comments

Last chance offer if I haven’t already spoken to you about this.
If you agree with my politics (or at least disagree significantly with the Obama vs FOXnews mainstream), and live inside St. Louis City limits (ie NOT the county, look it up), and want to drink for free tonight, please email me before 6:30.
vromanrobert@gmail.com

I feel safer!

Posted by vroman on May 2, 2011 No comments

A few spoilerish questions about this piece of theater
1. Osama’s body was disposed rather quickly. They have DNA evidence? And they are comparing this to what, the publicly available pre-existing database of terrorist DNA samples?
2. For all we know, Sammy has been dead since the last time rumors of his demise spread in 2002, but its just more convenient for official confirmation to spring up in 2011.
3. If he only had three body guards, the idea of a live capture seems at least worth entertaining. Then you get a Trial of the Millenium! And who is going to pay attention to dry Federal Reserve shenanigans with that kind of media circus front and center?
4. If the last two alleged near-miss plots had nothing to do with Osama, and the wars are continuing apace, then this event has absolutely no impact on geo-politics.
5. We have established an upper bound of $6trillion necessary to hunt down and kill any human being.
6. The homeland O_ama has always been more threatening.

Race card does not trump non-interventionism

Posted by vroman on April 30, 2011 4 comments

Nick Calcatera asked my opinion on this article defending the Civil Rights Amendment from Rand Paul’s pernicious attacks.

Re: Pt 1. Two things wrong here. First, preventing a class of people from doing blank, is categorically different from requiring them to do blank. All the examples of “you can’t sell X to Z-class people” is not logical precedent for “you must sell X to Z”. Second, I would go so far as to disagree with the necessity of every single example he presented. “You can’t sell guns to Indians” of course not! Because we want them disarmed when we steal their land! The farmers and railroads benefiting from Indian relocation were not the same people as rifle manufacturers, so political favoritism overruled capitalism.
“Cant sell liquor to minors” arguments against a drinking age are legion.
“Can’t sell guns to minors/felons” its hard to find a gun under $200. A kid with that kind of money either has generous parents who should be paying attention, or is responsible enough to have a job. If that job is dealing drugs, thats just more reason to legalize drugs and let multinational corporations bury the street punks in economies of scale and slick advertising.
On the latter, an individual who is considered too dangerous to allow to purchase a weapon should not have been released from prison in the first place.
“Cant sell porn to kids” HA. HA. HA. Did this guy write this article on a typewriter and fedex it to someone with an internet connection?
“There has never been unfettered right to sell whatever you want to whomever you want” Yes, govt has always sucked, thanks for reminding me.

Re: Pt 2. As Lee points out, the alternative to institutionalized discrimination is not necessarily institutionalized anti-discrimination.
Obv, Jim Crow was terrible. The ability of blacks to organize and put economic pressure on racist businesses is commendable and effective. In the absence of Civil Rights Amendment, this same tactic could be employed. Even without a planned boycott, its simply bad business to arbitrarily deny one’s self an entire demographic of customers, as seen in his Louisiana street car example. They didn’t need to legislate anti-discrimination! Color blind capitalists will win on net over racist capitalists, in a free market.

Re: Pt 3. Its normative to completely discount the utility of racist whites. Say there is a community composed of [blacks, noble whites, racists whites] and the racist whites are willing to spend more to have a white-only store, then that is a market opportunity!
A capitalist (who may not be racist himself) could create a white-only store, and theoretically stay in business against all-welcome competitors.
Sure the racist whites are irrational to get the same goods at a higher price just to satisfy some arbitrary criteria, but SO IS BUY AMERICA campaigns! People have irrational preferences all the time! So what? The market caters to all. Blacks get stuff cheaper in this scenario too, because demand is lower at the stores that serve all, if a cohort has segmented themselves.

Re Pt 4. If you have law X not being enforced, the solution is not to pass law Z, its enforce law X. If its legal for a black man to buy a house from a white man, and a lynch mob shows up, the solution is “enforce property rights” period. If you can’t remind people “its legal to sell houses, from anyone, to anyone” with armed police, it doesn’t follow that another law “if you are selling a house, you MUST sell to anyone” is going to solve anything.

Re Pt 5. No one is defending Jim Crow! Drop it.

Re Pt 6. Again, referring to a previous un-free market will never justify a current un-free market.

Re Pt 7. Of course he can’t resist the ad hominem that anyone who questions CRA must be a secret racist.

URL upgrade

Posted by vroman on April 29, 2011 3 comments

I have purchased and transferred my blog to unpopularideasclub.com. No more slumming with the .blogspot plebs.
Thank you Eric. I’m sending you business cards.

Giant Ward Map

Posted by vroman on April 27, 2011 1 comment

I have become frustrated with the lack of detail on the map from the Board of Alderman’s website, so stitched together numerous googlemap screenshots and made this huge 3500×6000 map of St. Louis City wards.

Feel free to make use.
FULL SIZE HERE

On to Rhode Island

Posted by vroman on April 25, 2011 3 comments

I won a local legacy GPT yesterday with my same countertop deck. To be honest, there were only 11 people, and the whole top 4 scooped to me, because the material prize was the same for everyone, and we’d just be playing for the byes, and I was the only one who expressed interest in possibly going to the GP.
Brief recap
Rd1 – Elves 2-0
Rd2 – UW countertop 1-2
Rd3 – doomsday 2-1
Rd4 – UGR countertop 2-0
Top 4 consisted of [2x UW countertop, elves, merfolk]

I’m still having trouble with the mirror. It feels like a coinflip who gets down counter+top first, and the only way to break out is resolving Jace. I did not add the green splash for this tournament, but I’m now convinced its critical to have comfortable chance in the mirror.
As for Rhode Island, I will definitely be flying if I do in fact end up going. Spending 40 hours in a car is not an option.