So, uh… yeah. My guild in Warcraft is pretty much gone. I kinda figured this was going to happen, but I didn’t expect almost everyone to leave and, well, that’s pretty much what happened. I have a couple good friends who still play but, like myself, are disgruntled (upset? annoyed? heartbroken?) about what happened to our guild and don’t really feel like playing the game, thanks.

(It was an amazing guild and I stand by feeling frustrated and somewhat upset that it mostly doesn’t exist any more.)

So what have I been doing?
Well, Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend. Yeah, we have Thanksgiving differently than the Americans do. Yup, we’re weird.

I discovered I like pumpkin pie. As I’ve spent some years loudly declaiming it, this was something of a shock to me. My younger self must have been on drugs.

There’s a natural segue: I’ve been on drugs! (Mild ones, though- over-the-counter stuff) Yeah, uh, someone at the family gathering had some kind of plague and gave it to all the rest of us. The last few days have been somewhat surreal.

I have made no progress whatsoever in my mad science, as drama, turkey, cooking delicious brownies (Oh, I baked delicious brownies) and being sick have taken much of my time. A fair bit of the rest has been looking for work that doesn’t involve the words “Would you like fries with that”, although that outcome is looking more and more likely. Bummer, isn’t it?

I did get some quality board-gaming in with my family and friends. Played a fair amount of SmallWorld, some Dork Tower, some (to my extreme frustration*) Scrabble, a few games of Shadows Over Camelot, some Pandemic, and (even though it’s not a board game) a bit of Super Smash Brothers: Brawl. I also picked up Scotland Yard: Deluxe at a late-season yard sale, but we’ve barely had a chance to scratch the surface on that one.

Anyway. Not dead yet. Planning to get some work done on my mad sciences now that my current MMO situation consists of “I have the holiday drake and am twiddling my thumbs waiting for FFXIV.”

Stay tuned, and while I can make no promises I will at least try not to have a month-long gap before the next update.

Stay tuned!

*Most people are now wondering: “You’re a writer! How can you hate Scrabble?” Normally I don’t- I love it, in fact. It’s just that this time it was played with a very specific group of people. House rules allowed not only the use, during your own or anyone else’s turn, of the official Scrabble dictionary, but mandated no time limits on turns. This lead to “Oh, I know a word, I just want to make sure it’s an optimal score!”.

As my own typical Scrabble move takes something on the order of twelve seconds, I start to get frustrated with this when I can solve a Sudoku during the course of ONE other player’s turn- which took a matter of twenty minutes.

See, for about two weeks, maybe two and a half, nothing happened with me. Then all of a sudden, stuff started happening at a rapid clip, and I’m still playing catch-up.

So, in the last month (oops), what’s happened?

• I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again, as originally planned. Much refreshed after my break.
• I picked up some toys (computing gear) at a flea market. I’m planning to make a thermosiphoned water-cooled media center out of it, total homebrew job. We’ll see what happens.
• In Warcraft: I’ve run Heroic ToC 15 times looking for one item? Has it shown up? Of course not.
• As above: I’m now Balance/Restoration instead of Balance/Feral Bear. I blame Kieran for this, just in case you’re curious, Kie.
• They made me Guild Master. They’re all completely insane… the guild tabard and ranks have been changed to reflect the fact that tomorrow is International Talk Like A Pirate Day (Yes, it really is; tell yer mates, lubber)
• Much cooking and baking, which I totally forgot to photograph. Go me! I plan to rectify that today with focaccia bread, which was originally going to happen yesterday but got pushed to today. Those of you who die a little inside each time I post a cooking post… you’ve been warned.
• Probably other things I’ve forgotten. I’ll get back to you on that.

Currently struggling to stay alive during ludicrously-unpleasant heatwave; researching new recipes; writing (and DMing, and playing in) various tabletop RPGs.

But it just occurred to me- if Blizzard really wants to get my business back? Dump the majority of the rumors about this whole ‘Cataclysm’ thing and have Thrall challenge, duel, and kill that emo-turned-frothing-moron Garrosh.

Important note: If you see a term you do not recognize, keep reading. It may become apparent to you or it may be explained explicitly further on in the post.

This is Lesson One: Of Heroes, Health and Hordies

Please direct your attention to the following image.

This is Aleyah Dawnborn, a Hero. Some notes about heroes before I go into detail:

• A hero does not count as part of a deck; it is considered seperate.
• A deck is built around a specific hero or heroes following the deckbuilding rules (more on these later).
• The hero associated with a given deck begins in-play, face-up (with the text showing, as shown above). Heroes, unlike other cards, are double-sided- the face-down side of a card is simply the art, expanded.
• When your hero dies, you lose the game.

Now, to expand upon Heroes, please direct your attention to the following version of Aleyah’s card:

Circled in Red: The Hero’s Faction. Factions that exist so far are Alliance, Horde, or Demon. As a general rule, the deckbuilding rules state that cards marked with the Alliance icon can only be in a deck with an Alliance hero leading it. Similarly, cards marked with the Horde icon can only be in a Horde-hero-led deck. Demon heroes follow their own rules (these are printed individually on the hero cards). There are also Neutral cards which can go in both Horde- and Alliance-led decks.

Circled in Yellow: The hero’s Name. Self-explanatory!

Circled in Green: The hero’s Class. Much like Faction restrictions, there are cards that have Class icons on them. A card with a Warrior icon but not a Paladin icon, for example, could not be legally included in a deck led by Aleyah (A card with both a Warrior and Paladin icon- plate armor, for example- would be fine).

Circled in Light Blue: The Hero’s “Type Line”.

• Upper-left: Denotes that this card is a hero, and its race (“Blood Elf”) and other information about it, such as its class (“Paladin”).
• Lower-left: The hero’s talent spec (“Holy”). Certain cards may say, for example, “Requires Holy Hero”. This would mean the word “Holy” would have to appear in the hero’s type line for that card to be included in a deck led by the hero.
• Right side, upper and lower: The hero’s Professions. Certain cards may require that a hero have a given profession to be included in a deck.

Dark Blue: The hero’s Powers. I haven’t taught you the exact mechanics of this yet but, essentially, this is an unusually-powerful ability that can be used to swing the game in your advantage- but only once per game, as part of the cost is to flip the card facedown (and that power does not appear on the face-down side).

Finally, Purple: The hero’s Health. When your hero has damage on it equal to or higher than its Health, it dies (and you lose the game). It is important to note that this is not WoW-online-style “You have this much health and it disappears as you take damage”. It lists a maximum capacity, not a starting value that is reduced over time- this seems trivial but is, in fact, an important distinction later.

Thanks for tuning in! If I’m doing my job right, you now know the basics of heroes, and have some inkling about building decks (and what can, and cannot, go in a deck led by a given hero). Tune in next week for Lesson 2: Exhaustion, Energy and Something Ex Nihilo.

Important note: If you see a term you do not recognize, keep reading. It may become apparent to you or it may be explained explicitly further on in the post.

This is Lesson Zero: Of Terms, Tabletops, and TCGs

I am making no real assumptions about your level of knowledge going into this. If you are an experienced player of TCGs, you’ll find much of this trivial. If you’ve played Magic: The Gathering, you can pretty well safely skip this entire post and wait for lesson 1. If, however, you’re new to all this, please, keep reading! It’ll save your sanity in the long run.

I apologize in advance for the fact that it is bone, desert, martini dry, and may be tough reading.

What I Mean When I Say ‘Always’
I will frequently, throughout the course of this series of post, use the words ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘must’, ‘will’, etc- implying that a given condition, action, or thing is absolutely required by the rules. This is a Trading Card Game, however, so there’s a rule that takes precedence. Here it is, in brief:
There are cards that break the normal rules; when this happens, cards take precedence over the rulebook.

As an example, I state in the post on Heroes that a player has only one Hero and it’s not considered part of their deck. This is not always true. However, the cards that break this rule are outnumbered thousands to one, so the safe assumption to follow is that a player, indeed, has only one Hero, which is not considered part of their deck, unless (insert vanishingly small probability here).

Short version of this note: When I say ‘always’ it actually means ’so close to always that it’s statistically insignificant to go into the niggling little details, I have a headache, get me a coffee’.

Of TCGs
The acronym ‘TCG’ means “Trading Card Game”. The official title of the game I’m introducing here is “The World of Warcraft Trading Card Game”. A lot of people just abbreviate that to “WoW TCG” or “Warcraft TCG”.

A Trading Card Game differs from a traditional card game such as Uno, Poker, or Solitaire in a very important way: Rather than all players having a common pool of cards to draw from (the deck in a normal card game), each player owns their own cards, from which they construct a deck.

Inevitably, you will own cards that do not fit in your deck(s); equally inevitably, so will other players. This is where the Trading part comes in. Rather than just purchasing the cards you want one at a time, you can purchase either a Starter Deck (guaranteed to have an immidiately-usable deck that follows the deckbuilding rules) or, more commonly once you have a deck built, booster packs containing a set number of random cards. You can also trade your unwanted or unneeded cards to other players for cards you do need or want. Some players find as much entertainment in trading and constructing decks as they do in playing the game itself!

Looking at Cards
In the language of a TCG, “Looking at” doesn’t literally mean ‘to have in your field of vision’. It means ‘to observe the obverse of a card’ (the ‘face-up’ side; that side printed with an image and text) that is to say, not the background (reverse) side. When I say “you cannot look at” a card, what I mean is that it is required to stay face-down (the side with the Warcraft Logo facing upwards)- you can’t look at its face-up side.

Collections and Decks
Your collection is all the cards for the game that you own. A deck is a grouping of some of those cards, built according to certain deckbuilding rules, that you can use to play the game.

The Basic Way Things Work
Each player (minimum of two, though there can be more, in some cases many more) brings a deck to the table. You use your own deck, your opponent(s) use his (or her, or their) own deck(s). You never use more than one deck during a single game.

The players randomly determine who goes first if they have not played each other recently (for players who have played recently, the loser of the most recent game is allowed to decide who goes first). Each player shuffles his deck and presents it to his opponent(s), who may shuffle or cut it.

Zoning In
Cards that are part of a deck involved in a game being played can be in any of several Zones- this refers to a combination of their physical location and their ’state’ within the game.

Cards in Hand:

• Each player has their own hand.
• Cards in hand are, as the name suggests, held in your hand.
• You may look at all cards in your hand.
• You may not look at the cards in other players’ hands unless they specifically reveal them to you.
• The only ‘public’ knowledge about your cards in hand is how many cards you have in your hand.
• You can freely re-order the cards in your hand.

A Deck (while a game is in progress)

• Whilst a game is in progress, a deck stops being ‘a grouping of cards’ and starts being ‘a game zone that cards can occupy’
• Each player has their own deck.
• You may not look at or re-order the cards in any deck, yours or an opponents’; it begins the game facedown and stays that way until the game ends.
• The rules and cards will tell you when and to what extent you are to draw cards from your deck into your hand.

The Graveyard

• Each player has their own graveyard.
• The graveyard is where ‘dead’ cards go, thus the name.
• Graveyards are face-up; any player may look at and reorder the cards in any graveyard at any time.

Removed from Game (RFG)

• All players share an RFG zone.
• Cards never go here ‘naturally’- they are placed here only by specific cards.
• The rules for observing and ordering cards in the RFG zone are covered along with the effects that remove them, but the default is face-up and freely reorderable.

In Play

• All players share the In Play zone.
• Cards are put into and removed from this zone based on the gameplay rules. It is here that the meat of the game takes place.
• Cards in play can be face up or face down. Face-down cards can be looked at only when the rules specify.

Ready and Exhausted
Cards in Play (but not the other zones) can be either ‘Ready’ or ‘Exhausted’. An ‘Exhausted’ card is something that has temporarily depleted its potential; for example, a card representing an elven archer would have to Exhaust itself to fire its bow; a card representing a shield would have to Exhaust itself to block a sword-strike.

Ready cards are oriented normally, which is to say “so you can read the ones you control”. Exhausted cards are oriented at a noticeable angle (usually 90 degrees, or at a right angle) to normal orientation. To exhaust a card, therefore, is to rotate it 90 degrees, and to ready a card is to rotate it back in the opposite direction by 90 degrees. You can’t ready a card that’s already Ready, and you can’t exhaust a card that’s already Exhausted.

Flip
To turn a face-up card face-down, or to turn a face-down card face-up.

All Done!
This concludes today’s lesson! I’m proud of you for wading through that. I’ll see you next week for a description of Heroes- what they are, how they work, and why you need one!

Random philosophical thought: Post frequency seems to vary in some proportion based on how much I think of this blog as work. Interesting.

Catch you later, folks!

In his post, he goes over a list of reasons why WoW has, for him, become less of an entertainment and more of an obligationistic time-sucker (verbiage my own).

It got me to thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know). I used to do all sorts of things. I played games (many of these). I coded. I wrote.

Now I spend my evenings playing WoW, a lot of the time. Not recently- in a twisted way, I have Blizzard to thank for the wake-up call- but still.

Those of you who are biting your nails in suspense, calm down a little.

I still enjoy the game, for all its faults. I know this is because I have friends who I can spend time with only in-game, and/or because the game’s challenges haven’t quite worn off. But… it doesn’t need to take as much time as I have been known to give it. I can make time for my own things and reduce the time I spend in WoW. There’s nothing making me play.

So… after tonight- I get to see the beginning of Ulduar, hopefully, with some friends, and I do find that exciting- I am not going to log in to WoW until, at a minimum, Monday. Call it an experiment, if you will. That gives me Thursday and Friday evenings, and all day Saturday- Sunday was (for a marvel) already scheduled for out-of-game things*- with which to try other things.

Perhaps I’ll resume one of my many, many half-finished strategy or RPG games. Perhaps I’ll restart one of them. Perhaps I’ll finally put the last polish on some rules I wrote for tabletop strategy. Perhaps I’ll even get some coding done.

Maybe I’ll even write in my blog (yeah, right).

No, I’m not quitting blogging. Or WoW. Put the handcuffs down. Hey! Help! Aaaaaah!

*okay, so Sunday’s activity is overseeing, demonstrating and playing the Warcraft Trading Card Game look it’s not the same thing okay it just isn’t. stop looking at me like that.

Things sort of snowballed from there. I am now the area Tournament Organizer, Judge and Specialist for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game.

And- shh, don’t tell my guildies- I’ve actually been having more fun with it than I have with the online raiding.

Some draws-
You don’t have to spend time- weeks or months in my case, as I’m notoriously slow at levelling- doing ’secondary’ content before you get to the cutting edge stuff. Any deck can compete the instant it’s built.

Old content doesn’t stale. Is the Onyxia raid deck easier than the Black Temple raid deck? Yes. Is the Onyxia raid deck trivial enough that you can solo it the way you can in Online? … not even close. You’d get eaten whole- it’s still a challenging fight for a raid group.

You can switch it up in a hurry. If I get tired of playing my main deck (Hybrid caster Horde druid) I can just stick it back in the box and pull out one of my others; the deck I replace it with will similarly be ready to go.

Jerks are rare- and they don’t last long. If someone is being a griefer in the online game, your choices are to log off, /ignore, grit your teeth or some combination of the above. If someone is being an equivalent jerk in the card game- which is unlikely, as people don’t seem to be such jerks offline- you can pop him one (or, more likely, ask the judge to pop him one investigate the matter). Unlike the online game, Judges- the card game’s version of a GM- take ‘good sportsmanship’ seriously, and your griefer could find himself awarded a game loss or even ejected from the premises.

So is it going to replace my love of the online game? No, I don’t think so.
Is it in there reminding me just how good Blizzard is at making compelling properties? Yes.

I will leave you with a picture!

This is Morova of the Sands. There are many Heroes, but this one is mine. She and I beat down a gnome warlock yesterday. It was fun.

And a question! Anyone out there play the card game? Anyone out there want to learn about it? (Anyone out there wish I’d shut up and get back on topic, already?)

I have no tales of derring-do, no thrilling escapades with which to regale you. Essentially, the mind-numbing furious frustration engendered by School of Hard Knocks burned me out faster than a piece of dry tissue paper plunged into the fiery heart of a neutron star.

After collecting the last criterion for School of Hard Knocks, on Thursday, I logged out, realizing that I, well, really didn’t want to play. I spent my weekend playing cards- I am a fan and proponent of both Magic: The Gathering and, to a greater extent, the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. Yes, I realize there is some irony in escaping from World of Warcraft to play… World of Warcraft. There are some key differences, but that’s a topic for another time.

Weekend ended and, well, I didn’t feel like playing WoW. The guild was going through drama, and the little voice in my head that is The Loyal Officer was hoarse from all the shouting. The I-Am-Stressed-And-This-Is-Not-Relaxing voice tied him up and dragged him off somewhere.

Guild drama shook itself out over the next week; we are now a smaller guild. I admit to being relieved- I’m on record as having stated I felt the guild was too big, and all but one of the recent /gquits were members with whom I’ve clashed at least once. Still didn’t feel like doing much, so I played my tiny fire mage from level 11 to level 14.

Yesterday I stepped back into the game proper (my druid) for the first time in almost two weeks. Four of us went and demolished Utgarde Keep.

I noticed that Typhoon, when glyphed, has a shift in its usage paradigm, and picked up a staff for my offspec. I also had fun chewing the fat with three of my friends as we turned vrykul into proto-drake kibble.

I guess I could be playing again, now. As for blogging… I took advice from the venerable Kestrel, who I will now paraphrase because I simply cannot remember his exact words: “You don’t have to post every day, or even every week. And the posts I like the best are when a WoW blogger posts about something tangentially or even directly related to WoW, rather than a rehash of game mechanics.”

Well, I can’t promise posts about game mechanics (or neat twists on them) will fail to appear here… but tangents? That I excel at.

N.B.*: I have not forgotten that I was tagged to do the Newbie Flailing meme. I will get there. I have not forgotten that I have failed to update NibNotes in about a month now. I have not forgotten the e-mail from Tyberiuss- shout-out to Ty and his buddies in AIE.

I have simply not gotten around to them yet. I probably will- please hold.

‘N.B.’. Abbreviation. Latin; “Nota Bene”, roughly “Note well”.

Just got out of a nice run with some friends, though. We started buck naked at the beginning of RFC. We ran a few instances, equipping only what we found… and ended up with UBRS as our fourth (fifth?) run.

Drakkisath dropped some sword for our paladin. We’ve all kept track of what we had equipped, and we’re going to try again later.

It was fun.

That is all.