A paper cut on my eyeball would have been preferable. Licking clean the bottom of an week-old ferret cage? Woulda done it in a second. I would have even welcomed the thought of twitchy junkie giving me a full-body shave with a dull razor and ice-cold water rather than go… …but alas, I couldn’t avoid…
Explaining Rogue Decks: Jack Benny is dead. And I MISS him. But I’m not going to demand that you listen to him. For those of you who don’t know Jack, at one point he was bigger than Jerry Seinfeld. Bigger than "Friends." But technology crept into his veins like a slow-acting poison, leeched all of…
CONVERGENCE IDEA #1: A DECK YOU CAN PLAY. Okay, so here’s the deal: I recently designed a deck that has gone 5-1 so far in multiplayer games. Big whoop. You can find a deck like that anywhere, especially if you’re looking at Jon Chabot’s evil multiplayer combo decks. The difference is, I won with ….
Have you ever been mugged? I’ll tell you, it’s irritating. Not because you’ve lost some money; yeah, the financial hit’s a hassle, and you’re gonna be eating macaroni and cheese for a couple of weeks… but in the end, it’s just a couple of bucks. You’ll survive. What twists in your gut, what burns deep…
Archaeologists were thrilled last year when they discovered a Persian library, which had lain in a remote ditch for the past fourteen centuries. Buried almost wholly intact underneath a canopy of vines, the library was nameless except for a set of mysterious symbols carved onto the walls; it turned out later that the words were,…
Submissions. I get ’em. And I want more. But sometimes I have to reject ’em. It has been said that SOME sites will publish "anything that’s sent to them,"* but the fact is that probably a fifth of all articles submitted here get rejected – and that’s including the Featured Columnists, who usually don’t get…
Up until now, you may not have realized that demonically-possessed cows play a vital role in multiplayer design. I don’t blame you for not having figured this out before… Mainly because they don’t. Which begs the question: "So why in hell did you call this column ‘Diabolic Cows?’ " The answer is, as with most…
So there I was at the tourney, having gone 3-0, winning all six games in straight sets. I was the number-one player at the tourney so far, and sat at table Number One – a rarified air, believe you me – waiting for my next opponent to step up to the plate. I had just…
I am ten seconds away from beating the game that has consumed the last two months of my life – Planescape: , one of the finest PC games ever created – when my teenaged stepdaughter comes down the stairs, dressed in the splendid regalia she intends to wear for her next dance. My opinion means…
"This is what’s left of my collection." "You sold the rest? You SOLD a collection that went all the way back to…" (chokes up) "…the Lost Days of Magic?" "Calm down, son – I didn’t lose it, I just didn’t want it back afterwards. No, my collection had to be surgically removed in an emergency…
One of the problems with being a writer is that you can occasionally blow it. Because I’ve heard these phrases time and time again: "Guy wouldn’t let me take back a move. Jerk." "He brought some dumb deck he copied off the ‘net to what WOULD have been a fun tourney and whipped the heck…
If this is your first prerelease tournament, then this is the article for you. Sealed deck play can be tricky if you’re a casual player or not used to the environment – reading this article (and the ancillary reading) will ensure that you don’t embarrass yourself. Now let’s get one thing straight. I am not…
"Did you cheat?" she asked me. She was broke, out of the game, and only wanted to know how I had won. We were friends, so I could afford to be honest. "Of course," I replied. I had cleaned the entire table of $20,000 at poker that very afternoon, emptying the pockets of five suckers…
"I personally am an Internet Magic junkie. I spend an hour every morning reading all the different sites. As does much of R&D. So remember when you’re posting on-line, please be aware R&D is paying attention." – , Magic Card Designer, in an interview at magicsingles.com "Finally, I’d like to point out that R&D is…
So I had created a really crappy deck and I was dying.* In a burst of enthusiasm (while slapping a deck together during the last fifteen minutes of Farscape, as usual), I decided to create an all-blue deck to show off my four shiny new . I created my "Dagobah deck", as I called it,…
