Last week I promised you a story by Star City’s own Peter Jahn – and guess what? I lied! A lot has been happening lately, and that story was written before StarCity’s downtime. These things happen I guess. In the meantime, I have also been getting loads of rules questions since I have now officially taken over Sheldon’s job here for a while.
But on to this week’s story – it’s about what happens when eight people can’t use their mana. Trust me, things will go wrong, horribly wrong!
Why use counters when you have a phone? By Robert Taylor
Okay… You wanted obscure and least played cards? Mana Cache, Mindslicer, Volcanic Hammer. I present to you a bizarre combination of events that resulted in a truly amazing eight-way.
I was running my blue/red multiplayer craziness deck, someone had a mercenary deck, I had a red burn player to my right and a nasty black deck to my left. We were playing melee, attacking left. I’d got off a turn 1 Mogg Fanatic and quickly plonked a Giant Strength on it. The next turn, I plonked down a Standstill.
Standstill is truly devastating in an eight-way. No one wanted to play a spell and give everyone else three extra cards.
The game continued for about four turns with no one playing anything and just putting down land. So everyone had around seven lands at this point. Eventually, someone played a spell and broke the Standstill. I then played Mana Cache
Enchantment
At the end of each player’s turn, put a charge counter on ~this~ for each untapped land that player controls. ; Remove a charge counter from ~this~: Add one colorless mana to your mana pool. Any player may play this ability, but only during his or her turn before the end phase.
The black player to my left played Mindslicer, announcing he didn’t want to lose his hand because he had some good stuff in it but he needed to stop my Fanatic. It goes round the table; I look at my hand and I have nothing of use, so I attack. It becomes obvious that he’s not going to block with it. Instead, the red burn player to my right Volcanic Hammers the Mindslicer. Everyone discards their hand. At this point, most of the players have around ten or eleven lands out with nothing in their hand. With Mana Cache out on the table, no one can do anything and the total is just jumping up by eight or so per turn. The total gets so high I abandon using pennies and use jigsaw pieces.
Then it gets so confusing we abandon this and place a mobile phone on the Cache. In the end, the total got up to 250-odd, even with me playing an Endless Scream to give my precious goblin +30/+0. The mercenary player used all the colourless mana in the cache to bring out mercenaries at a rate of knots, but decked himself. The burn player won in the end with a couple of blazes.
Next week
I have a great story lined up for next week trust me. Nothing happens, but it’s still a great story. If you have any interesting multiplayer tales, please send them to [email protected].
‘Til next week, have fun,
– Gis