Solo Magic: Balance of Power

I've recently collected and revised a set of solo formats for Magic: the Gathering into a reference document. I'm sharing a few excerpts over the next few weeks for folks who are interested.

Balance of Power

Balance of Power was created by Bruce Zimov and his original rules can be found here: http://www.angelfire.com/games4/magicvariants/Balance_of_Power.htm The following rules are based on those.

Introduction

Balance of Power uses four creature piles and a land pile to represent four creatures battling to create a status quo. The creature on the top of each pile will attack the other others whenever it wouldn’t result in their death. The game ends when no creature will attack.

Game Concepts

Creature piles are piles where creatures and other non-land cards are placed. A pile will always have a creature on top. If a creature is ever not on top of a pile, then all cards in that pile are put into the graveyard.

The land pile is a pile of lands that any creature pile may use to cast spells, activate abilities, or pay for any other cost. Mana abilities of lands require the land be tapped and sacrificed in order to be activated.

The four creature piles are laid out in a 2x2 grid so that each pile is adjacent to two other piles. Creatures may attack other piles, but may only attack adjacent piles.

Game Rules

Setup

Shuffle your deck and reveal the top card of your library. If it is a land, put it into the land pile. If it is a creature, put it on top of the current creature pile and the next pile becomes the current pile. Otherwise, put the revealed card on top of the current pile. Continue drawing until you have placed four creature cards, one on top of each creature pile.

Cards placed on top of creature piles this way are considered to have been cast.

Gameplay

Play proceeds counter-clockwise from the first creature pile. Each creature pile has a turn. During that turn they will not draw or have a second main phase.

The creature cards on top of piles are considered to be on the battlefield, but their abilities that trigger when they or another permanent enter the battlefield do not trigger. All creatures have haste.

Creature piles may cast spells from their pile and activate abilities of permanents they have cast from their pile, and target creatures or any permanents or spells played by a creature pile.

If a creature pile has a spell they could cast which would not result in all of their cast creatures leaving play, but would remove other cast creatures from play, they must play that spell unless they attack this turn.

Cards in a creature pile which have not been cast can be affected by discard effects.

If a creature pile casts a spell, it may not attack or cast any other spells that turn.

Attacking

Creature piles get an attack phase, can only attack adjacent creature piles and can only attack if they would not die as a result of that attack.

Cast creatures on top of a defending creature pile must block if able.

Unblocked creatures deal no no damage and have no effect. Similarly, effects like trample have no effect. Attacking is done to force blocks and the removal of other creatures.

If a creature pile attacks on their turn, it may not cast spells that turn.

A pile may cast instants during the turn of other piles, but priority between piles favors the active pile, much like it does an active player.

Creatures Dying

When all cast creatures in a pile have been removed from the pile, all cards--cast and uncast--from the pile are put into the graveyard. Then reveal the top card of your library. If it is a land, put it into the land pile. If it is a nonland, non-creature card, put it onto that creature pile. If it is a creature, cast it and put it on top of that creature pile. Continue drawing until you have cast a creature spell or until you need to reveal a card from the top of your library, but there are no cards in your library.

Play continues until you run out of cards in your library or when no cast creatures can attack or cast a spell without leaving the battlefield.

Victory

If you achieve a balance of power--that is, no creature pile is able to cast a spell or make an attack that would not result in them being removed from the battlefield--then you win.

Otherwise, if you need to reveal a card from the top of your library, but have no cards, then you lose.

Rulings and Tips

Drawing a card does take a card from the library and add it to a creature pile as an uncast card.

Enchantments with the supertype “World” are added to a separate, world pile they are cast and are not removed when the creature pile that cast them leaves the battlefield.

There aren’t any players, so life gain has no effect and tokens which would be placed on players are ignored.

Magic: the Quiet Evening In is available as a .pdf document on Google Docs. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IY7PvM19uYzFm-waDCAIKKgt8kmUCUIY Feedback will be incorporated into Revision 1.

My shot at the holy grail of gaming: Magic the Gathering RPG

So I ran a Magic roleplaying game by straight-up tacking Magic: the Gathering onto FATE. We had a good time. 

I should've stopped at bridging the gap between FATE and Magic: the Gathering, but I didn't. This thing is a sprawling, 32-page document that creates a new set of Magic concepts and systems which absolutely do work as roleplaying background, but are fucking impenetrable. But hey, it's 17k pages so I'm gonna share it with folks.

The real conflict in creating a Magic RPG is making the cards work in a roleplaying setting. I did that by instituting a set of power tiers--called moxes--which allow spells to scale in power with the planeswalker (or creature) casting them. In the lowest mox--Mox Alpha--most spells take on a benign form. Tapping down a creature can make them drowsy, a burn spell can provide light, and a creature might become confused or addled if you make it discard a card. At Mox Unlimited, a planeswalker can cast spells which annihilate whole armies.

The FATE integration isn't that strong, but one of the options is non-combat casting. Five skills (Will, Investigation, Deceive, Rapport, and Athletics) are aligned with each of the five colors. Players may discard a card to invoke an aspect for a skill check instead of spending a Fate point. One of the colors in the card's color identity has to correspond to that skill.

The Tempest is basically a way to rationalize the randomness of a player's deck. 

Planeswalkers channel their Tempest which provides them with a channel of aether which they can shape into spells. When a planeswalker runs out of ways to turn their Tempest into spells, they must revert to Mox Alpha or die by decking out. The Primer focuses a lot on reconciling these things.

Planeswalkers have fetters, which exist to explain some planeswalkers having higher "starting life" and to give players a potential ways to connect to planes. As is, fetters are just a way for powerful NPCs to be even more powerful. It's a bit much, but it's not like anyone has to use it.

I'm especially proud of the three-page "Life, the Multiverse, and Everything" appendix at the end which conjectures on how planes are formed.

(Link)

Remembering Sphinx's Revelation

So Sphinx's Revelation was a top-notch card in Magic's standard scene for a while. I mean, it's a mythic rare so that should be obvious, but it also let you gain life and draw cards just...whenever.

It rotated out about six months ago, but I just found this touching video, which could honestly apply to any of the cards lost during Magic block rotations.

Zah-ham-baye, zah-ham-baye

So, Terry and I have been playing Magic lately. Amidst a lot of other games, I finally got my zombie deck, "Zompocalypse Now" off:

Click through for the full-size image.

Every D10 represents that many zombies. Because of my Undead Alchemist (blue card on the far right), in lieu of damage my zombies caused Terry to put a card from his library into his graveyard. For every creature card put into his graveyard that way, I got another 2/2 zombie (with +3/+3 from my Zombie lords).

I just want to say that even though Terry was losing, he didn't scoop so I could run up my zombies and win legitimately. He's a good friend.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 4, Part I of II

For the past few weeks, I've been idly speaking about artifacts (and lands) in Magic's history that give mana of any color. Some give a few mana up and then sacrifice themselves, some convert generic mana or life into the color of mana you need, and others can produce mana of any color, but usually don't, or restrict how you can spend it.

Because generating mana of any color is so powerful and because lands are so cheap, the drawbacks and conditions for those types of lands are widely varied and quite unpredictable. Almost wild, really. 

In each Magic game, you have a total amount of mana you generate between each of your untap steps. If there's a land that isn't tapped when you start your turn, it's wasted potential (mostly). The goal is to have a progression of mana that you've used every turn until you've won. If you stall at four lands, that total for the first five turns looks like 1+2+3+4+4. By that fifth turn, your first land has given you five mana.

If you have Undiscovered Paradise in your hand, you're going to have to decide at some point whether to play a land that's going to churn out mana every turn or play UP again to cast a spell now and face the same dilemma next turn. Undiscovered Paradise doesn't cost you one land drop or one mana, but one mana every turn you have to replay it. If you tap it for a color of mana you can already produce, it's even more futile.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 3

For the past few weeks, I've been idly speaking about artifacts (and lands) in Magic's history that give mana of any color. Some give a few mana up and then sacrifice themselves, some convert generic mana or life into the color of mana you need, and others can produce mana of any color, but usually don't, or restrict how you can spend it.

Though it really is just a restriction, making the production of colored mana finite has been explored enough to warrant its own category. Sure, Black Lotus and Lion's Eye Diamond are powerful one-shot, bursts of mana, but Magic eventually dialed it down to one mana, or even just filtering. Weatherlight gave us Gemstone Mine and Tempest gave Lotus Petal. The mine was pretty popular, but you only got three uses out of it. The lotus also had finite uses—well use—but managed to break its format.

The concept stuck though. Invasion had Archaeological Dig, which produced generic mana until you sacrificed it for a mana of any color. It also had Chromatic Sphere, which was essentially a two-mana Lotus Petal. What Chromatic Sphere had that the petal didn't was a card draw attached; now you weren't discarding cards to get the mana you needed, you were cycling them.

Then you have Ravnica's Terrarion, which is the Magic card equivalent to Sin City's Marv. Terrarion is ugly, slow, and clunky, but it's a hell of a nice card. Like Kalhni Gem, it's almost too niche to include, but it swings us neatly back to our one-shot mana filters perfectly. Time Spiral's Chromatic Star is an obvious descendant of both the Terrarion and Chromatic Sphere. It saddens me that Star vs Sphere is a real and concrete point of contention in some parts of the Magic community, a fact that is one of many reasons I'll shed a single tear when World War III starts, but only because I know humanity will find a way to survive.

Strangely, these sorts of artifacts taper off after Chromatic Star. I'm not sure why. What I've seen more of are things like Sphere of Suns and Pentad Prism, which use counters to make a finite amount of colored mana before the artifact becomes useless.

To lapse into pure hyperbole, I can conjecture about why they stopped. Pentad Prism.

Oh, sure, it gives you a set amount of colorless mana. It ends up filtering and floating mana at a 1:1 rate in a two-color deck. Pentad Prism, like Mox Opal, is the right card in the right set. It's a simple, flawless piece of design that makes Magic hum like a perpetual motion machine^[1]. Chromatic Sphere? Cute. Chromatic Star? Adorable. Lotus Petal? Nope. Implements of Sacrifice? Fuuuuuuuuuck you! :) Pentad Prism is a reason to shut down the store and retire.

Swinging back to the land side, Tendo Ice Bridge in Betrayers of Kamigawa took the same aproach. It lessened the more finite elements of the Gemstone Mine by allowing giving a one-time multicolored land use and providing colorless mana indefinitely. It was a hybrid of the mine and less successful filters like the Henge and School, but still popular.

The vivid cycle (illustrated here by Vivid Creek) would be a straightforward upgrade of Gemstone Mine, but it enters play tapped, essentially costing its own mana to play. The change allows something that lasts longer than Tendo Ice Bridge, while being more useful in the long term than the mine. The short term tradeoff is something for professional players to talk about, but using time to balance multicolored mana generation is--in my opinion--the maximum extent of complexity for lands that generate finite mana of any color. I am going to talk about it next week though.

---
[1] Which I don't think would actually hum because of the energy loss due to emitted sound.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 2

Last week I talked about getting mana of any color from colorless sources, namely artifacts and lands. Black Lotus was too strong. Mana Prism and Standing Stones were awful, but the work moved on. I laid out three major avenues Wizards seemed to pursue to get the balance just right; artifacts that can only be used once, repeatable artifacts that required a cost (usually filters that turn one type of mana into another), and artifacts that placed conditions on the type or use of the mana they generated.

Let's start with the exception: Lion's Eye Diamond from the Mirage set. It almost looks like Lion's Eye Diamond was an attempt by the folks at Magic to tame Black Lotus. After all, lotus proved three mana was worth more than a single card. Lion's Eye Diamond took it to the next step; what if the cost of all that mana was every card? Lion's Eye Diamond was never a Black Lotus, but its "drawback" added a lot of fuel to graveyard-based dredge decks and keeps it in the just-under-$100 range in the secondary market these days. Until Lotus Bloom got it right in Time Spiral, it was also the final attempt at the three-mana-for-none-artifact.

A Layperson's History of Getting {U} from a Stone, Part 1

So, last week I talked about an artifact that let other artifacts made colored mana, on the condition that they had that color. There are over 100 artifacts that are colored (most of them White, Blue, and Black because colored artifacts were released as the mechanic for the white, blue, and black faction in Alara), so it's a workable niche.

I often research my designs so I can understand templating and power levels. I ended up looking at the interesting methods that lands and artifacts have used to give players mana throughout the history of Magic.

Hated as they are, these cards have seen more nerdboners than anything should ever have to.

The grandaddy of them wall was the Black Lotus. The Moxes were up there too. The theory behind the lotus, based on conjecture, is that it's only one-use, so it's not that bad. However, dropping a four-mana anything on turn one is a really big benefit. It might be a card advantage issue, where you're effectively discarding a card for three mana (even Dark Ritual makes you pay B for that), but it's still a bargain. I can't even begin to defend the moxes, which are basically lands you can play all at once that hate Nevinyrral's Disk and Shatter.

It's the Magic: Hungry Eyes

So, last weekend, Jay Treat over at Goblin Artisans put up this Weekend Art Challenge. It was based around an image by keepwalking07. In case you can't/won't click over to see the image yourself, it's a massive silhouetted mecha standing amidst a ruined landscape.

Jay's challenge was to create a common or uncommon colored artifact based on that image. Bonus points were offered for a card whose color and status as an artifact were made more relevant by its rules text.

My first thought was to create a piece of equipment because it seems every submission I make to Goblin Artisans has the desperate, sweaty need to be recognized as a unique snowflake. Despite the fact that it came from TMI, the first set from the Deep-Seated Personal Issues block, I was relatively happy with the result:

Wraith of Loss

So, I read Goblin Artisans pretty regularly and they have a weekend design contest based on a piece of art. This week it was Pavel Lagutin's "Day Watch" game poster. It's a pretty cool picture.

Anyway, the prompt was to build something post-apocalyptic, so I wanted something that would survive and apocalypse. My first run through of Wraith of Loss was this:

I really wanted to see if the timing triggers for get-a-second-combat-phase cards like Act of Aggression would look okay with another ability. While it wouldn't be a good idea to have "blink" effects--exile and return immediately, exile and return at end of turn, and exile not immediately, but before the end of turn--it's a headspace that entertains me.

Dragon's Maze Spoilers

[EDIT] Crap. Folks are Googling their way here for Dragon's Maze spoilers, an outcome I should have predicted when I put up a post labeled "Dragon's Maze spoilers" a week before actual Dragon's Maze spoilers came out, but didn't.

Hey, welcome. The blog is a grab-bag o' things, but the other Magic stuff is here. 

As some of you might know, the next magic set is called Dragon's Maze. In it, Niv-Mizzet finds a way to settle the conflict between Ravnica's 10 guilds with the creation/discovery of a maze across the city. The guild whose champion is the first to make it through the maze will (ostensibly) be the one to rule over Ravnica.

The images of the champions have been released, but their stats have not. I've compiled a list of those characters and their cards and estimated their abilities based on my knowledge of Ravnica, the mechanics introduced in Return to Ravnica and Gatecrash, and my limited understanding of Magic's current design philosophies.

It's a good ability that works well with bloodthirst, even if the draw/discard thing is more red than green.

It's the Magic: Dervishes

Yeah, yeah. I've played Gatecrash and it's pretty cool, but both of my Orzhov decks are awful, so fuck it; today I'm talking about custom card creation. Specifically a concept that I'm deeply in love with:

The idea with Twin-Knife Dervish (TKD) is that it can split up the damage dealt by a group of blocking creatures by giving them first strike. Then, it can simply shrug off that damage if the total isn't enough to kill it. Essentially, it uses first strike and double strike to fight two different battles, like a master swordsman cutting through waves of enemies.

It's the Magic: Vanishing Act

Today's blog is on the other blog. I started looking at Return to Ravnica last night and...wow, I don't even know where to begin with it.

In a bad way.

It's not that it's bad, it's that I don't have any money to buy it and when I look at the list of cards online, the whole thing seems pretty schizophrenic with a few repetitive themes (Unleash, Detain, Overload, Populate, Scavenge). I'm not saying it is bad, I'm just saying that it's making a bad impression from up here in the nosebleeds.

It's a Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate

Some of the sharper of you guys may have realized that I've been missing a lot of Mondays and not doing a lot of "It's the Magic" lately. It's not that I've lost interest in Magic, but that the space, time, and lack of pressures I could boast a year or so ago just aren't there, and it's hard for me to focus on Magic with the zeal I did then.

I'll probably do something with Izzet vs Golgari on Monday, though I doubt it'll be a straightforward review (Izzet seems to win a lot, but Golgari is just shy of scary up to the point that the game turns. Reviewed!). Then, I'll probably do a standard "Top 10 Return to Ravnica Spoilers" and maybe a bit on the prerelease. After that, I don't really know. "It's the Battletech" doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

I've noticed I've been "overengineering" a lot of the topics I've got queued up. You know what it's like; you want to do something big and really good and you end up needing to devote time and effort to it that you never really do and it never gets done and maybe you should just do an okay job and get it done because there's no rhyme or reason to any of it anyway.

It's the Magic: Is it Monday Already

Whoops. I was working on this for a video, but Monday definitely snuck up on me this week. Enjoy. It's long and full of irony.

This place is packed and there are like, two seats free. One's by a bunch of kids and I'm like, "fuck that." So I go over to the other table and I ask that guy if he wants to play and he says, "No. I can't, I'm just sleeving this guy's cards." And sure e-fucking –nough he's just sleeving this other guy's deck, and all I can think of is "who does that?" "Ah, geez guys sometimes Monday's blue, or ahm, maybe Tuesday and Wednesday are grey,  and I don't give a shit about Thursday, but come Friday, my fin de semana comienzos with going to motherfucking Dragon's Lair to sleeve someone else's deck, something that anyone could have done at any point during the previous week and does not require that I leave his house.  Because I am a people person!"

So I sit at the kid's table and I play this guy with Strategema—

/Which one is that?/

White blue deck with Venser and Karn. It's built to stay alive until it restarts the game and then stay alive until I restarts the game and then stay alive...

/I get it/

So, I go up to a guy and we play. I asked his name twice. I forgot twice. I could not bring myself to care. His name was Kevin, or Kyle, or K-Pax. Some shit. We're playing and at one point, he's got two indestructible oozes and a pair of two-one deathtouch, flash asps in play and I play Divine Reckoning. Everyone chooses a dude they control and the rest die. I didn't have any dudes, so I considered myself ahead of the curve. He chooses—he fucking chooses so help me god, Terry—an indestructible ooze. I had to stop him. I had to say, "No. Stop it. I thought we could handle this quietly and with a bit of dignity, but I'm paying 2 and two white to kill a single asp. You choose the other one. You oozes will be fine. I'm just casting a fat, slow doom blade here." So he's a nice guy and he's sitting on front of me I squeak out a victory at 2 life from under two [Predator Oozes] and the spell with flashback that lets him get all his dudes in his graveyard back into his hand.

It's the Magic: Sundown for Strategema

So, when October fifth rolls around, Return to Ravnica will come out. When it does, Karn, Venser, and the rest of Scars of Mirrodin block (and M12) will rotate out of the standard format. This means that I'll have to replace my Strategema deck (an event which Terry describes as "Karning Karn").

Actually, in order to best use the resources at my disposal, I'm trying to take the two dozen standard decks I have and narrow them down to fifteen decks with an even distribution of colors and color combinations (White, White/Blue, White/Black, White/Red, etc.)

However, I'm rubbish at Red and Red/Green decks, so I thought I'd publicly work on the decks so that readers, friends, and random passers-by could offer input on the deck creation process. My rules for the decks are as follows:

1) I'm primarily using cards from Innistrad and M13. I'm not against using cards from the soon-to-be rotated Scars of Mirrodin and M12, but I'd like to have some roughly equivalent replacements marked for when October comes.

2) Splashing colors is fine. Green has a renewed interest in handling non-Green mana, so I won't rule that out.

3) In order to decide which decks get which cards, I'm using five tiers to prioritize which decks get cards of a particular color when they both need it. For example, my White/Blue, Black/Red, and Mono-Green decks get first pull at the colors of their type. The Mono-Red and Red/Green decks are way down at the bottom of their colors and get last pull at their colors. These decks won't be competitive, but... No. They just won't be competitive.

4) I only use cards I've pulled. I have a sufficient collection of Innistrad and M13 and buying specific cards isn't economically feasible right now, so the decks will largely be based on the cards I currently have at my disposal.

In fact, choosing which of the cards at my disposal should be used as the foundations of these decks is the first step of this process. Listed below are my selected cards and reasons for choosing them. If you have another card that might make a basis for a good deck, go ahead and let me know.

It's The Magic: The Great Dominarian Planeswalker Showdown

I'm not in a financial position to sample the newly-released M13, I haven't gotten out to play FNM, and I'm not gettin' any play at home, so there hasn't been much to explore on the Magic front. However, while reviewing the new set's planeswalkers (now, with the fortifying power of Bolas!) I thought about which planeswalker would win in a fight.

Then I thought, "Bolas always wins a duel." Because I owned and played with Bolas versus Ajani. Then I realized that most Jaces are useless in a standup fight. In the end, I decided that a tournament of four-way free-for-all games, played with standard decks constructed exclusively from commons would be the way to go. The twist: Each deck's planeswalker begins in play and when its planeswalker leaves play, it loses.

There were eight first-round games and the winners were forwarded to the finals. The finals consisted of two rounds of four-player games, with the top two planeswalkers advancing to the championship round.

Standard Tour of San Antonio: Cards and Crafts,

While the internet is full of ways to find game stores in your area, it does very little to tell you about the real character of those stores: their atmosphere, their product, their staff, or anything else a curious gamer might want to know. To help others out, I've started a week-by-week tour of the stores in my area, playing a Friday Night Magic at each one and sharing the results with you.

This week I went to Cards & Crafts, located at 8104 Tezel Road, right by the Little Caesar's. In a breach of tradition, I'm covering the Friday Night Magic before giving an overview of the store.

Cards & Crafts is geared to play Magic: the Gathering. They have much of their floors space dedicated to a play area. An accessory wall and boosters for recent sets are on display, as well as an almost holy grail of an organized collection of cards from older sets. That last one is almost a holy grail because Cards an Crafts has what I can only describe as Mecca in a Holy Grail, surrounded by a Wailing Wall: individual tokens for sale. While they were (predictably) out of Goats, it's a really big deal.

It's not just Magic though. They've got a room dedicated to their baseball cards and sports memorabilia collection. I can't honestly judge it's quality, but if you're into that kind of thing, you should certainly check it out. The store also carries other CCGs; Legend of the Five Rings, Naruto, the Universal Fighting System, and Spellfire (&#$*ing Spellfire). It has a breadth of collectible cards like Buffy, Smallville--I didn't even know there were Smallville cards. Despite not selling any tabletop minis (that I noticed, anyway), they have a good selection of mini-mats and terrain for mini play.

It's also one of--if not the--most intimate location I've been to. The staff are laid back, knowledgeable, and eager to answer questions. The FNM I attended there was professionally handled (in fact, this is the only store that used "Match Record Cards, which was awesome!), even if the players were a bit young. Most importantly, I had a pretty good time while playing.

It's the Magic: Legend--Challenge Accepted--ary

Goblin Artisans has put up a new design challenge; redesign one of the legendary multicolored creatures from the highly questionable Legends set.

Highly questionable.

The challenge stipulates that the name, art, and flavor text, but all other attributes can be changed. You can read the full details on their site here. 

Overview

My choice is a personal favorite: Sivitri Scarzam.

In the lore of Magic, Sivitri tamed dragons and terrorized a corner of Dominaria before being defeated. It's a short bit of history, but it's worth more than a 6/4 vanilla creature for 7 mana. Don't get me wrong; even in that price range, very few black and blue creatures can boast that kind of power. Those who can are often mythic rares.

Standard Tour of San-Antonio: Friday Night Magic at Cards & Crafts

While the internet is full of ways to find game stores in your area, it does very little to tell you about the real character of those stores: their atmosphere, their product, their staff, or anything else a curious gamer might want to know. To help others out, I've started a week-by-week tour of the stores in my area, playing a Friday Night Magic at each one and sharing the results with you.

This week I went to Cards & Crafts, located at 8104 Tezel Road, right by the Little Caesar's. In a breach of tradition, I'm covering the Friday Night Magic before giving an overview of the store. 

As with my last FNM, I'm playing white and blue deck based around staying alive. I earlier mischaracterized it as a deck designed for trolling, but that's not accurate. "Strategema" is designed to let my opponent's deck play out. This gives me a better feel for the player, see the local metagame, and hone my skills as a player. It can be frustrating to play against, but that's not always the case.

Round 1 put me up against another blue and white deck, played by Tim. We chatted politely through several quiet, early turns before he tried to kill me with a host of angels and all manner of double-striking guys. 

Specifically, these manners.