It's the Magic: Standard Tour of San Antonio: Gamelot Friday Night Magic

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.

Last week I went to Gamelot, located at 7007 Bandera Road, on the corner where Bandera meets Huebner.  As is tradition, last week I covered the store in general, saving the results of the Friday Night Magic for today.

The actual event was better than expected. It was a standard constructed affair and I brought a White/Blue Venser/Karn deck that was--well, to be honest, it was designed to troll competitive decks by not dying via Venser and Stonehorn dignitary, then restarting the game via Karn.

For your opponent, it starts like "Cause and Effect," but ends like "Remember Me."

It's the Magic: Drafting Dark Ascension

So, I'm living with two other people who play Magic. It's good times because I can occasionally do a draft. If you have seven friends who play Magic and haven't killed yet, kill your friends.

This week's draft was straight Dark Ascension. Technically, it's supposed to be a pack of Dark Ascension plus a pair of Innistrad packs, but we went straight up DA. Katie drafted a White/Green/Blue deck I call 3-Geist, Terry drafted the White/Blue Increasing Spirit, and I cleaned up the Black and Red, adding a splash of Blue in Grixistrad.

It's the Magic: The First 20 Years

This Week's Best Thing Ever

At the much talked about Pro Tour this weekend, Jeremy Neeman drafted a 45-card deck featuring a single copy of Lost in the Woods and forty four forests. Read the full article here and be amazed.

The only card to strongback an entire deck.

It's the Magic: Darkness has Ascended

Dark Ascension, the second set in the Innistrad block, is upon us. Things get...well, "darker" seems a bit obvious, but it is accurate. It'll actually be out on February third, so it's not upon us, really; it's moving toward the point where it's going to be upon us. So the darkness hasn't ascended yet so much as it's still queuing.

It's the Magic: Innistrad

New Hotness

Innistrad is good. It's always a bit harder to be nice about something than to be mean. If Innistrad had missed, I would have had plenty of snark about racist human tribes, vampires liberated of conventional sexual/gender norms, and using "furry" as a creature type for werewolves.

As it is, it's good. The tiny, devout human tribe has a hard time getting the feel of an angry mob, but then, there's a scale to Magic that makes that inherently difficult. Playing werewolves is tense and highly interactive. My gut impulse is to say that they're a bit too strong, but my actual play time with them is limited. Ultimately, they're fun to play against and I can't think of higher praise than that.

Spirits are 'meh,' and I haven't really hit the right chord with vampires yet. The Zombies seem like fun, though the self-milling blue zombies have a tendency to put you on a clock that hurts blue in a long game. That said, I still like the cards and I'm sure that there's going to be a self-milling zombie archetype that starts rocking some serious socks soon.

The flavor is top notch, giving us a whole universe--moon to shoreline--that works by its own rules while still evoking a particular place in the player headspace (northern Germany, c. 1700?). All that, and we're given a big, but subtly-played, mystery that remains elusive about betraying any secrets of things to come in the next two sets.

Huh, That's Funny

Speaking of that mystery, I was wondering if anyone else caught the similarity between a certain "central religious figure is missing" story for Innistrad and a more conspicuous "central religious figure is missing" story by a certain writer named Ennis. Huh, vampires too. If there's a human who can command Avacyn because he's super-posessed, I'm going to choose a vampire to be his BFF and go ahead and break my Vorthos cherry with a theme deck. Suggestions for which Magic card gets to be The Saint of Killers?