In the Web of War(craft)

Yesterday, Duy, Jason and I decided to have lunch and Wendy's and then stop at J&J's afterwards to see if they had any new shipments of the WoW card game like they said they would. Lo and behold, this time they had enough packs for us to get 4 packs each and do a real draft. They were pretty expensive though, something around $5.49 each, so about $2 more than a Magic booster. You still get 15 cards in it, though the rarity breakdown is slighty different from Magic's.

So a bit after we got home, we drafted in the living room. Now, for this game, you have to choose whether to play as Horde or Alliance - you can't mix cards from both. Since we only had 3 people, you can probably guessed what would happen; two people would end up fighting over one faction while the third lucks out and gets to take all the good cards and then some of the other faction. Indeed, Jason ended up going Horde while me and Duy had to fight over Alliance. I would hazard a guess that Jason's deck would also probably be the strongest and most consistent out of the three, though we haven't played nearly enough games so far to tell.

Another big thing that sets drafting WoW apart from Magic drafting is that each must revolve around a hero card. Basically, your hero represents you, and any ability cards (spells) you play must be of the same type as your hero, and any ally cards you play (creatures) have to be of the same faction. Since there are 9 classes, and they have varying degrees of useful abilities, you might want to settle on your hero early to be sure of having some ability cards that your hero would actually want to use. Also, just like in Magic, it seems that any limited deck would also need a lot of allies, so choosing your faction early would be even more important, otherwise, you might have to add in some really subpar cards to make sure you deck even reaches 30 cards!

There's plenty of other differences in the gameplay and rules as well, but those were the two that I think most influenced the drafting and made it feel different from the numerous Magic drafts we've had over the years. Although it's more costly than Magic, the game is still really fun to play, and anyone who has an average understanding of Magic should have no problem picking this game up. In some ways, it's even better than Magic. (And I've played Magic for 10 years, so that should be some pretty high praise coming from me :P) The game seems to move a steady, brisk pace, and you never really are sitting around waiting for turns to go by with nothing to do. The recommended number for a draft is 4-8 people, so the 3 of us were hoping that we could get some other people interested in trying out the game and having a "real" draft. I think it would be a good way to get people introduced to the game, since constructed would require both more time and money to do. So, is anyone up for it?

Greater Gargadon

So finally, all the suspense in waiting for me to blog again has finally ended. :P It seems that blogger has upgraded their technology since I last blogged, so now I'm using this new template that for some reason seems to be screwing up my sidebar links. I've done a temporary solution for now, but it still looks kinda crappy. And I think the width of the posting area is too small. But other than that, I guess it's okay.

I had a couple of interesting convos yesterday, one of them was with Bao, and the other was with Jason and Duy over dinner. I was thinking about posting the whole MSN convo with Bao, but then I realized it probably wouldn't look that good on my new template, and so I'll just link to it:

http://www.baomon.com/blog/alan-blog-dec-10.html
(thanks sir!)

Because of these talks, I've been motivated to try to accomplish some things in the past that I was never able to do, and also to change more and become more efficient at things and better at communicating. To that end, I'm going to try and blog more often. I dunno how often that will be, since I'm still in the middle of finals and then I have Urbana and a lot of Christmas stuff after I'm done school, but I'm thinking a lot of time I spend doing other stuff like reading Magic sites could be better spent elsewhere.

Also, I was going to practice expressing opinions by giving a review of Tales of the Abyss, or something else, but that will have to wait for another time. I'll give it some thought over dinner perhaps, and then maybe later I deal with some other stuff that's been annoying me. (Why does the hydro company require a $685 deposit? I've already had to pay so many deposits this term. Hope I can actually get them back next year...)

Oh, and I'm pretty satisfied with my new computer. I think I'll give it a 9/7. :P