Game 81: Magic the Gathering - Planechase Format

 YEA!!  After a month of finishing out the semester and then traveling for two weeks, I'm back to gaming again!  I've also got two of my three boys home - we have Jacob here between travels to Australia and Germany, and Caleb is back from Michigan and not yet out at the coast.  The upshot of this is that I get to play MAGIC again, and that makes me happy!!  We played Planechase, which is not a format I had yet posted about here, and so here you have it.

Before moving on into that, though, I'm going to be a little bit negative.  I am a gamer - duh, see blog.  I spend time in gaming stores here at home.  My house is filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of games.  I game whenever I get a chance. SO  .  .  .  on my recent trip to Edinburgh, I thought I'd check out the gaming scene.  I didn't just want to do the touristy thing; I wanted to get local and hang out with "my kind" of people.  I was curious about the gaming scene out there, and I figured that to some extent a gaming store would feel like home away from home.  Yeah  .  .  .  not so much.
 I checked them out on their website before leaving home - read the description and found the opening hours.  Here's how they describe themselves:







Welcome!

Welcome to Games Hub Edinburgh! We are the original board gaming, card gaming, roleplaying & internet cafe in the UK having opened doors on the 3rd of August 2012. We are based at 101 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh, EH3 9JB.
We have 1000 square foot of gaming rooms; a fully working cafe serving food, coffee and cold drinks; and a discount store selling all sorts of geeky goodness at great prices!  
The following buses stop near us: 2, 10, 11, 15, 16, 23, 24, 27, 35, 36.  There is also a taxi rank and various paid parking location nearby.


Does this website description not make this place sound welcoming?  Well, it wasn't.  At all.  I was made to feel unwelcome and like a moron.  I found it ironic that this, a place where I should have been completely at home, was so unwelcoming, but in other things were I stepped out, where I sought to go deeper into the life of the city than a tourist would, places that seemed like they should not have been open to me, I was welcomed with open arms.  I got to sit in on bell-ringing practice at a kirk - not at all an open event.  I also was welcomed to play the largest pipe organ in Edinburgh, and I'm not an organist, just a curious student.  But gaming, something that is the stuff of my life, yeah, I wasn't welcome into that scene in Edinburgh.  Not cool, dudes, not cool.

OK, so back to the home front  .  .  .  In Planechase, a card is turned up in the middle that affects all players.  There is a deck of these cards, and there is a special die, the chaos die, that governs when you planeswalk to the next location and when the second option on the card triggers.  Below are three examples of planes we ended up on; you may need to zoom in in order to see the text.



Caleb, Jacob, and I each grabbed a deck off our shelves.  Actually, Caleb had just built a deck and wasn't sure how it was going to play, and Jacob and I, sort of inadvertently grabbed some decks that were higher-powered than we remembered.  I was seen to be the threat in the first game, with my dragons, so they kind of targeted me a bit.  (I always like to have a forest and the birds in my opening hand with this deck.)
 I got out two Crucibles of Fire, so all my dragons had +6/+6, which made the two Broodmates here 10/10.  I should have just taken Jacob out, as he couldn't defend against flying at the moment, but I split the attack between Caleb and Jacob.  (My Achilles Heel is that I'm a mom, and I don't want to pick on one son over the other!!  Seriously - I need to get over that!)
 And then Jacob swept in with his Stormtide Leviathan and his Brine Elemental and sent me to my doom!
 We all switched out decks.  I just grabbed something off my shelf again, a deck I forgot I had.  Once I saw it again, I recalled it as being something that had to come up just right in order to work at all.  The whole thing revolves around the Sacellum Godspeaker.  It just so happened I had one or two of them in my opening hand.  I only ever got 2 out, but by about turn 5 I had gotten all four of them in my hand, so even if Jacob or Caleb had destroyed one or two, I could have come back with more.  Without this card I would never have gotten enough mana to play my 8-cost, 11-cost, and 15-cost cards.  I had a lot of big green, and I had a lot of Eldrazi, including Emrakul the Aeons Torn, which I did get out and with which I did win.
 There's Emrakul in the center of my army.  I mean, 15/15, uncounterable, flying, protection from colors, annihilator 6  .  .  .  what are you going to do about that?
I ended up with a lot of mana ramp due to one of the planes we had planeswalked to and also due to my Primeval Titan.  Even with a couple of Sacellum Godspeakers, I'm not going to complain about massive mana ramp - not with such high-cost creatures!

I'm not normally at all competitive against my sons in Magic, so when I do win - and as decisively as this - even if I had higher-powered decks than they or I were expecting, I have to do at least a bit of shameless self-promotion.

OK, so I've been out of town for about two weeks, and, as you know from earlier in this post, I didn't get to game in Scotland, but we did game in Michigan with family while there for Caleb's graduation.  I've been home for about a week, and we've played 5 other games here, but they are all games I've posted about already.  Here are the games played in the last 10 days or so, the first three in Michigan:


Can't Stop
Dutch
Fill or Bust
Sushi Go
For Sale
Code Names Pictures
Karuba
Deception

And now off I go for more MTG - Cubing with Caleb!!! WAHOO - look who's home again and on summer break!  Oh yeah!!!  It's time to get this blog rockin' and rollin' again!

POST SCRIPT: After putting this up, I spent the afternoon at a colleague's house with a group of gaming friends.  I arrived a little late, and they were already playing KeyForge, which I didn't then end up playing - a card game somewhat along the lines of Yu-gi-oh or Magic from what I could tell.  Next up was Call to Adventure.  It played well and had a good story aspect to it.  I love dice, but I like that this one used rune tokens (two-sided) for the "rolls" - nice change-up there.  I struggled a bit, as I didn't fully understand where all the victory points would be coming from in the end, but after one game I've got it, and I'm ready to play more.  This may soon be a game on our shelves!  (And after being with not-so-welcoming gamers in Edinburgh, it was good to be home again with these folks!)


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