78%
6% wrong because I brain farted.
So I’m level 1 for a while longer. I did have a good time and really enjoyed the judging, maybe that was due to not having my feet/legs feel as dead at the end of the weekend. Which is the root cause of my greater staying power is a good quesiton though, it was either the greater amount of walking I’ve been doing lately or the hours spent testing and interviewing :)
So what have I learnt so far in the lead up to World Catholic Youth Week*? Just that Cardinal Pell is an idiot, these are the things we’ve learnt about him:
If I was catholic I would have to question if I want this man to be leading me.
* Its not World Youth Week, there needs to be a lot of non catholic focus for it to be that, the official name is just misleading.
** Ok, you can be that without being an idiot, and Pell appears to flip flop around on the issue any way. As a custodian of the earth though he should be in favour of the solutions to climate change.
Ok, the start of this draft was killed by wordpress, apparently a saved draft can be replaced with the text “undefined” so this will be quicker than I intended.
People are complaining about how long 9 player games of EDH take.
Apparently this is because there are too many wrath effects and lie gain in the format.
My responce is two pronged:
Play many wrath effects, playing them is essential to keeping the format balanced.
Use that useful rule about General combat damage. I only need to deal 21 damage with my general to kill any player. So lets get the General damage flowing. This needs haste: (more…)
I had an interesting deck last night, it had to radically different mana bases I couldn’t choose between. The cards in the deck can be summarised as:
2 White Cards (Mistmeadow Skulk and Rune-Cervin Rider)
10 Green White Hybrids
1 Green Card
4 Red Green Hybrids (2 Wurms, 2 Duos)
3 Red Cards (Scar, Burn Trail, Power of Fire)
2 Artifacts
So I could go with:
9 Forests
5 Plains
4 Mountains
Or with the counter intuitive:
3 Forests
8 Plains
6 Mountains
Now because one of the white cards was Rune-Cervin Rider the heavy green mana base was better, but isn’t it weird what options are possible with these sets.
I was happy with my deck though, it was just a pair of sideboarded Disenchants away from winning the draft. I need to remember to sideboard more often in drafts.
SYG was this weekend, and Northern had a team of around 25-30 people down there. This was our second year having a go a the serious competition of Aerobics (B) Mixed. Mad props to all involved, you guys rocked:
I know this isn’t related to most of what my blogs about, but plenty of people who visit this blog will be insterested in it.
I love it how big evil corporations (and by golly eBay counts as that) try to make more money by offering to be your friend. When you buy items on ebay in a forgein currency and try and pay for them using paypal you have two options for how to convert the currency.
The default option is to have PayPal convert the cost to your native currency and charge you that amount. They give lots of nice helpful reasons for this, mainly coming down to the fact that you shouldn’t trust your credit card company to be nice and that by converting with PayPal you know up front how much its going to cost.
The other option, spoken on in much negative language is let your credit card company do the conversion for you. This is the option I always go with. Despite the conventional wisdom to the oposite, your credit card company isn’t all that evil. Just now I brought my self a beautiful black bordered german Bayou, card + shipping came to the reasonable sum of $USD48.00. The lovely friendly people at PayPal were going to use a conversion rate of .9336, which doesn’t sound to bad, as practicle rates are always below the market rates (currently .9567). The terrible shady types at my credit card company are going to use a rate of .9563, although history tells me that when the transaction is finalised (currently I’m working out that number based on the difference between my balance, limit and available limit) that will be shifted down slightly, but not by much.
So PayPal wants to screw me over to the sum of 2.3c / USD, thats nice of them isn’t it.
Remember people, always check out your options. The nicer someone talks, the meaner they are.
This happened Monday night at a tournament I was involved in, bonus points to the first to guess which person I am.
Albert looses game one and chooses to play first
A turn 1: Moonring Island, Drowner Initiate
B: That land comes into play tapped.
A: Oops I meant to use this Island.
B: Sure.
B turn 1: Draw, land, go.
A turn 2: Draw, Moonring Island, go.
B turn 2: Draw, land, go.
A turn 3: Draw, Briarbelly Cohort, go.
B: Dude that land comes into play still.
A: Oh yeah, I keep forgetting, I’ll play Memory Sluice instead.
B: Sure.
B turn 3: Draw, Land, Dude, go.
A turn 4: Draw, Briarbell Cohort, go.
B turn 4: Draw, Land ….
A: Hey its only turn 3 you can’t play a 4th land already.
B: F***, Judge.
Ok, I can’t slow roll this, I came 7th. I am rather stoked about that, it is by far my best tournament result ever.
Firstly the deck list:
(more…)
I upgraded to the Beta of Ubuntu 8.04 at the end of last month. I was happily surprised, naturally my wireless is broken, everything seams to work, but the tick box to enable the style of security we use doesn’t jump out at me. I’ll wait till the release of 8.04 before bothering to fix that though.
The good surprise though was that the default installed copy of Firefox 3 Beta 4 had a working flash install right out of the box, even on amd64. Previously I had to install the 32bit version of Firefox to get flash to work decently, but the default install of amd64 Firefox worked even smoother. That is until this morning when I installed the next round of updates, which included beta 5 of Firefox 3. Which is a piece of shit.
Flash doesn’t work.
It randomly crashes.
Why oh why did I install these updates, argh.
Just posting to say the below post has had a lot of extra info put in, including some pointers towards future directions for the deck.
Played in the A-Bomb tourney today, I believe I was playing for Mind Bogglers of Croydon, but who I was playing for wasn’t all that important to me (sorry guys). I’m going to lead you guys on a bit of a story before I bother getting the tourney report.
After seeing the general goodness of Reveillark in both Standard and Extended I felt that the concept of a highlander Flash combo deck needed to be done with updated Reveillark tech. I felt the deck now had enough redundancy in combo pieces that I should be able to manage a version of the deck that just overloads with combo pieces and comes out with the win somehow. Here is the decklist skeleton I started with:
Combo Cards: (12)
Carrion Feeder
Mirror Entity
Flash
Protean Hulk
Body Double
Volrath’s Shapeshifter
Sparkmage Apprentice
Dakmor Ghoul
Highway Robber
Imperial Recruiter
Reveillark
Natural Order (more…)
I’m about to start putting pictures into my posts about my holiday. Should I just be using WordPress hosting for them or should I use a third party?
Any opinions peoples?
For reference this is what a WordPress hosted image will look like:
Hrm, it appears that only smaller images can I use a thumbnail for :( So suggestions are needed.
Over the next few days (read weeks) I’m going to be posting bits and pieces of my trip to the Pro Tour in Kuala Lumpur with a short trip over to India added to the end. If you want to read all of them and nothing else follow my India tag, people that only want to read judging things can follow my judging tags and skip the other bits. Chances are though that the post will be long enough that they involve many topics each.
Feb 12th
Arrive at the airport over 3 hours before my flight. Check in my pack with attached day pack. Trundle off with my (read mums) yellow carry on suitcase to buy my self a novel to read and a hard case for my sunglasses. I pick up the first book in a trilogy that I read the end of on a recent trip, I wasn’t happy to learn it was book 3, I had spent a lot of time checking that it wasn’t apart of a series. Some times you look very hard and still manage to not see what you were looking for :( (more…)
I’ve been using the current beta for a few hours now and am loving it. They want to claim that it is up to 3x faster than Firefox 2 at complex web applications, now I can’t put a quantative number on it, but it does feel faster.
Yeah I know placebo effect and all that, but it does.
I recomend giving it a look, it can’t hurt right :) Linkage.
Hrm, well that would be a link if the link creating window didn’t appear to be broken, I wonder what caused that?
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