I am not good at portioning things. I read books in a single sitting, sometimes two if they are especially long. I’ve eaten an entire box of oreos over a single day, and back when I had peanut butter in the house, eating the whole thing with a spoon was not an uncommon occurrence. The same is generally true of games. When I pick up a new game, especially a roguelike, I find myself playing for hours at a time.
I’ve had Titanium Court for just under 2 weeks, and in that time I’ve played 10 hours or so of it. This is a shockingly low amount of playtime for something I like this much.
Listing the labels that apply to this game is an exercise in pointlessness. They’re all there. It’s easy enough to put them out. But without actual instructions, it’s like listing the ingredients for a cake completely on their own. It’s mostly pointless.
I could tell you it’s a roguelike match-3 puzzle strategic tactics game, but I might as well tell you lemon, egg, butter, flour, sugar, oven. It might tell you why you that its time to opt out if you really hate roguelikes or match 3 games, or are allergic to lemons, but it won’t do much else.
Anyway, welcome to Titanium Court.
Gameplay
It’s a little tricky to know where exactly to start with Titanium Court, but war is probably as good a place as any. Every day, the court will go to war, and you must lead it. War consists of multiple encounters, and each encounter has two phases, high tide and low tide.
High tide is the match 3 phase. In this phase, you manipulate the battlefield by swapping around tiles. Matching tiles removes them from the battlefield and grants the appropriate resource. Match water for water, match wheat for food, match hills for rocks, and forests for wood.
Each move removes a small amount of your bar, with multi-matches refilling it. When the bar empties, it’s time for low tide.
Low tide is the prep phase for the tactical strategy portion. In this phase, you can produce units and cast spells from the unit cards in your slots. You have five slots for units and spell, and they can be cast as many times as you have resources. Most spells are semi-instant, but producing units is not. Instead, each unit goes a bit further down the time tracker on the left.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a strategy game if it was just your units showing up. Enemy castles that are left on the board in Low Tide will produce units. Some attack your castle, some just sit around, and some don’t do much of anything.
Oh. Hmm. The word Enemy is in pink text over there. How very odd. Probably nothing to worry about.
Narrative
I find it tricky to talk about the narrative of Titanium Court for two reasons. First, I haven’t finished the game, and even if I did finish the game, I am somewhat suspect that I really understand what is going on with Magic, and the Enemy, and everything else. Second, I think it’s a fairly big spoiler to reveal what I do think I know, but might not. Third, the games tone is something I think is best experienced rather then revealed.
That said, I can offer a sort of litmus test, a bit of a sampler if you will, of whether or not you will enjoy the writing in the game. At one point, I was offered the option to skip a boss fight in exchange for watching a three minute musical number about Atlantic Salmon. During another, a funeral procession was held for a football that I routinely failed to protect.
The game has also had a few moments I’ve found quite surprisingly unsettling, and an antagonist I’ve grown to genuinely dislike, despite the the high amount of space between the player character and myself.
Overall
I quite like Titanium Court. I think it’s going to be one of those sleeper hits that doesn’t quite get enough attention until someone bigger then me picks it up, and it turns into a cult classic. It’s clever, well written, and manages to be genuinely unnerving at times, despite it’s apparent simplicity.
That said, I’ve also found it weirdly draining, and that it requires my full focus. It’s not particularly snacky, or bite sized, or other nice words we use to compare things to food that is easily consumed. It’s more like ice cream. Try to consume it too fast, stuff too much it, and get a headache.
Publisher Falling Whale Games has claimed that popular board gaming website Board Game Geek refused to run an advertising campaign for their game “Possess Me, Satan.” They say that their campaign was rejected due to its theme, with the unnamed employee rejecting the campaign stating that their personal experience with demonic possession and oppression.
The game in question bills itself as a social deduction game in the vein of Mafia or Werewolf.
This first surfaced on this reddit post. I reached out to Falling Whale Games, who confirmed that one of their team members had been the one to post the emails, and provided the full email text, which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.
Notable quotes include:
As a follower of Jesus, I routinely help people suffering from demonic oppression, and more occasionally, possession, and it’s absolutely devastating the damage he does to peoples’ lives.
and also
we’ve walked with one lady who was diagnosed with 32 distinct personalities as a result of horrific occultic abuse, and she eventually was one whole, complete individual, healed by Jesus, with no fragments or need of allher psychological meds
The employee also suggests that Falling Whale Games pull the entire project.
IMO, the responsible thing to do would be to pull the entire project, as there are *way* more people that suffer this than you could possibly imagine, putting on a good face (usually enabled by dissociation), but suffering terribly behind the scenes.
When Falling Whale Games requested clarification, they were rebuffed, and the employee also stated that if it were up to them, they would not be running ads for Pillbox Games’ “All True Believers” either, and that it’s “it’s not over religion, but reality.”
Update – 11:39 PM
Board Game Geek has confirmed the messages were genuine, and that BGG’s Advertising Manager has been let go. Scott Alden made the following statement.
“Due to a situation in which BGG’s Advertising Manager responded inappropriately in a business email to a designer, I have decided to let him go. His response does not reflect or represent our company or the way we conduct business.”
Reaction
Community reaction has been mixed, but often critical. Responses on reddit range from demanding an explanation from BGG, to stating that they will be ending their support for BGG. The community seems to have found consensus that this is an unusual and disappointing reason to reject an ad campaign.
Full Email Text
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee “Thanks for submitting your ad campaign. We’ll review it and contact you if we have any scheduling conflicts or errors.
Once your ad campaign is approved, you’ll receive a confirmation email.
Contact me if you have any questions.
Best regards [Name Removed by Falling Whale Games]”
Falling Whale Games Team Member “I just wanted to follow up to see if this ad campaign was approved for not? Last time we did ads with Board Game Geek we got a confirmation email the very next day.
I just need to make sure the ads are actually going to run on time since our crowdfunding starts on May 19th.”
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee “Thanks for the follow-up!
To be completely transparent, I’ve been sitting on this one and praying about what to do in this instance. As a follower of Jesus, I routinely help people suffering from demonic oppression, and more occasionally, possession, and it’s absolutely devastating the damage he does to peoples’ lives. It’s sometimes beyond what would even dare be depicted in a horror film. The amazing thing is that I get to see Jesus completely heal folks of even the most severe effects (we’ve walked with one lady who was diagnosed with 32 distinct personalities as a result of horrific occultic abuse, and she eventually was one whole, complete individual, healed by Jesus, with no fragments or need of all her psychological meds), but it doesn’t change the terrible reality behind the theme that this game is depicting.
So, I just can’t in good conscience approve this one; given what I’ve seen firsthand, the thought of displaying this subject matter makes me sick to my stomach. I don’t begrudge you personally, as many people just plain don’t understand the reality of it, but I’d strongly urge you to consider these things. IMO, the responsible thing to do would be to pull the entire project, as there are *way* more people that suffer this than you could possibly imagine, putting on a good face (usually enabled by dissociation), but suffering terribly behind the scenes.
I know this response was more than you bargained for, but I wanted to be 100% honest about where I’m coming from, rather than just ignoring the request. Even though you may not be on the same page, I appreciate your understanding.”
Falling Whale Games Team Member
“Thank you for getting back to us.
It’s very disappointing to hear you are denying us service based on religion. Is this the decision of Board Game Geek as a company or of just you personally?
Is there an advertising policy rule we are breaking?
There is currently ads on Board Game Geek for a game called “All True Believers” which is themed to the occult so it seems strange that our game is being singled out.
We are definitely not going to pull the project due to individual people not liking the theme. It is simply not for those people.”
Unnamed Board Game Geek Employee
“Keep in mind it’s not over religion, but reality. It’s the same reason I would say a game would be in very poor taste if it featured being a sexual predator, or something that would directly trigger someone that’s been harmed by the subject matter. It’s about keeping BGG welcoming to everyone, and since I’m privy to this subject matter, I know firsthand that this is not friendly content, and incredibly triggering, put in front of some of the population that visits BGG.
Similar to site moderation, there are of course judgement calls to be made when it comes to displaying ads on the site. If it were just my personal preference, “All True Believers” wouldn’t be approved either, but I have to factor in if something being displayed is going to be overtly triggering. In that game, it’s a bit less obvious from the title, whereas you went for the shock value. Of course, that’s a business decision on your part, but it also means it’s not responsible of me to put it in front of a diverse community of gamers.”
Sources and Confirmations
After reviewing the initial reddit post, Gametrodon reached out directly to Board Game Geek and Falling Whale Games.
Falling Whale Games stated to Gametrodon that they had indeed posted the messages on reddit. Board Game Geek has yet to respond.
Further down in the reddit thread, the user u/OctavianX, who we believe to be the community manager for Board Game Geek, stated that “Our advertising manager should not have presented his personal beliefs as representing the company. We are making sure he understands this was an inappropriate and unprofessional response”.
Falling Whale Games has provided us with the banner ads that they would have run during the campaign. It’s not clear to us why these or their other content would not have been approved.
Initial community reaction was skeptical: why would Board Game Geek make this decision? Was this a publicity stunt on the part of Falling Whale? But our investigation suggests that the email thread that Falling Whale posted is accurate and genuine.
Some Quick Final Thoughts
Everyone is entitled to their beliefs. Also, if your beliefs include the idea that someone can be healed by religion so that they no longer require anti-psychotics, I will fight you in a Denny’s parking lot.
I’ve tried to keep a neutral tone as I’ve reported on this situation, but I can’t remain neutral about these extremely harmful attitudes towards peoples’ health.
I believe that it’s the responsibility of Board Game Geek to address this appropriately, starting with an apology to Falling Whale Games for having someone on their advertising team tell them to cancel their game. If they don’t, I’m going to avoid using the site in the future. I encourage users who feel equally frustrated by this decision to do the same.
What the community should NOT do is actively harass or dox the person who made this decision at BGG. It’s not an appropriate or acceptable response, and frankly is likely to just make that person feel like a martyr than actually having them confront their fairly rude and spiteful decision.
There are a lot of things that go into me writing about a game for the blog. Sometimes it’s a sorta desperation, when Sunday roles around and I scrounge around through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Most of the time, I’d prefer it was joy, when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).
Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. Ultimately, this is a post about nostalgia, and frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person then it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.
Just to be as clear as possible: If you do not want to listen to 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.
Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo MMO rather then a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts, but if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash, and what’s technically capable in Flash in 2009.
Normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here, because even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.
In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing in most cases.
Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.
Welcome to 2009
Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s literally any hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time then middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games growing, and there’s just one problem: I never get to actually play them. My screentime limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.
Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s Free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friends house. Relatives at Thanksgiving. Home again.
It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.
From this standpoint then, Adventure Quest worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop, and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.
In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this, and unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.
Glasses off, analysis on.
With the value of hindsight, there isn’t actually much that Adventure Quest World does that it hasn’t been beaten to punch by other, bigger games. Everquest has been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.
It’s defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these things were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars, events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!
As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the communities success or engagement, but as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.
The defining feature then, of AQW, was that it truly optimized the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.
Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now
I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully onboard. I loved the design notes, a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.
But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More then anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltraire, Paul and Storm, these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.
If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Cntl-Alt-Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.
If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this: At some point in Highschool, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of glacier national park, I remember very little of it.
But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company, and just being completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happens. I doubt even he remembers.
From 2008-ish, to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.
Returning to 2026
I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort, not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.
Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.
I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite it’s update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon then Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market, in an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.
The story is at best mediocre, and at worst bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. It’s end-game hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoked a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me, the sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots!
But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.
Back to the Past – 2011
This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.
There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more then a player. The game means more to me then I do to it.
Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine
This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more then anything else), I’d dissect why the games player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.
Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.
It’s been a strong 12 months for games about are coin flips. Unfair Flips was ultimately about taking a coin that always flipped tails and beating on it until it flipped heads. Q-Up was a game about taking a coin that could flip heads or tails, and trying to bend the world so it didn’t matter which happened.
To continue this metaphor, Sol Cesto is a game in which you want a coin to flip heads. You can manipulate reality to try to make it more likely to flips heads. But it’s necessary to plan for what happens when it flips tails 10 times in a row.
After about 12 hours, I’ve found that while I like what Sol Cesto is trying to do, I don’t know that I love how it does it.
Gameplay
The idea is simple. The sun is gone, lost at the bottom of the dungeon, and someone must get it back. That someone is likely to be one of several unfortunate souls—your first choice is the peasant, and you’ll unlock additional characters via meta-progression.
Each character is a bit different, but they generally have a set of starting consumable items, a passive ability, an active ability called a talent, and a stat score for wisdom and strength. It’s these last two that will determine how most interactions go.
You’re dropped onto a dungeon floor, and you have to visit a certain number of rooms to unlock the door to the next floor. Each floor is a 4×4 grid of tiles. Each tile is a room that contains either a monster or a treasure.
Here, then, is the coin flip. You don’t choose which room to visit. Instead you choose a row. The game then randomly drops you into one of the open rooms in that row. If it’s a treasure of some sort, great! Heal yourself, or grab some gold. If it’s a monster, it’s time for combat.
Combat is simple. You will always kill the monster in the room, but as it dies, it will inflict damage to you equal to the difference between it’s stat and your stat. If you have three strength, that means you can take out three-strength and below monsters for free. If you only have a single wisdom, every three-wisdom monster is suddenly a loss of two health. Given that most characters have six or less starting HP, damage starts to add up quickly.
The primary loop of Sol Cesto, then, is simple: look at the screen, and make the best choice to maximize your odds of keeping things going in a favorable way. Run out of health, and you die, being sent back to the surface to begin again.
And again.
Then do it again.
There are, of course, more twists to it, but they are just that: twists. As you get deeper you’ll encounter monsters that buff other monsters, monsters that get bigger as you kill other monsters, dark screens that can only be lit up by killing other monsters. There are consumable items that you can use to tilt choices in your favor. The characters’ unique talents charge up as you clear rooms, and can be used to shift choices; the wizard links two rooms together and the knight can select a column instead of a row. There are teeth to be wrenched from stone statues and jammed into your own jaw, modifying the odds at which you’ll be dropped into certain rooms.
Despite all this, I don’t find myself wanting to play more.
Metaprogression
The game that keeps coming to mind as I play Sol Cesto is Spelunky 2. It’s probably a bit of an aesthetic similarity, as both trade in some sort of sacrificial Aztec temple theme. This theme is one of the things I actually have no complaints about with Sol Cesto, as I find its unearthly wall-carvings-come-to-life art style as quite appealing.
No, the problem is gold.
Opening treasure chests gives you gold, and gold is both the currency used to both buy items from shops during a run, and they way you unlock meta progression options AFTER a run. And as you can see below, there is a LOT of metaprogression.
This is, frankly, a tension I find deeply unfun. Do I try to win and push my current run forward, or do I just cash out so I can keep unlocking more options, unlocking more abilities, and generally increase my chances of eventually succeeding? Do I take teeth that make me more powerful and tilt the odds in my favor, or do I take the ones that give me more gold?
My goal on a run of a roguelite/roguelike is to win the run. When I fail, I want to fail because I made a mistake that I need to learn from, not because I haven’t farmed enough yet. Spelunky was the king of this, because when you died in Spelunky, it was always your fault. Somewhere along the line, you made choices or took risks that resulted in your own demise. With Sol Cesto, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The other thing is the length of runs. Sol Cesto runs are not short, and if there is some sort of shortcut, I haven’t found it yet. My first run to get through 100 floors was something like 40 minutes, and I had to spend the first part of that piloting through floors of enemies I’d already seen at least a few dozen times.
I’ve already proven I can solve these, so why do I have to keep doing them again and again?
I’d be ready to put Sol Cesto down if it wasn’t for one other thing.
Secrets
Edit: 4/30 – Someone pointed out that this next section has spoilers, so if you’re playing and enjoying Sol Cesto, or decided you want to try it yourself, you may want to skip this bit.
Spoilers ahead! You have been warned.
Fairly early on in Sol Cesto, I figured out that you could grab the shopkeeper’s nose. It was a neat little visual thing; a little Super Mario 64 inspired goof.
Except then I realized that if you drag it back far enough you can launch it into his head to stun him for a few seconds and steal everything in the shop.
Then I noticed that on the pail that lets you cash out gold for use in a future run, one of the bricks in the background was a different color, and leaning out of the wall. So clicked on it until it fell out, and I found some more cash.
There’s more of these sorts of things. Some elements on the screen can be clicked on for gold when they show up. Full clearing a screen gives a single extra gold coin. You can bomb teeth statues to get buffs, and use reroll dice on most screens.
And this is why I’m hesitant to entirely give up on Sol Cesto. I keep wondering if there’s some secret that cracks this thing wide open… some trick I haven’t spotted yet. Something I’m missing that changes everything.
Maybe clicking on a specific tile secretly increases your odds of landing on that tile?
Maybe using items on the smith can let you get extra stat points?
….
Maybe this dungeon is just making me go crazy. I think I need some sunlight.
Another month, another Magic: The Gathering set. This month, it’s Secrets of Strixhaven. The OG Strixhaven was a magic school-themed set with a focus on instant and sorcery spells. Secrets of Strixhaven is another swing at those themes, bringing back the same colleges of magic with new mechanics.
Set mechanics, and other context
Secrets of Strixhaven’s marquee mechanic is prepared. This is a mechanic that lets your creatures cast copies of instants or sorceries printed on them under certain conditions, a bit like an inverted version of Adventure. All colors get some prepare cards, and some are a bit better then others.
Here are the schools, and the single color mechanics!
Quick Overview of the 5 Archtypes in Secrets of Strixhaven.
I went to two Strixhaven prereleases. Let’s get right into it. Here are the two pools.
Event 1 Pool – 1 win, 2 draws. – Witherbloom splashing blue
Event 2 Pool – 3 wins, went to top 4. 2-1 in semis, knocked out 0-2 in finals – Quandrix splashing black
Pre-Event Prep
I didn’t do any test pools this time around, which came back to bite me. Secrets of Strixhaven sealed could turn into some really grindy matches, and if I’d known that earlier, I might have adjusted my strategy.
I also might have recognized that Silverquill was the aggro deck.
Going in, I thought Secrets of Strrixhaven would be bomb-heavy, with a lot of removal. I think that was generally a correct read! What I didn’t fully anticipate was how that would impact game pace.
Event 1 – Lessons Were Learned
There’s not much to be said on this event that isn’t really said by the pool itself. In matchups into non-Silverquill decks, games tended to get slowed down, mostly by small deathtouch creatures. Burrog Banemaker, and Noxious Newt were responsible for a lot of this.
Everyone had combat tricks, but no one wanted to drop their combat tricks first. And in a set where every color pair has a mythic flier, using hard removal on little guys feels like it might be a bad idea. So games tended to stall out until someone dropped a bomb.
For example, my first opponent had a Dellian Fel. As far as planeswalkers gon he is fairly vanilla. But it turns out that being able to gain life, draw cards, and destroy creatures, while having a synergistic emblem you can get on your second turn after playing him is pretty good! I’ve also seen a few other matches where the paradigm cards just kinda shredded people; mostly Decorum Dissertation and Germination Practicum.
Anyway, I wasn’t the only person getting match draws. The friends I went with also got some, and other folks also drew. It was pretty weird honestly.
I’d learned a few things at the first event. Primarily: I needed to find a way to aggressively close games out before they went to time.
Usually in a sealed event, there aren’t many ways to influence your pool. But Strixhaven has a seeded pack for each college in each prerelease kit, and the Fourth Place (my store) allows trading sealed kits with other folks in the event before it starts. So I swapped my Witherbloom kit for a Quandrix one.
Witherbloom wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t good. Even running pretty half of the rares, they just didn’t do enough to actually win me matches. So I needed an additional source of bombs, and I thought Quandrix could do that for me with cards like Pterafractyl and Fractal Mascot
I was mostly right! I managed to convincingly smash my way through my first two rounds, then struggled a bit in round 3 before managing to take the win. This put me into top 4, where I pushed through semis to finals.
And then I got absolutely butchered in the finals. Some of this was the Silverquill deck I was playing into. Some of this was just making a large number of blunders. I’m of the opinion that Silverquill, with just a few good cards is much, much stronger than almost every college in this set, because it’s the only one that really gets rewarded for going on the offensive. Repartee and Prepared spells are just incredibly synergistic, much more than having some +1/+1 counters, or a bit of lifegain. And with games stalling out, cards like Summoned Dromedary and Inkling Mascot just do so much.
Overall Thoughts
I generally liked Secrets of Strixhaven. That said, I have some thoughts about the seeded packs.
I haven’t minded seeded packs previously. Both Khans and Avatar used them, and I thought they were pretty good. To be more specific: I didn’t feel like I lost games in those sets because my opponent had a ended up a with a better color of seeded packs.
That’s not really true of Secrets of Strixhaven. Both events I went to, Silverquill just absolutely cleaned people out. I did some free play against a friend’s pool yesterday. He rebuilt it into Silverquill, and… I got cleaned out again.
Some archetypes are going to be better in some formats, and some pools are going to be stronger. But it felt like some Strixhaven sealed pools would always go to time, and some would absolutely run over anything in their way with value commons and uncommons. And you could sway your odds if your pool was Silverquill-seeded.
I didn’t like that much.
Also, bring back foil year stamps on promo cards! I know you can do it Wizards. Wizards said they did it to “reduce the number of cards that store owners have to care about, and to make things easier if release dates change” but like… they are doing special versions of Japanese-only alt arts exclusively found in collector boosters.
You can add a single special card to prereleases, you cheap weasels.
