Some decks are brought together through powerful synergies that make it tough for opponents to stop them. They’ll play powerful cards, but their true strength is the way each effect plays off of the others. And then, there are decks that slam a bunch of powerful cards together into a strong mana curve and win through the sheer value generated by each card.

That’s what we’re playing today: Mono-black. A deck that comes together through the simple fact that each of its cards is individually worth incredible value.

There’s no real way to get around it: A lot of the power of this deck comes from the fact that black has access to many incredibly powerful value pieces like Invoke Despair, The Meathook Massacre, Sheoldred, the Apocalypse, and Liliana of the Veil. Each of them either creates a massive tempo swing/card advantage or presents an inevitability that our opponent must answer or otherwise die.

Even the lower end of our curve represents value, with beaters like Evolved Sleeper, Tenacious Underdog, and Reckoner Bankbuster. All of these cards are great plays in both the early and late game, presenting cheap threats that can draw us additional cards as the match goes long.

Each of the cards is powerful in a vacuum. Put enough of them in the deck and get them to stick on the board, and it’s easy to outvalue the opponent.

And yet, my heart yearns for blue, my true love. I’ll need to work on building one of those mono-blue counterspell piles.

(PS: It’s hilarious that Meathook Massacre got banned in the time since I recorded this. I don’t think it hits the deck too bad because we can find replacement cards, but it *is* a hit.)

Qwark’s vid comic has revealed the location of a secret hideout that he once used to disappear after escaping from Dr. Nefarious long ago, and it seems likely that’s where he’s holding up now.

Let’s go to him, and give the coward a piece of our minds.

That final clank section would have been a much smoother experience if I just exercised some patience. Almost all of the deaths I experienced there were the direct result of trying to rush. As they say, nothing wastes time more than trying to save time.

And of course, we can’t have a home base that we return to multiple times over the course of the game without a section where it’s invaded by the enemy. That’s not a criticism, but merely an observation. These types are spaces are ones that players start to treat as sacred/safe because the game has taught them that they are. When enemies attack us in our safe space, it feels like a violation of the “rules”, which heightens the impact.

That said, the actual invasion is over in the span of a few minutes, which takes a lot of the wind out of its sales. It would’ve been nice to linger a bit more on it, but there is always a danger that it would overstay its welcome.

Despite Qwark’s bumbling and cowardice, he did succeed in getting us a valuable data disk for Al to decrypt. In the meantime, a secret fifth issue of his four-part vid comic has come to light. With no better leads, we might as well check it out.

Obviously, the HUD (and the skill points menu if we ever looked at it) spoiled that there was a fifth vid comic before we ever got to this point in the story, but they still do a good job with its presentation. Using Slim Cognito as the narrator is a smart choice because we already associate him with the black market and under-the-table merchandise. It sells the illicit nature of the comic without having to compromise the presentation. Admittedly, it doesn’t make sense for Qwark to keep the comic in his possession, but that’s not really important in the grand scheme of things.

I appreciate Up Your Arsenal for still acknowledging and remembering that Captain Qwark is responsible for some truly horrific crimes in the name of staying famous and popular. I’ve said it before countless times, but despite the fact he remains a prominent character in the series for comic relief purposes, they never really reckon with the fact he’s done little to make up for what he’s done before. And that’s before we get to the (non-canon) theatrically reimaging of the first game’s story which further softens him.

It’s something that always struck me as awkward. And I know this is a story meant for kids, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

It’s complete madness. Somehow, Dr. Nefarious has discovered a way to transform organic life forms into evil robots, and he’s used it on the citizens and invading tyrannoids in Metropolis. It’s only a matter of time before he uses it a second time, so it’s up to us to stop him.

We’re going to try something a little different for the rest of this Let’s Play into our next game. Instead of uploading the entire VOD as one video, we’ll break it down into smaller, slightly (but only slightly) more digestible chunks. I find as I write these that the sheer number of topics to discuss can often make it overwhelming, so hopefully, that will stop being a problem.

Something I forgot to talk about during the recording is how, in retrospect, Captain Qwark faking his own death makes him look even worse. Since he said he would meet the team back at the shuttle, and they dutifully waited for him to return until Clunk hit the launch button, it’s entirely possible that he could have killed Ratchet and Scrunch by convincing them he really was going to return. Fortunately for us, Dr. Nefarious’s double agent saved the day by leaving Qwark to die, but he could not have known that would happen.

I’m not saying that Captain Qwark is the worst person alive, but I’m implying it.

After we finished with our Limited pool, I still had a solid half-hour to game a few games in Arena, so I brought out the deck I’ve been using to grind my dailies, courtesy of Saffron Olive from MTG Goldfish. He was able to craft a reasonably strong mono-red burn deck that used only common and uncommon cards available in the current standard. This means that I can run it while saving my valuable rare and mythic wildcards for decks I would want to try out in the current metagame.

And because it’s a mono-red deck, it’s very easy to quickly jam a ton of games with it on the Arena ladder.

It’s good to know that no matter how many times Standard rotates, what cards are in the format, or what the most popular decks tend to be, there will always be mono red, and it will always be one of the most accessible decks in the format (which is why they changed the face of Magic from Jace to Chandra).

And honestly, when grinding out dailies in Arena, a deck like this is probably one of the better ones a player can run. It is far easier to accumulate the number of wins one needs to cap their weekly experience when they can play 5 or so games in the span of 20-25 minutes. Just through the sheer volume of matches alone, they will accumulate wins rapidly.

It also helps that the deck is fast enough that many opponents will be caught completely off guard by its rapid-fire pace. It’s impressive how quickly life totals melt in the face of attack after attack. And if you can pull off the dream of a Turn 1 Kumano Faces Kakkazan into a Turn 2 Phoenix Chick, you’re already most of the way to an easy win.

If you’re looking to get back into Arena like I was, I can wholeheartedly recommend building this to start.

I must confess that I never thought I would return to MTG: Arena ever again. Wizards of the Coast and the Arena team never fixed the problems that I had with the economy and impossibly slow rate at which cards are acquired for anything other than a Limited player. Problems that have been effectively solved by other games like Legends of Runeterra and YuGiOh: Master Duel.

But as it turns out, I’m a huge simp for Ajani. And even if they turn him into a villain, I can’t help but want to play if they print a new card for my favorite leonin planeswalker.

Thankfully, I had enough Sealed tokens saved up from old prerelease Arena codes that I was able to use as an entry point to return to the game.

We didn’t have the best luck in this Sealed pool, but out of all the Limited formats I have tried and bounced off of over the years, this is the one that finally stuck with me. (Before you ask, I was not playing prerelease events or Arena during the time Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty dropped. I hear that is another legendarily fun limited format.)

I’m not sure what’s different about this Limited format compared to so many of the others I’ve played, but I’m able to create at least decent Limited decks that perform well. It’s been far more approachable for me that something like an Ixalan format like the one of my first pre-release. It could simply be that I’ve gotten better at reading Sealed pools, but I also think another part of it is the flexible mana bases we can construct in this format.

I can’t say how long I’ll keep up with the game, but considering I’m close to building Mono-Black Midrange for Standard I imagine I’ll be back for a least some time as long as I free to play it.

Oops, we did it again. As it turns out, Courtney Gears is not that innocent. In fact, she may be involved with Dr. Nefarious and his plot to destroy all organic life in the galaxy.

Hopefully, we can use that to our advantage, getting close to our villain in the hopes of taking him out in time for the next episode of Janice and Lance.

One of the fun parts of going through the Obani Moons and Aridia is seeing how the cutscenes for both of those planets deliberately avoid making use of Clank/Clunk because players have the option of playing them both before and after going to Holostar Studios. In other words, the team at Insomniac can’t say with any degree of certainty whether Clank or Clunk is the one hanging around with Ratchet. It’s the kind of detail that is hard to unnotice once it gets noticed.

That said, Holostar Studios is another fascinating area, and one of the types of levels that I do adore in video games. As a rule, everything that exists in video games is artificial, simply due to the nature of the medium. When a level tasks the player to perform something that’s fake in-universe, like shooting a movie, the additional layer of abstraction allows us to play around with the artificial nature of what we’re doing.

It’s something I’ll always find amusing.

Our return to the Solana Galaxy has been met with a warm welcome from many faces, both new and familiar. We’re… I mean Captain Qwark is… leading the charge? Seriously?

Unfortunately. But lucky for us, we have more than enough raw firepower to compensate for our so-called leader of the “Q Force”.

Something that was brought up as a topic of discussion during this episode was the idea of dynamic difficulty. We often forget that it was a very long time until adjustable difficulty was a standard feature in gaming. Prior to the late sixth and early seventh generation of game consoles, it wasn’t always expected for games to allow players to fine-tune the difficulty to better suit their desired play experience.

And yet, many games before did get easier or harder to scale with the player’s level of skill, they just did it more discreetly, rather than shift a difficulty mode. We saw it more obviously in Crash Bandicoot, where when we kept dying in certain sections the game would give us extra masks and turn regular crates into checkpoints for us.

The Ratchet and Clank series is more subtle about it, such that most players won’t notice, but it does do something similar. Each time we die, the game begins to fudge variables like bullet spread and enemy accuracy to make the same section easier. Additionally, more obviously in Going Commando and later, we keep gaining experience for health and weapon upgrades with each death, meaning we’re also growing stronger with each failed attempt until the two lines meet and the level is easy enough for us to beat it while still providing an adequate challenge.

Mike Stout and Tony Garcia talk about this during some of their Developer Commentary Let’s Plays, where they mentioned that the goal is to keep the average number of deaths consistent across various degrees of player skill. If the player was performing too well, the game would dynamically grow more difficult, and the opposite is also true.

It makes the conversation over games getting “dummed down” amusing because even if players never realized it, a lot gets fudged in their favor when they play to ensure they have a smooth experience.

As we’ve previously discussed while playing Master Duel, I am fond of the Branded Despia archetype. I love that fusion, which was once one of the worst ways to summon monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh, has become something not only viable but good.

And now, thanks to the latest release on the platform, they’ve been brought up to the full power level that people who play the TCG enjoy. With the addition of Branded Fusion and a few new boss monsters, we can turn a few cards in hand into a powerful board state.

Welcome to Branded Despia DPE.

My version of the deck runs both the Brave/Adventurer Engine, with Water Enchantress and Rite of Armesir, and the recently nerfed Destroyer Pheonix Enforcer engine. Both of them play relatively nicely with Despia as long as we don’t need to use our normal summon of Springans Kitt or Aluber to fetch out our Branded Fusion.

Part of what makes this deck so appealing is that it is incredibly easy to pilot once you understand the combo chains and how they lead to powerful payoffs like Mirrorjade, Guardian Chimera, Gryphon Rider, and DPE. If we go second, we don’t have many lines of interaction, but if we can go first we can set up the board with a series of powerful negates.

Though we’re not completely powerless if we go second since we still have access to cards like Maxx “C” and Super Polymerization to neutralize powerful boss monsters before we make our plays.

It’s both a fun and powerful deck that’s sadly difficult to build because of all the SRs and URs involved, but not impossible to.

We’re back with some of the greatest heroes the galaxy has ever known… and Captain Qwark is apparently here too. The last in the original trilogy, it’s time to begin Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. A new villain has come to threaten an old haunt, so we can’t just let that go unpunished.

We’re going home.

Mike Stout and Tony Garcia’s Developer Commentary can be found here.
The Golden Bolt’s retrospective can be found here.

Out of all the games in the original trilogy, this third game is probably the most hotly contentious of them all. Critically and commercially, it was a massive success on the level of its predecessors, but there is also no denying that it went through a troubled development process.

And already we’re seeing a lot of the side effects of that troubled development. Things like ship combat getting cut because the person programming it was so tired of being overworked that he couldn’t take it anymore and left don’t happen in a well-managed game development studio. As someone who adores this franchise, it does hurt to know how much crunch went into its creation, but we can’t just refuse to acknowledge it.

Thankfully though, that does seem to be a thing of the past since the latest game from Insomniac, Rift Apart, was famously finished without crunch.