It’s been a while since our last run of Monster Train. With a new expansion coming out for Runeterra, it is tempting to explore the new cards. Alas, I have not yet had time to play around, so until I do this is a good way to spend the time.
Let’s give it a go.
I was really impressed by the strength of my deck this run. A little bit of a boost to magic power and a few cards that hit enemies multiple times and suddenly we’re killing even the final boss before the can even start their attack. We lucked into some extremely potent synergies.
And then we got to the bonus final boss… and we fought valiantly before it kicked out butts. Next time, I’ll be more prepared.
At least, we approach the end of our adventure in this old, isolated village in the middle of France. With only one more of Miranda’s children left, her defenses are beginning to look weak.
Our daughter is nearly in our grasp. We need only make it just a little bit further.
If this game has a major weakness, it would be that enemies consistently take far too long to kill. The Propeller Man fight is a glaring example of this. I had figured out the mechanic before David explained it to me, and was doing a decent job hitting its weak point. And yet, despite my performance, the fight was taking far longer than is reasonable, to the point where I began to question myself. The mechanical soldiers prior to that fight are also great examples of that.
Aside from that though, it’s a solid game. I think the beginning is one of it’s strongest parts, and the section with the shark-man could have been cut entirely, but other than that it was incredibly solid.
There’s something to be said for how the end of any Resident Evil game nosedives straight into crazy without ever looking back. We fight Magneto with a tank that is somehow not made out of metal, before getting our heart ripped out by Mother Miranda. Then, after culling the local wildlife population and demolishing a building with a mold problem, we fight Sephiroth for our baby, who will grow up to be a superhero.
And this all happens in the the span on an hour or so. It’s so silly that one almost has to admire it. May RE never change.
But next week, we play a true horror game. We play… BUGSNAX.
I made a claim last week that I don’t think the Lurk mechanic is very good. The thing about making bold proclamations on the internet is that if at any point, you are proven wrong, then the record of your mistake is forever ingrained into history.
And yet, I happen to find a recipe for a Lurk deck that has been seeing some play. So is it time for me to already be proven wrong?
Original recipe courtesy of Mobalytics. Modified recipe: CMBAMBAGAEBAGBAFB4DAIBYNCNAUISSQAEAQIBZ3AIAQIBQHAECAOFQ My friend’s recipe: CMBAMBAGAEBQIBIJB4DAIBYCCMLEISSQAEAQIBQCAIAQIBQHAECAOQI
The Lurk deck can eat shit!
Okay, that’s an admittedly extreme take, but honestly my opinion of the deck is only marginally more positive now that I’ve gotten games in with it. It’s not as bad as I thought it was. Players can certainly win games with it, but it has weaknesses that will be difficult to overcome.
The first is that the Lurk package lacks any meaningful form of card advantage, putting it on a much tighter clock than other decks. Even the removal spell that best synergies with the mechanic, Bone Skewer, is effectively -1 in terms of card advantage unless it’s used to blank a removal spell already being cast. And in that scenario, you’re unlikely to get the Lurk synergy anyway because combat would have most certainly already been initiated by this point, and you’re using it to turn the tide back in your favor.
We can and do offset than with The Preservarium, but the playset are the only 3 cards in the deck that offer +1 card advantage. Additionally, it runs into the second big problem with the deck. Eight out of its 40 cards, or 20% of the cards, do not have Lurk. While a 4/5 chance to get a successful Lurk trigger sounds like a lot, any X-Com player knows it is still a 1/5 chance to miss. Those odds to miss only go up with every Lurk card we draw, or that exist in our opening hand. We had some lucky matches at first, but I think the later matches were a better indication of what you’re likely to experience, even with some topdeck manipulation.
Now, that’s not to say that there are no positives whatsoever. It feels good when we’re consistently getting our Lurk procs. Our creatures can grow in power rapidly, forcing our opponent to answer our board or die before they can truly set up. And despite our aggressive strategy, we do have some ways to clear up a late-game board thanks to both a leveled-up Pyke and/or Jaull-Fish. That can help us swing in that final bit of damage before our opponent is able to stabilize. Combined, this means our board and grow powerful quickly, which we will need since we lack much in the form of long term card advantage.
It’s a rewarding deck when RNG gives us the good luck, and miserable at all other times. I’d personally stay away from it despite understanding its allure.
Two of Mother Miranda’s four children now lie dead by our hand. From them, we have retrieved flasks containing the preserved body parts of Ethan Winters’s beloved daughter, Rose.
Halfway to our goal, David Phillips and I must now defeat their remaining siblings so that we can complete our journey, defeating Mother Miranda and saving the youngest member of the Winters family.
I must admit that frustrations aside, the game is pulling off a very delicate balance when it comes to resources. As of this point in the game, I have not run out of ammo or healing supplies at any point in my adventure, despite responding to most problems with violence.
And yet, I do still feel the pinch on my resources. Especially in this episode, I’m always running low on ammo. I always need to scavenge for whatever parts and components I can find so that my stock doesn’t fully deplete, and even purchasing ammo will only go so far because Duke only has so much in stock at any one time.
It makes me curious if the game is doing some work behind the scenes to keep the available pool of resources at a set level. It’s something that Half-Life and Half-Life 2 famously did with health kits. The more health the player currently had, the less a single health kit would heal for. I would not be surprised to hear that Village did this with ammo and other pick ups as well.
According to David, we may finish during our next recording. If we do, I’ll need to figure out what game comes next.
It’s been almost exactly one month since we’ve last graced the world of Runeterra. Conveniently for us, we’re decided to dip our tops back into the well just in time for a new mini-expansion to hit, and with it new champions and play patterns to test.
Though out of the 3 new champions, there was only one I was interested in build around: Ekko. I’ve been trying to make the Predict deck a thing since Zilean dropped, and now he’s got the perfect partner.
What I was most amazed by in this deck is how much value I gained from Ekko, both in the frequency of attacks and the number of cards I was able to draw off of him.
Although I lost it, the match we had against my friend’s Nasus/Kindred deck is a great example of what the deck wants to do. Ekko creates a ton of support cards that both accumulate card advantage while allow us to continuously attack and clear away our opponent’s board while we regenerate our own.
Despite the tremendous value Nasus was able to create, thanks in part to the late game Overgrown Snapvines, Wyvrn was overwhelmed by our countless assaults. When we have a Chronobreak in hand, we can completely negate the risk involved in being aggressive by rewinding the clock to before we attacked. And it we get a Parallel Convergence off of his Called Shot signature spell, that further increases our offensive.
And Zilean, once he levels up, even furthers out capabilities by allowing us to reuse every spell we play. Combined with the Chronobreaks and Called Shots, this number of uses we have out of each card will let us get the most value out of our low mana curve.
The real weakness is that Ekko is extremely easy to kill, so this deck needs cards like Ancient Hourglass to keep him safe. That was the big issue I encountered in testing prior to the stream, and I’m glad there are some good answers in Shurima to help with that.
I’m still not sold on Lurk as an ability, but I’m open to being wrong. It just seems like there are better things to do with our mana/cards then set our top deck, especially with something as bad as Feral Prescience. It did better than I expected, but I still don’t think it’s good.
The Season of Sin continues, and Sloth continues to be the big theme. Only, this time it’s not Agent 47 who embodies the sin. Our target, in his criminal negligence, has created a body count that far exceeds our own. His victims and their families demand justice.
I must admit that I was a little bummed out to discover that I could simply poison the fool with a cup of juice as if he was just another ordinary target in a sea full of them. However, I’ll not turn down a simple Silent Assassin rating if the opportunity presents itself.
What was far more interesting was my attempt to finish out the Gauchito Antiquity. That required far more thinking with regards to how one might manipulate the environment in order to poison 5 people at once. There’s probably a more elegant way to actually perform the kills once the poison activates, but a win is a win.
Lady Dimitrescu and her daughters have all been felled by our hands, and as a result, we now have the first of four jars of our daughter’s body parts in our possession. Thus, we have three more of Mother Miranda’s lieutenants to go before we can finish our campaign.
If the remaining lords will not return to their thrones themselves, let them return as cinders. And of course, David Phillips is here to help me realize that goal.
I expected each of the remaining lords to take about as long as Lady Dimitrescu did, so when we had defeated the second one before the first hour of the stream was completed, I was surprised. While I can certainly see how that would’ve been scary for a lot of people, it was harder for me to achieve the same frights because I both have played a lot of horror games over the past few years, and I have a co-host to play off of.
We’re also already approaching the point where, like every Resident Evil, the monsters become less scary because we are not only better at fighting them, but we’re doing so with superior weapons and more ammo. The Lycans that terrorized me in the first episode couldn’t hold up to a few well-aimed shotgun slugs directly in the chest. Even the larger, more mutated Lycan keeled over after taking several direct hits via explosives.
If our luck holds out, then the rest of the game should be smooth sailing.
As we pass the halfway point for the month of June, Agent 47 finds himself possessed by yet another Deadly Sin. This time, it appears that Sloth has taken umbrage with our work ethic. He’s seen fit to give us a lesson in taking things easy…
The core gimmick of this escalation is that unlike anything else we’ve done before, we have a stamina meter, which the game calls Vitality. Every single action that we take, even basic movement, consumes a portion of our stamina. Once it runs out, we will start to take damage over time which we cannot heal from. The only way to recover is to kill or pacify the jogger running around the level’s perimeter.
In other words, routing is much more important here than it has ever been before. Aimlessly wandering around the map without an objective or idea of what you want to do will only deplete our stamina, making it harder to complete our assassination before we run out.
It’s a cool mechanic, and I hope it’s something they toy with more as they continue to release content for the game.
We have played a number of roguelikes and run-based games around here, so I’m always on the lookout for new ones. And now that I have a PS5, I have the chance to give the newest member of the genre a try.
So let us play… Returnal.
The problem I had playing Returnal was that it, in many ways, made me miss a lot of the features that Supergiant’s Hades brought to the genre. I started to miss how I was able to choose a weapon type from the start that I wanted to use without having to sift through drops I otherwise don’t care about. I started to miss having the choice between several buffs rather than choosing to take one or decline it. And most importantly, I started to miss how Hades made me look forward to dying with promises of new conversations to have with its insanely attractive cast of characters. None of these are deal-breakers, but together they do begin to collectively drag down the full experience.
That said, there’s a lot that Returnal does bring to the table. What we sacrifice in terms of tasks to do between runs, we make up for in the complete lack of downtime. When we die, we go right into the next run with almost no loading time whatsoever. That’s just something PS4/XB1 games would not be capable of due to the hardware they were developed on. I also think the Adrenaline concept, where players get bonuses for consecutive kills without taking damage, is a powerful way to enforce the importance of avoiding enemy shots, especially since Selene will take a serious beating after a couple of well-placed hits.
There’s also the fascinating malfunction mechanic. In most roguelikes, the risk of a debuff would be a significant downside, but here it’s not too bad. We know that just by completing tasks that we were likely already going to do anyway, like killing enemies and opening chests, to clear it. No matter how bad it is, it shouldn’t permanently derail our run. Even the moment-to-moment gameplay is extremely satisfying, dodging enemy attack patterns while making sure we bump out as many bullets as possible.
And yet, I cannot in good faith recommend this game at the $70 asking price, especially with the fact that runs can take over 3 hours and unless they’re finished in a single sitting, there’s always the chance an update will cause them to get erased. It’s a damn shame.
Our adventures in the frigid European countryside continue as we explore Castle Dimitrescu, accosted by its grotesque hosts. With powers and abilities beyond ordinary people, it seems likely that we spell our own doom.
However, perhaps our abductors are not as invincible as they may seem. With a bit of trickery and resourcefulness, perhaps David Phillips and I can turn the tide.
Something I’ve noticed in the way I play Resident Evil: Village, compared to my previous playthroughs of the remakes of 2 and 3, is increased confidence in the way I’m playing. A lot of that has to do with the systems I’m working with now. In those games, a single zombie was something to be taken a threat. By comparison, I am now engaging in knife fights with groups of 3 enemies at a time.
Even the lycans that I began the game dreadfully afraid of have already begun to lose a bit of their punch. They’re still dangerous, but with my pistol and shotgun we’re doing a fair job of dispatching them before they become serious problems. I don’t want to say that I feel safe, but I feel safer than I have in previous RE games.
Dimitrescu herself only served as a minor irritation. She does a lot of damage, but her lack of speed makes it relatively easy to dodge her, a trait which extends to her boss fight despite a radical transformation.
Oh well. One lord souls has been placed into the Lordvessel. Three more and we can finally fight Gwyn at the Kiln of the First Flame.
