What is this? Are we actually back? After spending… *checks notes*… almost half a year on indefinite hiatus, I think it’s finally time to bring Commander Night Playback back to the masses.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with this series, our objective is to recap and do a postmortem analysis of the Commander games my playgroup run on Cockatrice every Saturday. This session had me equipped with one the newest commanders from Commander 2020: Xyris, the Writhing Storm.

I had run this deck in the previous session. Thanks to some bad luck with my draws, I wasn’t able to secure the land drops required to even garner a board presence, let alone win the game. It was worth running again just to see if it would perform better with a more fortunate hand. My opponents this time were running Jarad, Golgari Lich Lord and The First Sliver respectively.

And as far as performance goes, the deck vastly exceeded my expectations in the first game we played. Thanks to an Arcane Signet, I had managed to ramp out Xyris one turn early. Unfortunately, The First Sliver had managed to cast a Smothering Tithe before I was able start attacking. This meant that for every attack that landed, not only was I giving at least one opponent a few extra cards, but I was giving away mana on top of that.

Since The First Sliver was about to receive a glut of mana, but was otherwise running out of cards in their hand from land drops and the few slivers they managed to put on the board, I opted to swing in at Jarad to split the mana/card draw benefits across multiple players. Having missed my land drop that turn, I was more than happy to draw into a Gaea’s Cradle, and the extra mana allowed me to cast a Dockside Extortionist and Doubling Season, to create some treasure for each one of the treasures my sliver friend generated off of me.

Even after a few turns, the group wasn’t able to do anything to keep my board in check, and after dropping a Beastmaster Ascension with 11 creatures on board, I swing at The First Sliver with everything I had. When they went down, Jarad folded under the pressure. From start to finish, the match took about 25 minutes.

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Naturally, we all reshuffled and began a second match with the same decks. I had another fortunate hand. Additionally, The First Sliver had started missing land drops after the third round.

There’s a joke among our table that whenever the sliver deck summons a Manaweft Sliver or a Gemhide Sliver, I will always remove it before they are unable to untap. In my defense, the ability to turn all of one’s creatures into mana dorks is too powerful to let live, which is why the streak continued. I had no choice but to Pongify that Manaweft Sliver when it hit the board, missing land drops be damned.

Of course, since I wasn’t casting any creatures in the meantime, waiting to play Xyris on turn five without any mana ramp, they naturally turned that 3/3 ape onto me. This only continued when I played an Impact Tremors in preparation for Xyris’s summoning.

That said, the other problem I was running up to was the fact that I also wasn’t sure I would be able to hit my 5th land drop in time. With the mana I had left, I countered the Syphon Sliver my tribal opponent was trying to play with Mana Drain just to ensure I had enough to cast my commander even if I missed my fifth land.

And from there, the game was almost wrapped up. Once Xyris was ready to attack, I played the Purphoros, God of the Forge I had kept up my sleeve, swinging my commander at Jarad and dealing an additional 9 damage to each opponent with the combined effects of Impact Tremors and Purphoros.

With Jarad spinning his wheels, and The First Sliver going what they could with their limited mana supply, I was pretty much free to close the game, especially since I drew into Gaea’s Cradle again. Using the mana I now had ready access to, I played Psychosis Crawler to accelerate my victory. Swinging in with Xyris once more, I hit a Wheel of Fortune. With everyone tapped out, and mana to spare, I used it to wrap things up nicely.

There’s no denying that this run with Xyris was successful. In less than an hour, I had managed to take home two decisive victories. That said, it is difficult to access how much of that is due to my performance or the deck itself and how much of that was due to sheer luck. Since my playgroup does not use tutors, I was not able to search for any of my pieces: I had to draw into them. I’ll probably play this deck more, and if it becomes too strong I’ll just table it like I’ve done with other decks in my group (*cough* Yuriko *cough*).

But before I wrap up, I just want to set some expectations. Last time I wrote this series, I grew exhausted from the need to create a new deck each week, and then recap every game in my playgroup. So to make this easier on myself, I will only write up one of these playbacks when my group runs a match I really want to talk about, and only to discuss that match/those matches.

Until then, take care and stay safe out there.

Our elusive Egg Hunt continues, and today we complete Midday Gardens fully, and get as much of Evening Lake done as we possibly can before the next boss fight.

Fun fact: Evening Lake is the only hub world in the entire trilogy that has portals underwater.

This episode is a microcosm of what holds Spyro 3 back from true excellence when compared to its two predecessors. Throughout this episode we play through several challenges that aren’t backbreaking or overly challenged, but have elements to them that make them tedious.

• The Bently section isn’t difficult, but nor is there much of substance to it and it doesn’t last long enough to feel like
• The speedway races don’t take much skill to win, but they’re very basic. So simple that beating them doesn’t elicit any real emotion from me, nor do I feel stimulated while performing them.
• The boxing match is entirely random, with no real form of AI manipulation or tactical thinking that can tilt the odds in the player’s favor. If the computer decides to perfectly counter all of our moves, we just aren’t going to be able to win no matter what.
• The twin dragon mini-boss can be tedious since the dragon moves fast enough and the hitbox shrinks so much that hitting one of them for their last point of damage before they start regenerating becomes more difficult than it feels like it should be.

None of these issues on their own is bring the game down too much. Even the best games can have that one section that’s just a slog to play, but once it’s done we no longer have to concern ourselves with it.

It is the aggregate of these irritating sections, among others, that the issue arises from. While the core platforming is still has an excellent flow and feel, it is constantly interrupted these one off sections that are of varied and questionable quality. While some of them are still a ton of funny, many of them aren’t, and because there are so many of them we’re often rolling the dice and hoping the next one we find is at least free of those otherwise minor annoyances. In other words, it’s death by a thousand cuts.

That said, it bears repeating that just because I don’t like this game as much as the first two doesn’t mean that it’s bad. This is still an excellent game, and I have to applaud both Insomniac for developing it and Toys for Bob/Sanzaru Games for bringing it back in the Reignited Trilogy.

Another Runeterra stream, and another two fun decks to experiment with. And as a master of the long game, I’m naturally inclined towards those lovely control decks.

Ezreal has become one of the most well-known control finishers, so it was only a matter of time we’d try one of his variants. All we have to do is hit enough of our opponent’s units with our effects to transform him, which will allow us to just play our hand out to end the match.

But there’s another new contender on the block in the form of Corina Veraza, who can absolutely decimate an opponent if the game goes late with a powerful board clear ability. If that doesn’t just end the game, it’ll open up the way for us to close it with some of our other effects.

Thanks to MobaLytics for providing a handy list of cool decks for me and everyone else to try out, like the ones seen in this video.

Deck Codes:

• Ezreal Karma: CEBAKAICAITCSOBZAYAQIGY7EQVTIOQCAEAQIJYCAEBCKMIBAEAQENY
• Corina Control:  CEBAGAIED4TTIBYBAUOSCKBLGI2TQAQCAECDAMIDAECQCDZWAA

One of the aspects of Legends of Runeterra that I’m endlessly impressed by is how easy it is to build new decks. I haven’t had to invest any more money into the game than the $50 sum that I invested in the very beginning. While that is a hefty sum of money, it’s nothing compared to the kind of cash I’ve dropped on Magic the Gathering: Arena, Overwatch, and numerous other games of their ilk I’ve had to cut ties with.

As someone who has both the inclination and spare change to comfortably spend cash on free-to-play games, especially card games, feeling like Runeterra is designed to be much gentler to my wallet comes as a huge relief. It also makes the game far easier to recommend to other people, since I know they won’t feel compelled to spend big just to keep up with the competitive scene.

Whenever I have the desire to build or try out a new deck, which is often as you can see, more often than not I already possess the vast majority of the cards I need to build it. The ones I don’t have I will almost always either have the spare wildcards and/or shards to craft, despite not having spent any additional currency on the game in the months since release. As someone who builds a new deck to stream on Magic the Gathering: Arena each week, and has dumped a lot of money into keeping that up, that’s very literally valuable.

We’re still on the Legends of Runeterra bandwagon, and I don’t see us stopping anytime soon. This game has really caught my attention, and it’s still amazing what Riot has managed to do with the Collectible Card Game genre.

And of course, we wouldn’t be on brand if I didn’t eventually try to run some form of control deck.

As a reminder, I get all the decks I run from MobaLytics.

Deck Import Codes:

• Endure Spiders: CEBAGAIBAMLCEBYBAUSCQKZRGI2TQAQBAEAQWAYBAUHR2NACAEAQKGIBAEASO
• Mageseeker Lux: CEBAMAIEBYIBWHZUHADQCAA2EAQSQKRPGAAACAIBAAUQ

One of the things I’ve noticed is that control works a lot differently here than it does in games like Magic, even if the underlying concept is the same. All a control deck seeks to do is stall the game until they can outpace faster decks with long-term, more gradual value. Normally, but not always, in the form of bigger win conditions

In Magic, that translates into “Play enough removal and board clear to make sure aggressive decks can’t attack you down. Then, use spells to draw extra and outpace them in the long game.” The game is packed with many different ways to direct destroy or exile problem creatures and threats our opponents may be playing. Damage spells can work too, but they’re less reliable since damage is removed at the end of a turn.

Here in Runeterra, the idea carries over, but the execution is almost wholly different due to the systems at play. Direct removal and board clear isn’t something you see very often since only the Shadow Isles (and more conditional removal from Noxus) have access to that type of spell. However, damage is persistent in Legends, meaning that damage spells and units with challenger that can be protected with cheap combat tricks substitute for what would function as removal in other games.

Further, while card draw is important, and many of our spells will help us sift through of deck while damaging our opponents, the digital nature of the game allows us to generate spells and allies with our abilities. At the high end, we aren’t so much drawing cards as much as we are creating them, generating value through those type of effects.

The net result is that even decks like this feel aggressive in their own way, but instead of relying on big board clears, we use our forces to make favorable trades and take out our opponent’s units before they attack us. It’s quite dynamic, with many low-level decisions that need to be made.

On this Easter Sunday, I can think of no better way to celebrate than we going to hunt for eggs…

Dragon Eggs, obviously. Spyro still needs our help to have the next generation of dragon kind. What did you think I was talking about?

Replaying Year of the Dragon on stream, after playing it so many times before, I can’t help but notice that the developers do a great job avoid the “Metroidvania” problem, where the protagonist is stripped of all the powers and abilities they learned in the previous game to justify having to reacquire them in the new one. I just never noticed until now because it’s done in such an unobtrusive manner.

Players actually have all of the abilities from the previous games unlocked at the very start. However, they’re careful about controlling the usage of these skills so that players who are new to the game don’t need to play the other ones. This is especially noticeable in Midday Gardens, where before we can access Enchanted Towers, a level the requires us to spit at flying monsters to defeat them, we need to use the skill to hit the target and open the portal, making sure we know how to do it. The same is true for Spooky Swamp and the climb move that we need to use just to reach the portal for the level.

Now, that’s not to say the game doesn’t have Metroidvania-esque gates. Rather than lock them behind skills Spyro has, they’re locked behind the new playable characters. It is impossible to 100% all of the levels in a given hub until after it’s boss has been defeated (aside from the final one), because there is always one challenge that cannot be undertaken until we unlock the character from the next home world. It accomplishes the same goal without taking away from Spyro’s base kit.

Of course, that’s exactly why Insomniac stopped making Spyro games after this. They realized that they were running out of ideas for what to do to add new content to future games beyond breath abilities, so they moved on to what would eventually become Ratchet and Clank.

Still, I can’t help but appreciate the skill and craftsmanship that led to so many excellent games from them, when timelines were tight back in those days.

Giving the sheer number of decks that I have piloted in Magic the Gathering: Arena, it was only a matter of time that I would eventually give a version of this deck a shot at some point. No matter the Standard, this archetype always exists.

That’s right, we’re playing Mono-Red/Red Deck Wins. Our goal is to play a bunch of cards and turn them sideways.

The decklist can be found here.

Of course, I’m being somewhat facetious when I say that all we do is “play a bunch of cards and turn them sideways”. The truth is that there is quite a bit of decision making that needs to be done on the fly with a deck like this.

Our goal is to finish off our opponent as fast as we possibly can. The longer a match goes on, the slimmer our chances become as our resources begin to run dry and the opponent, assuming they aren’t as aggressive as we are, starts to pick up steam through card advantage. If the opening hand doesn’t have enough of a strong start, we are more than willing to go down to five in the mulligan because we just don’t have time to dawdle.

That’s why we run the best aggressive, low-cost cards we can to get damage in early and often. To that end, Fervent Champion is one of the best cards we can field. For 1-mana, there’s not much more we could hope for in a card. And if we have multiple copies on the board, they can start to boost each other’s power for more powerful, safer swings (since first strike makes blocking difficult). Scorch Spitter may not be as strong, but it’s equally as useful as a way to get a bit of extra guaranteed damage out of each swing.

Runaway Steam-Kin serves multiple purposes. The first one being that it’s ability to pump itself allows us to accelerate our damage output, and increase the effectiveness of our instant speed spells in the middle of combat. And if we’re willing a let go of that power boost, we can use that mana to make as much out of the few turns we have as we possibly can, since we can’t afford to give our opponent a chance to get online.

And in the name of getting as much value out of our cards as we can, we include the two most effective red creatures from Eldraine with the Adventure mechanic: Rimrock Knight and Bonecrusher Giant. Both of them, but particularly the giant, are great creatures with high power that can again help to make the most of our early turns. Additionally, both of their Adventures are instant speed spells that make blocking our attacks as uncomfortable as possible while also punishing those who don’t block with even more damage. Shock serves a similar function in this case since it can be used an instant speed to turn the tides or just finish off an opponent.

Light Up The Stage has been one of the best cards to grace mono-red in a long time, because it manages to provide just a few valuable plays that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. It’s low cost and flexibility has kept it in the deck type even when other similar cards are no longer in vogue.

Anax, Hardened in the Forge give us something that mono-red rarely ever managed: Protection from board clears. Even if an opponent manages to destroy all of our creatures, Anax can replace them with tokens we can hopefully use to swing in for that final bit of damage to win the game. Even though it is Legendary, running four copies isn’t the worst because we can still get tokens out of the one we sacrifice. Our other 3-drop, Phoenix of Ash, is another fast creature that we can resurrect when it dies.

Shadowspear is great for breaking the symmetry of a mirror matchup by giving us just a bit of extra life to survive our opponent. It’s additional stats combined with trample also give it the power we need to justify putting a copy in the main deck.

And as for cards to finish off a match, we have both Torbran, Thane of Red Fell and Embercleave. Either by giving all red sources extra damage, or by overcoming a bad block with instant speed double strike and trample, we can take an opponent by surprise and lock down a game when they thought they still had a turn to stop us. We need to already have the board in place to use either one of these, but if that doesn’t exist by the time we can use these pieces, we have already lost.

There’s a reason Mono-Red is always a popular deck in Arena. Win or lose, players can jam many more games quickly than they can with other deck types. It’s powerful, but it needs to be played effectively or risk fizzling out before they can take the win.

At long last, our Disney/Marvel overlords have seen fit to deliver new campaign content to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 3 in the form of the game’s final planned update for the Expansion Pass. This time, instead of a series of challenges, we have an almost two hour long campaign that takes place after the events of the main story.

As always, my Marvelous Duo teammate Acharky joins me for one more adventure.

While we discussed this in the episode, it’s a big deal to see characters like Doctor Doom and the Fantastic Four make a return to Marvel video games, much like it was to see X-Men make their return. At the time, I find it difficult to celebrate that because the Disney copyright monopoly is both the reason they came back and the reason they all but disappeared in the first place.

Many of you know the story, but for those who don’t: Back when Marvel was still independent, they needed a quick injection of cash to avoid closing down completely, so they sold off the rights to a lot of their Intellectual Properties to any studio who was willing to buy. This kicked off the period of pre-MCU superhero movies my generation is most familiar with, featuring Sam Raimi/Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man from Sony Pictures and the X-Men movie series from 20th Century Fox.

After Disney purchased them for over $4 billion in 2009, and the first Iron Man film was released in 2008 to start off the MCU, all of the content Marvel published started to revolve around the Cinematic Universe they were concocting. Since characters like the Fantastic Four and the X-Men were owned by other studios, and thus couldn’t become part of the MCU, Marvel began to deemphasize them. Fighting game fans might mark this as the time when mainstay characters like Magneto, Storm, and Wolverine were suspiciously absent from Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite. They even went to the lengths of removing the Fantastic Four emblem from the Bombastic Bag-Man outfit from a Spider-man mobile game.

It is only now, that Disney has purchased 21st Century Fox for over $71 billion in 2019, and Marvel has the rights to use those characters again (presumably in whatever upcoming plans exist for the MCU), we’re starting to them crop up once more in places like Ultimate Alliance 3 and the comics (when they were absent from 2015-2018). After spending so much time trying to erase the Fantastic Four, we’re starting to see a resurgence.

Though I am annoyed and enraged at the Disney corporate machine continuing to acquire more and more of the cultural landscape so that no works may ever again reach the public domain, I must admit that there is a form of catharsis in seeing these characters finally get that much needed breathing room they deserve. Since Doctor Doom was also the big villain in the very first Ultimate Alliance game, it doubles as a nod to the prior entries and a bookend to the series, even if it very clearly sets up for a sequel.

It’s great to see everyone together again. I just wish it didn’t come at the expense of broadening Disney’s cultural control.

While it’s been nearly a month since the last time I talked about Legends of Runeterra, I’ve still been playing it regularly. And as my interest in Magic the Gathering: Arena’s current standard declines, it’s begun to take up the slack as my new “primary” digital card game.

That doesn’t mean Magic: Arena gameplay is going to stop, but it does mean that it’ll be slowing down for a time, until something shakes up the current meta.

With that said, I’m head over heels for Runeterra. It’s such a breath of fresh air.

The decks I play with are taking from the meta tier list at MobaLytics.

If you’re interested in running them yourself, the codes to import them are below:

• Kinkou Elusives: CEBAEAIBAQLAWAICAIDASDARCULSQLBSHEAACAIBAIYQ
• Rivershaper Fiora: CEBAGAIAAMIS2BQBAIBCKKBLGE4QEAIBAIGAIAIAA4ERUJICAEAQALACAEBAIKI

It’s hard to overstate how generous the monetization model for this game has been. A large part of what keeps me coming back is being able to take a look at the top decks being played, and almost always having enough shards and/or wildcards stocked up to be able to build it and test it out to see if I want to play with it long term.

That’s not to say that I haven’t dropped money on cards, but that I’ve dropped far, far less than I have in other games (less than $20 total). I’ve definitely spent more on cosmetics than I have on actual cards.

And something I also noticed is that individual matches go by quickly in Legends of Runeterra, but not too quickly. This is something I’ve been having a problem with a lot lately in Magic: Arena due to the current Standard: Either matches end with the first three turns, or they devolve into a slow, halting grind as both players try to out value the other. This game manages to straddle the line between the two extremes quite comfortably.

On top of that, there’s a lot of decision-making going on in any given match. Because damage persists on units, and defending players can only place a single blocker between themselves and attacking foes, combat, and maneuvering around combat with tactical thinking and reactive spell-casting, becomes a much greater focus that in Magic. The result is a ton of interactivity between players a depth that I don’t see very often.

It just makes me want to dive in more than I already have.

The Sorceress and her army of rhynocs are still out there, with all of the dragon eggs we have yet to rescue. We can’t afford to let them down, so our Egg Hunt continues here in the Forgotten Realms.

We’re making progress in Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon.

In the last post, I talked briefly about how this game relies a lot on gimmicks. Although we’re still in the early game, this tendency has begun to materialize in the what we’ve been doing. The actual segments of platforming don’t last very long, and once we’re gone we spend so much time in very cleanly sectioned off side areas completing challenges that often have their own unique control scheme associated with them. This will only continue to be a pattern as the adventure continues and we unlock more characters to play as.

For me, this is the biggest reason why Year of the Dragon is my least favorite Spyro game in the trilogy. The core platforming is why I keep replying these games over and over again, and for almost every gimmick section that’s fun, there’s almost always another one that I can’t stomach. While Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage had it’s own gimmicky side-content (“Trouble with the Trolley, eh?” is the most infamous quote for a reason.), they were rare and most of the game was still focused on the central mechanics.

Another large part of that is the sheer number of challenges the game needs to throw at players to fulfill it’s quota of 150 Eggs, almost double the 13 Talismans and 64 Orbs (for a total of 77) in Ripto’s Rage. It’s why some eggs are just located in pools or on random platformers that barely qualify as off the beaten path.

I don’t envy the position Insomniac was in when it developed this game, as they only had a year to develop this game and it was twice the scope of the last one. While playing it, that lack of time can be profoundly felt all throughout. It was a whole different time in game development, and seeing that generational gap made all the more plain, even with a fresh new HD coat of paint.

We find ourselves once more into the Dragon Realms, after our second stint in the Australian Outback. After our last adventure, the land was at peace, yet that can’t last forever. Lo and behold, a new plot begins to unfold.

A group of thugs from a far away land have spirited away this year’s brood of dragon eggs, and the holes they crawled in through aren’t big enough for the dragons of this land to burrow through. Fortunately, our young, intrepid Spyro is just the right size, and with enough experience under his belt to take on one more quest.

Off we are to the Forgotten Realms, on an Egg Hunt of grave import.

Since we’ve already obtained Shelia, I’d like to take this time to explain why I’m not fond of the new design. It has less to do with the design itself and more to do with how it doesn’t really convey the same spirit of the base design.

Here’s a side-by-side:

While the new design looks great, it’s also much more traditionally feminine coded than the original model. Something I liked about how Shelia was portrayed in the PS1 version is that she was clearly feminine in the way she spoke and acted, but the model itself was more androgynous in its appearance. The Crocodile Hunter-esque direction is nice, but I think I could without the “dolled up” hair that she was given. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just not what I wanted.

That’s something of a running theme with Spyro 3. We’ll see it more as we progress through the game, but Year of the Dragon is a game full of gimmicks. From the extra characters to the plethora of mini-games, there are tons of moments where the game introduces a brand-new control scheme wholly unlike any that came before for a single side-objective. They run the gambit of poor to great, but that’s not really the problem. The problem is that they come at the expense of the core platforming, which is the reason I play these games at all.

I don’t blame the development team for this, because they were doing what they could to add something different to the game. Members of the team have publicly said the reason they moved on to Ratchet and Clank is because they were out of ideas on how to expand Spyro’s moveset. It’s just something to make note of.