Theros: Beyond Death has finally arrive to Magic: Arena, and with it a whole host of new and returning cards and mechanics. One of those mechanics is Devotion, and no card is more representative of Devotion’s power than one of the MTG communities old favorites: Gary Asphodel.

And with Gary back in Standard, it’s only natural that mono-black devotion is one of the most commonly built decks in the new format. Like many others, I was also eager to hop onto the Gary train.

I took the decklist I was using from here, but it appears to have been modified in the time since.

At its core, the deck’s primary goal is to increase our devotion to black high enough to swing the game with single successful cast of Gary. It is difficult to overstate how powerful Gary is despite being only a 2/4 for 5-mana, largely due to his enter the battlefield trigger. I have had games where I have won simply by using it when my devotion to black was over 10, meaning my opponent lost that much life in a single shot, and I gained it all back.

To facilitate this, we will favor cards that have as many black symbols in their mana costs as possible. Thankfully, we don’t have to sacrifice any value for this. Mono-black has many strong tools at their disposal, the trick is to find the best ones for our job.

Yarok’s Fenlurker is a fine example of one of those tools. Both of it’s 2-mana cost are in the form of black symbols, meaning it adds 2 to our devotion just by being on board. But beyond that, it forces our opponent to exile a card from their hand. Even if it gets removed later on, it’s done its job just hitting the table.

Ayara, First of Locthwain is another strong card that contributes heavily to our devotion by costing specifically 3 black mana. She gives us extra value and life for every single creature we play, and if one of them is the target of a spell, or if we need the gas, we can use her to sacrifice a creature for some extra card draw.

Nightmare Shepherd and Erebos, Black-Hearted serve similar purposes, protecting our board from the threat of board wipes. The Nightmare does so by allowing us to turn them into 1/1 tokens, and Erebos by giving us the chance to draw cards off their demise, for the low price of 2 life per card.

Tymaret, Chosen from Death serves two purposes beyond boosting our devotion. The first is as a resilient blocker that can gum up the works when our opponents try to swing at us. More importantly, he’s a way to extract problem cards from their graveyards, like the dreaded Cat/Oven combo. Erebos’s Intervention fulfills that second task as well, while also acting as a removal piece if need be. Our other removal options are Eat to Extinction, which is valuable exile piece, and Murderous Rider, which can also be played as a creature to increase our devotion.

And while you’re likely familiar with pieces like Knight of the Ebon Legion, Order of Midnight and Cavalier of Night, you probably haven’t seen much of Bolas’s Citadel before. If it successfully resolves, the card advantage we’ll accrue off of it is more valuable than any amount of life we’ll spend. Combined with a good Gary, there’s little our opponent can do to stop us if we reach this point.

This specific version of the deck might not be that powerful, but I look forward to seeing how it develops as Theros Standard continues.

As the winter chill sets in, and snow starts to fall on the ground, what better time to continue our Seasonal Vacation in the realm of Avalar with our good buddies Spyro the Dragon and Sparx the Dragonfly.

With the permanent superflame, we’re sure to have a significantly easier time helping the various citizens we encounter along the way.

As you may remember from the last stream, we were contemplating whether or not we should continue with the superflame power up I earned through getting 100% on my own time, or if I should reset the game, redo the progress from the previous stream, and proceed with a normal playthrough. Ultimately, I decided to keep the current run and continue to use my “New Game+” benefit. I could say that it’s because we couldn’t completely recreate the save since we abused superflame a few times, but truth is I just want to have fun with it.

But even discounting our little bonus, there’s still plenty to soak in when playing through Spyro 2. Having reached Autumn Plains, I can finally talk about just how much I love that home world. Out of all the hub worlds from the original trilogy, Autumn Plains was always my favorite. Most people would choose to spend time off at a tropical beach or resort town, but I’ve always had a natural inclination to the mild temperatures and warm colors of Autumn. I’d glad choose to spend time resting in a place of perpetual Fall.

The background music for Spyro 2’s home worlds adds to that feeling. When combined with the lack of enemies or obstacles and the overall atmosphere, this level always makes me feel at peace when I’m navigating in. The palace section also feels like the kind of place one could take a tour of or display a gallery of artwork or historical artifacts, which only furthers that sense of tone. Hearing the rustling of the wind at the top of the tower, overlooking the whole map and drinking it all in is the image that comes to mind the instant I think of this game, so it was a treat seeing it redone in HD.

Which brings us to the fun fact that was discussed in this episode. It’s obvious that all 3 home worlds in this game are themed after seasons: Summer Forest, Autumn Plains, and Winter Tundra. For this reason, it was always assumed that there was a fourth planned home world that never made it into the game. The other “supporting evidence” for this theory was that there were 4 speedways, Autumn Plains getting two of them, with the assumption being that one of them was to be used for this “cut” 4th hub. In a twitch stream of Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon, it was confirmed by the dev team that this “cut world” never existed in the first place. The plan was always to be 3.

This hasn’t stopped fans for continue to spread the rumor, of course. Last I heard, there was even a fan project to create this “Spring Savannah”, but the most recent video I could find on this subject was from March 2018, so I don’t know what happened to it: Whether it released or the team had to discontinue the project for some reason.

And lastly, as promised, here’s a clip of the original Turtle Soup challenge from the original PlayStation version of the game. As you can see, the top down perspective can make it difficult to line up the charge so the turtles move away from the pot. The new perspective, combined with our permanent superflame ability, makes this challenge significantly easier in the Reignited Trilogy, something I’ll be silently thankful for.

But I’m also grateful for all of you, who read these posts and watch my videos and streams, because you decided to spend your time with me instead all of the other distractions competing for your attention. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you as we continue our adventures with the original PlayStation’s unofficial mascots.

With the impending release of Theros block in Magic: The Gathering, and having heard a lot about how the game has changed since I last played, I figured now was a good time to dive back into Supergiant Games’s latest work, still currently in Early Access: Hades.

Like Elspeth and so many, many characters in Greek myth, let us attempt to escape the underworld.

I have adored every release Supergiant Games has put out since Bastion, and Hades is no exception to that rule. Even though it’s still being developed, it felt feature complete even on release, and as time goes on it’s only gotten more refined.

Hades’s also makes excellent use of it’s source material, creating compelling characters and relationships between members of the Greek pantheon that most of us are familiar with. That moment on stream where Orpheus retells his story for Zagreus off screen genuinely made me laugh because it signaled that the developers knew exactly what they were doing. Similarly, I loved seeing Theseus and Asterius fighting side by side in a tag-team boss fight at the fields of Elysium.

I also can’t help but notice that the team retooled a couple of old ideas so that they would have more impact during a given run. When I last touched the game, Heat was a resource one could acquire, similar to Darkness. Except, when Darkness is used for character upgrades, Heat would add addition challenge modifiers to each run. Since then, it’s been folded into a new bounty system, where players can agree to tougher conditions in the hope of getting higher rewards. And seeing that on top of new systems like the renovations makes me all the more eager to dive in once more.

I don’t know how many future runs will be capture on stream, but know that I’ll be playing this way more than I used to.

Despite a few delays, my good friend Acharky and I would never miss out on an opportunity to be Marvelous, and this latest update to Ultimate Alliance 3 allowed us to do just that.

Join us as we talk about comics and media while taking on newcomers Iceman, Gambit, Cable, and Phoenix. And then, we take the Danger Room for a spin and do some Infinity Challenges.

As we both said during the stream, neither one of us are fans of the concept of the Phoenix Force. Personally, I don’t find it interesting, but that’s only as a casual observer of comic book lore. My only real experience with it is as an evil entity that just possesses people to destroy the universe… or something.

That said, it makes sense to include her in the roster of playable heroes, along with the rest of this update. It’s good to see the X-Men finally get some much needed love after being snubbed for years due to the movie rights being owned by Fox, and Disney unwilling to provide the free advertising to a competitor. I only wish this didn’t come at the cost of the Disney monopoly acquiring even more intellectual property to be sealed up, forever out of reach.

And it’s nice to see Ultimate Alliance 3 getting updating so long after launch, even if there’s only one more planned update remaining. My complaints with it aside, I still want it to succeed. While a lot of my problems, like the fact each character is leveled separately, will never be fixed, I can at least recognize that new features make leveling under-developed characters easier.

It’s always good to come back, and I can’t wait to return for another stint with the next update.

We might have played this deck type once before, but I can’t deny how fun it is to win by repeatedly throwing that cat into the oven.

As far as the decklist goes, the core of the previous version of it is all there. The real changes are in the removal suit. Rather than running Casualties of War, we’re using cheaper removal in the form of cards like Thrashing Brontodon, which also serves as a strong creature and a potential sacrifice trigger even if we don’t have any specific targets in mind. That said, the strategy is basically the same as it was last time.

What I find most interesting about this deck is that despite being built around the cat/oven synergy, there’s a lot of resilience on display, and ways to win even if neither card, or only one, of the two pieces hits our hand. While slower, we can still use Trail of Crumbs and Gilded Goose to generate food tokens that we can cash in either for Mayhem Devil or Korvold triggers. And if we do have our combo established, all of these pieces only work to push our advantage further to secure the win.

Or… we can go up against a self-mill deck and destroy their Jace, Wielder of Mysteries with a Murderous Rider just as they are preparing to draw their final card.

The plan after finishing Crash was to run the new Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 content with Chris, but I foolishly forgot that I had uninstalled the game some time ago.

So instead I decided to start playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Welcome to the magical world of Avalar, where we’ve been summoned to toast a new threat. And naturally, with new challenges comes and expanded arsenal.

First off, apologies once more for the audio balancing. It will be fixed in the next recording.

In the original version of Spyro 2, when a player achieves 100%, they unlock a version of the superflame power up that already exists in the game, except that it is a permanent upgrade. This benefit extends to all future runs as long as the 100% save game data exists. Naturally, this was carried over into the remake. I was hesitant to keep going with it for the sake of showing off the game better, but I ultimately think it’s okay play with superflame, since I can talk about what is made easier with that ability.

The glitch I was talking about in this episode was the Double Jump Glitch, which I was able to find references to on the Spyro wiki. I never knew its name growing up, just that it helped me complete challenges and find secrets that I clearly wasn’t supposed to be able to find without abilities I didn’t have. I’ll miss it, but I understand why they didn’t bother trying to bring it over in the Reignited Trilogy.

Aside from that, I want to call attention to the scene with Elora after beating Glimmer. Comparing the scene in the original version below to the reignited version(timestamp), there’s no change in lines. The key difference is in the delivery. There’s a slight bite to the original that conveys that both Spyro and Elora are still not quite friends since they only just met. This edge is softened in the new performances, which give off an impression that they immediately hit it off. Neither interpretation is bad, but one of those extremely slight details that I can’t help but pick up on since I’ve played this game so many times.

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out how much better the intro cutscene looks in the new remake when compared to the original below, since the animators, modelers,  and actors have much more to work with. But it’s not just in higher quality models, either. The use of cinematography and camera work adds so much more to the reignited version of the scene than there was in the original.

All criticisms aside, Toys for Bob did excellent work in re-imagining both the Spyro and Crash trilogies, and they should be commended for that.

At long last, we have arrived at our final destination. After braving the trials and tribulations scatted across these isolated islands off the coast of Australia, our pal Crash Bandicoot, the blunder from Down Under, has foiled his creator’s plans for world domination via an army of mutated animals, and save his girlfriend Tawna.

His island castle burning crumbling, burning down around him, Dr. Neo Cortex has only one though: Revenge. Ambushing the reunited couple as they pilot their escape blimp, creator and creations clash.

In this episode, we conclude our adventures in the outback, with special guest Chris, from the Marvelous Duo.

Apologies for the audio balancing issues. I had to reconnect my Capture Card to my computer earlier that day because it was experiencing issues, and forgot to set the volume of the game recording down to it’s usual levels. Thankfully, both Chris is loud enough that he has no issues, and I am still audible, even if I’m quieter than I’d like.

Although we didn’t finish the cut, Stormy Ascent, I am still glad that we played it on stream to demonstrate how difficult it was. There is a good reason it’s on the cutting room floor instead of in the final game, but I’m happy that it was brought into the remake to give people a glimpse of what design choices had to be made.

Something I got to talk about here, but neglected to mention in other posts, is the surprising sense of world building, even in the original PS1 release, that exists in the details. It’s something as simple as seeing the after effects of Crash exploring the castle in the final boss, with it burning in the background as we fight Dr. Cortex. Even in earlier levels, the castle is often in the background to remind the player what their final destination is going to be. Or how the third island is noticeably more “industrial” than the other two, with machinery and power plant levels helping fill in extraneous detail for how Cortex runs his operation.

While I don’t think the original Crash Bandicoot aged well, it served as a valuable piece of gaming history for being a pioneer in the space of 3D platforming, even before Super Mario 64. Further, it paved the way for the later games in the franchise, which are games that I still play semi-regularly. Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back is one of my favorite PS1 games, and I look forward to playing it with the rest of you here.

Our adventures in the Down Under continue, as we try to save our girlfriend(?) from an evil scientist. Also, we’re a mutated bandicoot going up against mechanical sentries and other mutant animals.

Join us as we traverse old ruins, cross treacherous bridges, and fumble in the dark, and climb the castle walls. This is Crash Bandicoot.

As I replay the original Crash game as a part of the N Sane Trilogy, what sticks out to me is just how easy it is to identify the era it’s from. The PS1 version was released in September 1996, and that’s about when I would’ve guessed it came out if I had not looked it up.

Even with an updated presentation and quality-of-life improvements, there’s a roughness to the way it plays that strongly invokes the feeling of that time in game design. Death can set players back quite a way, and any one mistake and be instantly lethal.

But beyond that, it’s also very 90s in its aesthetic and attitude. Like Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash basically exists in antithesis to the softer, more subdued plumber from Nintendo, as highlighted by his famous commercial below. Crash meant to be the new, “cooler” platform mascot, something the kids could latch onto as edgier, without being too edgy.

It’s as much a time capsule as it is a game, hearkening back to an nostalgia era from my childhood. The remake isn’t perfect, but it captures the essence of what Crash Bandicoot was so that other people can go back and explore it in a historic context. It’s telling that even with the analog stick at my disposal, I would much rather use the d-pad when playing because of the level design and mechanics.

And shout-out to Koala Kong, who is a very handsome marsupial.

Once more, we return to the Arena, but our creatures have other plans. While some are just fine being summoned to the field, others would rather spend their time on their own adventures and misadventures first.

Suits me just fine, because my Golgari Adventures deck is set to make the most of their pioneering spirit.

Check out the decklist from MTGGoldfish.

The two most useful tools we have at our disposal are Edgewall Innkeeper and Lucky Clover, so much so that it can often be worthwhile to mulligan otherwise good hands if they don’t contain at least one of these cards. Both of them accrue tons of extra value, Edgewall Innkeeper in the form of extra cards and Lucky Clover by copying the effects of our adventures.

And we have a glut of powerful effects to copy, like Foulmire Knight that can exchange some life and mana for cards, and/or be played as a 1/1 with deathtouch to keep attacks at bay. Murderous Rider, one of the most powerful removal spells in the format, gets even better when copied, turning into a lifelink body with decent stats afterward. Beanstalk Giant also takes advantage of Lucky Clover, allowing us to place multiple basic lands untapped onto the battlefield to extend potential make another play on that same turn, even if it’s just a Foulmire Knight. When we’re ready to cast it, it can be a massive beater to quickly close out a game.

While we’re not really playing Lovestruck Beast for its adventure, it can certainly help gum up an incoming attack. With it’s own 1/1 human, along with our Innkeepers and Foulmire Knights, we have so many 1/1s in the deck that it’s quite likely by the time we can cast the Lovestruck Beast as a creature, we have satisfied the conditions to let it attack and block. And if either of them bite the dust (or any other valuable creature), we can use Order of Midnight to bring them back for a second chance.

What you may have noticed already is that despite being an adventure deck, we have accidentally included a large number of mono-black knights. For that reason, it is appropriate to include the Smitten Swordmaster as a potential late-game win condition. With a Lucky Clover or two out, and enough knights on board, the adventure half of the card can dramatically swing the game in an instant. It didn’t happen on stream, but I only took my opponent from 13 life to 0 with a single application of this card, copied by Lucky Clover. And in a pinch, it’s a body that we can use to fill out our board state.

As for non-theme pieces, Midnight Reaper can allow us to draw cards if our board gets cleared, which will keep us in the game. And with games running as long as they do, Casualties of War becomes a great removal tool to destroy just whatever has become a problem on the opponent’s board. 6-mana is actually perfectly reasonable to achieve, and with our ramp and otherwise low CMC we’ll likely be able to make additional plays on top of it to take advantage of the opening.

It may not be the best deck, but it is powerful and a ton of fun to play.