After our detour through the wreckage of Raccoon City, it’s time to go back to our PlayStation platforming nostalgia series. Though a few months have passed since our last sojourn with the blunder from down under, neither Crash nor his sister Coco are any worse for wear.
With a new threat from old enemies on the loose, we’re in for one final adventure. The crystals are scattered through the ages, and it’s time for us to step into the Time Twister to reclaim them before Dr. Cortex can.
As I said in the Let’s Play, this particular game has a special place in heart. It was one of the first three games I ever got for my PlayStation when my parents bought it for me. That makes it one of my most formative gaming experiences.
That’s why I chose to play the Spyro and Crash games in the order that I did. The first Spyro and the third Crash games are both really positive experiences for me, so I figured they would make excellent bookends. Additionally, playing one franchise and then switching to the other was my way to avoid being fatigued with either one.
Watching the footage back, I am so glad that the enthusiasm I have for the Warped comes through while I’m playing. Even the commenters on stream noticed that I wasn’t getting frustrated, smiling even through any/all death I may have suffered.
I said that Crash 2 is my favorite in the trilogy and I do stick behind that, since I’m of the opinion that platforming games are at their best when they stick to a core set of mechanics and explore them to the fullest. That said, it’s clear that by the third entry Naughty Dog had learned much from building two whole games prior.
The most obvious example being the chase sequences, which are paced much more reasonably than they were back in the other two games. You can see that I had more time to react to the obstacles coming up than I did in those game. Though I still made mistakes, those were all mostly my fault for trying to rush when I didn’t have to.
Even in the world of gimmick levels, this game is much better about them than it’s earlier siblings. Aside from the racing levels, which can get pretty annoying later in the game, most of them are polished and feel great to control. In doesn’t hurt that I’m particularly fond of both the jet-ski levels and the Great Wall levels where Coco hops on Pura.
It’s good to play Crash again. I’m excited to continue this series. Until next time, I leave you with this:
Since we wrapped up Resident Evil 3’s campaign last week, David and I thought it might be fun to play the other game that came packaged in with it: A co-op multiplayer game titled “Resident Evil: Resistance”.
It was certainly… an experience.
It’s genuinely hard to access a multiplayer game, partly because the community is such a large aspect of what can make or break it. It’s entirely possible that if I had played on Day 1, then I would have a much different experience than the one on display here.
This problem is compounded by the fact that this is undoubtedly going to be a niche game mode. Most people who purchased Resident Evil 3 likely went through the same though process as David and I. “I’m here for Resident Evil 3. This other game is cool, but I’m not interested in it.”
Only a handful of users are even going to launch it, and an even smaller percentage will enjoy it. Among that already minuscule group, an even lower percentage will stay past the first few weeks before moving on to something else. Those that remain will either fall into the category of new or die-hard players, with very few people in between.
And since they appears to be a progression tree, where players unlock new skills, equipment, and abilities as they complete matches, players who are just starting out, like me, don’t have the same baseline set of tools that other players do. Factoring in lack of actual player skill and map knowledge, they become an obvious load for an veteran player to carry.
Honestly, including progression in something like this was probably a mistake, because it severely caps the player base. After the game has been out for a sufficient length of time, newbies aren’t going to want to stick with it, case in point, because the other players simply outclass them before they’ve ever had a chance to start improving their own skill.
Which exacerbates the problem we experienced at the end of this video: Wait times. The sad truth, as Lawbreakers found out, is that a multiplayer game can be good on its own merits, and still completely fail if the player base isn’t there to support it. Low retention numbers mean that wait times are long, so less people play, and the vicious cycle continues.
I doubt Capcom cared too much about that with RE: Resistance, since it was packaged in with Resident Evil 3, but it’s a lesson to consider for future projects. Shame, because I like the premise here of a Left 4 Dead-style game with another player directing the enemy forces in an asymmetrical combat. I just arrived too late to join in on what fun there could have been.
While I suspect that these protests will still be ongoing by the time this goes live on my blog and YouTube, I want to reiterate that this footage was recorded, and this post was written during the protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police office Derek Chauvin.
This is not an isolated incident, and such occurrences are well-known and feared by the American-American community, and other minority communities across both the US and the world.
As small a platform as I have, it is nonetheless a platform. To that end, I want to share some resources that might help you join in supporting our brothers and sisters struggling in the fight for justice. Do note that this list is far from comprehensive, but a good way to get started.
Once you’ve finished doing your part to show solidarity with those protesting a violate, fascist police state, we can proceed to lead a nation of pirates and sea monsters to victory against fascist police states by giving them the ol’ Bilgewater Welcome.
Both of the decks we’re playing today are heavily focused around using the new cards from Bilgewater, with support from the Shadow Isles and Freljord respectively, to entirely different yet effective ends.
As always, I take the deck ideas that I use in this show from Mobalytics. The decklists are as follows:
The game plan of the Sea Monsters deck is a simple one. Our goal is to go Deep as quickly as possible, which is triggered once we have 15 or fewer cards remaining in our deck. To that end, many of our cards use the new Toss mechanic, which is a form of self-mill where cards from the bottom of our deck get removed from the game, ignoring champions. A significant chunk of our forces, like Dreg Dredgers and Deadbloom Wanderer, and card advantage pieces like Salvage, have Toss as an ancillary effect, allow us to maintain our board while arriving at our win condition. Once we’re at the precipice, we can use Jettison to go over the edge.
But until then, our goal is also to keep our opponent’s board in check. For that reason, we have a ton of effects like Vile Feast, Withering Wail, and Grasp of the Undying to destroy their most valuable units before they become problems. We also use Atrocity as a finisher if we need extra reach.
Once we’ve finally gone Deep, then our victory is close at hand, because the Sea Monsters in our deck all gain significant stat boosts. In addition, our star champion Nautilus will provide us a mana discount on those creatures, freeing us up to flood the board with units that have incredible stats and abilities. We’ll also reclaim any powerful Sea Monsters we’ve tossed, throwing them back into the deck.
Our other headliner, Maokai, serves as an alternative win condition. When he levels up, after enough of units have been Tossed or killed, he destroys all but 4 non-champion cards in the enemy’s deck. In Runeterra, like Magic, players automatically lose the game when they draw from an empty deck, meaning that our opponent will then be put on a very short timer. With Thresh as our third Champion to summon the other two, we have a strong overall package that can out value most decks if we can buy enough time.
———————————————————-
The other deck in our arsenal once more makes use of Miss Fortune and her amazing ability to deal damage once she sees the we’ve declared an attack. Only this time, we’re not relying on Scouts to quick level her up. In fact, that single, reliable point of damage she does to the enemy Nexus is the most valuable thing she can provide, because our goal is to activate our various Plunder effects. If Miss Fortune can’t provide that effect, we have cards like Warning Shot or Make it Rain to accomplish that too. The latter can also be used early on to take care of the many value units that have a low cost and exactly one point of health.
Using Plunder, we can keep ourselves afloat by stealing cards from the enemy deck. Cards like Black Market Merchant, Yordle Grifter, and Pilfered Goods all allow us to make use of our opponent’s resources, which can otherwise make up for our own lack of card draw. Island Navigator also accomplishes a similar card advantage effect by creating a random 1-drop, but she also has Scout, which can be useful for piling on Miss Fortune attack triggers.
To close out the match, we have Sejuani which pairs well with all of our incidental damage and Miss Fortune triggers. Once she’s out, we should be able to consistently Frostbite our enemies and keep them from doing damage to us, quickly silencing their resistance. With it’s Plunder ability, Riptide Rex can also devastate an enemy board or deal that extra bit of damage we need to close out a match.
————————————————————-
One deck aims to control the board, and other aims to swing hard, fast, and consistently, but both express the true terror of the seas.
This is normally the part where I would that we are “at last” finished with Resident Evil 3, but that would imply we played it for very long. The truth is that this was actually an extremely short series, this being the third episode. And yet, we have already arrived at it’s conclusion.
With my friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet in tow, I had nothing to fear braving the final act of this adventure to save Raccoon City.
Ignore all the evidence of your lying eyes and ears. I am, in fact, a good video gamer.
That said, it’s clear that my audio balancing skills could still use some work. Though I appear to have largely fixed the issue with my own audio, I did not set the audio for the Discord chat correctly, which made my guests difficult to hear. All I can do is promise to continuously improve the more I do this.
I might also try switching to XSplit if these issues with OBS continue onto other games, but thankfully that’s not as much of an earth-shattering issue because I can splice footage together.
As for the game we played, the real problem with Resident Evil 3 is that it’s difficult to talk about it outside of the context of Resident Evil 2. It’s not a bad game, and it holds up well when judged on its own merits. It’s not scary, but it plays well and has a great sense of atmosphere. And though it’s not a long game, that also means it doesn’t drag. While I have some frustrations with individual rooms, there isn’t a segment that stands out as overwhelming vexing. It’s all generally solid, polished content.
That said, it’s hard not to be disappointed in some respects. After the way Mr. X defined the Resident Evil 2 Remake, the Nemesis feels underbaked and underutilized. He’s less of an ever-looming threat and more of a recurring set-piece. Even when we do encounter him similar to how we had to keep away from Mr. X, just a simple grenade knocks him out for the duration of that encounter. Later in the game, we don’t even get that. We just get boss fights, and it’s difficult to feel like anything special about a standard video game boss fight.
Jill and Carlos are fun characters in inhabit, and they have a decent chemistry with each other. Both of them are capable people, making the best of the resources they have in an effort to do the most good. I also like that it seems that Carlos is starting to fall for Jill, but Jill herself doesn’t really go out of her way to accept his advances. She’s always focused on the task at hand, and while she trusts him, she’s still focused on keeping the city safe.
I hope I get another reason to come back to this series soon, especially if I can get the goon squad back together for it.
Just to add some variety to my usual streams, I figured that it would to challenge myself to do something new in Magic the Gathering: Arena. For that reason, I thought it would be fun to give Brawl a shot.
Building myself some new brews to test out this new (to me) format, let us see how the format, and my deck-building, holds up.
You can find both my Kenrith and Nethroi lists on TappedOut.
Though it’s obvious that the Kenrith deck didn’t pan out, I’m happy I still gave it a chance because it taught me more about Brawl than all my time theory crafting could ever teach me about the format.
As you all may know, I play a lot of Commander, and that experience playing King Kenny warped the way I built the deck. Unfortunately, there are key differences between Brawl and EDH that hurt my chances with the deck.
Commander is primarily a multiplayer format, where Brawl is designed to be 1v1.
The card pool is still limited to Standard playable cards, with a few exceptions added as part of Arena’s Historic format.
Both of those facts result in a lower CMC, and faster games than you’d expect from EDH, which gives someone like me less time to prepare and get their engine on board. Reliably reusing a 4B cost ability is a lot easier when pitting multiple opponent’s against each other than it is in a 1v1 fight. I think Kenrith can still work as a commander, but it requires an entirely different strategy than I’m used to.
——————————————
While Nethroi is also a general that I’ve piloted in EDH, the style I’m used to playing him with was significantly better suited to the Brawl format. Unlike Kenrith, Nethroi isn’t relying on too many activated abilities, and thus doesn’t need to be as mana greedy.
After my experiences with Nethroi in Commander, I counted on him being the way I would out-value my opponent after they used up all of their removal options. The deck is deliberately built using cards that either have low, or no, power in the graveyard, allowing me to maximize the potential of my 10 power allotment, so it’s no surprise that I can mass resurrect a ton of creatures.
What was surprisingly was that I was regularly able to do it multiple times in the same game. Cards like Gemrazer and Necropanther were thrown in purely because they are value creatures. However, if we mutate them onto the stack that Nethroi is already part of, we gain another trigger of that ability, which can allow us to mass revive a ton of creatures in the grave once more. It’s a synergy that let’s us sustain way more than we ordinarily could.
The other all star I want to shout out to, that I was shocked performed as well as it did, was Embodiment of Agonies. It partners well with Nethroi on several ways.
By virtue of the fact that we’re playing a singleton deck, we will almost accidentally include many cards of different mana costs. This means that when it’s played, it will often come out with above average stats for his casting cost.
It’s not human, meaning that we can mutate Nethroi onto him.
It’s base power is still technically 0, so if it dies, it can be resurrected with Nethroi’s mutate trigger without eating into our 10 power budget.
Since it has innate flying, and it’s power comes in the form of +1/+1 counters, mutating Nethroi onto it transfer those counters onto the mutated stack, and give Nethroi the flying ability it’ll need to help safely swing in for tons of lifelink damage.
I threw it into the deck just to serve as another easy revival target, and I was surprised to see it turn the tides in so many of the matches I played. Though the deck hasn’t been updated on TappedOut, I actually slotted in into my Commander deck after seeing how well it did here.
It was a ton of fun seeing board states and card combos that I don’t often get to see in Magic: Arena, so I look forward to playing much more Brawl. It’s no substitute for EDH, but I can’t help but think about what other possibilities and interesting synergies must exist for the format. My inner Timmy can’t help but get excited over the space of possibilities.
Finally, after two long weeks of no Commander gameplay from my playgroup due to extenuating circumstances, we managed to gather enough players for a round of my favorite Magic format. And on my birthday, no less.
That’s right, we’re playing Tiny Leaders! No, wait. I mean EDH. Of course, I mean EDH.
There were a number of solid synergies and combos that I saw from all of us at the table. The game lasted about 1.5 hours, so we all had opportunities to pull off our own impressive combos.
Macar was the first to get truly scary, or at least troublesome. Normally, Macar is not a threat because the best way to tap him is through combat, so he can be easily blocked and killed. This is where the “Drivin'” Macar aspect of the deck comes it… thanks to vehicles.
The one in question was Aethersphere Harvester. Using it’s crew ability, they tapped Macar, allowed him to untap and activate at the start of their turn without subjecting him to the rigors of combat.
Additionally, they were intending to set up ways to tap and untap him even more times. First, they played Clock of Omens to use the Gold generated by Macar to untap key artifacts. Then, they played Silverskin Armor in the hopes of turning Midas Automotive Services into an artifact to continuously tap and untap, which Gavi countered by cycling Decree of Silence for free. Still, it was impressive in it’s own right, and it kept me from committing too strongly to the board without a sacrifice outlet available to me. Macar managed to get an Umbral Mantle equipped later, but rarely did they have the mana to make much use of it.
As for me, I don’t think I ever had a chance to take the spotlight, but I managed to make my own moves when I could and protected myself from the worst of it. Every time one of my creatures was about to get exiled, my Altar of Dementia was there to build up my graveyard and keep them “in circulation”. When my graveyard was about to be exiled, I used an Elixir of Immortality to shuffle them back into my deck so that I still had access to them at some point. It made it difficult to get a foothold, but I was able to keep some form of engine in the form of Sylvan Library, and my Planeswalkers that were being largely ignored.
Among them, the one that exceed my expectations was Ajani, Caller of the Pride. It’s a simple ability, just putting +1/+1 counters on creatures, but it helps keep Tayam stocked with counters we can use to activate that recursion ability. In the brief moment I had Winding Constrictor and Evolution Sage on board, my favorite lion man was carrying his weight even more so. I even managed to get his loyalty high enough for his ultimate… except Macar had an Archfiend of Depravity keeping both myself and Gavi in check. Here I was, thinking I was being all sneaky and slowly building up to my ultimate, but in turns out that it’s hard to be sneaky about it when the effect I’m building up to is literally written on the card.
Naturally, the archfiend was also impacting Gavi’s ability to generate tokens, so they were willing to ignore me for a time. I could only be thankful that my board couldn’t be completely wiped by Macar, thanks to Yawgmoth, Thran Physician being on board. This may very well be the only time where his “Protection From Humans” clause was ever relevant, but because of it I was able to keep another value engine on board.
Eventually, I was able to use Ajani’s second ability to give him double strike and flying, forcing Macar to use the Archfiend to block my attack. Unfortunately, this was when Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger to exile my Yawgmoth and my Altar of Dementia, but I did sacrifice one to the other to keep it in circulation.
And my other Planeswalker, Liliana of the Veil, was able to start taking center stage afterwards. Despite being mono-Black, Macar was sorely lacking in recursion, or they weren’t drawing into it. This meant that with the looming threat of Gavi on the other side, there was much stopping me from whittling away at their creatures. This pressure left me free to cast a perform a Pernicious Deed to reset the board. While I had intended to use Eerie Ultimatum to reestablish, it would have been Neutralized if I had done more that resurrect Liliana to get rid of Ulamog.
This prolonged attrition between the three players left all of us without much. So when Gavi managed to acquire a nearly full grip of cards with Boon of the Wish-Giver, she was basically free to dominate the endgame. Specifically, with The Locust God and a Psychosis Crawler. After performing a Cyclonic Rift to dispose of any final resistance, Gavi managed to take the win.
I genuinely can’t complain. Each player managed to get their own blows in, impacting the game for the other two. Though I wish I could’ve gotten my engine fully online, I did managed to use Tayam enough to feel satisfied. I’ll likely keep playing him a bit more and experiment to see how I might be able to modify the deck further.
Our mission in Raccoon City continues, as David and I continue to chronicle the tale of Jill Valentine and Carlos Oliveira. Last time, we managed to make it to the Kendo Gun Shop after besting the Nemesis in a rooftop confrontation. The proprietor gave us a key to the alley on the side of the store, which should hopefully get us back to the train station.
Hopefully, nothing bad happens and we escape unharmed. Then again, what could possibly go wrong.
In hindsight, it was quite fortunately that my OBS crashed 3 times while recording this episode, because it finally gave me insight into something I’ve heard people mention a few times, but could never quite got a handle on myself.
As painful a confession as this is for me, I don’t give me content the post-production love that I honestly should, just because it’s really hard for me to set aside the required time. What I noticed is that, either through moving away from my mic while playing or my voice just naturally getting quieter, my audio is difficult to hear compared to when I test. With this in mind, I have some ideas for what I can do to solve this problem, and hopefully it’ll stop being an issue.
I’m fully aware that there’s more I could do to improve the quality of my content, and I’m hoping in time I can start building up to that. I’d like to separate my feeds, so that the game video and audio is separate from mine and my guests (so that editing and audio balancing is easier). I’m happy with my video quality from my capture card, but it’s clear my audio work leaves much to be desired. This may be a one-man production, but that’s no excuse to sit on my laurels.
As for the episode itself, it’s interesting to note how different Carlos’s segments feel compared to Jill’s. With Jill, she feels like someone who, despite having access to limited resources, is more than capable to using those resources to maximum effectiveness, handling herself better than could be reasonably expected. Meanwhile, Carlos gives off the impression of someone who is absolutely more well-equipped and organized.
So much of that comes down to the first impressions. The game opens with Jill frantically running away from the Nemesis, scrambling to have use the environment to keep her distance and land a few hits (or ram him with a car) where ever she can. Even her pistol is an object she finds rather than one she goes in with. When we finally take control of Carlos for the first time in the old police station from RE2, he literally starts out with a fully-loaded machine gun with 200 rounds of ammo to spare.
Now, it’s important to note than both of them are just as effective mechanically. While Carlos has a machine gun, it doesn’t do as much damage per hit as the pistol. And despite her initial loadout, Jill has access to a ton of ammo and weapons in the environment. The difference is purely one of aesthetic “feeling”, not of practical effectiveness. It shows how important that initial impression is, and how what happens in the story do have tangible impact on the emotional state of the player when engaging with the mechanics laid in front of them.
It’s been some time, so let us take a short reprieve from Magic the Gathering: Arena to delve back into Legends of Runeterra. Since we last entered Summoner’s Rift, a new nation, and a brand new set of cards, has made its way into the game and people have been playing around with them to great effect.
So of course, we have two new decks that make use of these mechanics in different ways. Sit back, relax, and join we for a few rounds.
As always, the deck lists I use are taken from MobaLytics.
The first deck we plays is built around being quick and aggressive, but using strong enough bodies so that swings are almost always in our favor. We also take advantage of the new Scout mechanic. If the first attack taken on a given turn is done by units with Scout, the attack coin is preserved and the player is able to make a second attack.
One of the deck’s two champions, Quinn, both has Scout innately, and levels up when she witnesses enough attacks. Since the Scout attack is still an attack, she can bear witness to two attacks per turn and hopefully level up quickly. The Scout card we have use of is Grizzled Ranger, which can set up some awkward blocks for our opponent, since they know killing will just generate another creature.
The second champion in the deck, Miss Fortune, further takes advantage of our stream of attacks, while making them safer, by deal additional damage per swing. Like Quinn, she levels up after she’s seen us attack enough times, and if she does it’s basically game over. Not many enemies can stand up to repeated, reliable 3 damage per attack. (Shame we never once drew into her.)
And just so that we can attack even more than we already do, we make use of Relentless Pursuit, which restores our attack token. That said, I’ve played another version of this deck that instead uses Citrus Courier to both heal our army and induce that same effect, which I switched back to after the steam.
It’s rare for me to play such an aggressive deck, but this is one that feels really good to pilot. We have more than enough tools to make our attacks as safe as possible with Challenger units and combat tricks to swing the math in our favor. Our champions also feed directly into our strategy, and when they level up our attacks are even safer than they were before.
————————————————
The second deck is built around champions we’ve seen before: Lux and Karma, using them as our finishers in a control strategy.
Since similar decks have already been featured, I won’t go into too much detail, but this deck does tend to rely more on creatures than past setups I’ve run. Specifically, Radiant Guardian is an all star, allowing us to outpace more aggressive decks with careful blocks, giving us enough extra life to sustain through to our finish line. If we’re fortunate enough to pair her with an Unyielding Spirit to keep her from dying, most of what we go up against just isn’t able to handle her.
And with the density of units we have compared to a typical control deck, we can take advantage of removal options like Concerted Strike as well. Other new cards in our arsenal include Deep Mediation, which I would run even if we didn’t already use a ton of spells to trigger Lux.
—————————————————
These new cards have been fun to play with, and I appreciate the variety of decks I’m seeing from the community. Such creativity is usually indicative of a healthy meta, and while the game will always be improving, it’s in a good spot after its first real expansion of sorts.
After my wildly successful run of Resident Evil 2’s remake back in early 2019, I couldn’t possibly pass up the opportunity to go do a similar playthrough for Resident Evil 3.
Thankfully, my friends David Phillips and Andre Doucet were in agreement, and together The Spooky Bois are back in town.
Special thanks to Sam Callahan for working on this thumbnail for me as well.
Before we proceed, I should make it clear that unlike the Resident Evil 2 playthrough, this is not a blind run. I had intended to make it a blind run, but eventually curiosity as I kept eyeing the copy I purchased for this Let’s Play. Not to mention that I was between games at the time, waiting for the Final Fantasy 7 remake to come out.
The thing that immediately stands out to me in this game, compared to the Resident Evil 2 remake, is just how much less scary it is overall. It’s difficult to parse exactly how much of it is improved controls/responsiveness versus my retaining skill from the last time I played a Resident Evil game (which was that RE2 Let’s Play), but I rarely felt like I was in any genuine danger even at my least powerful.
You might even to start to notice that in the way I play. Resident Evil 2 had me making tactical choices over which zombies I would even bother trying to kill rather than just leave them knowing I could easily juke them. Here, I assassinate pretty much every infected and/or undead thing that I am capable of, barely ever running low on bullets or healing items (even if I forget to take them out of the item box). By the time I had wrapped up that first section, I could have sprinted across the zone because all of the zombies were just dead.
This also extends to the Nemesis. Unlike Mr. X, who was a constant looming presence over everything we did in the Raccoon City police station, Nemesis feels like he’s barely around for most of the game. When he does deign to make an appearance, it’s usually short and heavily scripted, making him feel more like a quick-time event than an organic threat. While he’s still a persistent pursuer in the game’s story, we don’t get the same impression of him mechanically. In terms of gameplay, he punctuates individual sections, serving more as a marker of progress than a threat to be feared.
While I don’t have the window into what the original Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was like, David has played that version of the game, and I find his commentary on the way the remake handles translating it into a modern day game fascinating. Sounds like a ton of work went into adapting the beats of the story into something a modern presentation, especially in how they removed the elements of choice affecting the campaign and adapted characters like Carlos to be less stereotypical than they were in their original incarnations.
Hopefully, I remember to keep picking his brain about that as we proceed.
Every now and then, a deck comes to light that is so surprising in it’s effectiveness that it takes seeing it in action to truly understand how powerful they can be. This is one of those types of decks.
That’s right, we’re staying in the bike lane with a Jeskai Cycling deck. Don’t be fooled by the fact every non-land card in the main deck is either common or uncommon. In the hands of a good pilot, this deck can make miracles happen.
This deck has several cards that can act as win conditions. As far as creatures are concerned, there are 3 out of the 4 we run that can set on opponent onto a clock, forcing them to come up with an answer or else die.
Valiant Rescuer creates a 1/1 token the first time we cycle each turn, even in our opponent’s turns
Drannith Stinger hits our opponent for 1 for every card we cycle.
Though it may not be a creature, Improbable Alliance also serves as yet another payoff. Since cycling draws us a card, it’s easy to get to that second card condition to trigger the creation of a 1/1 flying faerie. The activated ability is nice to have late game, but it’s not what we’re playing the card for.
And thus, our strategy is to bring out one, or hopefully more, of these cards early and then just start cycling cards like crazy. Between all the triggers going off, we should hopefully be able to quick out-value and overtake our opponent quickly, before they have the opportunity to establish a board presence or sweep our forces away. Once we have enough commitment to the board, we can start cycling extra copies of these cards as well, since each of them has a mere 1-mana cost to do so.
In most matchups, Drannith Healer would just be another card to cycle away for one of our other creatures. However, against an equally aggressive opponent he can be used to provide us the extra life we need to turn the tides in our favor.
Even if we can’t accomplish our strategy with creatures alone, we also come equipped with backups and other tools we can use to finish the game. Chief among is the alternate win-condition: Zenith Flare. For 4-mana, it deals damage to any target, and gives us life, equal to the number of cycle cards in our grave, even if they didn’t get there through cycling.
Do not, under any circumstances, underestimate the damage Zenith Flare can do. I have both hit and been hit with over 15 damage in a single cast of this powerhouse, ending the game suddenly out of nowhere. (My personal best is 18.) When all else fails, it can turn a desperate situation into an assured victory. More importantly, it’s a flexible card because even if it’s not strong enough to turn the tide on it’s own, it can be used to take out the big creature of planeswalker that would otherwise keep us from the win, gaining us a small bit of life in process. Despite the other cycling payoffs, this card is what brings the deck together.
But that isn’t the only trick we have up our sleeve. Once our fox is pumped up sufficiently, Go For Blood can be used to take care of most creatures that would either become a threat or keep us off a lethal swing. For an instant speed answer, Startling Development can give one of our creatures some extra power, or de-power an enemy combatant, to turn the tables on a bad swing. Both cards can also be cycled off if we’re digging down for other cards, or need the triggers.
The other cards in this deck, Footfall Crater, Frostveil Ambush, and Boon of the Wish-Giver, also provide some useful utility, but in all likelihood they’re just going to be cycled away. I’ve found that I almost wanted the cycling trigger, or to dig deeper into my deck, more than I wanted to cast the actual card.
Of course, since all of our permanents are 2 CMC or less, and we’re already in white, we might as well play Lurrus of the Dream Den as our companion. Played at the right time, we can use Lurrus to recast one of our fallen payoff cards after a long game, maybe more if he’s not immediately killed. It’s telling that out of all the cards we use, it’s be far the most expensive, where everything else is easier to procure.
This is a deck I would heartily recommend to anyone looking to dive into Arena either for the first time or after not playing for a while. Lands aside, everything you need to get it up and running should be easy to acquire and there’s a ton of power behind it.
