Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze

 While waiting for Metroid Dread to arrive in October, I decided to splurge on another game to add to my Switch collection. Tropical Freeze was initially released in 2014 for the Wii U (which makes its full-price re-release on the Switch a bit eyebrow-raising, but whatever,) as a continuation of the revival of DKC that began with the Wii's Donkey Kong Country Returns.

What the game is is a totally charming platformer that is both old-school but also takes advantage of the far more powerful hardware that we have these days. While the original DKC used computer graphics to take the place of pixel-art sprites, this game makes use of three-dimensionality to have, for example, levels that have you hop in a barrel and watch as you smash through the background to find yourself in a whole new environment.

Difficulty-wise, the first world is a bit of a cakewalk (caveat: I've been playing through Super Mario World and the original DKC recently on the SNES collection, so my platforming reflexes are in good practice,) and I think the first boss took me only two attempts. However, once you get to the second island (which is how they thematically connect the groups of levels) the difficulty ramps up significantly - I found myself repeating the same span of one level over and over, my 26-life reserve dwindling to 15, and then down to 9 once I fought the second island's boss.

Boss fights, incidentally, are very elaborate, with multiple phases and often only brief windows in which you can damage them.

Like "Returns," Tropical Freeze sets aside the classic Kremlings and their leader, King K. Rool, to give us some new baddies - a sort of Norse-themed invasion of arctic creatures into DK's tropical home. Penguins, seals, owls, and I'm sure other cold-climate creatures are your primary adversaries.

One thing that's really different is the way that your companions work. Rather than having Diddy, Dixie, or Cranky simply swap with you when you get hit, instead they'll ride on your back and give you some extra jump effect. You and each Kong buddy has two hearts, which act as a health bar, and if your companion loses both of theirs, they fall off your back and you'll have to find another barrel to get them back. These barrels (and actually, barrels in general) are not nearly as common as they were in the old games, so hitting a checkpoint in the middle of a level can sometimes make the going more difficult going forward if you can't get a barrel.

Also, depending on your companion, you'll gradually build up a little meter that allows you to wipe out all enemies on screen and turn them into useful items, like lives or golden hearts that allow you to double up on health. (I don't yet know what you get with Cranky Kong.)

Anyway, it's nice to see that at least with Nintendo, this most classic of game genres isn't dead (though I'll confess the fact that this game actually came out seven years ago makes this statement a little less useful.) And I think this should help me pass the time while I wait for Metroid Dread, which has been my obsession this last month or so.

Critical Role Announces Campaign 3

 Critical Role is the gold standard of actual-play TTRPG streams. A group of self-described "nerdy-ass voice actors" has spent the last six years entertaining us through extremely character-focused D&D play, weaving genuinely moving stories amidst all the joy of a chaotic group of dorks messing around in D&D.

After finishing their second campaign earlier this year, the past few months have seen a bit of a break in the CR world, with a couple one-shots and a mini-campaign called Exandria Unlimited, which had a different DM (and allowed usual DM Matt Mercer to actually play for a change!)

Anyway, the new campaign starts on October 21st, and will be set on the continent of Marquet. Each campaign has primarily taken place on a different continent, with the first primarily taking place on Tal'dorei, though they made trips to the other major continents of Issylra, Marquet, and Wildemount. The second campaign was almost exclusively set on Wildemount and the surrounding islands.

Marquet is a largely arid continent that has a bit of a Middle Eastern vibe, though I'm sure we'll see more nuance and complexity introduced in the new campaign. In Campaign one, the party, Vox Machina, befriended J'mon Sa Ord, the secretly draconic ruler of Ank'harel, which I believe is the largest city on the continent.

Marquet is actually also the setting of the last (at least so far, but likely the true finale) Vox Machina one-shot. Following the campaign proper, CR did three epilogue-like one-shots (or four if you count the Adventures of the Darrington Brigade,) the last of which took place during a destination wedding at Dalen's Closet, a region of the city of Shamal.

Beyond that, I don't believe the games have explored the region all that much, and as someone who adores desert settings for fantasy, I'm really excited to see what form the campaign will take.

I'm eager to see what people will play - one thing I've noticed is that both campaigns have had someone multiclass into paladin, but never start from the get-go (I happen to love paladins). Naturally, the more important thing is the sort of character the players pick, but... well, just like any campaign I actually play in, I'm eager to see everyone's new characters.

I suspect someone will play a monk after everyone saw how awesome Beau was in combat. Anyway, Critical Role is such a comfort food kind of thing to me, so I'm very excited to see what is coming next.

Speculation on New D&D Settings

 Something Chris Perkins has now mentioned a couple of times is that WotC is working on two brand-new campaign settings for D&D. This would be unlike the various returns we've seen like with Eberron and Ravenloft in 5th Edition, or even the introduction of Wildemount, which, while new as a canonical setting for D&D, was previously established in the Critical Role campaign and in their own Tal'dorei Campaign Setting (Wildemount and Tal'dorei both being continents on the world of Exandria.)

The way I see it, a campaign setting needs a very distinctive hook to make it worth developing. The Forgotten Realms, alongside Dragonlance and Greyhawk, and, actually, Exandria, to me seem to cover the classic fantasy setting pretty well.

Going into other settings we've seen recently, Eberron covers a more technological, pseudo-modern (or at least pseudo-early-20th-century) setting.

Naturally, there are a lot of different ways to do a medieval fantasy setting - the world of A Song of Ice and Fire is very different in tone and history than Tolkien's Arda (on which Middle-Earth is a continent,) so I suppose I might be too dismissive of an attempt to make a traditional-style setting.

D&D has also gotten fairly weird in as well - Ravenloft's reality doesn't work the same way that the material plane does, and there's already the outer-planar weirdness of Planescape and the science-fantasy hi-jinx of Spelljammer.

So, where does one go?

One place to look for inspiration is history. Eberron has a few hints of a wild-west-type setting, though it mixes that with a lot of other pulp adventure genres like the Noir-ish city of skyscrapers in Sharn and adventure stories in jungles and ruins. As far as I know, there's not a setting with a really dominant empire in the vein of Rome. Theros does a riff on Greek Myth, of course, but I think you might have some fun with the palace intrigue of Rome.

I always like to mix some sci-fi into my fantasy, though I realize that Spelljammer already covers this to a large extent. That being said, I wouldn't mind seeing a somewhat more tonally serious science fantasy setting for the game (though not until after we get a legit Spelljammer book.)

Another personal favorite of mine is the modern fantasy concept. Dimension 20's Fantasy High does a great job of making the game work in a suburban, pseudo-modern setting with cars and cell phones and high school, and I think it would be really cool to see something like that.

D&D's settings do tend toward a more Euro-centric style, and though we've seen area in, for example, the Forgotten Realms expanded into regions inspired by other parts of the world, it might be interesting to see a whole setting inspired by the myths and history of a place that isn't full of white people (this is, of course, assuming that the leads on said project would likewise be people of color.)

Also, while there are elements of it in many settings, there isn't really any true D&D steampunk setting (I suppose gas lamp fantasy would be the more accurate term, given the existence of magic.) Admittedly, Eberron comes close to this.

As we've seen in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, WotC is playing with the idea of parallels existing between the Shadowfell and the Feywild, with the Feywild having its "Domains of Delight" in the vein of the Shadowfell's Domains of Dread. Might we, then, see something akin to Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, but for whimsical Feywild adventures?

Of course, these two settings, whatever they are, are still in a rough stage of development, and aren't even guaranteed to come out. But they have been mentioned multiple times now, which seems to bode well for their eventual release.

And I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for them.

Lore Speculation on Metroid Dread

 So, lore. And Metroid.

With a lot of more modern/recent games, delving into the story and lore is a huge thing I love to do. There are countless posts on this blog that revolve around my speculation on the story of World of Warcraft, in large part because that is a game that really cares a lot about lore.

Nintendo games, to my mind, are of an earlier era. Mario games never bog you down with anything resembling continuity - even the Mario Galaxy games, if I recall, didn't really make any reference to one another in terms of any kind of ongoing plot.

The Zelda games officially have a canon... well, canon. The Zelda Encyclopedia put forth a convoluted timeline that connects all of the games (or at least all the ones that existed at the time,) but I've always felt that the games tend to be more thematically tied to one another than in a strict sense of continuity. I think Majora's Mask is a direct sequel to Ocarina of Time, where Link's quest begins in an attempt to find Navi, but beyond that I think most of it is a broad-strokes saga, like variations a mythic figure.

Metroid, however, does have a strict continuity.

The first Metroid game I played was Super Metroid, which, despite being like five or six years old at the time, was the newest in the series. (Like many, I checked it out after playing Super Smash Bros. and liking Samus the best as a fighter.) Within the game itself, there's very little in the way of plot - once you arrive on Zebes, the only real "cutscene" you get is during the final boss fight, and then after you get into your ship to escape the exploding planet there's one more animated cutscene.

But unlike Mario or Link, who have never really monologued (Mario says a few short phrases now and then, but generally not a complete sentence that isn't "It's-ah me, Mario!") Samus narrates the opening of her third game, recapping the events of the first two games and then explaining why you're heading to Ceres Station in the game's playable prologue.

The continuity of Metroid games is clear and relatively linear. Metroid, Metroid II: The Return of Samus, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, and Metroid Dread are the five games in a 35-year-spanning quintilogy. Metroid Prime is a sort of interquel spin-off series, but again those games take place one after the other, and the events of one game have canonically happened in the next one. Then there's Metroid: Other M, which people hate but which also has a legitimate place within the continuity.

Unlike Link, who is really a reincarnated spirit in different generations with almost every game, Samus is just the one individual who remembers all the things that have happened in each game.

Anyway, despite this being a game series that started in the decidedly story-light 8-bit era, all this is to say that the lore here is real and something one can speculate about.

With that preamble, I think the theories I wanted to talk about seem quaintly low-key in comparison, but here goes:

This first theory is one that I did not come up with, but seems to be making the rounds on the internet.

Metroid Fusion sees Samus infected with something called the X Parasite, an organism that can infect and mimic other organisms. It's more or less a slower-acting version of The Thing from John Carpenter's seminal horror classic (and a reminder that there's a strong cosmic horror element to Metroid games). Samus is saved, however, by a vaccine that is created using the remnants of the baby Metroid she rescued on SR388 and who gave its life to protect her when she fought Mother Brain in Super Metroid. Samus has effectively become part-Metroid. And as it turns out, the X Parasite is the whole reason the Metroids even exist, as they were created by the ancient Chozo to wipe out this deadly threat.

Ironically, at the end of Metroid Fusion, there's a sort of reversal of what happened in the end of Super Metroid. Fighting the Omega Metroid that broke out of the government's shady bioresearch facility, you get your ass handed to you until one of the horrible SA-Xs, aka the X-parasite doppelgangers of Samus that have been hunting you throughout the game, comes to attack the Omega Metroid, using the powerful Ice Beam and such that you used against Metroids in the past. When it's killed, you're able to recover your old powers, which gives you the chance to defeat the Omega Metroid and escape the lab before it plummets into SR388.

With your Metroid vaccine (get vaccinated if you haven't, by the way!) you've been gobbling up X parasites the whole game just like the Metroids were designed to. So let's put a pin in that.

In Metroid Dread, you show up on planet ZDR because someone sighted an X Parasite there, when everyone thought they were extinct after Fusion. You go to investigate, but you're confronted by a Chozo warrior (not thought extinct, but rare) who attacks you and strands you deep beneath the surface of the world with your abilities drained from your suit.

The Federation had sent a group of robots named EMMIs to try to find the X Parasites, but they've gone silent, and when you encounter them, they try to kill you - this will apparently be a major challenge of the game, as these things can one-hit-kill you if they catch up to you, with only a split-second counter giving you a chance to escape.

Given that the EMMIs were sent to try to find the X Parasite, could that explain why they're going after Samus? Either she has some kind of X Parasite residue on her that they are detecting, or...

What if she's actually an SA-X?

The SA-X at the end of Metroid Fusion jumps in to fight the Omega Metroid at the end of the game. Is it possible that, as the SA-X grew to emulate Samus more and more, that it began to think it was her? This is actually something of a trope in sci fi, and particularly sci fi horror - the grand reveal that the protagonist who is worried about some sinister doppelganger actually has been the doppelganger all along. Maybe the EMMIs aren't malfunctioning at all, but are actually trying to extract their target from you.

And maybe that explains how you wind up so deep underground, far from your ship. Maybe you aren't the Samus that arrived on that ship.

Now, there's your real mind-blower of a twist. It actually kind of... works, right? But I can't say I'd be super happy about it.

Setting aside that really big twist, I wanted to talk about another theory, which has less dire implications, but still could be interesting.

We know that there's a center of Chozo civilization on ZDR, as well as live Chozo who you'll have to fight (the final boss very well might be the Chozo guy from the beginning.)

In the trailers, we see a glimpse of a bas-relief depicting Chozo warriors with glaives/halberds, along with a larger, commanding figure who looks like the guy we fight at the beginning of the game (the warriors, interestingly, look like they're wearing Varia suits). What I only realized more recently was that the commanding figure is pointing toward a group of robed Chozo who seem to be falling.

Could he be ordering their downfall?

The Chozo are an odd presence in Metroid - they were a great civilization that has mostly fallen to ruin, but they are not extinct. Samus was raised by the Chozo on Zebes after her parents were killed in an attack by the Space Pirates, which is how she got her suit and strength (she's also got some Chozo genetic meddling in her as well.)

We know the Chozo made the Metroids to deal with the X Parasite, but it also seems the Metroids might have led to their downfall, given that the big fanged jellyfish creatures like to drain the life of other creatures they encounter.

But now, I wonder: was there a schism?

My sense of the Chozo that Samus was raised by was that they were sagely and wise - maybe members of the faction shown falling in the hieroglyphics. There might have then been a more militaristic faction that overthrew the sages. So, it might be that the primary antagonists of Metroid Dread are, in fact, the evil Chozo.

And what else might they be responsible for? I think Mother Brain was a Chozo creation as well, though it went rogue and joined with Ridley and his Space Pirates. In Dread we're going to encounter a number of Central Units, which... weirdly, look a whole lot like blue Mother Brains, consisting of a giant brain with a single eye, and which shoot these weird rings at you.

Could Mother Brain have been some creation by this militaristic faction, maybe even to replace the wise sages they'd cast down?

This is all pretty far-reaching speculation, of course. But I'll admit, I could go for some heightened sci-fi drama (admittedly, Dune is coming out next month too.)

What to Expect from 2024's "5.5E" Core Books

 As someone who jumped into D&D relatively soon after the release of 5th Edition and has purchased every single official 5th Edition D&D book (along with three monster books by the Kobold Press,) my thoughts on a true new edition are filled with a bit of anxiety. Obviously, the big 5 up there means they've rebooted the game four times in the past, but this is "my" D&D, and I don't want it to be "obsolete."

Now, of course, the nice thing about a pen-and-paper RPG system is that you don't have to worry about the game not working on "new systems" the way that, for example, there's not a great way to play something that came out on the Gamecube these days unless you have a functioning Gamecube or Wii. There's nothing stopping a group from gathering up a bunch of 2nd Edition books and running D&D that way, and the books I have will still be usable as long as they're legible.

But I felt a bit of trepidation about the launch of a 6th Edition that would make all the rules expansions and such that I've gotten over the years not work with new content. However, as it turns out, it looks like D&D's 50th anniversary will see the release of revised core rulebooks that are meant to be compatible with older 5th Edition content.

One of the things that has made 5E so popular, I think, is its relative simplicity. The whole game boils down to modifiers and DCs. Can I do this? Well, the DM has a target number and you have to roll a d20 and add the appropriate modifier. And everything else is just wrinkles on that central concept. I've read about THAC0, and I still have no freaking idea what it even means. Concepts like Attack Bonus and Armor Class are abstractions of something that's fairly easy to figure out.

Tasha's Cauldron of Everything gave us revisions to the existing classes in some cases. Most of these were quality-of-life stuff, like allowing classes to swap out cantrips, fighting styles, and other choices they've made over the course of the campaign. A couple got a little love with just brand-new abilities, like a Barbarian's ability to do a little charge toward their target when they start their Rage.

Could we expect to see these kinds of revisions baked into the 5.5 PHB? That could be what they do, but I'm hoping for something a little more ambitious.

First off, let's set some guidelines: I think that the PHB is going to focus on the core basics of the game, and as such we shouldn't expect to have some massive expansion of playable races or classes or subclasses. Monsters of the Multiverse will likely be the better go-to for expanding races.

But maybe we can get a little more ambitious:

I think the Artificer is probably the best-designed class in 5th Edition. It has a huge advantage in that its designers had the benefit of years of experience with the edition, but it also fills a niche that wasn't really covered in the PHB and just works out really effectively. I would love to see this class integrated as a PHB option, complete with a spell list that might include Artificer-exclusive spells. Its integration into the PHB would also mean that other rules expansions and campaign setting books could add new subclasses without needing to add the entire class.

Next, I'd like to see some class redesigns. Now, how does this remain compatible?

Well, the nice thing about a modular game like this is that as long as the parts can interface the same way, you can do whatever you want. In order for the additional Fighter subclasses found in Xanathar's, Tasha's, and Wildemount to work, all you need is to make sure that the subclass features are found at the same levels (well, ok, you also need to make sure to retain abilities to which the subclass features refer).

But I think a lot of classes could undergo significant redesigns while leaving the gap open for existing subclasses to still work with them. And when it comes to the subclasses in the PHB, these could be redesigned as well. (I would be overjoyed to see a nearly fully-reworked Great Old One Warlock - a subclass whose flavor I adore but whose mechanics are seriously lacking.)

Classes that only got two subclasses in the 5.0 PHB could also get a third one - giving each class a sense of truly having options to consider. I could imagine giving the Barbarian something like the Zealot, or the Ranger could get something like the Gloomstalker, giving something with a bit of distinctive flavor that still feels within the "classic" archetypes enough to work as a "standard subclass."

Still, we don't want this to be completely bloated, and I've just introduced not only a full class but also several subclasses. So let's see what else to look at:

When it comes to races, I think we'll likely be seeing the Tasha's-era rules go game-wide. Every race will get their ability score increases freely distributed, and we'll probably see things like languages and skill proficiencies as more of a guideline than a strict rule. Furthermore, I'd actually love to see each race given racial traits that don't pigeonhole them into a particular role. The half-orc, for example, was clearly designed to be a melee combatant, not only because of their Strength and Constitution increases, but also things like Savage Attacks (while we're at it, I know that things get a little fuzzy when it comes to fantasy races - orcs were invented to be a brutal, savage type of person, but at the same time, these words have some serious cultural baggage. I love exploring so-called monstrous races as fully-formed and nuanced people. Oh well, I think someone from a less privileged position might be better at figuring out what to do with terms like "savage" when used in this context). I'd love to see races designed so that there are benefits to playing them as a caster or as a brawler.

I suspect we're going to get the least revision to things like the action economy in combat, which for the most part is a "not broke, don't fix it" thing. I could see getting some change to spells, though I think this is a delicate thing to futz with when this is a revision rather than a new edition. We can't be going around with different versions of what "Fireball" actually does.

The Monster Manual, I think, will change in the ways we've already heard about with Monsters of the Multiverse. As a DM I'm overjoyed to hear about this simplification of spellcasting monsters. I also like the change in Wild Beyond the Witchlight that introduces the qualifier "typically" before alignment. There were may complaints when Candlekeep Mysteries and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft jettisoned monster alignment altogether, and I think this is a pretty good compromise. Alignment is a weird abstraction of complex and nuanced issues, but it's also an iconic part of the game that has informed the creation of the very multiverse. A devil is, by definition, lawful evil. But I think it's great that you could say that a red dragon is only "typically chaotic evil," and open up the fun possibilities of a friendly red dragon (or an evil gold one.) I also think that by introducing this variability in alignment, you can also give players and DMs a sense of what things are on that planar level in which their alignment defines them, as opposed to things that exist in more nuanced places, like the material plane or feywild. (Hell, I think that many Fey would be some kind of "lawful chaotic.")

Now, the DMG is sort of the weirdest of the core books, given that it's much less about a list of things to use and more chapters of guidance for how to run the game. I think a seasoned DM could easily run a D&D campaign without even using the DMG at all, but that's not to say the book is useless.

There's some guidance in Wild Beyond the Witchlight that should definitely go into the new DMG - stuff like how much information you owe players regarding a monster's health (my tendency is to say they're "bloody" or some variation thereof when they hit half their max HP and "they're looking very rough" when they're down to like 10% or lower.)

Personally, the part of the DMG I use the most is the chapter on customizing and creating new monsters. I've gotten pretty comfortable homebrewing creatures for my players to fight, and I'd like to see a bigger emphasis on this kind of stuff. The next major campaign I run, I will probably either do custom magic items or have the players find their big, powerful stuff early on (with the likely exception of any kind of "you can cast high-level spells multiple times a day" kind of things).

I'll be very curious to see how differently the game will play with these new revisions. My expectation is that the main emphasis will be cleaning up modular options like redesigning subclasses and class features. I would love for the Ranger, for example, to feel like a legitimate and good choice over, say, a Dex-based Fighter (actually, I'd also love for a Strength-based Ranger to work too.)

As another more specific note, I think I'd make Eldritch Blast either a class feature or a spell that Warlocks get for free, as it's so central to how they work.

Indeed, I might even have a part in each class section that explains what you can expect gameplay-wise from that class. Telling players that Warlocks are going to focus largely on either weapons or Eldritch Blast, with their spellcasting as a limited but still powerful supplement will give players a much better impression of what they're getting into.

We are, of course, over two years away from these releases, and there's going to be a ton of additional 5E content to come out between now and then. But I definitely have some gears turning in my mind, wondering what they'll come up with.

Future of D&D Panel Recap

During this weekend's D&D Celebration, the most exciting panel that closed it out was "The Future of D&D." We got some announcements and some very cryptic hints. Let's break it down:

Settings:

While we didn't get any specifics, and some of this has already been hinted at, we are going to be getting two returns to classic settings in 2022 (likely with setting sourcebooks) and one smaller reference to another classic setting (not sure if this is going to be an adventure book like Ghosts of Saltmarsh giving us a bit of Greyhawk, or what). There's also a third classic setting that will be getting published in 2023.

What will these be? Well, given the settlements made with the Hickmans, it seems possible that one could be the popular Dragonlance setting. There's also been a strong emphasis on the Multiverse in this panel, so I think Planescape is a strong possibility.

The final hint, which came at the end of the panel, is that there's a sketch from Hydro74 (the artist behind the limited edition covers for myriad 5th Edition books like Xanathar's Guide to Everything, The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, and Volo's Guide to Monsters) depicting Boo, the famous miniature giant space hamster from the Baldur's Gate games (companion to Minsc.) While a miniature giant space hamster is just... a hamster, giant space hamsters do play a big role in the science fantasy Spelljammer setting, where their running in wheels powers gnomish ships.

In addition, Chris Perkins reiterated that there are two brand-new settings in development. While these are not guaranteed to see release, they'll be the first brand-new settings (that didn't premiere in a stream like Exandria) for the game since Eberron in 2004. My fingers are crossed for a modern, Urban Fantasy-style setting, but we'll see.

New Books:

Coming out in January, there's going to be a Rules Expansion box set that includes Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and a new book called Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. MPMoM will take monsters that are setting-agnostic (likely those found in Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Volo's Guide to Monsters, but also from some other sources, like perhaps the Elemental Evil's Player's Companion,) as well as playable races that are similarly setting-agnostic.

MPMoM will contain 250 monsters and 30 playable races. But this isn't just a reprint - the statblocks on monsters are getting reworked. We were shown various NPC stat blocks, including the Warlock of the Great Old One and the War Priest, and these creatures have been thoroughly re-worked to be easier to run. For one thing, spellcasting is now in the actions section, but on top of that, spellcasting is now more built around utility, while casting characters now have special damage abilities that are built to be their primary action. Rather than using spell slots, they can simply cast a shorter list of spells a certain number of times a day. This is all to make the NPCs and monsters easier for a DM to run, which I really welcome (tracking spell slots on NPCs is a huge pain.)

Also, they're now just putting all monsters in alphabetical order - a Glabrezu will be under G rather than D for Demon.

Now, these changes are a preview of the biggest announcement:

In 2024, for the 50th anniversary of D&D, they'll be releasing new versions of the Core Rulebooks. This is not going to be a full 6th Edition, but will instead be a revision based on feedback from what will at that point be 10 years of 5E. They're designed to be compatible with all the old books, so I don't think we'll be seeing any profound re-workings of the basic rules, but probably tweaks to the classes and the monsters in the Monster Manual.

It's a lot to take in. I'm particularly excited to see if Spelljammer and/or Planescape are coming back.

Obviously, there are a lot of details yet to be revealed, but it's definitely some exciting news.

The Wild Beyond the Witchlight First Impressions

 I picked up my copy of The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, D&D's latest published adventure, which takes players into the realm of the Feywild.

I'm about 40 pages in, and already I'm pretty excited about what is on offer here. I'm still in the first chapter, which describes the eponymous Witchlight carnival, which ties into things we found out about in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and also gives us a better sense of who this Zibylna mentioned in that book actually is.

I don't want to get into serious spoilers. At this point in the book, we're really in the first stages of the adventure. The party goes to the carnival following one of two story hooks (one is more personal in nature, the other is a classic call to adventure - personally I'm more interested in the former, but we'll see how those hooks progress, as it's suggested that the party might have different objectives based on them.)

Anyway, the thing that stands out to me here is that there's more explicit advice for DMs. The carnival uses a tracking system to show what time it is in the 8-hour-long festivities, as well as the general mood of what's going on there (basically, the party has an influence on how everyone's feeling, which has story implications.

The immediate set-up means you're probably going to have a lot of stuff to do in a first session. If your players are the sort to really push for getting into danger and combat, I'll have to see what the rest of the book offers, but if you have players who are really into RP and shenanigans, this is a fantastic way to open the adventure.

There's a lot of cool lore right off the bat, and the tone of this adventure is already whimsical and intriguing before we've even gotten to the Feywild proper. The DM of my regular Sunday games more or less is an archfey already, so I think this would be a really fun game to run for that entire group (which I might do!)

Metroid: It's Been a While

 I realized just now that I've actually played every home console Metroid game (EDIT: actually, I forgot about Other M, so not technically). Granted, I've barely played the first one. I guess as someone who was born the year that it came out, I don't have much in the way of 8-bit nostalgia. My first exposure to video games was very much of the 16-bit era, and the 8-bit games are so basic and rudimentary that I don't really have fun playing them in the way that I do when returning to SNES classics.

What shocked me, though, to realize, was that there have only ever been two main-franchise Metroid games for home console.

I should add in that there's a huge caveat here - the Metroid Prime trilogy and Metroid: Other M are also home-console games, making that six over the past 35 years. The Prime games are great, though I'm given to understand that Other M was a big letdown.

Metroid has had a lot of releases on mobile systems. Metroid II: The Return of Samus was on the Gameboy (and we have the Gameboy's black-and-white monitor to thank for Samus' iconic Varia suit pauldrons, which were necessary to visually distinguish the suit from the initial one). Metroid Fusion, which is technically the fourth game in the series, was also released on a mobile system, the Gameboy Advance. Subsequently, the remakes, Metroid Zero Mission and much more recently Metroid: Samus' Return, which remade games 1 and 2, game out on mobile systems.

One reason for this, I think, might have been that in the wake of such revolutionary games as Super Mario 64 and Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the N64 Era was one in which all the major gaming franchises became 3D. The capability existed, and so the gaming industry seemed to decide that all games would have to make the leap. Some of these did better than others, but notably, Metroid skipped the N64. I first became aware of Samus because she was a playable character in Super Smash Bros., and then got a used copy of Super Metroid for like 5 bucks, which might be the best video game deal I ever got (oh man, I miss FuncoLand. Seriously, before it was bought by Gamestop, FuncoLand was an amazing chain of video game stores that all seemed like independent funky stores where you could try out games picked out by the staff on myriad consoles set up around the store, and you could find tons of really great stuff.)

I think the limitations of the mobile systems meant that they were the de facto home for side-scrolling games. In more recent years, things like New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Donkey Kong Country Returns would bring this style of gameplay back, but in the late 90s and early 2000s, it was as if the games industry worried that side-scrollers would be too retrograde in style (Yoshi's Story on the N64, something of a follow-up to Yoshi's Island, was a rare exception).

Mario made the transition to 3D very effectively, and Zelda freaking knocked it out of the park with what is, by many, considered the greatest video game of all time. But some transitions were a little less impressive, like Donkey Kong 64, which went a little insane with the "collect things in the level" concept imported from Super Mario 64. Notably, we haven't had another DK game like that since, and instead the series has returned to its side-scrolling roots with Returns and Tropical Freeze.

Metroid went for eight years without a follow-up to Super Metroid, but in 2002, we got a dual-release of Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion. The former was for the Gamecube while the latter was for the GBA, and the two were, I believe, released simultaneously. (Actually, a quick Google search puts Fusion as one day later,) and there was even a thing where you could hook up your Gamecube and GBA using an accessory I sure as hell didn't have (I also didn't have a GBA) where you could give Samus the fusion-style suit in Prime and... some cosmetic benefit in Fusion.

Anyway, Fusion built on Super Metroid's legacy, but I can't say a ton about that given that I never actually played it.

Prime, however, was a radical departure. The America-based Retro Studios reimagined the Metroid series as a first-person shooter, and while there were some who were mortified to see that, it turns out that in practice, the fundamental gameplay wasn't all that dissimilar. You were still shooting your arm cannon and missiles at foes, collecting upgrades that let you do new things which let you explore new places where you could get new upgrades.

Prime took the first-person perspective and played with it in a way few games do. Rather than simply adopting the perspective and leaving it at that, the Prime games had tons of environmental effects - your visor would steam up or catch droplets of water if you were out in the rain. Electrical interference would cause the HUD to obscure your view with static, and bright flashes of light would occasionally let you glimpse your own reflection in the visor, or rather, Samus' reflection.

The Prime games had three main entries, the first two being on the Gamecube and the 3rd being on the Wii (which, confession time, is the only one I actually beat. I got nearly to the end of the first two but never actually got to the final boss of either - I used to have a bad habit of giving up right at the end of a game I liked, perhaps so that it wouldn't be over.)

In 2006, actually prior to the 3rd Prime game, this spin-off series (though spin-off only in terms of continuity and gameplay, as it was still Samus) had a mobile release in Metroid Prime: Hunters, which took the FPS gameplay to a mobile platform.

In fact, there have been a fair number of mobile releases in the series, from the commercial failure of Metroid: Federation Force to the much better-received Samus Returns a year later, which was a remake of Metroid II.

In terms of home console releases, though, the most recent was Metroid: Other M, which came out in 2010. This means that the gap between console Metroid games is actually longer than it was between Super Metroid and Metroid Prime at 11 years.

Of course, given the nature of the Nintendo Switch, you could argue that this is also a mobile release as well.

Before Dread was even announced, there was a tantalizing tease that Metroid Prime 4 was in development back in 2017. However, about a year ago, Nintendo announced that they had scrapped the original project and were starting again from scratch, claiming that the project was not living up to their standard of quality.

It's certainly disappointing to have to wait a whole lot longer for the next Metroid Prime game, but the announcement of Metroid Dread basically washed away that disappointment.

The Nintendo Switch came out in 2017. Console generations typically last roughly 5 years, so we might be due for a new console some time in the next year or two. If that's the case, I'd think that Prime 4 is probably going to be on that, rather than the Switch. That being said, I think the Switch has been a hugely popular success, and the hybrid mobile/home console design is one I think Nintendo is likely to keep doing moving forward (or at least one I think they probably should).

The Outer Worlds is a Game I Would Have Loved About 10 Years Ago

 Finding it for less than 20 bucks on the Nintendo Switch store, I downloaded The Outer Worlds. The game is a FPS/RPG hybrid somewhat in the style of Fallout 3. Set in a distant future (or seemingly an alternate-future,) you're a space colonist whose colony ship was lost 70 years ago while corporations went to colonize other planets, and a mysterious scientist thaws you out intent on sending you on a mission to get the resources needed to thaw out the rest of your ship (which has thousands of others frozen in cryostasis) in defiance of the corporate dystopia that seeks to stop him and you.

You arrive on a planet and encounter the really crazy corporate culture that has developed while also dealing with a big alien planet with a lot of its own life.

The game has two major things going for it right off the bat: first off, what little I've seen of this planet is pretty and colorful. So often I find that these sorts of games go too far on the "used future" aesthetic as if everything has to be grey and brown. The second is that it has a Bioshock-like retrofuturistic feel to all the corporate advertising and such. It's not full-blown Fallout in style, as the ships, robots, and gear does actually look futuristic, but it's like everyone's discovered late 19th/early 20th century art aesthetics and gotten really into them.

The first settlement you come across is a company town dedicated to Spacer's Choice, which cans food (their speciality is something called "Saltuna," which is either salted tuna or something very weird and alien they're just marketing in a way to make you think it's that.) It's a dystopian world where everyone's afraid of speaking ill of their bosses lest they lose their one lifeline on an alien world.

In addition to wildlife and dangerous robots, you'll also come across Marauders, which are basically your classic bandits and thugs.

There are some fun wrinkles here - thanks to your 70 years in cryosleep (which was supposed to last only 10) you've developed a weird relationship with time, allowing you to periodically slow down time in the middle of combat, which lets you more precisely aim to cause various status effects.

I've only scratched the surface of the game, but it has made me realize something:

I'm not sure that I'm still into this kind of open-world game as I used to be.

Ten years ago (well, in a little less than two months) was the release of Skyrim, which has got to be the most popular open-world RPG of all time. And I drank deep of that game, spending hours upon hours finding dungeons and leveling up my skills to become a total badass.

But after sinking so much into that game, I think I've come to appreciate a more streamlined and curated game experience. There's something to be said for simplicity. When I saw that there were several types of food that provide various temporary buffs, and a whole system for repairing and modding weapons and armor, I think 25-year-old me would have been really eager to master these systems, but 35-year-old me feels his eyes glaze over.

When I got an NPC companion to follow me around and fight alongside me (thankfully they seem to always bounce back if they go down in a fight,) I realized that all that crafting and equipping gameplay was now multiplied by two, and if I wanted to get it totally right, I'd have to do a lot of flipping back and forth through menus and such.

One of the reasons I think I've been so excited for Metroid Dread of late is that it looks like it's going to be fairly classic Metroid gameplay, with a simple pattern of explore-acquire upgrade-explore new places the upgrade opened up. Samus never has to repair her gear, and upgrades have a visceral effect, not a change to stats. (Yes, the suits tend to reduce the damage you take and things like the Plasma beam do more damage, but no one has ever spent time in a Metroid game trying to balance a bunch of different scaling stats and crafting systems.)

I think as I've gotten older, I've become less patient with the fiddliness in gearing that most modern RPGs require.

Remembering classic SNES JRPGs, one would typically just have three equipment slots - a weapon, an armor, and an accessory - for each character. Most of the real strategic/tactical decisions are made in combat.

And I think that might be the real standard - even in a turn-based RPG system, you can have a cool strategy game to play (D&D is a non-digital example).

One of the things that I like about Skyrim is that the first-person combat actually felt pretty good (by 2011 standards). I remember making an Argonian character who was a sword-and-board tank type, and hitting someone with a shield bash felt really cool. Now, yes, I would fast-travel to all the best mines to power-level blacksmithing so I could make daedric weapons and armor as quickly as possible, but one thing that was very useful was that those upgrades were pretty linear - you knew you were getting a better piece of gear because it had a single stat to upgrade.

FFVII Remake managed to make the combat fluid while at the same time including the menu-hopping strategy of the classic FF games, which is frankly a mind-bending achievement.

With the Outer Worlds, I guess I just find myself shooting marauders in the head with 50 bullets and finding it weird they don't die until I realize that it's just because my gun has bad stats. I'm not saying it's an invalid way to build a game, but it's one that I'm finding less viscerally exciting.

I don't mean this to sound like a bad review. This is about my feelings for the game rather than the game itself. While I've only played for a couple hours, I think that if you really want an open-world style FPS with a pretty cool aesthetic, this is definitely one to check out.

Reviewing the Tribal Themes of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt

 I'll need to look into the odd rares and such of the latest set to see to what degree Midnight Hunt adheres to Innistrad's top-down focus. I guess they've done a lot of the classic horror tropes in earlier visits to the plane, and the mechanical themes that have developed are pretty strong, which feels like the major design focus here.

So, let's talk about those focuses (foci?)

Innistrad has always had tribes built around allied color pairs. Azorius (White/Blue) is Spirits (aka Ghosts), Dimir (Blue/Black) is Zombies, Rakdos (Black/Red) is Vampires, Gruul (Red/Green) is Werewolves, and Selesnya (Green/White) is Humans.

In Midnight Hunt, each of these has a keyword or ability word except for vampires, though there's a pretty clear mechanical theme for them as well.

Spirits have Disturb, which is, essentially, Flashback for creatures using double-sided cards. You have a human creature, and if it dies (or otherwise gets into the graveyard,) you can cast it for its Disturb cost but transformed to its spirit side, which is often either more powerful or has some kind of complementary feature. Not every spirit in the set is built this way, but I believe all the spirits have flying, so you can build a kind of flying deck around this. Spirits are a pretty common creature type, and we got a fair number in Kaldheim, which isn't going anywhere from Standard until next year (and if I recall correctly, Kaldheim is also built around two-color tribes, though it's all ten combinations, and I think Azorius colors are also spirits.)

Next, we've got Zombies. My most recent deck is a Dimir zombie one that tries to make use of decayed zombie tokens as cannon fodder. Oddly, Decayed is actually a pure downside that almost exclusively exists on creature tokens (though there is at least one exception to that.) Decayed zombies are basically one-time uses, but the point is that they're cheap to produce, which then means that you can get a lot of them and then sacrifice them for more permanent effects. Corpse Cobbling, for example, lets you basically stick them all together as one big Frakenstein-like creation that has menace (and no decayed.) And, of course, there's plenty in black to allow you to sacrifice creatures for powerful effects. I'm a big fan of Tainted Adversary, the black member of the Mythic Adversary cycle (actually, I think they're all pretty good) that is a 2/3 deathtouch zombie for 1B, and then when it comes into play (even if you didn't cast it, and even if someone kills it with a removal spell the moment it hits the battlefield) you can pay 2B any number of times to get two 2/2 decayed zombie tokens and a +1/+1 counter for the Adversary for each time you pay it. (What makes these cards great is that they have decent bodies for their cost even if you don't pay the extra costs, so you either get a mana-efficient creature early in the game or a much splashier effect with a bigger creature later in the game.)

Vampires don't have a keyword or ability word, but they do have a theme, which is that they tend to care about dealing damage to the opponent. There are a lot of creatures that have additional effects if they come into play on a turn where the opponent has lost life. Florian, Voldaren Scion, the legendary 3/3 first striker for 1BR actually has a slightly different effect, but a really powerful one - when your postcombat main phase begins, you get to look at the top X cards of your library, X being the amount of combat damage you did to the opponent that turn, and exile one of them, being able to play it for the rest of the turn. When you're hitting with multiple creatures, this lets you absolutely excavate your deck for a card you'll want to use. I think my cobbled-together Vampire deck might be my most successful one of the Innistrad archetypes so far (though my Human deck is also shockingly powerful.)

Then we have Werewolves, which are a whole lot of fun. As we've discussed before, they have the Daybound/Nightbound keyword, which keywordifies the mechanic they've always had, though I think it might work a little differently. Now that there's a day and night gamestate (you start tracking it once you put a card that cares about it into play) you can get werewolves into play on their transformed side if it's night. There are a bunch of solid cards here that work well together, including a bit of wolf/werewolf tribal support. Still, even if you're not going specifically with a werewolf deck, some cards like Reckless Stormseeker/Storm-Charged Slasher are probably going to work in any red aggro deck that isn't specifically goblins-only. Tovolar, the legendary werewolf creature, works best in a werewolf deck, though his transformed ability to give creatures extra power and trample is probably useful in any Gruul aggro deck.

Finally, we come to humans. Humans are built for a go-wide strategy, which is reinforced by their ability keyword Coven. If you have three creatures with different powers (like, power and toughness power,) these will have some extra effect. Just taking the creatures I got from my pre-order packs and burning a couple wildcards, I've managed to build a pretty powerful deck. Intrepid Adversary (another of that cycle) combos quite well with Bereaved Survivor/Dauntless Avenger (specifically the transformed side) as well as a few other creatures with enters-the-battlefield effects. Being able to distribute +1/+1 counters with something like Luminarch Aspirant makes it a lot easier to get that Coven bonus, and the Selesnya-color legendaries, Sigarda and Katilda, are both really great for this archetype. (Katilda lets you use your humans to ramp, and then use that ramp to put +1/+1 counters on all of them. Sigarda helps you get more humans out of your deck.)

Now, not all the themes in this set are tribal. One theme is Flashback, which might not be a total build-around, but I did manage to put together a halfway decent mono-red burn deck with Thermo-Alchemist and some other cards that like you to cast damage spells.

It is, of course, far too early to see what kind of deck archetypes become dominant, or if this set will unseat any of the big ones that were dominating Standard 2022 (which is now just "Standard") before its launch. Green stompy has been a big thing since Eldraine, and survived the transition to 2022 Standard, but I wonder if it will evolve into a Gruul, werewolf-based deck archetype (Ranger Class and Werewolf Pack Leader already play into that.) We've also had some pretty strong black sacrifice themes, and I could imagine a monoblack zombie theme becoming pretty strong.

I love themes, so I'm always hopeful that some new mechanical theme in a set will become viable in the format. We'll see how things shake out.

First Go At Werewolves

   Midnight Hunt is upon us! My first deck experiment is a werewolf tribal one, naturally. Initially I tried a three-color deck to include a couple of good black werewolves, but I was having mana issues and decided instead to stick to Gruul colors.

I've had mixed successes. I think I need to figure out which rares to burn my wildcards on (though I already used three on copies of Tolovar, which I haven't actually drawn in any of my games yet). So far, the stand-outs of the deck have been the Arlinn planeswalker card as well as Kessig Naturalist/Lord of the Ulvenwald.

The latter is a 2/2 for RG, and when you attack, you add either R or G, which sticks around until the end of turn if it's not spent. When it flips, it becomes 3/3 and retains the previous ability, but also gives all wolves and werewolves +1/+1 (other than itself).

Arlinn has an ability it took me a game to figure out how to use properly. Her +1 allows you, until the start of your next turn, to play creatures as if they had flash, and when they come into play they get a +1/+1 counter. She then has a -3 to create two 2/2 wolf tokens. When she flips, her +1 (unless it's more?) just adds some mana (I believe RG) while her +0 ability turns her into a 5/5 werewolf with indestructible.

So, there are a couple ways I think you could sequence Arlinn's abilities. One option is to -3 her on the turn she come out to get those wolves to protect her, and then the next turn, you use her +1 ability and wait, letting it become night at the end of your turn. Because her flash condition carries over to your opponent's turn, you wait until then to cast as many creatures as you can, all getting boosted and conveniently not turning things to day because it's not your turn. Then, you've got a boosted, transformed team of werewolves (assuming that your opponent doesn't have the cards to spend on setting it back to day) the next turn, when you can swing in with Arlinn and the rest of your wolfpack.

I did also put together a spirit deck, which actually did decently on my first game (it won) though I definitely need to do a fair amount of iteration on it to really make it work.

I'll be curious to see what cards wind up really blowing people away. I had some buyer's remorse burning four wildcards for Demiliches, which turned out to be really hard to use effectively.

I'm also waiting to see if the new dual-lands are worth 4-ofs. I got two of the Gruul ones and two of the Selesnya ones, and two copies are working out pretty well in my werewolf deck. I worry that drawing multiples in your opening hand will be a pain, though I guess at worst they come in tapped.

Weirdly it appears that there's only one basic land art for each type, though that might be because we'll get another in Crimson Vow later this year. I tend to like to diversify my land art when possible just to make things a little more interesting.

Anyway, it remains to be seen how strong the tribal themes will be in effective decks - I suspect instead we're likely to see individual werewolf cards proving themselves highly effective in decks that don't necessarily care about you having werewolves. But I like playing with set themes, like my Orzhov dungeoneering deck from AFR.

I'm eager to play around with the other Innistrad tribes, but I'm going to focus on refining this deck first.

EDIT:

Several matches later, I think I've started to figure out the rhythm and challenges of a werewolf deck.

As an aggressive deck (as is typical for Gruul,) you want to be putting a new creature into play each turn, but this of course means delaying nightfall, which is the state you really want the game to be in as much as possible.

Tovolar is one solution to this: if he's out and you have at least two other wolves or werewolves, then it becomes night at the start of your turn regardless, and he'll draw you a lot of extra cards.

Where the deck struggles is when the opponent has hefty creatures of its own. The werewolves aren't as impressive against a green stompy deck that already has a ton of big creatures.

Still, I really enjoy the flavor of it - the notion that you amass a bigger and bigger pack of wolves that can then seriously go on the offensive once your opponent misses a turn of spellcasting. Decks that draw a bunch of cards will make it harder to achieve this, but Tovolar (Tolovar? Cannot remember) helps force the situation.

Standard Rotation and Midnight Hunt

 I actually really loved Throne of Eldraine from a Vorthos perspective. Magic's original design in Alpha was top-down, before the nuances of game mechanics created a drive to build things around those mechanics. But anyone who has been playing MTG can tell you, there are some real powerhouse cards from that set that have been dominant in Standard for nearly two years.

Then again, if you've been playing in Arena, you've probably been playing in 2022 Standard, which excises Eldraine, Theros, Ikoria, and Core Set 2021 from the format.

Given that, the new Standard is going to be, basically, that plus the new Innistrad set that launches tomorrow. Even without Lovestruck Beast, Green Stompy has been a very powerful and popular dech archetype in that format, and I imagine with a big influx of werewolves, we might see that trend reinforced - though we might also see it branch out into Gruul colors, given that werewolves are a red/green tribe.

As someone who didn't get to play Innistrad on the last two visits, I'm eager to see how the various classic mechanics work out.

One note of controversy is the Decayed keyword, which is a drawback that shows up on zombie tokens. Decayed means the creature cannot block, and if it attacks, you sacrifice it at the end of combat. Now, if you love making massive, ever-growing hordes of zombies, this drawback might seem terrible. However, the intention here is that the drawback allows for cost reduction - you can pump out a whole lot of these tokens for cheap thanks to the keyword. And then, you can use them as fodder - either to attack with a lot of monsters at once to overwhelm blockers (kind of like a zombie movie?) or to sacrifice for other uses.

I don't think any creature cards themselves have decayed - it seems to be something that is only given to tokens or creatures who enter the battlefield from the graveyard. Obviously, I'll have to see it in play to get a sense of how well it works, but I'm curious.

I don't know if there's a real defining vampire mechanic, but they're going to be the centerpiece of the next set, so we'll have to see what happens then.

One thing I will miss is the Ikoria Triomes. I guess I'm just a sucker for any dual (or in this case triple) land that actually has the land types on them. One of my prized possessions is a Revised Edition Underground Sea, which is of course from the OG dual land cycle that had no downside (other than, in rare cases, land-type-specific-sweepers like Flashfires.) This, of course, was before basic land types had their mana ability as a baked-in rule, and in fact before land types were even listed on the type line (or "basic" for that matter,) so the card had to explain that you could tap it for black or blue mana, and that it counted as both an island and a swamp.

Anyway, I'm curious, given that the Streets of New Capenna will, I think, be built around 3-color factions, if we'll get new triple lands then, but that's probably not coming until next... spring? Summer?

My Cup Runneth Over

 This blog began as a World of Warcraft-specific one. I've played the game for 15 years, and probably logged more hours in it than any other video game. Before I get too dramatic here, this isn't some post announcing that I'm quitting the game or anything. I do have some continuing discomfort giving money to a company that is currently ignoring workers' demands and attempting to bust any burgeoning union rather than actually fixing the deep-rooted problems that have, apparently, persisted since the company's beginnings. A combination of a hiatus to gather thoughts on the Blizzard lawsuit and a three-week trip to the east coast interrupted by momentum in patch 9.1, and while I think I'd like to see the rest of Sanctum of Domination, I've just been feeling less compelled to play WoW of late. That makes me a bit sad, given that Shadowlands feels like my expansion - the kind of high-fantasy, big-concept swing that I've wanted the game to take.

And I don't think I'm going to jump onto the FFXIV bandwagon. MMOs seem to demand a lot more attention than other genres of game, and while I'm in deep enough with WoW and invested in it, I'd like to give other game genres some air to breathe.

As it turns out, this fall has a lot of stuff vying for my attention. In just two days, Innistrad: Midnight Hunt gets released for MTG (or at least Arena - I forget if the physical cards come out the same time as the digital ones,) which is a plane I missed on the first two visits, and one I've been really eager to play in. (I always wanted to make a werewolf deck, and this seems like the best time to do so.) The vampire-themed follow-up, Crimson Vow, comes out later.

Of late, I've also become obsessed with next month's release of Metroid Dread. I re-played Super Metroid on my Switch and some funky controls aside, the game holds up really well. (I've also been replaying Super Mario World, which to me is the quintessential video game, and have found that I definitely have many layers of rust. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to get into that freaking floating door in the castle in the Vanilla Dome but could never quite pull it off with Magikoopa shooting at me. I say this as someone who, in college I think, got all 96 exits and completed the Special World. I hope this isn't just me being old now.)

Then, on the D&D front, we've got Wild Beyond the Witchlight coming out this month and Fizban's Treasury of Dragons next month, both of which I've pre-ordered from my FLGS.

I'm also planning on replacing my 6S iPhone with one of the new ones announced today. I don't do a ton of gaming on my phone, but at least being able to run Arena on it without draining half the battery in a single match should be good (and having a bigger screen to see the cards.)

My biggest current gaming project is a probably-too-ambitious attempt to use the core rules of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to create a science-fiction equivalent (working title is Stars & Spaceships, which yes, is not good, but again, it's a working title.) I'm hoping I'll have something in a state to be playtested before too long. I know there are probably a lot of sci-fi games out there, but I also know that learning a new TTRPG can be a really daunting challenge, and I think letting my friends slip into a familiar world of actions and bonus actions, ability checks, attack rolls and saving throws, and a core character-building principle of "what species are you," "what were you before you took up this adventuring lifestyle," and "what kind of genre archetype are you" would make it a lot easier for players to pick the thing up and go. Expect more updates if I get this thing off the ground.

Anticipating Metroid Dread and Thoughts on Control

 I beat Super Metroid on what I think might only be my second full playthrough (could that be?) I played the original on a used cartridge in 1999 or 2000, after having picked Samus as my favorite fighter in Super Smash Bros. (Still probably my favorite even in Ultimate, though I enjoy Cloud and Ike a lot.) Super Metroid had been one of the games advertised on the back of my Donkey Kong Country bundle box when I had first gotten an SNES, but I knew next to nothing about the series until much later.

Anyway, Super Metroid is one of my favorite video games of all time, and speaks to me as someone who grew up in the 90s as one of the "quintessential" games for the major Nintendo franchises that came out for that system (a friend and I were talking about it and I conceded that Ocarina of Time is arguably the more quintessential Zelda game than Link to the Past, but I'd put LttP as a close second for me.)

One thing that I do think has not aged terribly well is Super Metroid's controls. The biggest issue is the need to cycle through Missiles, Super Missiles, Power Bombs, the Grappling Beam, and the X-Ray Scanner to get to the other items - given that you can complete the game without any sequence breaks even if you skip the X-Ray Scanner, it's arguably easier to play without it.

Now, the only other Metroid games I've played (other than a few very brief forays into the original NES Metroid) have been in the Metroid Prime spin-off series. Here, there was a dedicated missile button, and things like Super Missile were actually a kind of special alternate-firing mode that used the Charge Beam and missiles for fuel.

Selecting weapons in Super Metroid is especially tough on the Joy-Cons of the Switch, because it's very easy to accidentally hit the joystick while fumbling for the tiny Minus button. I generally found myself using the Directional buttons for movement given that the subtleties of the joystick could often cause me to accidentally aim up or down while trying to simply move left or right (or move left or right when trying to crouch.)

I'm curious to see how the free-aim system works in Metroid Dread. I believe it's adapted from the Samus Returns remake, which was a recent 3DS update of the Game Boy's Metroid II. Looking up the way that controls, you can hold the L button to aim with the joystick, which might be how it works in Metroid Dread.

One thing I'll say is that the Dark Souls/Bloodborne games have gotten me much more comfortable with using shoulder buttons for attacking (I guess also nearly all first-person shooters, though not the Metroid Prime games). I could imagine a control scheme where you use the right analog stick to aim while you use the left to move, and then fire with R or ZR.

Anyway, I ordered a Pro Controller because I think it will be far more ergonomic than the Joy-Cons, which feel like they're built for much smaller hands than mine.

While I think the SNES controller was a really elegant controller for its day (unlike the bizarre monstrosity that was the N64 controller - did any game ever use the left prong?) I think that just having more buttons on a controller now should help a lot to make gameplay more fluid.

Anyway, having played through Super Metroid again (and saved the animals! Which is not something I thought you could even do the first time I played it) my excitement for a new game in that mold has greatly increased. I'm a little worried that the EMMI segments might prove more tedious and annoying than enjoyable, but we'll see!

Coming Back to Super Metroid

 I think in anticipation of Metroid Dread coming out next month, I picked up the old Switch Super Nintendo collection and booted up the old Super Metroid. I had some save file there that had gotten the Morph Ball and that was it, so I figured that was close enough to a fresh one.

In the last two days, I've blown through most of it, though I'm now at the super space pirates right before Ridley and have, weirdly enough, gotten the urge to go collect more energy tanks and missiles and such.

I will say that I don't think the Switch Joy-Cons are really as good for the game as a classic SNES controller. For one thing, having to reach for the Minus button to select items is a real pain (though the item-switching system in that was never really great.) Frankly, as someone with somewhat larger hands, I've never loved the Switch controls, and should probably invest in a Pro controller, which is probably more ergonomic.

One thing that strikes me as kind of funny is that one of the most classic Nintendo franchises is, to an extent, a horror game. The feeling you're supposed to get in a Metroid game is one of creepiness and isolation. The monsters are lovecraftian horrors.

Playing through again, I am definitely more impressed by the speed runners who do all sorts of sequence breaks and perfect boss fights, because I generally come out of most of them with about half a tank of energy left (Crocomire was a real pain until I figured out the tell for his "spit" attack. Still had to make use of the charge beam because I ran out of missiles pretty early on.)

Anyway, this is a game that really managed to feel iconic. It's also interesting that it makes a lot of references to the original Metroid. It's explicitly taking place within the same parts of the planet Zebes as the original game. Kraid's region of lower Brinstar even seems to have a more old-fashioned visual design, even if the boss himself was seriously upgraded for Super Metroid.

Officially, Super Metroid is Metroid 3, and Dread, coming out nearly 30 years later, is only the 5th game in the main series. This, of course, ignores the Metroid Prime trilogy, as well as Metroid: Other M, which it seems most fans would rather pretend didn't exist.

Anyway, not sure that I have a ton to say about the game, other than that it's really good.

Maskwood Nexus Fun

 So, this deck was copied exactly from someone online and I cannot find the person to credit, so apologies. But it's a fun deck that takes advantage of the various tribal themes in Kaldheim as well as a favorite from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms.

I missed the period when Kaldheim was the new set, probably because Shadowlands had come out, but it seems like the intended tribal theme was a bit underplayed. I do have a fun giants deck, and I think elves got some love, but I don't think I've seen a bunch of archetypes built around the other tribes from Kaldheim's ten realms. Wait, no, duh, Angels. Ok, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this.

The point is, though, that one of the "tribes" is the shapeshifters of Littjara. These all have the Changeling keyword, which keyworded the Mistform Ultimus ability to give them all creature types anywhere they are.

Now, this deck doesn't actually have any of them, but it uses the artifact Maskwood Nexus to give that to all of your creatures.

The centerpiece of this is to use Maskwood Nexus to turn all your dudes into Skeletons and thus get big bonuses with Skeletal Swarming. But there are some other tricks that are really cool as well.

The deck is in Jund colors (Green, Red, and Black) and has a few ways to generate a ton of treasure tokens. The best of these is Magda, Brazen Outlaw, a legendary 2/1 dwarf that gives all your dwarves (and thus all your creatures if you have the Nexus out) +1/+0. It also, more importantly, gives you a treasure token any time a dwarf you control becomes tapped. While she's the only actual dwarf in your deck, the Nexus will make it so that every single one of your creatures is producing a token. Then, you can sacrifice 5 treasure tokens to search your library for a creature or artifact and put it into play.

And that's where you get the big bruisers - Immerstum Predator, Gold Span Dragon, and Eskia's Chariot (the latter of which gives you tokens that are going to be making more treasure each time they crew the chariot) can come in and smack your opponent for big chunks, giving an alternative but also complementary win condition in case Skeletal Swarming doesn't work out.

One of the cleverest things about the deck is that it uses Jaspera Sentinel to help ramp up, but you can also use the sentinel to ensure that Magda or other smaller and more vulnerable creatures you have aren't forced to attack by Skeletal Swarming. You basically get to "bench" them while the more expendable/durable creatures smash the opponent.

I tried building a skeleton tribal deck when I first got a couple copies of Skeletal Swarming, but at least for now, the pickings are a little slim. You can run into the problem of the opponent having enough blockers to kill two skeletons and survive, and thus reducing the threat of Skeletal Swarming. But this deck, using the Maskwood Nexus, makes it a lot easier to have a ton of skeletons out to give them all big bonuses.

The deck doesn't always take off, but it becomes a very serious problem to anyone who doesn't have the removal to get rid of Magda. In a game I played in the midst of writing this, I used Esika's Chariot to make sure I tapped all my creatures at the end of my opponent's turn, maximizing the treasure I generated, which I could then trade in to tutor up more creatures. It took me forever to get Skeletal Swarming out there, but once I did, the opponent forfeited before I could reduce them to -259 or so life.

Day and Night in Innistrad

 When it comes to MTG, I'm undeniably old school, even if I was literally in elementary school when I was old school, and I had a child's understanding of the game (wait, so we're not supposed to just use every card we own?) I still think of Planeswalker cards as "that new thing" even though they've been around since 2007 (though holy crap do I hope we get a black-bordered Urza planeswalker card in The Brothers War, maybe marking the moment he ascended).

Anyway, many, many things have changed about the game since I started playing. Like, Legend is no longer a creature type, and basic lands actually say "basic" on their type line. Creature spells aren't "Summon *creature type,*" and interrupts haven't been a thing for a long time.

One of the things I find really interesting is that there are these effects that no longer can be determined purely by what cards are in play (or "on the battlefield," which is a new term by my standards.)

Obviously, there have been cards that have effects while in the graveyard, or even while in exile (new term, once again) but I guess what I'm talking about might have started with "The City's Blessing" in Ixalan. This was a threshold (though not Threshold) where, once a player had amassed ten permanents, they got this blessing for the rest of the game, even if they lost some of those permanents. Naturally, like with most stuff in Magic, the "blessing" had no inherent rules - it's a tag that other cards check for.

Still, it's this odd thing: in formats and with decks that don't care about the City's Blessing, this is essentially a rule you can totally ignore. But should any card in your deck refer to it, suddenly it is a thing that needs to be checked.

Perhaps the most ambitious of these odd mechanics is Venture into the Dungeon. In the most recent standard set, Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, this one keyword (well, key-phrase might be a better term for it) carries a massive amount of meaning. It contains all three of the dungeons you can choose from, and requires you to track your progress along them, and then also requires that you track if you've completed a dungeon (and with one card, whether you've specifically completed the Tomb of Annihilation).

AFR boosters, I believe, all come with the three dungeon cards to make sure that everyone has access to them, but it does mean that any deck with this mechanic is going to need to have some way of know all the myriad things that any given instance of this keyword is going to mean.

So, in fact, the codification of "Day" and "Night" in Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, is less complex.

The mechanic is a keyworded version of the traditional Innistrad werewolf mechanic. To explain, werewolves typically enter the battlefield in their human forms. Then, there is a triggered ability, where at the start of the turn, if the player whose turn it was did not play a spell that turn, the werewolves transform, typically becoming bigger and beefier. Then, if someone plays two spells on their turn, the werewolves transform into their weaker, human forms. The idea here is to create a sense of anxiety and dread - your opponent wants to keep playing spells to keep them from transforming, because they become a bigger threat and are harder to kind of stuff back into their human forms once they're out.

Midnight Hunt is going to turn this into a keyword, and creates a new kind of gamestate where it can be day or night, all based on the same spellcasting premise as the older werewolf cards. Then, werewolves simply have the "Daybound" and "Nightbound" keywords on either side of them, transforming when the time changes.

Notably, though, if there aren't any cards that mention day or night, it is neither. Some other cards will actually make it one or the other when they enter the battlefield, and the Daybound/Nightbound permanents will cause the game to start checking if it's one or the other each turn.

I think what's really exciting about this is that Innistrad Werewolves can now be far more complex creatures. The "werewolf mechanic" rules text took up a lot of space, meaning that most in earlier sets could only be kind of "french vanilla" levels of complexity beyond their transformation. Now, you're going to see some far more interesting effects on these lycanthropes.

The establishment of day and night, and Daybound and Nightbound, then also opens up this concept to non-werewolf permanents. Frankly, I think that it could be a big Innistrad mechanic moving forward (though given that this is the third visit to the plane, it'll likely be a while before we return again.)

Davriel Discard

 I put together a fun deck that is a bit on the spotty side, but when it works, it's a lot of fun.

The core of the deck is Davriel, Soul Broker. Davriel, the black planeswalker introduced in Children of the Nameless, rather than a card set, is a fun, rakish character, and this card, part of Historic Horizons, is a digital-only planeswalker that has a very interesting mechanic.

It's 2BB, and starts at loyalty 4. The +1 ability is good for slowing down and discouraging attacks. When you use it, any opponent that attacks you or planeswalkers you control has to discard a card, and if they can't, they instead have to sacrifice a creature (such as the creatures with which they're attacking.) This does encourage you to play a bit of a discard deck, which is what I've built (though discard has always been an imperfect control strategy.)

The -2 ability is the real showstopper, and something that could only be done digitally. It says "accept one of Davriel's offers, and one of his conditions." Essentially, you get one really good thing, but then also have to pay a price. Both can take the form of one-time effects or permanent emblems. Generally, the offers are a little better than the conditions, but you can also figure out which are more important in the moment. For instance, one condition gives your opponents' creatures +1/+1 - pretty bad if you're facing an aggro deck, but not a problem at all if you're dealing with some creature-less control deck. My personal favorite offer gives you an emblem that gives every Davriel planeswalker +2: draw a card. Given that my deck also runs Davriel, Rogue Shadowmage, this gives that War of the Spark uncommon with no + abilities way more longevity, not to mention that I can pump the Soul Broker one as well, and oh yeah: you also get to draw more cards, which is always good.

His -3 gives a creature -3/-3 perpetually. This will often kill off a creature instantly, but it'll also ruin anything that gets bounced or flickered. That said, I don't think I've actually used this one.

All in all, the deck I've build is a mono-black control with various creature removal and discard spells to maximize the effectiveness of Davriel's +1 ability. The primary win condition is Westgate Regent, the vampire noble from AFR that has Ward - Discard a Card, which is a lot harder for the opponent to do when you've been chopping up their hand the whole game. The Regent can take an opponent down pretty quickly, thanks to their doubling power and toughness each time they hit the opponent. Naturally, they're still vulnerable to Soul Shatter and the like, but ideally you're forcing them to cast what they have in-hand as quickly as they can with all the discard.

There are definitely some better discard cards I could be using, but right now my policy is that I don't burn rare or mythic rare wildcards for Historic - I got my three copies of Davriel from playing JumpStart. We'll see if, in the future, I feel sufficiently invested in Historic to really build up a collection there, but one thing that's nice about Standard is that the narrower card pool means fewer must-haves at any given time.

We'll see what kind of stuff we can do with Midnight Hunt when it comes out in a little under two weeks. (I really hope that I can make a viable werewolf deck.)

Druids versus Clerics: Can Tree-Huggers Heal at the Same Level?

 The Cleric is the quintessential healing class. But that, in and of itself, often makes it a less popular role. Designers at WotC have explicitly said that they go out of their way to make Clerics the most powerful class in D&D to better encourage players to be the team healer.

If you've come from MMOs like WoW, it can be a little surprising how D&D healers work. Resources are far more limited, and so a healer is not simply going to spend every round of combat casting heals on their allies. Typically a D&D fight is mostly about killing the monsters before they can do the same to you, but being able to bring a player back from the brink (or, ideally, keeping them from going unconscious at all) can be a very important aspect of the party's action economy in allowing them to prevail.

Clerics are not the only class with access to healing. I'll still use a narrower definition of healing to mean that we're talking about the ability to heal other party members - a Fighter can get a pretty nice boost of health with their Second Wind ability, but this is reserved only for themselves - the Fighter can only get another party member healed by shoving a healing potion in their mouth.

But beyond Clerics, Artificers, Rangers, and Paladins all have a bit of healing, but as half-casters, they won't get terribly powerful effects. Bards also get some healing spells, but I don't believe any class feature reinforce this, and they only have some of the spells.

The only class I think you could argue is also truly set up to be a healer is the Druid.

Druids are, I think, more popular. They have a lot of unique spells, and their Wild Shape ability can be a lot of fun. But how do they hold up as healers?

Well, let's take a look at their respective spell lists first, and then class (really subclass) features that reinforce the ability to heal. (Of note, I'm counting the expanded spell lists from Tasha's Cauldron of Everything).

Clerics have the following spells that restore hit points (including spells that bring someone back from the dead, which give at least 1 hit point.) I'm going to set aside things that grant temporary hit points or increase hit point maximums. (I'm also leaving out any domain spells).

Cure Wounds, Healing Word, Prayer of Healing, Aura of Vitality, Life Transference, Mass Healing Word, Revivify, Death Ward (sort of), Mass Cure Wounds, Heal, Regenerate, Resurrection, Mass Heal, Power Word Heal, and True Resurrection

Druids get these:

Cure Wounds, Goodberry (sort of), Healing Word, Healing Spirit, Aura of Vitality, Revivify, Mass Cure Wounds, Reincarnate, Heal, Regenerate, and True Resurrection

So, if we eliminate the overlap, we have Clerics with Prayer of Healing, Life Transference, Mass Healing Word, Resurrection, Mass Heal, and Power Word Heal, while Druids have Healing Spirit and Reincarnate.

So, clearly, Clerics get more healing spells. But two of them are at 9th level, which few campaigns even get to.

I'd say the most glaring thing (before tier 4) here is the lack of Mass Healing Word for Druids. In most other cases, the Druid has another spell that can substitute in. Prayer of Healing is a wonderfully efficient out-of-combat heal, but I've seen Healing Spirit do wonders as a way to let the whole party get some quick heals in the middle of a fight. Reincarnate obviously introduces some major character changes (and I'd recommend that DMs change the race table to include other races in your setting,) but gets the job done.

While I think sheer numbers do put this in the Clerics' favor, I also think a Druid has nearly as good of a toolkit for keeping allies alive. Now, let's look at class features that aid with these things.

Of note is that neither class has any baseline class features that say anything about healing. So, we'll need to look at subclasses. Unfortunately, Clerics have an absurd number of subclasses. But I also believe that only a couple actually boost the ability to heal.

Life Clerics have Disciple of Life, which grants a bonus to the healing done by your spells. It's a decently generous bonus. They also have the Preserve Life channel divinity option, which is a big group heal. At Supreme Healing, at level 17, maximizes any healing you do. I think a Life Cleric is probably unmatched when it comes to sheer healing throughput.

Grave Clerics have the Circle of Mortality feature, which gives you maximum healing on a target that is at 0 hit points. Obviously not as powerful as Supreme Healing above, but you get it at level 1.

Now, I don't remember every single feature off the top of my head, but I think that that's it for real healing-boosting. Other Clerics get various utility that can keep other characters alive, but aren't strictly healing (and plenty of non-healers have stuff like that.)

Druids actually have a few subclasses with some healing capabilities.

Dreams Druids have Balm of the Summer Court, which is just an extra pool of healing to draw from.

Shepherd Druids have the Unicorn Spirit as one of their Spirit Totem options. This gives a group heal every time you use a spell slot to heal, and scales with your level. So by level 10, you could do a Cure Wounds on someone for like 9, but then everyone in the party gets 10 (meaning that the target winds up with a total of 19 healing.) Not only is this nicely multiplicative, but as a class built around summoning creatures, you can pour out a ton of healing to them. Even without any summoned creatures, though, this is a pretty great bonus to healing that can help top up allies even if they aren't in need of direct healing.

Stars Druids get their Chalice constellation with Starry Form, which effectively gives you an extra 30-ft Cure Wounds any time you cast another healing spell. In terms of pure healing, I think this is probably not as good as the Unicorn Totem (except at low levels,) but still adds some free healing, potentially to a second target, which is great.

Wildfire Druids get a bonus to their healing when their Wildfire Spirit is out, which is nice. They also get Cauterizing Flames, which effectively works as a pool of extra healing if needed, though it requires a little set-up.

And that, I think, is mostly it.

So what do we think?

The Cleric clearly has a bit of an edge here in terms of spells, especially when you get to tier 4, where those 9th level spells can do an utterly massive amount of healing and turn the tide of a battle. I think in the end, if you want to be the absolute healingest healer, Life Cleric is the way to go.

But we're not talking strictly about what's absolutely best. And I think that Druids are perfectly capable of playing the main healer role. This might have been riskier before they got access to Revivify, but once that's in the mix, I think a Druid could very easily be a party's primary healer, and even a highly effective one if they take any of those subclasses. As intense as those 9th level spells are, they're once-a-day effects. Using a spell like Shapechange, you could shift into various forms like Planetars to get access to a whole lot of limited-use heals.

So, I think this is something to consider if you want to play a healer but aren't really drawn to the lore and aesthetics of the Cleric. It might be slightly behind in full healing capabilities, but only by a small amount, and the added versatility might serve you very well.

My New Character: Triton Wizard Vodalos Sarpadiath

 On Wednesday, we had our session zero for the new Wildemount Campaign run by one of my best friends. Intended to be an RP-heavy, character-driven story, our DM has not planned any plot or villains, waiting for us to build our characters and make a story that grows out of that.

Now, our party does not actually seem to be very balanced. Between five players, we have only three classes, with two of us playing Paladins and two playing Wizards, with the odd man out being a Fighter.

Essentially, the two wizards are going to hiding behind a shield wall. And yes, we don't have any dedicated healers, so we've talked about possibly hiring an NPC to be run by our DM, or maybe we'll just rely a lot on healing potions.

My top two character concepts were the Wizard and an Armorer Artificer. While I will definitely want to play one of those (probably in my next major campaign,) my other current characters are all strength-based melee characters. I've also been playing half- and third-casters, and I wanted to play a character who is going to get some more advanced spellcasting.

I managed to roll pretty well, and using the Tasha's rules to reassign racial bonuses, I'm sitting on 18 Intelligence, 17 Constitution, 14 Dexterity, 14 Charisma, 12 Strength, and 8 Wisdom. I wanted to play a somewhat naive character, so low wisdom seemed the right call (and as a Wizard I have proficiency in Wisdom saves anyway, so I've got a positive bonus to every saving throw.)

While I could have probably put the 17 in Dexterity and made a Bladesinger, which seems a lot of fun, I'm actively avoiding melee attacks (in fact, none of my spells are even spell attacks - I have Mind Sliver as my damage cantrip, though with Tasha's you can actually swap out cantrips once a day) and then Magic Missile, Tasha's Caustic Brew, and Burning Hands as my damage spells I'm starting off with (and then Silent Image, Detect Magic, and Mage Armor as my other ones.) My other cantrips are Mage Hand and Prestidigitation.

Vodalos (whose first and last names are references to the Fallen Empires Magic: the Gathering set, which was the first I played with as a little kid) has a backstory that will push him toward Order of Scribes, which I think should be a very fun and effective subclass (and at level 14 I'll be able to tank a Disintegrate!)

I'm glad that I was able to start out with a +4 modifier to his main stat as well as a +3 to Constitution, which means I'll be able to max out his health pretty early (which I think is extra useful as a Wizard.) I'm considering grabbing Resilient: Constitution at level 8 or so to A: deal with that single odd ability score and B: make it easier to maintain concentration on spells.

With another Wizard in the party, I think we'll want to coordinate which spells we learn for free at level-ups, and then spend long rests swapping spellbooks to copy one another's (as a Scribe Wizard, I'll be able to do so at a rate of 2 minutes per spell level, which speeds things up by a factor of 60!)

Thanks to the Awakened Spellbook feature, specifically the one that allows you to swap the damage of spells that are the same level, I'm going to try to get at least one spell of unconventional damage. For example, having Magic Missile means that any 1st level spell I cast that damages things will be able to do Force damage, which almost nothing can resist. Getting Fireball and Lightning Bolt at 3rd level means I'll be set in most cases (though grabbing Tidal Wave or Thunder Step would give me some damage types that would be even less likely for them to resist.)

We haven't played a session yet - we're giving the DM time to build up a campaign for these characters and get the more specific details of their backstories. But I'm very excited to start.

Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Mechanics

 I'm very excited for the new set: Innistrad: Midnight Hunt. Along with the next set after it comes out, Crimson Vow, this will be a return to Magic's Gothic Horror plane, and a setting I was very excited to hear about when it first came out and on the return in the two-part Shadows over Innistrad block, but these came out during a time when I was not playing Magic, and so I never actually got to play with its mechanics.

Since cracking a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, I've found myself often drawn to the darker side of fantasy, and so Innistrad seems very much up my alley. Primarily built initially as a top-down set around horror tropes, it has always had a light tribal theme with two-color tribes of zombies, spirits, werewolves, vampires, and humans.

With the archangel Avacyn, whose role it was to counterbalance all of the human-killing monsters on the plane, now gone after her descent into madness thanks to Emrakul, humans in Innistrad are turning to older, more druidic folk magic. But Emrakul's presence within Innistrad's moon has caused a big problem - the days are getting shorter while the nights are getting longer, all on a plane where monsters get a lot more powerful at night.

That day/night cycle has always been implied on Innistrad, and is most commonly reflected on werewolf cards. If a player goes for their own turn without casting a spell, werewolves will transform into their scarier, wolf form. However, if a player then casts two spells on their own turn, the werewolves turn back into their human forms.

That concept is being expanded with a new keyword, which is Daybound and Nightbound. It works the same, but keywords this ability so that werewolves can now simply have "daybound" on their human side, and "nightbound" on their transformed side. However, this mechanic is no longer bound to only werewolves, so there will be other cards that make use of this concept, as well as a special card similar to the Forgotten Realms dungeons to help keep track of it.

To represent humanity trying to combine their strengths to stand against the monsters, Coven is a new ability word. This is a modifier that will either allow certain abilities or buff spells and such, as long as you have three creatures with different powers.

Disturb, then, is a bit like Flashback but for permanents. For instance, a creature can be cast as normal, but then if it dies, you can pay its Disturb cost to return it to play, but transformed. This seems likely to work mostly with spirit creatures, where you'll have a human character who dies and then comes back as a spirit.

Finally, Decayed seems to be a keyword that only shows up on zombies (and maybe even specifically zombie tokens.) It's a drawback, where the creature cannot block, and then once you attack with it, you sacrifice it at the end of combat. I think the intention here is to let you summon a pretty enormous host of zombies, but you won't be able to keep growing it if you use them. So you either need one big push, or you can use them as sacrificial fodder for other spells and abilities.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this set a whole lot. I've already pre-ordered the 50-pack set on Arena. I really want to make a werewolf tribal deck, and if there's any set where that would be viable, it'll be this one.