Naya Runes

 A little break form Elden Ring (I have roommates, so the TV is not always available, after all) to talk about a deck that I think has become fairly popular. It's relatively cheap to put together, with most of its staple cards being uncommon or common.

The deck is Naya Runes!

Runes are a cycle of auras from Kaldheim that you can place on any permanent, though they're primarily intended for creatures or equipment. Each costs one generic and one colored mana, and each creates an effect on the creature or any creature the equipment is attached to, such as +1/+1 and trample, flying, deathtouch, lifelink, etc.

More excitingly, these auras all let you draw a card when they enter the battlefield.

Now, let's talk about the two other key pieces:

Jukai Naturalist is a 2/2 human monk enchantment creature for GW (or is it WG? Can't remember the convention there) with lifelink. They also reduce the cost of enchantments by 1.

Runeforge Champion, then, is the first rare we're talking about, and is a 2/3 dwarf warrior for 2W. He has two important effects: first, when he enters the battlefield, you can search your library or graveyard for a rune card and put it into your hand. Next, he allows you to pay just 1 to cast any rune.

These two together create the most exciting effect of the deck: with the cost reduced to 1, that is further reduced by the Jukai Naturalist, and thus each rune is free. If you get lucky, the rune draws you another rune, and you can chain a bunch of these together.

And any deck that lets you cast a bunch of spells and draw a lot of cards is going to feel good.

So, we run Runes of Might, Sustenance, and Speed - I think 4 of the first two and 3 of the latter. Sustenance grants Lifelink, Speed grants +1/+0 and haste, and Might gives +1/+1 and trample.

Next, to fill things out, we have Generous Visitor, a 1/1 spirit for G that lets you put a +1/+1 counter on any creature whenever you cast an enchantment. This, of course, can be huge if we get a big rune-chain, but the deck has a lot of enchantments anyway, so it's a nice buffer.

Next, Kami of Transience is a 2/2 green spirit for 1G that has trample and gets a +1/+1 counter each time you cast an enchantment spell - these can get quite big. The massive benefit of these is that if an enchantment you control goes to the graveyard, you can choose to bring this back from the graveyard at the end of the turn, making this a recurring problem for your opponent.

Now, we like to have a lot of cards available to us, and that's where Showdown of the Skalds comes in. This saga starts by exiling the top four cards of our library and letting us play them this turn and the next turn, for 2WR. Then, the next two turns, each time you cast a spell, you get to put a +1/+1 counter on a targeted creature.

Where things get downright mean is Hallowed Haunting. This enchantment for 2WW causes you to create a Spirit creature token each time you cast an enchantment spell with "this creature's power and toughness are equal to the number of spirits you control," meaning that things can get out of hand real quick. Furthermore, if you control seven or more enchantments, your creatures all get flying and vigilance, and at this point you've probably got an unstoppable army to sweep the opponent.

Commune with Spirits is a nice utility spell - for G, this sorcery lets you look at the top four cards of your library and put a land or an enchantment card into your hand, and put the other three on the bottom of your library. Early-game this can work a bit like Environmental Sciences to smooth out your mana curve, while late-game it can help you dredge up runes or Showdown of the Skalds to keep up your card advantage.

Anyway, this is a fun deck that I also appreciate isn't profoundly annoying to play against - there are answers that can be brought against the deck, but it's also highly resilient and bounces back from board wipes with relative ease.

One Way Elden Ring Evolves the Soulsborne Genre

 Not long ago, I was playing a lot of Dark Souls III. It's a great game, of course (though one I have, frustratingly, never beaten - though I wonder if I were willing to skip the end of the Ringed City that I would be able to take out the Soul of Cinder without too much controller-shattering) but, like a lot of these games, there's a sense sometimes that every choice is a profoundly important one.

For example, there are a lot of weapons in the game that you can only find one of. If you, then, want to put a weapon infusion on it - adding some special kind of damage and perhaps alternate stat scaling - you have to use a special item that is consumed. You can undo this with a Scriving Stone, but I believe the original crystal used for the infusion is spent.

Elden Ring takes the "weapon arts" of DSIII and makes them a bigger part of the game - allowing you to collect them and swap them in for various weapons and shields. But these have a couple huge improvements: first off, you can easily swap between them on a particular weapon. Next, the Ashes come with the option (though not the obligation) to change the scaling of your weapons. And that can also be swapped out easily at any site of lost grace.

As another example:

In DSIII, Embers are an item that allows you to enter the "Lord of Cinder" status condition - which significantly increases your max health and also opens you up to co-op (and invasions). Embers can sometimes, on rare occasion, drop off of enemies, but most are found in the world and don't respawn. While you can rack up a lot of these, there's a psychological effect you get with this sort of scarcity that makes it feel like a huge gamble to use it.

In Elden Ring, you can easily farm the Erdleaves you need to make the equivalent item, which allows you to see the summoning signs around boss rooms (maybe anywhere those curved crucifixes are?)

Essentially, it feels like, on a philosophical level, the game is more forgiving of experimentation, which I think is always a really good thing, especially in a tough game like this.

It appears that this even applies to Remembrances - supposedly if you get to the top of those giant walking mountains with the bells (featured in many a trailer) you can duplicate these "boss souls" so that you could potentially get both boss items in a single run. While my Int-based spellcaster is unlikely to use either of the strongly Strength-based items off of Godrick the Grafted, the items you can get from Rennala's Remembrance both appeal to me - a staff and a spell (the spell requires 70 Intelligence, though, which means I've got at least 30 levels before I can cast it).

I'm curious to see if the same is true for the "Rebirth" you can do after you hit a certain point in the game - this requires an item to hand over to the NPC who does it (no spoilers) but I wonder if those items are finite or farmable.

Rennala... Down? Explanation Within

 Well, I finally put all that Erdleaf I had been mushing into materials to summon co-op collaborators and trounced Rennala, Queen of the Full Moon after several attempts where it seemed I was just about to win when I missed one dodge that obliterated me.

I don't know how spoiler-conscious my (theoretical) readers, but I guess spoiler alert? To the extent that that means anything with From Soft's enigmatic storytelling.

My partner was probably over-leveled, but my policy in Souls-like games is that I take any method the game is willing to give me to make it easier. No self-imposed challenges here, and if I can get a buddy to draw the mage-queen's attacks while I summon massive boulders to toss at her with Rock Sling, I have no qualms in taking it.

Oddly, however, defeating her did not leave her to be stomped in the face like Godrick by a bitter servant for the rest of eternity - instead, Rennala becomes a friendly NPC who can help you re-spec your character if you want to swap out what attributes you've leveled.

Rennala is introduced carrying a big egg, and Raya Lucaria has a motif of birdcages and cuckoo birds, which to me suggests that the egg is something else's, playing on some kind of psychic connection to her (cuckoos infamously lay their eggs in other birds' nests, and the cuckoo hatchlings get rid of the other eggs, preying on the mother bird's instinct to feed her babies).

Now, the whole second phase of this fight maybe implies that we were fighting some other entity... or something. But I haven't had the chance to really pore over all the hints at what exactly is going on here. We know that Radagon left her to marry Queen Marika and become the second Elden Lord (after Godfrey the Golden was the first). Maybe the egg is Marika's?

Oh, and the other huge lore drop we get if we go back to Roundtable Hold is that it was Marika who shattered the Elden Ring in the first place - which is crazy given that she's also described as its living embodiment. She is imprisoned within the Erdtree, and it sure looks like we're being pushed toward there - in fact, we've been told to go there now, despite there being a few more demigods for us to take down.

It's really odd being in this period of the game in which our understanding of the lore is so tentative - I've always come to these games after they've been out for years and hundreds of YouTube essayists have described tons of intricacies and connections.

I hit 40 Intelligence recently and was looking at the items I could get for Rennala's Remembrance (the "boss soul" equivalent in this game) figuring these would be more appropriate for a sorcerer. That assumption was correct, but one requires 70 intelligence.

Anyway, with a major dungeon completed (though given that there's an extra boss in Stormveil that I've barely been able to dent with my spells, I think "completed" is a pretty open question) I'm going to probably be sticking with exploration mode for a while.

I am also feeling a strong temptation to work on my Confessor alt, especially after Fextralife put out a video on how to build a block-focused paladin - I've never really thought much of using shields against bosses, but either it's always been viable or it's more viable in Elden Ring. The guard-counter, which I've even used on my below-100% physical shield on the mage is a really satisfying move.

The open world nature of this does make it a little more daunting to consider playing an alt, but I do really want to try out a few more builds - it seems that bows might actually be a viable primary weapon, which is cool.

Anyway, right now I'm climbing a cliff northeast of Liurnia with what seems to be sirens that sing in some kind of latin-like language, and I think this might be a way to reach a new region.

Facing Rennala

 Somewhat unexpectedly, I went from the Red Wolf of Radagon, squeezing out a victory, to discovering the room where one fights Renala, Queen of the Full Moon, aka the second (well, second if this is the second legacy dungeon you do) major boss of the game.

I beat the first phase of the fight, believing that it was going to be far easier than anticipated... and then the second phase began.

Phase one, Rennala is lounging on a floating chair while her students crawl around, casting hostile spells. The queen is surrounded by a bubble of golden light, which protects her from damage. To get her out of it, you need to hit three of her students that have golden bubbles themselves (these telekinetically shoot books at you, though this doesn't seem to do a ton of damage). Popping the three smaller bubbles (which doesn't require you to actually kill the student, just hit them once) will cause Rennala to fall to the ground, and you can pour some damage into her for a few seconds before she summons a new bubble, doing AoE damage and resetting.

One thing I discovered is that Rock Sling, a gravitational sorcery, deals a lot more damage to her because this seems to do a different school of magic damage. Here I am wishing there was a "raw" weapon scaling one could get, because my sword also does magic damage.

Anyway, this first phase is one of those "don't panic just because there are a lot of enemies" fights similar to the Deacons of the Deep in DS3 or the Celestial Emissary in Bloodborne.

Phase 2 I only saw a bit of, but she has some very powerful attacks that include throwing the moon at you. It's in a separate location as well. Again, Rock Sling seems to be a great option here, as I was taking off significant chunks of her health with each cast.

Anyway, I can still count this day as one of progress having gotten the Red Wolf down, but it's sort of surprising how quickly one goes from that boss to the final one of the dungeon (I guess Stormveil was quite different by having its miniboss at the very start). I suspect there will be two bosses per legacy dungeon, though again I'm finding that there are areas of these dungeons I have not really seen on my pass through - even if they are more traditional Soulsborne experiences, they're far from linear.

What's With This Big Tree? and Other Questions and Observations About Elden Ring

 I suspect it will be a thing that anywhere we travel in the Lands Between, we'll always be able to see the massive Erdtree towering over the land, projecting its golden light.

After feeling pretty dumb for not realizing earlier that "Limgrave" was "Limb-Grave," as in, the place where Godrick is sourcing all of his tarnished limbs to graft onto his body (and perhaps onto his followers) - and that it's Godrick we probably have to thank for taking us to the Lands Between in the first place - I had another thought: Grafting of course is used in human surgery sometimes. Someone with skin cancer who has a tumor removed will have a skin graft, perhaps replacing a bit of skin from the face with some from an area you don't worry as much about being scarred, like the thigh.

But grating is far more common in horticulture, where limbs from trees can be combined with one another, allowing a limb to grow on despite being disconnected from its original plant. Godrick's appearance is horrific, of course, but in some ways, the grasping arms coming off of his shoulders and upper arms are actually a bit reminiscent of the branches of a tree. Godrick has taken over Stormveil Castle after the exile of Godfrey the Golden - the progenitor, it seems, of the Tarnished - and he's specifically grafting the limbs of Tarnished to his body in his attempt to become the Elden Lord. It would seem that he's trying to claim the strength of Godfrey's line for himself, which makes his accusations that we are "playing at a lord" pretty hypocritical (a fitting attribute for a villain).

I find it interesting that the game insists on a few specific terms when referring to the Big Important Concepts of the game's world.

Naturally, I'm inclined to compare this to Dark Souls. In that, we know that beings discovered the Lord Souls, and also the First Flame. I was never entirely clear on whether Gwyn's Lord Soul was one and the same as the First Flame (probably not, as I think the first Dark Souls has you piecing together his soul from various bosses such as the Four Kings and Seath the Scaleless).

Elden Ring has a couple things that may or may not be directly related or even the same. We hear a lot about the Golden Order, which seems to be the kind of proper logic of the world. The Elden Ring seems to be the establishment of that Golden Order in magic Runes - and with the Rune of Death stolen, the entire thing shattered, sending the world into chaos.

Then we have the Erdtree. The Erdtree appears to be the source of Grace - itself a golden light that guides us, and I think it's tied to the Elden Ring given that when we collect our dropped Runes after doing a corpse run, it looks almost as if there's a small sapling made of golden light in the place where we fell.

But it seems that the Erdtree is not the be-all end-all of the world. In a ruined church east of the vast floodplain where the Academy of Raya Lucaria sits, there's a massive tortoise with a bishop's miter (yes, you read that right) who tells us about how the church was the site of a marriage between the founder of the academy, the moon queen, and someone affiliated with the Erdtree - seemingly indicating that the moon is its own power beyond all that. But that guy (and man I'm lacking names here) then left her to go marry Queen Marika and become the second Elden Lord, after Godfrey left and became Tarnished.

Oh, and another thing: this might be less about the game's specific lore than posing a question of underlying allegory. Anyone notice that Queen Merika's name is pronounced exactly like all but the first syllable in "America?"

Another thing I'm curious about is Melina - she's a pretty important figure to us early on, and in theory she's the one who is actually helping us level up, but I haven't really seen her in a long while, even after beating Godrick.

Another major visual motif is fingers. And once you beat Godrick (or, I'd assume also if you beat a different legacy dungeon first, its boss) a door opens in Roundtable Hold that allows you to meet and commune with the Two Fingers, which is way, way more literal than I had initially thought. And they are... super gross.

Now, I haven't come across this myself in my playthrough, but I'm given to understand that there's a kind of eldritch, forbidden faith (the two fingers being associated with proper holiness) known as the Three Fingers - one wonders, then, if there was originally a full hand in Roundtable Hold (or somewhere) and that there was some kind of schism.

Dragons are also a presence in the game. I've come across a Dragon Cult camp, but I don't really have a great sense of its import yet.

Knowing how deep and complex FromSoft makes its lore, I'm eager to continue delving into the lore and getting a better sense of the story.

That Green Grass Over There Looks Really Green! (Elden Ring)

 While I made an alt character, I have actually been pretty consistently playing my Astrologer with his sorcery build. I struggled a bit to find the Smithing Shards I needed to get his weapon upgraded to +3, and I may... have gotten a little carried away - my Magic Short Sword is now a +8 (I had a lot of the later materials). But, I finished the Raya Lucaria Crystal Tunnel mini-dungeon, which gives you the Bell Bearing you can give to the twin husks in Roundtable Hold and thus be able to purchase the tier 1 and tier 2 stones indefinitely.

This, of course, is a real demonstration of the trickiness of open-world design. I keep wondering if there are things in the early Limgrave area (oh, and I woke up this morning realizing how straightforward that name is - the game literally starts with one of Godrick's minions taking us, a Tarnished, to Limgrave, where he kills Tarnished and uses their limbs. Limb-Grave) that I have yet to discover.

One thing I'm a little surprised by is how few weapons I've found after quite a few hours of play. I guess that in part, because it's so easy to swap out Ashes of War and change the stat-scaling on your weapons, there's less of a need for so many. Of course, as a caster, I only have the stats for my starting sword and a couple of daggers.

Naturally, this is making me feel like I should play my Confessor, who is going to be a melee/faith hybrid build. While I originally planned to go Strength-based, I found the Flail at the little camp where you get your first map fragment, and realized it has an 18 Dexterity minimum - so when I go back to that character I'm going to get him at least up to that (it seems to have scaling with both Dexterity and Strength - but I supposed I could swap out Ashes of War if I wanted to go Strength-based).

One thing I've been trying to find is more of the gravity-sorcery magic that I saw previewed. It occurs to me, however, that given that I've been going around Liurnia (where the Academy of Raya Lucaria is - one of the legacy dungeons, I assume,) I'd likely be finding more traditional Glintstone sorcery, and that I should instead go east to the regions where General Redahn (conqueror of the stars or whatever he's called) hangs out - this is where I got my Meteorite Staff, after all (which can't get upgraded but starts with S-tier Intelligence scaling).

All the Soulsborne games are pretty dense. It might be that the community just hasn't had the chance to put all the pieces together yet, but Elden Ring feels a bit dizzying in terms of how much there is to do. Still, I've never felt really stuck, in large part thanks to the fact that I can always go try something else. There's a dragon that guards the key to the Academy that I haven't been able to take down (only getting it to like 75% - it's either resistant to magic damage or intended for much higher-level players) though I just read online that you can actually get the key by sneaking past the dragon instead of fighting it.

Limgrave is a sort of deceptively normal-looking region with green grass and blue skies. While Liurnia is still fairly "real-world" like, when I've gone to the east to a place I think is called Caelid (I don't have the map fragments to be sure,) the look is very different - red skies and a scorched earth.

I still feel like I'm running out of FP pretty regularly - I haven't quite figured out what the ultimate "damage-to-FP efficient" spell is, or if I just need to level up the Mind stat some more (the equivalent of Dark Souls' Attunement - though I think that it's separate from the items that increase how many spells you can pick up).

Scratching the Surface of Elden Ring's Lore

 FromSoft, and specifically Hidetaka Miyazaki, has a very unusual approach to game lore.

Lore in games, particularly RPGs, which are a very narrative-driven genre, is often a big draw. While I don't think a game can survive on lore alone if its gameplay isn't good, the lore can help us feel invested, to make playing the game feel more meaningful.

And in storytelling, the standard advice is that clarity is key: a good story will have a character with clear motivations and a plot with clear stakes. Miyazaki doesn't really like to do that.

The Soulsborne games have created a cottage industry of YouTube videos and wikis that delve into and attempt to unravel what it is, exactly, that these games are about, but the games are intentionally aloof - leaving them open to interpretation. Consider, for example, the two possible endings of the original Dark Souls. In one, you Link the Fire, sacrificing yourself to extend the Age of Fire, but by the time of Dark Souls III, we find that this process has become a regular historical ritual, not any sort of permanent solution to the problem. In the Dark Lord ending, we walk away from the First Flame and usher in an age of darkness - but is darkness actually evil? And that's not a rhetorical question! The player is left to decide for themselves whether they've gotten the "good ending" or not.

At this point, I'm still fairly early (I assume) in Elden Ring, having only beaten the first "Legacy Dungeon," Stormveil Castle.

Soulsborne games use visual motifs a lot to give you clues about the world. Different factions and groups will wear familiar colors or wield similar spells. The fact, for example, that Pontiff Suleyvahn has a sword that scales with Intelligence gives you a hint that this guy isn't some devout priest.

So far, I don't really have a strong sense of all the factions at play in Elden Ring. Clearly, each of the demigods likely has a faction associated with it. Godrick, the boss of Stormveil Castle, has decided to empower himself by grafting the arms of various Tarnished people (like us) onto his shoulders and back to make himself stronger. The first "boss" we face, and in almost all cases get promptly destroyed by, has been made spider-like in how many grafted limbs it has, and I assume the one we face in Stormveil Castle is the very same one (if you kill it, it doesn't come back unless your power goes out before the game saves).

Godrick's castle has a painting of a figure with a lion companion - and it just so happens that there's a lion-like humanoid boss of a mini-dungeon to the south of Limgrave. I suspect that Lions could be a common motif to look out for.

Another character we meet (whose name I'm blanking on) is the narrator of the lore trailer - the strange blue-skinned witch with the kind of after-image of a second face reflecting her own. She also seems to have two extra arms (or maybe four?) that look to be grafted on - yet she seems to not be in league with Godrick.

I also know that there's a school of sorcery called Raya Lucaria, and the woman who sell sorceries and is an exile of that school wears a big stone statue head as a mask or helmet, and I've seen other characters with this look.

Anyway, it's super early and I'm eager to delve deeper. Normally I try to play through these games perfectly without missing anything, and I'm sure that I'll screw up some quest lines or something, but I'm trying to just absorb what I can for now.