Going In Blind to Session Zero

 Tomorrow, I'm going to an (outdoor, fully vaccinated) session zero for a new campaign set in Wildemount, the continent on Exandria, which is D&D's most recent canonical setting (originally established by Matthew Mercer as the setting for the Critical Role campaigns. Actually, given its mention in Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, you could argue that Theros is actually newer, but on the other hand, the MTG worlds are also only dubiously "canonical" as part of the greater D&D cosmos, given that they're from the multiverse of a different IP that is, conveniently, owned by the same company. Similar questions arose when the MTG set called Dungeons & Dragons: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms brought in folks like Zariel, Mordenkainen, and Lolth as Planeswalkers.)

Per the instructions of our DM (who is also one of my oldest and best friends, and has played in every campaign I've run, and is a veteran DM himself,) we've been asked not to come up with characters until this session zero. This goes against my instincts, which is to write 6-10 page short stories as a backstory (I've actually written stories that began as character backstories before deciding they had legs as fantasy literature, and am now 8000 words into something that might become a novel). In an effort to build the characters deeply into the world, he wants us to all begin crafting our characters with RP at the forefront.

Still, D&D is a game with mechanics, and we're still going to be playing the game, so I've given some vague thought to the general shape of what I want to play.

I'm torn, slightly, between one class and subclass I want to play and a broader goal. Currently, the three characters I play most are an Eldritch Knight Fighter who is the group's tank and is melee-based, an Oath of Vengeance Paladin who is more more focused on damage output (but due to being one of the two melee characters in the party, becomes something of a tank by default,) and a melee-based Gloomstalker Ranger (who has been an illustration of why you should always go with a Dex build as a Ranger even if you plan on fighting in melee. Just use shortswords or scimitars instead of handaxes and you'll be fine.)

As you can see, I always seem to play characters who get into melee, and whose primary combat move is to just hit things.

So, my general intention with this new campaign is to try to be the opposite, playing a pure caster who would sit at range. My personal aesthetics push me toward a Wizard, but I'm trying to avoid going too specific on that should another player really want to be one. I have been somewhat drawn to the idea of a Druid - so often Wild Shape is the feature people focus on with them, and I think it would be fun to play one that is truly a caster first and foremost, likely going with either Circle of Wildfire or maybe Circle of Stars.

I love Warlocks, but I have played one through level 13, and so would prefer to try something new.

Now, this might all go out the window if I decide to go with the class and subclass I've been kind of obsessed with, which is the Armorer Artificer. In its Guardian Mode, I think it becomes the best tank class in the game (though Ancestral Guardian Barbarian is up there,) but of course this puts me once again into the category of a heavily-armored character who mostly just hits things. I could focus more on the Infiltrator Mode, but my instinct is that that version of the Armorer is not quite as amazing (though still decent.) And, of course, while you do get half-caster spells, the primary mode is still going to be attack rolls.

I've played one before (to level 12, actually,) but I do love Monks, and could imagine that as an alternative, though again that is utterly opposed to my primary intentions. I've only played one in a one-shot, but I did enjoy playing a Rogue as well, though again, the same issue arises.

Now, the point of the session zero is to come up with the character first, and then figure out a class that fits for that character. But I think there are a fair number of classes that could work for different classes. A Fighter's intense training could easily translate into a Monk's time at a martial-focused monastery. A Druid who studies natural mysteries could easily be a Nature Cleric, or even a Wizard.

When I write a backstory, I like to include at least one (though usually several) big mysteries - something weird happened that has not yet been explained, or there's a strange person who told the character something that does not yet make sense. I like to include these to seed things with the DM. Our DM is also doing what I intend to do in future campaigns as well, which is to not even come up with a primary plot until the characters have established their backstories. Brennan Lee Mulligan made this suggestion, arguing that in any good story, you wouldn't be able to just swap out different protagonists.

The nature of WotC's published adventures requires them to be somewhat open-ended in order for anyone to be able to run them with whatever party. And a really skilled DM can work specific character elements into a pre-written story. But it's a pretty exciting prospect to imagine that the big bads we fight and conflicts we deal with are all baked into our characters' stories. I mean, isn't it way cooler that Darth Vader is Luke's father instead of just some random bad guy? (Though, counterargument: didn't it suck when they dragged Rey's grand-parentage into Rise of Skywalker when the story would have been so much more meaningful if her destiny wasn't determined by her genetic donors?)

Anyway, the plan is for us to have a nice long session talking about the world and where we want our people to come from within it (naturally, I've gravitated toward races that aren't actually mentioned in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. Warforged are actually technically in the lore if you consider campaign 2 canonical, and then Tritons are just not mentioned at all, but I think they're really cool. We'll see. I could play an elf, though I'm usually less inclined toward the non-human Tolkienesque races).

Then, after our session zero, we're going to have one-on-one discussions with the DM about our character, including secrets they might possess that the group doesn't know, or just more broadly fleshing things out.

Conceptually, I think I'm going to try to avoid a dark and brooding backstory filled with trauma (which my Paladin is currently sitting on a whole mountain of). I had a lot of fun in a one-shot playing an older character who has a super healthy home life. I also might try playing an idealistic and naive young character (arguably my Great Old One Warlock was one of those, though he had that in addition to being literally psychotic... and he was also convinced he killed his dad in what was actually an accident, so I guess he had trauma too.)

Anyway, our session is tomorrow, assuming nothing comes up to delay it, so I might post about the new character tomorrow evening!

Cordial Vampire and a Historic Vampire Deck

 So, honestly, until embarassingly recently, I didn't really "get" Modern Horizons, or its digital-only gaiden sequel, Historic Horizons. But, now that I understand the "Modern" format (basically every card set they've come out with since the borders changed in 8th Edition) and how Historic is kind of the Arena equivalent, dating back to the first sets to be released on Arena (which I believe was Ixalan, though earlier sets like Amonkhet and Kaladesh remastered have been added,) these new sets make way more sense: a way to add new cards to these formats that can link up with any of the mechanics used in those earlier sets.

It's also a way for deck archetypes that might be popular in those formats to get some new blood in them - you might not have had much luck finding new Modular artifact creatures since 2003, but the "Horizons" sets bring new stuff to them.

And if this is all obvious to you, good for you. You've been paying closer attention than I have.

With Jumpstart: Heroic Horizons, we've seen new cards added to the Historic format, including one terrifying infinite combo that I imagine will see some kind of ban (for now, having instant-speed removal to cast immediately after they use Davriel's Withering on Witherlark, to kill the thing before the former resolves, and home they don't have another one and an open black mana to do it anyway seems to be the only way to survive it.)

But while I imagine that the metagame for Historic is even thornier than it is for Standard (and Standard 2022) it's also a format that opens up a lot of possibilities for fun decks.

Way back around 2005 or so, I made a vampire deck. This was before Zendikar, Innistrad, or any set in which vampires had any sort of tribal support. Back in those days, black had basically only the one "small creature" tribe that saw any kind of regular printing, which was zombies. Yes, we had skeletons, though never, I believe, with any tribal support, and then of course Thrulls, which did technically get at least one tribal card in Fallen Empires. Anyway, WotC had not yet decided to make vampires the default black "humanoid" "race." Indeed, the most prominent vampires were pretty big creatures like Sengir Vampire, serving more as rivals for black's other big creatures like demons.

This deck worked, kind of. (Notably, this was on MTGO, so there were some cards, like Reformed Vampire - a sneaky tribute to the character and show Angel, which was a spin-off of Buffy the Vampire Slayer - that wouldn't even count for the Modern format.)

Anyway, after doing a Jumpstart game in which I had a vampire (and sliver, though I didn't even seem to draw them) deck, I decided to try my hand at building a Vampire Tribal deck.

And actually, it kind of works. I've managed to have some pretty successful matches, which was especially nice after a terrible losing streak today (I've been fighting just to stay at Silver Rank 1, and even for a bit dipped down about halfway through Silver Rank 2.)

The deck is built around - if it's built around anything other than "these are some cool vampires" - lifegain and swelling creatures, which, you know, is actually pretty classic vampire stuff.

Through mostly luck, I actually have four copies of Westgate Regent, which is one of those cards I think could be a huge centerpiece finisher in Standard if the proper support cards would allow you to build a deck around it. A bit like Szadek, Lord of Secrets from way back, Westgate Regent is a 4/4 flying vampire for 3BB (classing Sengir Vampire body) with Ward - Discard a Card, and when it deals damage to a player, it gets +1/+1 counters for each point of damage it deals.

Naturally, this guy will finish off your opponent real quickly (finding a way to give it double strike would be really nasty) and the Ward cost can be great if your opponent is out of cards.

The next really crucial piece is Cordial Vampire. This guy is a 1/1 for BB. Whenever any creature (including itself) dies (the phrasing on the card is a bit different, which I assume is to make sure you know to count it as well,) all vampires you control get a +1/+1 counter. This is actually deceptively powerful, as if you trade in combat, this triggers twice. So you can let him hang back from combat and block to pump him up from a 1/1 very quickly (in one game he got to 10/10.) And this goes across the board, so if you can manage to have a large number of vampires out, this will get delightfully out of hand really quickly.

I'm not sure I'm ready to spend wildcards on historic stuff, but I actually think this deck has legs, and will probably tweak it a bit. I know that when I started playing Arena, vampire decks were pretty popular in the metagame (possibly in part because they were somewhat cheap,) and I could imagine working some of the cards from those decks into this one (there are several already.)

Anyway, when it comes to classic horror monsters, I think I like werewolves more the same way that I'm a dog person - I still love vampires, just as I adore our three cats, even if I think of myself, personality-wise, as more of a werewolf/dog person.

While I don't think a dog is in my future any time soon, given the building I live in (and also because the three cats we have are plenty to keep us busy with pet care, and I would burn this whole world down if anything happened to them,) the prospect of Innistrad: Midnight Hunt on the horizon suggests that there could very well be some really fun lycanthropuppies coming real soon.

Children of the Nameless

 So, I went and read the Children of the Nameless, a MTG tie-in novel released for free a couple years ago (it must have been a few, given that Davriel showed up in War of the Spark.)

This might be the first actual tie-in book I've actually read (as I said before, I never finished The Book of Atrus,) if you don't count online-only postings (though this kind of counts as that, given that I read it on the Apple Books app on my laptop.)

Anyway, it was a quick read and actually pretty good. Either it's novella in length or I burned through it very quickly (it's 539 pages in the Books app, but the pages are pretty generously spaced and large-fonted, so I imagine it'd be much shorter in other formats.)

The story takes place on Innistrad, but aside from a few references to angels going insane and the threat of werewolves, vampires, and geists, I think someone without any familiarity with the world could easily grasp the basics of the book.

Tacenda is a teenage girl who has a gift bestowed upon her by "The Bog," a circular pond near her village. Tacenda has access to a number of magical songs that can, among other things, ward off monsters. Her sister, Willia, has been gifted with powerful strength, which she uses to fight off monsters. However, with these gifts comes a curse - Tacenda is always blind during the day, and her twin sister is always blind by night, meaning they can never actually see one another at the same time.

One day, Tacenda's world shatters when a swarm of horrible geists come in and massacre her town, killing her sister, parents, and nearly anyone she knows. She suspects that the "Man of the Manor," a recently-arrived nobleman who displaced the previous lord (who had been a vampire) is behind the attack, and goes to take her revenge.

However, when she arrives, she discovers that the lord and his demonic servants had been framed, and she and the lord, Davriel Cane, go to investigate.

Though Tacenda is, I would say, more of the protagonist here, Davriel is obviously the real highlight of the book. This is a Magic book, after all, and Davriel is a perfect black-mana antihero. He is a master demonologist and diabolist, who has retreated to Innistrad (yeah, he's a planeswalker) in order to hide from his foes and live in comfort and laziness.

Davriel is a cynic, often lambasting Tacenda's moral sense and laying out a philosophy of transactional relationships and a sense that people who believe they are "good" are the most likely to commit atrocities. He's clever, having arranged contracts with demons that ostensibly would forfeit his soul to them, but which couldn't practically ever be fulfilled (for example, with one of his demons, he will surrender his soul if he makes it to 65 without dying, but never told the demon that he had already died once.)

While the colors of magic are never mentioned, the book does a rather interesting exploration of Magic's nuanced view on the matter - Davriel's demons are actually quite likable and sympathetic characters who also mourn the loss of their fellows, even if they are in theory motivated by the desire to claim and consume souls. Miss Highwater, a succubus-like demon, respects Davriel for recognizing her skill at contracts and employing her in a job that does not reduce her to a mere seductress.

The story is not an epic, taking place all within a single night, but it hints at a much deeper and larger story for Davriel, which will likely be explored if WotC uses him in future sets (his appearance in Historic Horizons is promising, and I suspect we'll find that the plane New Capenna is on is either his home plane or the first one he planeswalked to.)

Important to the story, and certainly to his character, is that he carries within him an "Entity" that is the sentient remnant of a destroyed plane. Though it is not a demon, the Entity acts very much like one, always begging for him to give in and use its power. But, for reasons that are eventually revealed, he has refused, even though he is certainly not a scrupulous person.

Anyway, it's a fun read.

Capenna and Kamigawa and Some Non-Ravnican Urban Adventures Coming for MTG

 Kamigawa was first introduced in 2004-2005's Kamigawa block, back when we had one big block per year with three sets usually taking place on a new plane (actually, Kamigawa was only the second of such plane-hopping blocks, after Mirrodin.) But while Mirrodin's story the prior year had followed the stories of Odyssey and Onslaught blocks somewhat directly (the plot set in motion by Karn trying to do the right thing but accidentally making things worse, even on the very plane he created,) Kamigawa was actually a distant prequel, giving us the background on Toshiro Umezawa, a wandering ronin who would be the ancestor of Tetsuo Umezawa, an as I understand it previously un-fleshed-out figure from the original Legends set way, way back in the early days (like, before I even started playing as a little kid - I was two sets late!)

Kamigawa was presented as a fantastical world based on Japanese folklore. The primary conflict was between the world of mortals and that of the Kami, the spirits who inhabited every aspect of the world (inspired by Shinto beliefs in Japan.) Beyond that, the setting had Samurai and Ninjas, and its demons were all "Oni," which in Japanese culture are a kind of ogre-like demon. Thus, I believe that all Oni in Kamigawa block were actually Ogre Demon Spirits, as most extra-supernatural creatures were considered kami (dragons, for instance, existed in a legendary cycle as dragon spirits.) Among the humanoid races, we had goblins reimagined as kappas (which aren't quite the same) as well as rat folk known as Nezumi, four-armed snake-folk called orochi, fox-folk known as kitsune, and "moonfolk," who look rather human-like but have long, rabbit-like ears (based on the Japanese notion that the craters of the moon resemble a rabbit, rather than the western "man in the moon.")

The aesthetics of the original block do get pretty surreal with the kami, but for the most part, it looks like a classic fantasy-version of Japan, more or less what you'd expect.

The new set, Kamigawa Neon Dynasty, which comes out in early 2022, is going to be a huge departure. Catching up with the modern day, which is seven or eight thousand years later, Kamigawa has undergone a profound transformation, and now exists as more of a cyberpunk setting.

I don't think we've actually seen any plane at point in history this distant from one another. I believe the "standard calendar" used for most of MTG lore is Argivian Reckoning, which I think places Urza's birth as "year zero," which puts the original block over three thousand years before that. I suppose the existence of Yawgmoth's legendary card from Modern Horizons (which depicts him prior to his discovery of Phyrexia, and thus makes him look like just a normal human, albeit a super, super evil one) means that we've got at least one card that comes from about two thousand years before the Kamigawa story (and one could argue that the various depictions of Nicol Bolas or other Elder Dragon Legends, or the Ur-Dragon, could come from even earlier).

The point is, things have really changed on Kamigawa. MTG has always had a bit of a science-fantasy element to it - the Phyrexians are kind of a robot apocalypse mixed with body horror, and the Thran, it's implied, had a rather futuristic society before their fall.

But going full-on cyberpunk is an interesting move. I'll be curious to see how much they lean into the sci-fi elements - naturally, one of the major concepts of cyberpunk is the existence of a virtual "cyber world" apart from the physical one, though I think that element of the genre has evolved as we've seen the actual development of the internet as a dominant cultural force. (The "cyberspace" imagined in early cyberpunk stories seems more like an MMO than the way people actually seriously handle internet commerce and espionage.)

What strikes me, though, is how cyberpunk tends to take place in urban settings. What we've seen of the new Kamigawa set - which is actually only two pieces of art, one depicting a new planeswalker who is some kind of cyborg ninja, and another just depicting a city with what appears to be magical trees growing out of it (could it be a basic forest?) - seems to imply an urban focus for the set.

Cyberpunk works well as a genre connection to a Japanese-inspired plane. Japan has produced some seminal works within the genre, such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and the genre grew out of an era of growing Japanese wealth and influence, particularly thanks the production of electronics. But even if we've seen sci-fi elements in Magic before, this is a pretty explicit leap out of conventions.

What's interesting to me is that the next set, Streets of New Capenna, seems likely to do similar things, both genre-blending and, again, finding an urban setting.

Again, we've seen very little of New Capenna, but the general vibe has been that it'll be a gritty urban city (New Capenna is likely just a city on its as-yet-unnamed plane, similar to how Strixhaven is just a school on the plane of Arcavios.) We know that the city was built by angels, but is now dominated by demons and gangs. And these gangs have the look and feel of 1920s and 1930s gangsters, the classic era of that other very urban and even less fantasy-adjacent genre.

Apart from its three-color gang theme, I don't know that we have a ton of details about New Capenna, but there are strong hints that Davriel Cane, the newish planeswalker character introduced in the novel Children of the Nameless, who has gotten a couple of cards depicting him and his magic, is probably from there. Davriel has the right look - his slicked-back hair, a pencil mustache, and his "robes" look more like a tailored suit. (One of his demonic servants, Miss Highwater, also seems to be wearing a woman's business suit). Davriel's previous life as an "accountant" might mean that he used to work for one of these gangs. I think it's highly likely that he'll be one of the planeswalker characters we see in New Capenna, and possibly the protagonist of its story.

Anyway, while Ravnica is the ultimate city in MTG, we have gotten a couple of urban-based sets and blocks before. Kaladesh is a whole plane, but most of the action in that block takes place in the metropolis of Ghirapur. Likewise, we had the plane of Mercadia back in the Mercadian Masques set, where almost everything that happened took place in that city (which if I recall correctly was founded by Thran escaping their destruction on Dominaria?)

Coming back to MTG many years later, I've found that the elimination of "blocks" can make each set a bit of a dizzying introduction of brand-new mechanics, so I think it's interesting when they find ways to create some kind of thematic throughline. Naturally, we've got two back-to-back Innistrad sets coming next, so it might not actually be too hard to have some mechanical continuity there, and next fall will see two Dominaria-based sets, though I believe the first will be set in the current point in the timeline whereas the other will be a distant prequel (or rather a different perspective on the story told in Antiquities). (Oh man, could we get a freaking black-bordered Urza planeswalker card depicting him right after his spark ignites?)

Anyway, I'm pretty excited for basically every one of the next six Magic sets.

Jumpstart: Historic Horizons, and the Whole Historic Format

 MTG Arena is only a few years old, whereas Magic the Gathering is pushing 30. Arena has translated the game very highly effectively to a digital space. While Magic the Gathering Online has been around for about 20 years, and that game arguably more directly replicates the paper card game, Arena streamlines things considerably to flow quickly, tapping your lands automatically and doing other quality-of-life things like showing cards you can cast from places other than your hand next to your hand.

I'm a huge fan (though I wish it hadn't taken them so long to make a MacOS version, which only came out last year) and it's gotten me back into this game that I've been playing off and on for the past, well, like 27 years.

Arena has a special format called Historic, which is basically just whatever sets they've released for Arena. The game got started in the Ixalan block, and so that and anything that came after it have all seen normal releases and thus are available for the format. More recently, they've come out with "Remastered" sets for Amonkhet and Kaladesh, which combined those multi-set blocks into a single release, and added them to the Historic format.

Because Historic is an online-only format, Historic Horizons, taking a queue from Modern Horizons (which is built to add cards to the Modern format, which is everything going back to Eighth Edition - you can tell because the card frames are the modern ones, as opposed to the old ones), is taking the radical step of making digital-only cards that have effects you couldn't really do in paper magic.

For instance, there's a card called Davriel's Withering, which is an instant that gives a target creature -1/-2 perpetually. That means that even if it's in the graveyard, scooped back into the hand or the library, or in exile, the creature retains this. In fact, this card has been the engine for an infinite combo loop - there's another card whose name escapes me, but when it enters the battlefield, you can put a creature card with a low cost from your graveyard into play. And you can make it a permanent -1/0 with Davriel's Withering, so that every time it comes into play, it'll immediately die, and thus can be a target for its own ability. So you get that going with any permanent that causes the opponent to lose life or whatever whenever a creature you control comes into play or dies, and you've got an automatic win.

But brokenness aside, it's interesting to see them playing around in this new design space.

It's also interesting for me, as a relatively new Arena player, to see this format. Given that I only started playing last year, most of the cards I have in Arena are still Standard legal (though about half of them, including the wildly powerful Eldraine cards, are going to be rotating out soon) so I haven't really been compelled to play in that format.

Standard is, I think, probably the most popular way to play Magic. The benefit is that no deck remains on top for a super long time. Each new set added to the format is a larger proportion of the total cards, and thus has a better chance of upsetting the balance, and every year, half the format gets rotated out. So even if there's a period in which one deck type always wins, it won't last super long.

On the other hand, if you're looking for diversity, Historic (and other larger formats) seem pretty compelling, as you'll encounter way more types of decks. This makes it a bit of a challenge to figure out the metagame, as your Eldraine-based Mono Green Stompy deck might not be quite so powerful in the face of some really powerful deck from three years earlier.

I suspect that if I keep up with Arena for a few years, the format will be less intimidating given that I'll have amassed a decently large collection myself.

Myst - The Latest Remaster

 The first computer game that I remember playing was called Cosmic Osmo. It was a black-and-white exploration game with no objectives. You traveled around in a space ship to one of I believe four worlds, and could meet funny characters with bulbous bodies and very simplistic animations. It was goofy and fun, and perfect for a small child like I was (I probably played it first when I was 3, so this would be 1989 or so).

Later, we got a new version of it called Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel (the last "world" of the original game was a giant spacebound fish, though of course you could visit them in any order.) This added another four worlds (again, if I remember correctly,) but in addition, the game advertised the next project by the creators of Cosmic Osmo, a little game called Myst.

If you are too young to remember when Myst game out, you might not realize how huge a deal it was. No other game looked remotely like it. It was the first game (or at least the first popular one) to have computer-generated 3D graphics that had rendered textures (as opposed to flat colors), making it look more like a real world you could inhabit than anything that had ever come before.

The game came out when I was 7, and it was a phenomenon. Computer and video games had mostly been considered something for children, but Myst, with its tricky puzzles and beautiful but empty world attracted a wide audience of adults.

Now, Cyan Worlds (which had been just Cyan at the time of Myst's initial release) has come out with an update of it. This is not the first update - far from it. As computer games have grown far more sophisticated, Myst's initial selling points don't seem so revolutionary. But it's a true classic of a game. The latest release is designed to allow you to play the game in VR (though you can, like I have been, play it on a normal screen as well.)

My sister works in VR, and despite the fact that people have been talking about VR for longer than Myst has been around, it seems like it's finally starting to get rolling as a games medium. But with the exception of Half-Life: Alyx, we haven't really seen the AAA video game industry jump onto this new medium.

What I find interesting is that I think the sort of games VR developers have focused on seem to be more akin to Myst than the action- (and, to be honest, testosterone-) fueled "mainstream" game industry. Myst seemed like an obvious thing to bring to VR (though given how many rereleases it's gotten in the decade since its release, I'll be shocked if we don't get or already have a Skyrim VR port.)

Myst was hugely foundational to my fantasy aesthetic - it's one of the main sources I could cite for my interest in non-medieval fantasy, the surreal cross-section of a kind of 19th century sci-fi with magic sticking with me.

The game has a puzzle randomizer, which changes certain values and such in the game so we can't just do the whole thing from memory, but I've got to be honest, I've blown through it without looking up any guides. The only times I've gotten "stuck" have been forgetting that you could search the drawers in Achenar's room for his blue page in the Stoneship Age and getting a bit turned around in the Channelwood Age (I mistook the elevator to the Myst book for one I had already used.) These puzzles are basically hardwired into my brain, so in 2 and a half hours of game time, I've already cleared through the Stoneship, Mechanical, and Channelwood ages.

The most notable difference playing now is that you have freedom of movement. Originally, you would warp from one tableau to another to move around the islands of the game, whereas now you have what is clearly a VR-style movement (you can go forward and backward or sidestep with keys and you aim where you're looking with your mouse, which presumably is just turning around and looking in VR).

I have noticed that some of the puzzle "consoles" have been changed, though that could have happened in other releases over the last 28 years. For example, the three pump buttons in the Stoneship Age have been replaced with this funny sliding lever and a single button to activate it. And Atrus has apparently upgraded the cabin in the "woods" on the main island to have an electric starter instead of requiring you to light a match.

The biggest change, which I didn't even realize until I was in the Channelwood Age, was that you can actually carry both Sirrus' red page and Achenar's blue page at the same time, meaning that you don't have to navigate back to the Myst linking book twice (glad I realized that before I did the Selenitic Age - that maze is a big one.)

Of course, with foreknowledge and also just the benefits of 30 years of game development, the game is sort of shockingly small. It's still gorgeous, though this release does not have the cutting-edge graphics the original had for its era. Also, they've replaced the blue-screen footage of Rand Miller playing Atrus and his brutish son Achenar and Robyn Miller (who also wrote the music) playing the conniving other son Sirrus. These have been replaced with CGI animated characters instead, which... I'll be honest, I always kind of liked the blue-screen live action stuff. Their performances were perfectly good for the characters (I believe, though I could be wrong, that the audio is preserved at least.)

The detail of the world is far greater now - the smooth polygons of the rock spire from which the big tower (the one where you find your initial hints to get to each age) rises are now jagged and treacherous-looking, and the hexagonal basalt columns that make up the area where you arrive in the Mechanical age looks a lot clearer. And there are birds and frogs and such that give the areas a bit of life.

Of course, another big change is that I'm five times older than I was when I first played this. The journals about the various ages found in the library, some of which carry necessary clues to reach them, I now find a lot more interesting, as they're the clearest area where the story is actually illustrated. I feel like you could do a whole exploration of the theme of colonialism - Atrus sets out to simply explore and meet new people, but his sons turn the whole exercise into domination and exploitation, and, given how empty these worlds are, likely also genocide. In Riven, the sequel, we find a world in which Atrus' father has come to dominate a terrified populace that views him as a god - it's implied that there are a ton of people in Riven, but that they are actively hiding from you for fear of either you or Gehn's retribution, or both.

Way, way back (probably when I was 8 or 9,) I bought one of the three books that the Miller brothers wrote about their world, this one being The Book of Atrus. I never actually read it, but it's sitting on my bookshelf. I'm given to understand that it's actually a lot better than most tie-in novels, and the fact that Myst (at least at that time) really was a project by a pair of brothers (and a few other people, of course) makes me think this is more about exploring the ideas and themes of it than generating excitement for the brand.

Anyway, after spending a couple weeks back in my childhood home with my dad, this is another fun nostalgia trip to go on.

Trying Out MTG Arena on a Phone

 Back almost ten years ago when Hearthstone was new, I tried it out - it was a sort of similar game to Magic, with familiar Warcraft lore, and best of all, it worked on Macs. But also, it seemed poised to work well on a mobile platform, even the rather simple-by-necessity phone platform. I think MTG Arena was likely WotC's response to Hearthstone. While MTG Online had been a kind of direct translation of the game to a computerized medium, including the ability to trade cards with other players, Arena ditched the traditional form of acquisition, giving us things like Wildcards, and then awarding tons of free packs simply for playing. Indeed, you can actually build some pretty serious decks without paying a cent, though if you want to have a bunch of competitive decks, you'll probably want to drop some cash.

The thing is, Magic is a more complicated game than Hearthstone. There's far more interactivity and complexity to its cards. Arena manages to streamline some of the things that made MTGO slow, like its pretty smart auto-tapping for lands, but how does it play on an iPhone screen?

Kinda ok? I guess?

To be fair, I have a relatively ancient phone, an iPhone 6S, which is six years old. Therefore, some of the graphical flair causes the game to drag a little (my Macbook Air, which is only a few months old and has the M1 chip, has no problems with it.)

So it's possible some of the awkwardness of the game is due to my phone being slow. I think I'm just kind of amazed that it works at all. I could certainly see the game running fine on an iPad, where I imagine you could have just the same UI as the PC version (I say PC including Macs here). The phone version squashes things a bit, so my impulse-purchased Davriel avatar is in a tiny rectangle rather than being at the lower center of the screen.

Still, it's exciting to see that I can now play Magic while away from my computer. This does probably put a final nail in the coffin of any interest I have in playing more Hearthstone (I'm not boycotting Blizzard, given what I've been hearing from developers working there, but MTG is a much earlier love of mine, and I generally like the game better anyway.)