Friday Standard and Solar Flare

Magic players: Digital Overload will be hosting its first-ever Standard tournament this Friday at 7pm.  We’re as excited as you and eager to take a look at what we can expect this season.

Stoneforge Mystic and Jace are gone.  Zendikar has followed them, taking with it a good number of cards, and leaving Innistrad in its wake, a mere 264 new cards to replace Zendikar’s 642.  To complicate matters, the new set’s power level seems to be way down from the heights of Jace, the Mind Sculptor, Lotus Cobra, and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.  This sober step back from the brink of format-breaking power we saw in Caw Blade probably represents Wizards’ desire to regain a firm grip on the reins of its most popular (not to mention lucrative) game by opening up FNMs and the game in general to more archetypes and skill levels.

Many competitive players have been looking to the Scars of Mirrodin block to produce the next dominant decks.  After all, Scars cards have strong internal synergy and had enough card-for-card value to be playable alongside Zendikar.  However, several Innistrad cards shook up the metagame at major tournaments this month, massively affecting the metagame enough that two of the top decks—Wolfrun G/R and Township Tokens—are named for them.  But one Innistrad specter has risen above the others to darken all of Standard with its shadow: Solar Flare.

The deck’s name is an homage to a champion deck of an earlier era, the Ravinca-block Solar Flare created by Paul Cheon, friend of the legendary LSV and 2006 US National Champion.  Much as today’s Solar Flare unearthed its name from a long dead deck list, so too does it seek to win games, by calling titans, wurms, and praetors back from the graveyard.  The potent combination of Think Twice and Forbidden Alchemy to find combo pieces, Snapcaster Mage and counterspells/removal to stymie early threats while retaining value, and the absolutely unfair play of Sun Titan into Phantasmal Image (copying Sun Titan) into calling back a Liliana of the Veil are all shored up by a reanimation plan fueled by Unburial Rights.

The Esper monstrosity represents the state of control in Standard currently, as well as the most dominant deck with the vast majority of wins in this month’s tournaments.  Rumor has it even Digital Overload’s own manager will be sleeving up these sixty for the foreseeable future.  Wise mages may want to do their homework and read yesterday’s Channel Fireball article by Alexander Shearer entitled, “Solar Flare by the Numbers” no matter what spells they choose in the coming weeks.

The Darkest Souls

Alright masochists, Dark Souls (demented, unrelenting successor Demon’s Souls), will be released next Tuesday, amidst squeals of torment and joy from hardcore fans.  Truly hardcore offerings have become few and far between in this the age of the massively-casual game (often played on a tiny phone or motion ‘wand’).  But developers From Software have lit a flare for the disenfranchised old-school gamer looking for a challenge worthy of his or her countless hours of battle experience and those strings of thankful worlds saved (or conquered) left behind them in virtual space.

Mostly, it trumpets a call to those zombie-eyed gamers who were once unafraid to be killed endlessly, always rising again on their path to victory.  Dark Souls deserves such an introduction.  Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, this third-person hack-n-slash adventure game is guaranteed to be the first our readers have played in some time that didn’t draw you a map, arm you with the best weapon, and all but hand you the villain’s head in a commemorative trophy.  Bonus awful-points if you were escorted throughout the entire linear—or completely directionless and irrelevant—quest by a helpful sprite or NPC who wouldn’t stop spouting the same stale lines.

The traps will be clever.  The monsters will be unfairly inhuman.  You are going to die.  But players will be able to learn from their mistakes, provide they don’t eject the disc don’t get salty and rage-quit.  Like restless ranks of the undead, players’ spirits will begin rising next Tuesday as they band together and take on a rare challenge built just for them.

Should you find yourself against the wall, facing down an armored horror unspeakable, call upon Digital Overload and our ghostly form may appear.  Until then, check out the live feed of IGN's twenty-four-hour preview marathon with Keza MacDonald and Marty Sliva.

Marvel Releases Official Tabletop RPG

Fans of both Marvel Comics and tabletop role-playing games in the tradition of D&D take notice: February 2012 heralds the release of a comic-book themed role playing game produced by Margaret Weis Productions where players take on the roles of up-and-coming heroes in the official Marvel Universe.  Titled Marvel Heroes, the first arc of organized play is set to begin in the Civil War arc, as the rift between Captain American and Iron Man, between freedom and registration fractures teams, tests loyalties, and asks tough questions about what it means to be a hero.

Organized play should begin shortly after the release, so get in contact with Digital Overload today and sign up to play or run Marvel Heroes events.

Gamers Arm Scientists to Fight AIDS

Nature Structural & Molecular Biology recently named gamers alongside scientists as co-authors of an entry that reveals secrets that may make possible new weapons against HIV and similar retroviruses.  Gamers made the discovery in Foldit, a game created by the University of Washington who were following the recent trend of ‘gaming work’ and harnessing the power of game-like motivation.  Using the games online tools, participants had unfolded and created an accurate 3D representation of a monomeric protease enzyme (a cutting agent of the retrovirus in questions) in just three weeks.

Much has been said lately about the untapped potential of gamers to solve complex problems and generate user-driven projects like the countless wikis online.  In time, the unfolding of this enzyme could be looked back upon as the first step of those great advances, where by combining a human’s creativity, spatial reasoning, and adaptability with the processing potential and reliability of machines, gamers began saving the world for real.

Innistrad Intro Packs and Spoilers

Innistrad Intro Packs have been revealed!  Choose from the Blue-White Spectral Legions, Blue-Red Eldritch Onslaught, Black-Green Deathly Dominion, Black-Red Carnival of Blood or the White-Green Repel the Dark decks.  Info from the Wizard’s site indicates that the UW, WG, and BR decks will be swarm/agro while UR combos out on Flashback mechanics and BG has some dirty graveyard tricks up its sleeve.

Meanwhile, spoilers abound online.  Check out these recent spoilers:

Magic Celebration, EDH, Standard, and FNM Draft

Ready for another Digital Overload event?  Join us on Friday to celebrate our spacious new location for a Friday Night Magic M12 draft.  Entry will be $15 with prizes up for grabs.  If you attended our M12 release party, we hope to see you there; if you have just found us online or through the grapevine, stop in and see what all the buzz is about at Digital Overload!

Find us at 18 Great Plain Road, 2nd floor, Danbury, CT 06811, and call 203-942-3870 for more information.

Not enough Magic for you?

Saturday is Magic Celebration, spelled F-R-E-E  P-A-C-K-S.  That’s right, Wizards has ponied up plenty of loot just for you.  Starting at 3pm, Digital Overload will be running Wizard’s Mini-Master event.  Show up, sit down and open a free pack of M12.  Add 3 land of each kind.  Beat your opponent and receive another free pack of M12.  Repeat for four rounds.  These Mini-Master events will be going on all day while supplies last.

We will also be hosting an EDH/Commander event at 4pm (with prizes) as well as a Standard tournament at 7pm, with Mini-Master going on in the background.  Find us at our new location after 3pm this Saturday at 18 Great Plain Road, 2nd floor, Danbury, CT 06811, or call us at 203-942-3870 for more info!

MTG Innistrad: Liliana and Garruk Spoiled

The release of Magic the Gathering’s newest block continues to march closer, like the restless multitude of undead warriors players expect to see in Innistrad.  The first set’s two biggest mysteries have already been unraveled.  We’re talking about the planeswalkers (and eternal enemies) Garruk and Liliana.

Those who have been following the storyline know that Liliana has just gotten her hands on a mystical veil which has increased her power significantly.  They will also know that when Garruk finally tracked her necromantic shenanigans back to their source, Liliana put one sizzling dark curse on him.  So they aren’t friends, and neither one of them is likely to have white mana in their casting cost any time soon.  Let’s look at what the cards actually do.

Liliana of the Veil  1BB

+1:  Each player discards a card.

-2:  Target player sacrifices a creature.

-6:  Separate all permanents target player controls into two piles. That player sacrifices all permanents in the pile of his or her choice.

(3)

Garruk Relentless//Garruk the Veil-Cursed 3G

Garruk Relentless (G)

When Garruk Relentless has two or fewer loyalty counters on him, transform him.

0: Garruk Relentless deals 3 damage to target creature. That creature deals damage equal to its power to him

0: Put a 2/2 green Wolf creature token onto the battlefield.

(3)

Garruk the Veil-Cursed (G/B)

+1 : Put a 1/1 black Wolf creature token with deathtouch onto the battlefield.

-1 : Sacrifice a creature. If you do, search your library for a creature card, reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.

-3 : Creatures you control gain trample and get +X/+X until end of turn, where X is the number of creature cards in your graveyard.

Obviously there are plenty of questions to answer here, the least of which being, “Why does getting a powerful artifact make Liliana cost less and have (in a vacuum) weaker powers?”  The designers’ commitment to making use of the graveyard in Innistrad may satisfy that question, but right now our readers are probably wondering more about Garruk, specifically “How does this work?”

Let me break it down for you, starting with Innistrad’s new mechanic “Double-Faced Cards” or “Transform” as it’s being called.  There are cards in the new Innistrad boosters which literally have no “Magic” back to them.  They have art and rules text on the front and art and rules text on the back.  In order to play with them in a constructed, unsleeved  deck, players will need to make use of the ‘checklist’ tokens which come with many Innistrad boosters.  These will only ever replace basic lands.

Simply mark up this card to indicate which card it is standing in for (one unique checklist card for each double-faced card) and place it into your deck with the rest of your cards.  The checklist has a ‘Magic’ back so that no hidden info is revealed from your library or hand.  When it comes time to reveal that card (someone is looking at your hand, you discard it or put it on the stack or battlefield) simply reveal the checklist card, set it aside, and replace it with the double-faced card it represented (which has been sitting on the sidelines, hopefully in some anonymous fashion.

It’s important to remember that these double faced cards are only ever revealed face up (the day side, it seems) and have the properties of only the face-up side in every zone except the battlefield under the specific condition that the card has been ‘Transformed’.  The back sides of these double-faced cards have no mana cost (this is different from a mana cost of zero, you can literally not pay for or play the back sides of these cards, even if some strange rule tries to let/make you). 

Drafting will be awkward to say the least.  Each pack will have one double-faced card in it, which means that if you fan out your opened pack, the back of that card will be showing to the other drafters.  These back faces are not considered hidden information, but players are allowed to take steps to hide the information, including starting their draft piles with one basic land so that any multi-faced cards drafted can be placed under that land to prevent other players from seeing what they’ve taken. 

You can find a healthy, official explanation of these cards here.

Meanwhile, Garruk is just a big double-faced planeswalker in a pretty ambiguous rules situation.  Now typically, double-faced cards remain the same object when they flip.  That means counters stay on, enchantments and equipment don’t fall off.  I assume this means that a Shock targeting my Garruk Relentless will still be targeting my Garruk the Veil-Cursed if I decide to Shock him first in response.  Maybe.  But what about attacking Garruk Relentless with a Tormented Soul.  Is Tormented Soul still attacking my planeswalker if I ping Garruk Relentless with Gut Shot, transforming him into Garruk the Veil-Cursed before blocks?

The new double-faced cards are still murky water that continues to be stirred by rumors and speculation.  Our advice: keep up with Wizards of the Coast’s official announcements and, of course, Digital Overload. 

$1M Modern Warfare 3 Prerelease Tourney

Bizarrely huge cash prizes and first-hands-on tournaments on a massive scale seem to be the order of the next generation of video game releases.  Dota 2’s ‘International’ was a huge success (congratulations to Ukrainian World Champions, Na’Vi for their million dollar victory, by the way) and Activision is wasting no time recreating the event in their image for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 this weekend.

International qualifiers are being held all over, with the top teams earning one of 28 invitations to the party, while the remaining 4 invitations will be available at the doors where left behind scrubs will get cut-throat, playing one last tournament for a chance to get inside.  Once again, when the smoke clears and the last bullet flies, there will be a cool million dollars awarded to the grand champion.  This party, however, will rock just a bit harder, as Activision has secured Boston’s Dropkick Murphys to open their party with a performance.  Strangely, Kanye West will also be in attendance, performing some kind of concert at the end of the event.

It seems like only last month being excited about a new game meant getting rained on outside a retail game store until midnight.  This recent trend toward massive parties where the Dropkick Murphys belt their songs out angrily over a massive pit of mercenaries shooting each other down for a life-changing pile of money should fill my fellow gamers with more than a little excitement.

GameStop Removes OnLive Coupons from Deus Ex

Here’s a piece of news that should shock none of you:

Video game retailing giant GameStop has recently confirmed reports that it instructed its employees to open new copies of the freshly released cult-favorite Deus Ex: Human Revolution and remove a second, free version of the game added by competitors OnLive.  In other words, each new copy of the disc for Deus Ex, also came with a code with which any user could access that game through OnLive’s microconsole or nearly any PC.  I can sense the wheels turning as our readers consider the ways they might have put that extra copy to use if they had bought the game elsewhere.

GameStop officials claim that SquareEnix bundled the coupons in with the game without their knowledge, and appears to be fairly cavalier about the situation, leading this writer to surmise that Gamestop has already crafted whatever dark lawyer cabal is necessary to see this action through.  SquareEnix has plenty of support and resources to buy their own legal interpretation, being the font from which many fan favorite series like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest spring.

Let the legal games begin.  

Also, if you like free bonus versions of Deux Ex, you might want to get your game(s) somewhere else.

Dota 2 and International Championship Revealed

The trailer for Dota 2 is finally out and with it comes Valve’s announcement of the International Dota 2 Championships.  The World’s top sixteen Dota teams will be meeting in Cologne, Germany tomorrow to battle it out over five days in a double elimination tournament with over a million dollars in prizes.  Teams from China, France, Thailand, Russia, Denmark, Singapore, Malaysia and Ukraine, as well as two international European groups, will compete for fame, honor and cash on the world stage as the championships are streamed in four languages across the internet.  Hordes of eager fans will be watching to get their first glimpse of the new Dota.

No pressure.

Meanwhile, the 2011-2012 continues to look strong for other game releases as well.  The third installments in both the Modern Warfare and Battlefield titles are months away.  Dota 2’s appearance will push crowd-favorites like League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth to step up or fade away.  And with the Diablo 3 beta running throughout the end of this year, we might even see the well anticipated title at Digital Overload next year.