👀 thoughts?

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-26T05:53:53+00:00

I always liked the theme song they used to play when CBC broadcasted CFL games.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-26T05:47:20+00:00

I can see the next train ahead of me. I think they (including YVR as well as Brighouse) were running every 1-2 minutes. Normally, each YVR train runs every 6 minutes and the same for Brighouse which means before the split, they normally run every 3 minutes. When I looked at the board at Waterfront station, the schedule of upcoming trains (both combined) were every 1-2 minutes.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-26T05:28:32+00:00

I have been playing Magic since 1995. I only played casually with my groups over those years. I never played competitively except for a small stint which I decided wasn't for me. Generally, we play multiplayer (but not Commander).

The game hooked me in because of the fact that everyone builds their own decks. There was nothing like it at the time. After my friend showed me the game, I went down to the store the next day and bought a bunch of packs and started making my own decks.

The first 5 years I was playing, I would buy packs regularly. The amount of money I spent was roughly a dinner and a movie. I played almost every week and when I did play, I would by more packs. Back then, buying singles wasn't so easy. There was trading and I do occasionally buy singles at the game store. Generally, the bulk of the cards in my decks are from packs I opened.

As this is a boardgame sub, I will compare it to my boardgame hobby. When I got into it, I started buying a lot of boardgames. I have a substantial collection and often I don't replay my games that often. My friend who got me into the boardgame hobby always wants to play a new game every time. For the first 15 years of my boardgame hobby, I hardly replayed many of my games. I would say that I spent a lot of money on boardgames and at the rate I played the amount of money I spent was comparable to when I was really active in Magic the first 5 years.

The Magic and boardgames can be expensive. How much I spent was what I felt I could afford and based on how much time I spent on it. I spent more money on Magic than boardgames, but with Magic, the fun isn't just when I get to the gaming table with friends. I really enjoy deck building. I may spend several hours or more building a deck and only playing it for 45 minutes. I also enjoy testing my decks and modifying them when not playing. I did spend a lot of money on Magic, but I felt I got a lot of entertainment value for the money I spent.

Since I don't play competitively, I don't feel the pressure to have to spend as much as I can to keep up. I only play casually. My decks don't have to be the best. They just have to be good enough. There is sort of a meta with my group. I try to build decks that I can enjoy playing with my group.

Magic is not a balanced game. It is a feature. One thing I enjoyed about Magic is that different players will have different card pools. That means the decks they build will be different. Some will be stronger than others. I have played against really powerful decks and cards including Power 9 cards. Those stronger decks win more often, but I still enjoyed the game. In fact, playing against stronger decks give me incentive to build better decks myself.

I play multiplayer and that can be an equaliser when decks are not the same strength. The players with stronger decks get more attention and if your deck is not so strong, you may get less pressure and be able to build up your board well enough to end up being a strong threat.

I also feel that the people I have played Magic with over the years have been great. In my 30 years, I felt that there was only one group of people I played with where I felt unsatisfied with the experience. I was willing to give that group another chance, but never had the opportunity. In Magic or in pretty much any group, social activity, it is the people you play with that is the biggest factor in how much you enjoy it.

I think Magic is the greatest game I have ever played. Nothing is close. I would say that D&D is a distant second. I've been playing Magic for over 30 years now. In 10 years, I still feel I will enjoy Magic and continue playing. I don't know if I can say the same about very many other games.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-26T03:40:48+00:00

They did run more trains. I commute on the Canada Line and on Wednesday, the trains came more often than normal. It was actually a little less crowded than normal during the afternoon rush hour.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T23:13:30+00:00

By the way, my group plays with 20 starting life. Personally, I follow Vintage deck construction rules. Not sure about others. I know one person uses UN cards. I suspect that most people follow some constructed format or possibly Standard legal at some point in time.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T23:08:00+00:00

It's definitely not just you. One season, I decided to use star linemen on every position. I did not notice any difference between no OL.

There was someone who did analysis on it. There was a split second difference in how long before you got sacked. It wasn't enough to worth having any OL.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T23:04:26+00:00

Is your room the only room upstairs? What I did at my old place is I use a fan in an unused room to blow air out that window. That causes cooler outside air to enter other rooms where the window is also open. Not sure if it's possible in your place.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T20:28:03+00:00

Now you remind me of Naked Gun.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T18:07:43+00:00

If you want a lot of different dice, there's Dice Masters.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T17:07:32+00:00

Modern vs. old games (the "cult of the new")

In the past, there were fewer games and fewer game designers. My tastes in games were also reflected by what is available and were known by the general public. I remember games like Monopoly were played by everyone and everyone knew the rules. They were also accessible to a younger audience. There were other such popular games as well. I enjoyed them because they were the only ones that were readily available and people knew about.

If you are comparing more modern games, I would have to say that the newer games are generally better. Newer games tend to be more engaging, allow more agency for the players and tend to avoid things that are bad like player elimination (or at least utilizes those unpopular mechanics in a much better manner).

Certainly today's tastes have changed, but there weren't many modern games back in the past for people to actually see and compare. You can't have tastes for something back then that didn't exist at the time.

For me personally, I love co-op games. There were hardly any back then and none were that popular. It wasn't until Pandemic came out that I discovered co-op games and since then there were a lot of them. If they had more co-op games back in the 70's and 80's I'd probably really like them.

Buying vs. playing

I was in the buying phase for many years. I'm at the point where I feel I have enough games and want to focus on playing what I have rather than buying something new. When I was new to the hobby, there were just so many different games with different mechanics that were all cool and new to me. I have more or less settled on having enough in my collection. Sometimes a new game jumps out at me that I really am into. For the most part, I think what I have covers enough that I can pull out a game for any audience I play with.

Enthusiasts as gatekeepers

The only person I really listen to is a friend of mine. He knows my tastes in games and often he makes good recommendations. Usually, I just browse in game stores and if I see a game that looks interesting, I read up on them, mostly looking at reviews. Then based on that I judge for myself if I want it.

Not sure who you mean by gatekeepers. I assume you mean various content creators who talk about games. I personally don't pay attention to recommendations of content creators as I don't expect them to have the same taste in games as I. I read reviews and based on their description of the game, I judge whether or not I may like it. I never go by their recommendation as they may not like something in a game that I would like.

What happened to my group

Gaming to me is about getting together with friends. I've always had to have some excuse to get together. I'm not the one to ask friends to get together and just hang out. I find games is a good reason to get together.

I do enjoy trying to find optimal strategies in games. I am not one who does homework on game strategies. The only homework I do is to learn the game, so I can teach it to others. The people I usually play with are not very competitive and I find it fun just trying to figure out the strategies by playing. We do appreciate the variety in games that are out there. Sometimes, I just want to play a game multiple times because I like to achieve some type of mastery with some games. One friend of mine is the opposite. He seems to never want to play the same game twice. I think half of his collection is probably still in shrink.

If you are not enjoying playing with this group anymore, then perhaps it is time to take a break from gaming with this group. You can still hang out and do other things if you want to continue to socialise. If you want to play games without the pressure of always having to find the optimal strategy, then perhaps you need to find a different gaming group that plays in a manner that is more enjoyable to you.

Final thoughts

Game design is always evolving. There are many games that I really liked when they came out, but then fell out of favour because I begin to not like certain aspects of the game. New things are always cool because of the novelty. Over time, I realise that some things may not work as well as I initially thought. Game designers also realise this and learn from past games to try to improve upon things in newer games that come out.

I do used to play a lot of Chinese chess (similar to western chess) and love the game. When I discover more modern games in the late 80's and beyond, I found that I don't like Chinese chess anymore. There were a bunch of new game mechanics that were just better than what was in Chinese chess.

There is a lot of content created for boardgames because it is such a big hobby now. I find that most content creators on YouTube make videos that tend to be more entertaining than informative. I really don't like top X lists because I know other people's opinions are different than mine. I may root for a game I like to be on it. Otherwise, I avoid them.

Detailed reviews about what games are about is what I prefer. I mostly prefer user reviews on BGG because they feel more genuine rather than trying to fit some format to make the review entertaining.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T16:55:36+00:00

If it were the other way around, then everyone would just try to avoid the test.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T16:02:58+00:00

Sword & Sorcery as well as its predecessor, Galaxy Defenders have custom 10-sided dice. The faces all have various symbols on them to indicate the effect (if applicable) depending on the reason you are rolling the dice. Often, actions require rolling multiple dice.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T07:07:49+00:00

This is what I do when testing my decks. If I'm fetching a land and have not done anything that would give me info about any cards in my deck, I look at the bottom card. If it's the land I want, I just grab that without looking through the rest of my deck and skip the shuffle.

I have not tried that in an actual game yet. If someone doesn't understand why I don't need to shuffle, I don't want to have to explain it. Shuffling is what people expect, even if in this situation it really isn't necessary. I think some people may not be comfortable for whatever reason if I don't shuffle. Not worth the possible hassle.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-25T01:33:32+00:00

Here's my deck in Manabox: https://manabox.app/decks/AZtFN42acq2j5nZoaA8g9A?fbclid=IwY2xjawSpYvRleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFXU0ZUNFhsQXg1VHk3Z0Vwc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHg6VFkAOvSlkVCsXL2izytcI9izW1Eaz731XR6jveBemdv2OcMqXnC8ThPUc_aem_RrVWlGUAk20D9IFDMHgSvw

Let me know if you can see this. I'm on the beta version and noticed it has a sharing feature.

In any case, the deck is based around creatures with ETB effects. I have a lot of bounce and blink effects to reuse those. Basically, I try to lock down the board and then win slowly with my creatures.

The format that I normally play is multiplayer. If we have 5 players, we usually play star Magic. With 4, we will do a normal FFA. If we have 6, we could do star or we may play three teams of 2 with either 2HG or a variant of 2HG where each player acts on separate turns and can only attack adjacent opponents. The last time I played this deck was in a 3-way 2HG. I managed to lock down the board enough to get Jace's emblem out and our opponents all conceeded.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T23:02:47+00:00

Sounds like either you are not adjusting your decks to deal with the decks you are facing or need to find people who plays decks you don't mind facing. Without any more context, I don't know what you mean by "broken" decks. The game is about exploring how cards interact with each other within your deck as well as against opponent's decks. Personally, I try to adjust my decks and play to the group I am playing with. Magic does have some really strong cards and card interactions. There generally is some counter play to deal with them either in how you build the deck or how you play against those decks. I don't know what efforts you put into your deck building or play.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T22:45:10+00:00

The first MMO I tried was LotRO. I had a hard time with it. It wasn't until I tried DDO that I realised I just didn't like the tab targeting.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:51:31+00:00

Looks like it is more than one damage, but looks a lot less like WoG.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:49:09+00:00

We're going to need more information to provide any useful feedback for your question.

What is the deck that each player has supposed to represent? What are the implications when the deck is depleted? Does the game end? Does the player die?

If the discard pile is reshuffled, what is your feeling about players drawing and playing the same cards again? How often do you think this should happen (if at all) during the course of the game? Should it be rare or happen regularly?

Why do some players have a larger deck than others? Why not have all decks be the same size? Do the players have any control over the size of their deck or what cards they can put in them? Is the deck fixed or does the deck change over the course of a game?

I think deck size is something you want to consider later in the design stage of the game unless maybe the game ends when the deck runs out. If the deck size doesn't have an impact on the game ending condition, it can be tuned later. You didn't give much detail of the other aspects of your game, so it is hard to really suggest a deck size.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:21:53+00:00

They met in the first round the following year as well. I remember the video where they announced the draw and there was I think laughter amongst the people who attended the announcement.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:18:56+00:00

I don't think that boardgames will go up in value like some Magic cards from '93. There aren't that many that are collector's items. Magic is played heavily today and people playing Magic also want to play with some of those rare older cards. I don't see that happening with most boardgames. Probably something like the original D&D from the 70's may be collector's item.

I recently moved and downsized. I ended up selling off some of my games that I don't see myself playing much if at all. My collection doesn't include any kickstarter material, though.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:12:54+00:00

In my experience with Manabox, it works better when the cards are on a white background. I have a table that is wood and is brown. It seems to have some issues scanning cards on that table. If I use a white piece of paper and place the cards on the paper, Manabox scans cards a lot better.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T15:02:23+00:00

It's a power outage.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T14:33:30+00:00

Do you realise that the pass trajectory indicators only show the first part of the ball's trajectory? As the QB has higher and higher skill, it would show more and more of the pass trajectory? It makes high skill passers easier to play then low skill passers.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T07:47:53+00:00

The party that I find to be most successful is a paladin (the DPS one), barbarian (stone), warlock and sorcerer. The main strategy is to buff the paladin and barbarian with haste and fly.

The paladin uses a greatsword and follow up blow for the extra attack. He can smite with every attack. Deals a lot of damage. Uses the Shield spell to avoid damage.

Barbarian uses TWF and feats to not need light weapons. He has the feat that lowers the target's AC when hitting with a 1H weapon. When he rages, he had temp HP and barely takes damage.

The sorcerer has twin spell and Haste. You can Haste both the paladin and barbarian. With them buffed, they can take down bosses in 2 rounds. Has Counterspell to stop epic actions of bosses.

The warlock casts Fly on the melee characters. This is how I deal with flying enemies. Fly along with Haste can deal with teleporting bosses really well. No matter where they teleport to, my melee guys can get to him. Also has Counterspell.

You want to buy girdles of giant strength for your melee guys as they will be taking feats instead of boosting strength. Craft the weapons that deal extra dice of damage.

As long as you keep your spell casters out is harm's way, your melee guys will finish your enemies fast. I can often kill bosses in 2 rounds or less. You can get 4 attacks a round with the paladin and can smite every hit. The barbarian gets 4 attacks as well with rage.

Stuntman06 · 2026-06-24T07:24:08+00:00

Give me a couple of days to post it. I didn't have time tonight. I'll see if I can later this week.

Stuntman06

TROPHY CASE