Card Games

All posts tagged Card Games

Wednesday nights are game night for me, and this week was Week 1 of the Journeyman League. The NOVA Nomads packed the house, with 5 games going non-stop all night, with probably 14 people in the shop, which is quite a few for us.

Since I’m a PG and unable to win any of the leagues I run, I usually pair up people and facilitate games instead of playing myself, since we have limited space.  As a result, I taught two players how to play Netrunner while they hung around waiting for a table to open up, and got one game of Warmachine in.

Continue Reading

Android Netrunner: The Card Game is an asymmetrical card game in which one player is a massive corporation with secret agendas and the other is a hacker out to steal their secrets and spoil their plans.


The basics:

The Corporation player has an Identity card that gives them a unique bonus throughout the game, a deck and a discard pile.  These three items create the three “core” servers that the hacker is trying to get into.  The Corp player defends these with pieces of ICE, like firewalls, dead ends barriers and secret agents designed to stop the hacker at all costs.

The corp creates remote servers, protects them, and installs agendas which get advanced over time.  Once they reach critical mass, the corp player scores them for points.

The Runner builds up their hacking rig, installing components that protect them from cyber and real attacks by the corp, and various programs and viruses they can use to tear down or get by the defenses put up by the corp player.  The runner has five health, represented by a 5-card hand size.  Whenever the runner would take damage, they discard a random card from their hand.  When they take damage and can’t discard, they die.  Some damage is permanent, and reduces the size of their hand.

Continue Reading

Happy New Year!

Now that we’ve cracked and analyzed half a dozen boosters, it’s time to run the second half of this though experiment, by doing some Sealed Deck construction. If you’re unfamiliar with this format, check out the MtG Official Sanctioned Formats, here. In short, you get six boosters, unlimited basic lands and about half an hour to build a 40-card deck.

The Boosters

I’ll be using the six boosters that have already been opened:

The Deck

I sorted everything by color first, and then examined what each color had to offer.  True to their natures, each color exemplified what they do best.  Red had loads of burn spells and pumpable creatures.  Blue had a bunch of cancellation and undos, and very few creatures, where Green had far too many creatures.  White was a mix, but with nothing but small creatures.  Black had some expensive but deadly creatures, and some interesting tricks.

In the end, I went with Red/Black:

For those interested in maths, here’s the deck on


Bombs = Creatures

Black donates most of the creatures, notably the two Minotaur Abominations as tanks, the fairly self-sufficient Vampire Warlord and the super deadly Deathgaze Cockatrices. If the Ogre Battlemaster happens to get out early, it makes everything that comes after very nasty. The fairly cheap Regathan Firecat and Marauding Maulhorn hit like trucks on the turns they come out. The Shadowborn Apostles and Gnawing Zombie are only present to help balance the mana curve and hopefully provide something to toss onto the field early in the game.


Here’s where Red shines, though Doom Blade is definitely worth mentioning. The Chandra’s Outrage cards are amazing, as is the Lightning Strike. Pitchburn Devils has a nasty surprise in store when it dies, and Seismic Stomp helps shore up the fact that the two Deathgaze Cockatrices and Sengir Vampire are my only flying creatures by removing any normal creatures from the way of my own beasts.


As I mentioned, I don’t have much evasion in this deck. I do have Accursed Spirit though, which is in the deck due to it’s evasive qualities.


I could have swung into white instead of black, but Doom Blade and the Deathgaze Cockatrices made the choice for me.

This deck is fast and hits hard once a few creatures get out. It also has enough removal for me to stop my opponent’s attempts at attacking, or open avenues for my own creatures to get through. I’ve had a few chances to play it, and I really enjoy it.

What do you think?

Did I make good choices? Based on the pool of cards, what deck would you build?



Continue Reading