odds//ends
Yesterday was my birthday and the week leading up to it was so lovely! I invited a group of friends to go see the Paddleheads last regular season game last Thursday night. (The Paddleheads are Missoula's frontier league baseball team). Having eight friends show up to a silly baseball game was very satisfying to me, a sign that we are building some nice community here. Once we hit the weekend, Izzy and I headed out to Glacier National Park for a weekend of hiking and camping. I had my Magic fastpack and cribbage. We ended up playing a lot of cribbage but never got around to playing Magic.
Cribbage is interesting because Izzy has played it much longer than I have. I first learned it from her while we were stuck in a hotel in Kodiak, waiting out the rains after attending a kelp farming workshop. Those early games were really just about me learning the mechanics and I struggled to put together relevant hands. Izzy also loved (and still does love) hitting em with Muggins-- seeing combinations of points that I missed. Cribbage is easy to pick up and very social but it's a fun game with a lot more moving parts than maybe it initially seems.
As we hiked this weekend, we talked about what might be seen as "second level" strategy in cribbage. I asked her if she ever thought about the odds that a card would show up in the crib and if she had ways to divine what might be happening with her opponent's hand. I played Euchre when I was younger and some of the satisfaction was trying to read your opponent's cards through their actions. I think there is a little bit of that in cribbage and it was the first time I had really thought about it. I am growing in comfort with the system, so I can start to think outside of the basic rules engine. This makes for a fun dynamic, as I think that is where Izzy is with Magic, so we both have a game with deep comfort, and a game where we are starting to explore those edges.
For the sake of record keeping, I recently did a chaos draft at Muse here in Missoula as well. I have really been enjoying the skill expression of chaos draft and this last week we had a small group of six players who all felt pretty equal in skill level and buy-in. This meant that players seemed to be finding lanes and building coherent decks without stepping on each other. I first picked The Lord of the Eagles and decided that if I could support it, I would love to build a fliers deck where I could try to cast this big guy for just UU. As we drafted, energy cards kept showing up for me, so I started asking myself, could I be a blue/white energy + fliers deck? I found a copy of Static Prison, a few copies of Tune the Narrative, and a good mix of fliers and some support cards. I really liked how my deck looked. It played well too. I ended up losing a very close first game to a guy named Carl who plays a lot of legacy. We traded games and he was able to snowball me in game three, but I put up a good fight. Game two, I played Kerry, who has been putting together some local cube drafts and has played some higher level competitive Magic. I had a few nice lines, but he cleaned up in two games. Finally, I played Rory, who soundly stomped me a few weeks ago in Kaldheim draft. This week, he was on an ambitious five color pile with Aftermath Analyst to ramp. It was a little clunky and my fliers started picking up steam before he could make anything happen. Two games went fast in my favor.
More than anything, my takeaway was that this was incredibly fun magic. The games were textured, I always felt like I had decisions to make, and the deck worked in a very coherent way. I had a better night going 1-2 than some more wining records and I think it's a sign that my mindful drafting is paying off. I still have more to learn in gameplay, but I am stepping on less rakes and that is a good start.
On the cube design front, I am ready to start trying to recruit a group to try out my hobbit cube "On the Doorstep" and will be asking some of the folks I've played with more regularly. I am also thinking about very clean and simple cards and considering what I can do with them in the cube space. Cards like Mana Geode and Arcane Encyclopedia feel like a way to build something simple and resonant. I recognize that basically no magic player finds these exciting, but right now, they resonate with me. We'll have to see where that goes.