Today was Day 1 of New York Comic Con (also known to some as New York Anime Festival.) This is going to be a fairly brief post, simply on the firtue of being written at 3am after just getting back and needing to be up in less than many hours to go back. Had a good time, though one or two dark spots kinda ruined a small portion of it here or there.
Going to NYCC, there were a few things I really wanted to do. Shockingly, playing an RPG wasn't on the list. I was looking forward to doing some drafting – probably one, if my mental plan had gone off perfectly. In addition, I wanted to go to a bunch of awesome panels, spend most of my time on the showroom floor, and watch some Starcraft 2 played at the IEM North American Finals (cast by Day9! Woot!)
While, I did accomplish most of that, a good portion of it wasn't nearly to the degree that I'd planned. I only got to watch Starcraft for a few minutes, though those minutes were of some truly exceptional play by HuK against drewbie. HuK's army was being annihilated – with his largely colossi force being minced by drewbie's Vikings, but HuK managed to hold it off for a little while, and found a window of 2-3 seconds in which he could attack, decimating drewbie's ground forces. Reinforcing with a huge number of stalkers, HuK whittled down the terran numbers, and despite losing all his Colossi, pulled out the win with a daring attack into the opposing main. For five minutes of watching SC2, I clearly got my money's worth.
The showroom floor was underwhelming. While once upon a time, comics were something I was really interested in, and Wednesdays were the highlight of my week, those times have largely passed. Furthermore, not having a whole lot of disposable income really kind of puts the pinch on any extravagant spending on my part. I did score a free shirt from the Nintendo booth, and it's for the sequel to a game that I loved: Golden Sun. I plan on wearing it there tomorrow, as I become the least distinguishable person there, since there will be a billion other people there.
I managed to find time for a Sealed Deck Scars of Mirrodin tourny, but I didn't do well. For some reason, I saw a distortion field, and decided to build Blue/Green control. This didn't work well at ALL, and I lost my first two matches pretty embarrassingly. I almost dropped from the tourny, but saw that if I won two of my four matches, I'd be in for at least one booster pack of prizes. I stuck in it, just to see if the third round would bring any more luck – and turns out, it did. I got a bye in round three, giving me one round that would decide if I was taking prizes home. However, during the third round, I took a look at my deck and realized exactly how horrible it was. Ditching it and instead rebuilding it to be my usual green/black infect deck with a much stronger emphasis on proliferate than normal, I did some playtests with it was was very impressed. Sadly, it just wasn't to be. Game one I lose to an extremely well executed Arc Trail that crippled my creature base beyond repair, and game two I had three lands in my opening hand – then drew eight in a row. There's not much that I can do about that. I was actually worried that I'd mixed in a whole mess of extra forests that I hadn't counted properly, but turns out that statistics just screwed me. There were 4 lands left in the 20+ cards remaining in my deck. I packed up, having only taken one game home in four rounds. Embarrassing to say the least. Honestly, I didn't even get anything halfway decent from it. Very sad.
By far the highlight of the day was the DnD Dungeon Delve that Shaun, Pop and I did. A Dungeon Delve is a timed, one hour encounter that involves trying to beat two fairly difficult encounters within the hour. For each milestone you reach, you get points to purchase magic items to allow your characters to be much more powerful the next time you play. All of them are done with premade characters, using a simplified ruleset called “Essential DnD.” Our DM was a very experienced player and actively tried to kill me a whole bunch. I nearly died twice, but the party managed to pull through, and we won the delve by defeating both encounters – something that the DM assures us is NOT the usual way it goes. I won the extra magic item roll at the end, and grabbed myself a sword of lifedrinking – which will no doubt come in extremely useful tomorrow, when we go back for more Delving Action. I greatly approve of this system, and how fast-paced it is. Combat seems to fly by, and knowing that time is against you really makes everyone think fast on their feet. We won literally by seconds – our last round ended after time did. The whole thing was just generally enjoyable, and we've all decided to do a couple more this weekend. I'll let you guys know how they go.
It's late now, and there's plenty more to do tomorrow, so I'm going to sign off here. Goodnight everyone. I'll have another convention post up tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment