In your end I'll bounce stasis...

Magic: The Gathering is a game that's one of those cultural cornerstones which I assume most people into the geekier arts (miniatures, RPGs, Boardgames etc.) are atleast aware of at some level even if they don't play it themselves. It's the first and most popular trading card game (Hell, it invented the whole genre) in existence, with millions of players. Like any other game it's not without it's problems though, the chief of which in my opinion is lack of reprints for certain staples (and infact the policy of never reprinting many of the best cards) and general speculation with the cards, feeding an all-consuming secondary market. This in turn leads to many people having fixation on card values ( which in all fairness is understandable in the sense that good decks in many formats cost more than used cars. Understandable or not though, it still poisons the atmosphere somewhat). What does this all have to do with anything, I hear you ask? I'll get to that in just a minute.

Like many I used to play Magic a lot (pretty much every week, often more than that), and like many I quit playing after some years. We used to play what's known as "Kitchen table magic" (I'm sure you can see where the name comes from), multiplayer games with no adherance to formats or banlists. This is fun if you have a good group. Both the upside and downside of that being that most kitchen groups are just that, groups of friends gathering at the kitchen table at someone's home. You get to hang out with your mates - great (I'm making the assumption that you like your mates here)! You will pretty much exclusively play against the same people, and after a while the same decks - mediocre.

Would you look at that, it's the same combo. Again.

This will eventually lead you outside. For those outings we usually played drafts and prereleases where you constructed your deck at the event. Wanting to branch out into other formats is what eventually drove me away - it was just way too expensive.

That brings us to the present. I've started again! I recently found a new format called Premodern (it's been played in Sweden for a few years but is just now gaining traction elsewhere), and was hooked. The format is much more affordable than many other formats (my deck cost me about 100€ to put together - in contrast to Legacy or Vintage for example, where you can expect to run several cards that cost more than double that. Remember what I said about the car? Yeah, it do be like that.). My deck  is a blue control deck revolving around an enchantement called "Stasis" and attempts to first freeze the opponent so they can't interfare with the deck, and then slowly whittle them away. Today I had the chance to play the deck in the format for the first time (earlier games were tests against my cousin's decks which didn't adhere to the Premodern cardpool). It, ah, did well. I won the tournament (it was a small one - only four of us so everyone played against everyone) 3-0 (matches going 2-0, 2-0 and 2-1 to me, matches being best out of three games). First match was against a blue/green creature/control deck, the second one against blue/white standstill and the last one against white rebels.

Maindeck on the left, sideboard on the right. Photo taken by Zuher Turbi.

The current decklist is:

Lands
19 Island
3 Forsaken City

Creatures
1 Chronatog

Instants
4 Chain of Vapor
4 Gush
4 Thwart
4 Daze
4 Opt
3 Arcane Denial
3 Impulse
3 Foil

Enchantments
4 Stasis

Artifacts
3 Black Vise
1 Feldon's cane

Sideboard
4 Hydroblast
3 Propaganda
2 Chill
2 Powder Keg
2 Submerge
1 Arcane Denial
1 Impulse

For now I'm completely in love with the deck, but I'll continue fidling with it for a while atleast. I'll propably also make other decks eventually, as I'm trying to get my friends interested, and I suspect always playing Stasis would lead to notable amounts of saltiness. It's a fun and awesome card... as long as you're not on the receiving end of it.

One Space Marine, Two Space Marines, Three Space Marines...

The subject of this post is counting. Specifically, counting painted miniatures. Last year I decided to start counting my painting to get an idea of what I manage in a year. This was inspired by many people in hobby groups doing similiar counts (from what I've seen seems to be a fairly common practice), and by my personal like of statistics of all kinds (I know it's weird, please don't hit me). Obviously I wasn't going to hit the awesome several hundred painted miniatures a year some people do, being a fairly slow painter, but I figured I'd give it a shot. Well, what was the count then?
Somewhat unimpressive, I must confess.

In 2018 I painted from scratch 47 miniatures, 5 of which were bigger vehicles or monsters, and finished, fixed, or touched up 138 second hand miniatures, 6 of which were bigger vehicles or monsters (I've bought several bigger lots last year). The amount of work done on each of those varies a lot, but most were on the smaller side, so I'm going to assign a calculatory value of 1/10 to each of these, arriving at calculatory total of 60 (rounding down) painted miniatures in 2018.

I think I'll aim for 100 for 2019. In other news, I've started a new project (not enough of those around, obviously) - Lizardmen. They were what first drew me to Warhammer, but what little I painted as a kid was horrible, and my cousin and (then) only opponent was more into 40k so they got boxed up and forgotten. Well, no more! I think I'll make a post on them when I finish the first unit. Well, that's that. Happy new year 2019!