Happy Holidays!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

I just wanted to wish you a very merry christmas and a happy new year in advance! Enjoy the holidays, be it for the meals or the general mood of everybody! I hope you eat vegan as much as possible in order to let animals have a merry christmas aswell.

Contentwise I will take a little break during the holidays in order to return strong in the new year!

So I'll see y'all 'round in 2016

Pretty charming to have options isn't it?!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Maybe you've already encountered one deck of the rare species called "5-Color Charms". The basic idea behind the deck is that having multiple cards for different situations is great, having one card for multiple situations is better but having multiple cards where each one has different uses is best. For that reason you play nearly every Ravnica-Charm, Alara-Charm, Tarkir-Charm and Dragon-Charm.

Now I'm not here to talk about the deck even though I'd love to, but simply about Charms in general. While some of them have, for example, two rather situational modes and one outright "meh" one, there are some among them I would definitely include in any deck that can play them no matter what.

Much like the ChannelFireball-Series I have prepared a Top 8 - List and some honorable mentions to go through today, so let's get going...

Honorable Mentions

All of these are pretty useful in many situations but just didn't make it onto the list because of one mode that's not too exciting most of the time.

Take for example Crosis' Charm: Destroy target nonblack creature? Yes I'll take that. Destroy target artifact? Sign me up. Return target permanent to its owner's hand? Ehhhh, might have some uses sometimes but as I said: "meh". The same is true for the rest of them:

• Darigaaz's Charm: "Target creature gets +3/+3 until end of turn."
• Esper Charm: "Target player discards two cards."
• Mardu Charm: "Target opponent reveals his or her hand. etc,etc."
• Selesnya Charm: "Target creature gets +2/+2 and gains trample until end of turn."

Simic Charm is definitely the worst of them, having no real bad mode, but no real good one either, except for maybe the hexproof mode but that one is still very situational. I just wanted to mention him because in decks that look to protect key creatures for cheap, he can be a nice addition providing three modes that will probably protect it against anything your opponents can throw at you. No swiss army knife like some of the others but still pretty decent.

Without further ado, I'll start with number 8...

Nr.8 - Jund Charm

EDH is a very durdly and grindy format, so often times you'll encounter at least one deck that heavily interacts with the graveyard in a four player game.
And since it's multiplayer, board wipes are pretty strong and important to have. Jund Charm has a little bit of everything. Most of the time the Charm will fizzle a spell that target's something in a graveyard while at the same time dealing with the rest of said graveyard aswell making future spells and abilites of the same kind a whole lot weaker.
And if that's not the situation you're dealing with, you can also get rid of token armies and small utility creatures at instant speed while possibly not harming your own team.
Of course he wouldn't be #8 if he had a third good ability but still, I doubt you'll encounter many games where you wish you hadn't drawn Jund charm...



(Except when you hope for that miracle-topdeck-one-outer of course...)

Nr.7 - Rakdos Charm

As small and minor as the modes look, I've yet to play a game where Rakdos Charm wasn't at least pretty handy. It's just one of those cards that make me feel comfortable passing the turn because "What could possibly happen that my Charm doesn't stop?!" Sure, there are many things, but some of the more broken ones can be stopped for the small price of a black and a red mana:

-  Graveyard wise you get the same deal as with Jund Charm for one green mana less.
-  A decent amount of combo-kills in the format involve at least one artifact so having artifact removal isn't bad to have.
-  What could be better than interrupting the player producing infinite creatures? Letting him do it and then killing him with is own combo!


As you can see, good old Rakdos Charm really is worth his money in regards to broken things and while sometimes he's just Shatter, having two "fuck your combo"-modes strapped onto it definitely makes him worth running 99% of the time.

Nr.6 - Rith's Charm

Slowly but surely we're getting into "three-mode" territory.

Rith's Charm is one of my personal favourites. Never overwhelmingly good but always pretty neat.

There're almost no games where someone isn't controlling a troublesome nonbasic land: Reliquary Tower with 10+ cards in hand, threatening hefty attacks with Kessig Wolf Run or turtling behind a Maze of Ith.
And if you don't worry about a land you can always produce three power in form of tokens at instant speed to block with or go offensive, especially if you're running Anthem-style effects.

Supposedly there have been situations where if you could've survived that last attack with a simple Fog you would've won the next turn... Just putting that out there.

Nr. 5 - Naya Charm

Naya Charm was one of the cards I didn't have on my radar for a long time until it was cast against me several times, always getting some serious stuff done.

Be it handling my Prophet of Kruphix, regrowing a Wrath of God to clear to board or buying that one turn that would tip the damage race to the opponents favor, Naya Charm never seems to be a dead card, because at the very least you can trade it for a more effective card you've already used at the end of turn.

The removal-mode is decent, not insane, and tapping down creatures is better in 1v1, but still having that instant-speed Regrowth with two additional modes is pretty damn good.

Nr. 4 - Abzan Charm

Still no "three-mode" Charm, but the two good ones are pretty insane considering you have them on one card. 

Exiling a creature with power bigger than three is pretty much Swords to Plowshares without the drawback in many situations, especially since EDH is so slow that big creatures matter more than in any other format.

Now the "All-Star"-Mode is definitely the Night's Whisper effect. Only that it suddenly has instant-speed! This can never, ever be bad. Whenever you encounter a game with little to no relevant creatures because everyone is playing control or your hand is full with other removal, Abzan Charm stays relevant by providing cheap and efficient card draw.

Not to forget the corner cases where the Charm might save an important creature from the likes of Mardu Charm or simple combat damage. No game-winning effect or even relevant in more than 5% of the games but hey, I prefer having access to the effect in these games instead of not.

As for the Top 3 ....

Nr. 3 - Treva's Charm

Three seems like the lucky number since the last three charms funnily enough are the ones I consider "three-mode".

The first of them all - Treva's Charm - is a really excellent piece of cardboard. Admittedly there are more defensive uses to it than offensive having the "attacking" clause on the removal part, but still, exiling a big attacking creature with lifelink/vigilance and then swinging back for a bunch seems to have some offensive parts.


What I like about Treva's Charm is, when everything falls apart, you still have the "draw a card, then discard a card"-mode to search for that unlikely out.

As much as I like that part of Treva's Charm the other two are juuuust a bit better...

Nr. 2 - Sultai Charm

Given this thing costs only 3 mana the options it provides are amazing. Dealing with most non-creature permanents except Planeswalkers while also providing an answer for many creatures is definitely a thing I want in a card.

Somehow I get the feeling the Sultai found Treva's Charm while delving through some junk and thought: "Hmmm let's do that... but better!"

While still dealing with enchantments you get to deal with artifacts aswell. The creature-removal part is still very conditional, especially in a format where more "golden" creatures see more play than usual and a high percentage of the games those creatures are very key to the strategy of the opposing decks as they're the commanders. But to make up for that the "draw-discard"-mode suddenly doesn't make card disadvantage... which is obviously huge.

Something that you tend to forget is that having access to black instead of white makes discard effects a whole lot better as black offers so many ways to reuse creatures in your graveyard while blue offers the same kind of deal for instants or sorceries.

To get to our "Numero Uno"...

"aaaaaand the oscar goes to..."

Nr. 1 - Bant Charm

Very similar to Treva's Charm but so different at the same time. Not only do I see Artifact-removal as more important than Enchantment-removal but the actual removal-part of the card is also a lot less situational.

Where before you might've looked at that Prophet of Kruphix or Jin-Gitaxias and saw them running away with the game you now have a very handy answer.

But that's not all. Bant Charm is just the swiss army knife I was talking about before. While handling a good 66% of the permanents you'd ever want to deal with, this beauty ALSO protects the answers to those cards itself can't deal with. Or protect your own permanents you know... whatever...

Admittedly before the change to how your commander interacts with "changing the zone" - aka the tuck-rules - this card was even more insane, but still it made it to the top of my list... or the bottom of this article at that...



Alright, that's it for today, I hope you enjoyed the read and that you're checking back in for more content in the future... If you do I'll...

See y'all 'round!

Soulshifting through the format

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Ever had this one deck idea that seemed really cool and somewhat potent but then got stuck while actually building it? Well, if I hadn't had such a situation before I would've now.

Let's go back a month or two. I was pretty hyped about the idea of building Celestial Kirin as my Mono-White deck, since a) the idea of playing a deck based on the opposing converted mana cost just seemed really cool and b) I am a sucker for Tribal decks since they just feel soooo cohesive. So I browsed the internet and my mind for white Spirits of any CMC while also looking out for non-Spirits that still might add synergetic effect. (Shout out to Bastion Protector for getting printed btw)

 

As I was going through cards, I came across the ol' "Soulshift" mechanic and surely they'll go fine into a Celestial Kirin deck. But then an idea sparked inside the chaos I call brain: Why not also build a deck that focused more heavily on this seemingly neat keyword. Effects like Eternal Witness have been and always will be among the stronger ones in EDH, and building a creature-based deck that has pseudo-protection against Wraths in Soulshift can't be too bad, can it?!

A quick magiccards.info-query later and I was pretty much sold:

Now while Abzan or Golgari might be good enough, I wanted to make sure blue and red didn't offer some hidden gems... And while red really wasn't that impressive...

Some of you might begin to see the problem: You'll want to play green and black for sure, since the majority of Soulshift creatures is in those two colors, while you don't really want to pass up on either white or blue.

Fortunately my playgroup allows any of the Nephilim to be played as your general, but still, playing a 4c deck that will want a certain density of spirits/soulshifters might become a problem when distributing slots since you'll also want some amount of fixing and utility in the deck (if you don't want to spend 1.000€ on your mana base that is...).

Additionally I came up with this insanely awesome toolbox, which added another pile of cards that would make me cry out in pain if I had to cut them from the deck:

...

There's just everything you'll ever need in a game of EDH printed in the form of a legendary spirit: mass removal (that even works around Indestructible), resilient threats, recurrsion, life drain, protection, and so on and so forth.

The real issues started when I actually sat down and started to build a rough draft of the deck. I just didn't know where to take the deck: 

1. If I wanted to use soulshift for maximum value - as a tool for grinding out games - I'd have to incorporate a sacrifice theme. Unfortunately a really good sacrifice engine requires quite a lot of room in a deck (outlets, additional effects, fodder, etc.), therefor I'd have to cut down on Utility-Spirits/Ramp/Toolbox. And especially cutting down on the Spirits would then make the tool box and soulshifting that much worse...
2. Going for a more aggressive approach would make many of the rather expensively costed soulshift-spirits pretty bad, but cutting them would, on the other hand, take away the safety net Soulshift provides.

Also a big thing to consider is that, depending on the curve of the deck, soulshift has a natural threshold: If you play many low drop spirits like Geist of Saint Traft and Kira, Spirits with soulshift 3 are viable additions to the deck, whereas a higher curved spirits deck might want soulshift 5 to be the lowest. This means that you can't just jam the "better" soulshift-Creatures into the deck because the quality of soulshift depends on the non-soulshift Spirits you might want to get back every now and then.

Sadly I've not come up with the perfect solution yet. Some of the Spirits that have neat little effects in addition to soulshift just are too small to return anything while others provide little to nothing besides soulshift which makes them have a bit of an awkward feel to them due to the high costs.

My "angle of attack", if you'd like to call it that, is trying to work around the high casting costs while also focusing more on the value providing Spirits instead of "comboing" with Soulshift at all costs. Also since Lifespinner will want some fodder, playing cards like Lingering Souls fill the double role of somewhat synergizing with Drogskol Captain and the likes while also providing Spirits to sacrifice. As for the "cheating" the mana costs:

Now Urza's Incubator is pretty good in most tribal decks for the acceleration it provides. But cards like Victimize or Rescue from the Underworld really shine in this deck: Either you sacrifice a small Spirit and return at least one of the better/bigger ones or you sacrifice a big one and return two Spirits to the game AND one to your hand while potentially having yet another creature with soulshift in play.

Mix one of these in there and you're pretty much set for any grinding you'll ever need.

Of course this is still not a real gameplan, but at least it's a base and I'll try to build form there. Provided all your spirit legends offer pretty insane effects, just backing them up with this recurrsion engine of Reanimate-Effects, Regrowth-Effects and of course Soulshift might be good enough in many cases, so maybe I'm just overthinking things. I hope to get a first draft of the deck running after the holidays and simply playtest my way from there to a more finely tuned pile of sweetness.

And never forget, simply running a good ramp package and value creatures is a good place to be in EDH:

With that I want to end it for today. I hope I could inspire at least one of you to try build a similar deck or maybe someone has already built a deck similar to this and wants to share his experience with me/us, because as always I'll...

See y'all 'round!

Infinity Evolved #7 - In sight

Podcast #1

You can also download the episode here!

Infinity Evolved #6 - Rockcrusher

Celeriac-Schnitzel someone?

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen!

It's been a decade - at least it feels like it - since I've posted a recipe. So why don't I stop this "bad roll" I'm on today, with one of my favourite recipes at the moment. What I really love about it is that there's no "faux-meat" involved but still a very hearty dish while of course being vegan (who would've thought eh?). So without further ado...

Celeriac-Schnitzel

Ingredients (for 2-3 servings):

• medium sized knob Celeriac
• 200-300g Soy yoghurt
• 100g Breadcrumbs
• Salt
• Pepper

Now the beatuy of this recipe is in its simplicity. Just peel the Celeriac, cut it into 0.5mm thick slices, boil up some water in a pot - don't forget to add a decent amount of salt - and cook until the slices are "al dente". Fish them out and put the slices on a paper towel or the likes. While waiting for them to cool down a bit put the yoghurt along with a pinch of salt and pepper - mix it up - into a soup plate and the breadcrumbs into a second one. Once cooled down a bit, take the celeriac slices, dip them into the yoghurt until fully covered by a thin layer and then into the breadcrumbs with them. So basically your standard breading pattern.

With that done all that's left is throwing them into a pan with a bunch of (plant-based) oil - wait until the oil has heated up - and fry the schnitzels until they're gold-brown. As side-dishes prepare whatever you prefer... rice or potatoes are my favourites!

Bon Appetit!

Please let me know if you liked the recipe or not, I'm always curious if I'm able to explain it in a way that people can replicate my dishes.

See y'all 'round!

Infinity Evolved #5 - UberLength Special

Infinity Evolved #2,#3,#4 - Triple Feature

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

The last few days have been a bit turbulent and I kind of forgot to post my Minecraft-Episodes here.... Sorry about that! So here go all 3 episodes you guys might've missed so far...

Infinity Evolved #1 - Expert mode!!

Spot on the Build #3: Blaze Pow(d)er Reloaded!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Some of you might remember my post on a Blaze Spawner Power Setup... For those who don't, here you have a quick overview (plus a link to the post if you click on the picture).

As stated back then the setup is very scaleable and the picture above shows the very basic version used for early-game machines. The main problem of the setup is that the ratio between Blaze Powder and Mob Essence is off, meaning that we get too much Blaze Powder/Blaze Rods and lack the Mobessence to turn them into RF.

Over the past couple of days I've now tried to solve this bottleneck issue, and increase the total RF aswell as the RF/t while still maintaining some compactness in the setup. Let me show you my results...

Setup #1 - Extra Mob Essence Farm

Weeeeell, how exciting... This is probably the most efficient way to get more power out of your Blaze Spawner as you will get the full 640.000 RF out of every Powder but probably will also cause more lag and is overall just boring...

Most of you will have guessed it by now: The bottom half contains the standard Blaze Spawner-Grinder-Pulverizer setup, while the top half is just some Cursed Earth and a Grinder, spawning anything just so you get more Essence.
Also in order to get all your Blaze Powder turned into RF you'll need more than one 5x5 Cursed Earth + Grinder setup so the space this takes up is overall pretty big. I didn't look into specific numbers here, because, let's be honest, I will never ever use this in a playthrough.... ever!


Moving on...

Setup #2 - Blazing Pyrotheum

Now we're talking! This was actually the first more advanced setup I came up with (that isn't straight boring) and the results were more than promising. Let's have a look...

Now that might look a bit confusing at first but let me assure you, that's mainly because of item/liquid/power routing. The goal, as you might be able to see at the 4 bottom left dynamos, is to create Blazing Pyrotheum, which can be inserted into a Magmatic Dynamo to create 2 Million RF per bucket at 80 RF/t. In order to do this in a self-sustaining way, you need to be able to produce all the ingredients for crafting Pyrotheum Dust (Blaze Powder, Sulfur, Redstone, Coal Powder) all based on the outputs of the Blaze Farm. Maybe a little sketch can clear some things up:

Blue = Input; Red = Output

What makes this whole thing work is the fact that Blaze Rods in a Magma Crucible are turned into Lava for a rather low powercost. That and the fact that the mana of one bucket of lava enables you to conjour a piece of Coal and a piece of Redstone will mean that you can convert 4 1/4 Blaze Rods into two pieces of Pyrotheum Dust which equal 1/2 bucket of Blazing Pyrotheum... and therefor 1 Million RF. 

Placing all these machines in a way that you can keep routing items as easy as possible aside, there are only a few tips and tricks that you need to keep in mind:

1. You need to Round-Robin Blaze Rods in a way that for every Blaze Rod getting pulverized 4 Blaze Rods land in the Magma Crucible to produce Lava. This will result in 4 pieces of Blaze Powder + 1 piece of Redstone and Coal each which means 3 Reactant Dynamos and 1 Magmatic Dynamo running. Three more "loops" later you'll have your 12 Reactant Dynamos and 4 Magmatic Dynamos producing RF for you.
2. You absolutely have to make sure that you round-robin the Redstone and Coal you pick up with the Hopperhock. One piece of it must rout back to the Hopper and one piece should get processed into Pyrotheum Dust.
3. The Redstone Logic is setup in a way that the Mana Detector triggers a pulse that will then get forwarded to the hoppers once the Mana Spreader is done outputting mana. This will ensure that the Coal/Redstone is dropped only once there's enough Mana to ensure a successfull conjouration. For that purpose just connect the Mana Detector to both the Input and the Lock of a State Cell from Project Red and then foward it to two Redstone Torches like shown in the Picture below. It also is very important to use Filters on the Hoppers to make sure that one of them recieves Redstone and one recieves Coal.

Also it might be wise to prevent overflow with Translocators (in this case the input of Blaze Powder and Sulfur into the Cyclic Assembler):

Setup #3 - Fire Water

This is a completely different abomination. It maximizes the total RF/Blaze as good as possible while also producing additional ressources like Potatoes, Sugar and Redstone.

The basic concept is the same as in the Blazing Pyrotheum setup: Converting Blaze Rods into Lava into Mana to conjur items with the Conjuration Catalyst that can then be used to produce power. In this case the mana is used to "only" create 2 pieces of redstone each time, which then are combined in a Vat to create a bucket of Fire Water each (by combining it with Hootch and Blaze Powder). And one bucket of Fire Water then equals 1.2 Million RF in the EnderIO Combustion Generator - sweet!

Since I personally like this setup the most, I'll provide a more extensive tutorial on how to build it for only this one. But to be honest, the extra Mob Farm is so easy it shouldn't require a tutorial and the Blazing Pyrotheum setup is veeeery similar so you shouldn't have a hard time building it based on the Fire Water Generation Plant.


Step Nr.1 - The Basics

First build a box of 5x5 (interior) out of any block. Just make sure that the walls in the North and West directions are two block thick or Blazes will be spawning outside (due to how the radius of Spawners is not centered on the middle of the block but the North-West corner). For symmetry I tend to do the East wall aswell, but it isn't necessary.

Then in the middle of said box, dig out a hole for your one piece of Cursed Earth and put the Blaze Spawner on top. This will make the Spawner spawn Blazes even if you are NOT around.

Lastly place your MFR Grinder so it covers the 5x5 interior of the box and close it up.


Step Nr.2 - Blaze Powder

Next up, getting the "normal" Blaze Pow(d)er setup going. I'm using a Macerator in this case, because it will turn one Blaze Rod into five Blaze Powder instead of the four we would get from a Pulverizer.
(Note: While you don't care about Sulfur when going for Fire Water, I recommend using a Pulverizer in the Pyrotheum build instead of a Macerator because of the secondary output.)

I'm using EnderIO as the conduits allow maximum compactness, but you can of course use Thermal Dynamics/whatever you like to rout Items, Energy and Liquids. In this case I output all items collected by the grinder to the chest (GREEN channel), then pull the Blaze Rods out into the Macerator (RED channel) - you won't need a filter since Blaze Rods are the only item that can go in there - and extract the Blaze Powder from there for further use (BLUE channel - round robin).
(Note: Make sure you extract the other items Blazes will occasionally drop somwhere, or else the buffer chest will fill up and clog up the system.)

Then to get my RF power to the Macerator (which normally uses EU) I hook up two MV Wire Connectors from Immersive Engineering using an Electrum Wire Coil. That will convert the RF needed by the Macerator into EU and power it.


Step Nr.3 - Blaze Power

Now that we can process the Blaze Rods into Blaze Powder, the first half of the build is nearly finished. Plop down 12 Reactant Dynamos, upgrade them with the "Transmission Coil Ducting"-Augment (for the sake of compactness) and set the Item Conduit to input through the blue channel.

Once that's done, you'll only need to give the system a small amount of energy to kick-start and you'll be producing energy which will then again feed into the system, powering further operations like killing Blazes or grinding Blaze Rods.


Step Nr.4 - Lava/Mana

Lava to produce mana is the next step. The Magma Crucible will get fed Blaze Rods (RED channel - Round-Robin-Mode at the Bufferchest to split the Blaze Rods between Curcible and Macerator!) to turn into lava. From there it will output it into the Floodgate below which will then place it in the world to get eaten by Thermalilies.

(Note: It is recommended to use a basic Mana Spreader with a Velocity Lens in order to have as little Mana as possible stuck in the Spreader itself.)

Step Nr.5 - Conjuration

What you'll want from this redstone circuit is to emit exactly two pulses whenever the Mana Spreader has output mana and is finished doing so. To create that behavior you'll only need a State Cell and hook up the Mana Detector to both the Lock and the Input.

Now whenever a Mana Pulse travels through the Detector, a Redstone signal is emitted that triggers the State Cell BUT the next pulse prevents the timer from going all the way by triggering the lock. This is repeated over and over until the last pulse. As no more pulses travel through, the State Cell can finally output a signal, which is then split and one side is delayed. This will disable the Redstone Torch twice, therefore dropping the two pieces of Redstone waiting in the Hopper.

To pick up the items we're doubling, a floating Hopperhock has to be placed:

(Note: It is very important to place an empty Manapool next to the Hopperhock and bind it to that or else it might drain mana from the Conjuration-Manapool resulting in less Redstone "produced".)

You simply connect the Hopper with the Chest of your Hopperhock and then put down a Vat and connect that aswell. Then Round-Robin-Mode with a single item will always keep 2 Redstone Dust in your Hopper as after doubling you'll have 4 and 2 will get inserted into the Vat.

The position of the Vat is chosen on purpose as setting the item input on the dynamo-side to the BLUE channel will add it into the Blaze Powder cycle, which is the other ingredient of producing Fire Water.

Step Nr.6 - Fire Water

The only "problem" with producing Fire Water is that it will need so-called Hootch as a base fluid. Luckily a rather small farm of sugarcane and potatoes will be enough to supply ressources to produce the needed amount of Hootch, it will even produce extras (5x5 farm). I'm not entirely sure if you could get enough Hootch out of a 3x3 farm, but I kind of doubt it.

So, facing away from the Spawner-Box, build a 5x5 field of Dirt and Sand (6 Sand and 18 Dirt), till the Dirt and put up Crop-Sticks with Potatoes and Sugarcane. To get the Dirt to stay humid, put up a sprinkler-system. Add a Harvester with a Radius Upgrade (Lapis) and the all-time Void Fluid Pipe and put a Pulverizer on top. Next up, a second Vat to produce and connect all pieces with 3 Item Conduits like shown above. (Note: The I/O pipe that extracts Potatoes and Sugar from the Chest on top, will need an Item Filter with Blacklist Redstone. Also the Servo that supplies your Hopper and Vat with Redstone needs Redstone to be in its Whitelist!)

Lastly add an infinite water source below the Hootch-producing Vat and you should be good to go.

Step Nr.7 - Fire Power

All that's left are a few Combustion Generators from EnderIO. Setting them up like the Dynamos is probably a good way of doing things, but make sure you disconnect the Fluid Conduits in the corner. That's because the Dynamos are supplied with Mob Essence but you'll want to transport Fire Water through them to your Generators. 

And that's it! You're done! You've successfully built a system that can produce around 3000 RF/t (with Augments and additional Dynamos/Generators) off of a Vanilla Blaze Spawner and a 5x5 Potatoe/Sugarcane Farm while also getting a surplus of Potatoes and Sugar.

If there's anything unclear still, just leave a comment, I'll try to explain it. It's pretty complicated to write everything down so I might've forgotten some minor details.

Other than that, I hope you liked this "little" Tutorial...

See y'all 'round!

FTB Infinity S2 E4 - Storage

FTB Infinity S2 E3 - New effects

FTB Infinity S2 E2 - The struggles!

Planeswalkers as Generals?

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

I think I am not the only one who has wondered: Would it be bad to let people play normal Planeswalkers as their Commander? Technically they're a "legendary creature" right?

Let's fetch a list of all printed planeswalkers: Here ya go!

64, eh? Minus the 5 we got in the Commander 2014 Packs and 5 from Origins equals 54 Planeswalkers that aren't legal... So let me share my view of things with you!

Powerlevel

To be honest I don't think powerlevel would be an issue. Yes, there are some very potent planeswalkers out there that will make a very strong and competitive commander...

... but hey, Animar or Prossh are definitely up to par in terms of raw powerlevel - just to give you two examples.
I think the real strength of them would be their resiliency since there are few cards that will handle them directly. As long as you have creatures to defend him/her/it, and many planeswalkers even bring their own, you can happily get incremental value out of your planeswalker and noone will be able to stop you. You can play a boatload of boardwipes and your general will get better and better since you'll be able to a) build your deck around the fact that you play lots of massremoval and b) the longer a game goes the more advantage you'll get out of your planeswalker and games with a ton of massremoval tend to go veeeery long.

In that regard, Planeswalkers are a bit similar to the Theros-Gods in that they are harder to deal with then normal generals but will provide a good amount of value over the course of the game. The major difference is that while the Gods are even harder to deal with than Planeswalkers in my opinion, Planeswalkers are way more versatile in their use due to them having different modes.

That said, Commander/EDH/"whateveryoucallit" is probably the single best equipped format in dealing with non-creature-permanents, but still - since I write this on the assumption that we play them as our general - being able to play them again out of the command zone kind of cancels out the relative richness of answers.

Then again, not every planeswalker out there is as busted as those three above...

Don't get me wrong here, I'd probably consider building a deck around them and it would be a ton of fun while being decently powerful, but if I were to build a deck for a mega competitive tournament, they wouldn't be on my list of consideration.

The most limiting factor in powerlevel for most of the planeswalkers is their lack of colors. Only 20 planeswalkers out there have more then one color and two of them are even colorless. Just having access to more colors ups the powerlevel of a well built deck by a considerable amount so you're basically present a trade-off:

1. Do I want to have the more powerful overall deck: Play a general with 3 colors (probably not a planeswalker)
2. Do I want to have a resilient commander: Play a planeswalker/god but have access to less colors.

That's a pretty fair trade-off and definitely not a reason why it is good that we can't play Planeswalkers as our commander.

Flavour

You know these people?

They're legal as generals because they have this neat little "Legendary" in their type-bar along with "creature".

Then let's have a look at these:

Holy mother of god! Suddenly: "Planeswalker"! 

Ok, I am exaggerating here but you get the point, don't you? "Planeswalkers" and "Legendary Creatures" are basically the same: They're extraordinary people/dragons/things/... that play a big role in the Magic: the Gathering multiverse. 

Maybe once they get their spark and turn into Planeswalkers they're too busy leading an army to battle, but if we get too realistic here there are several creatures we shouldn't be able to play because they got killed in some point of the lore.

So in my opinion, it would even be more flavourful to allow Planeswalkers than not, period.

Fun

Now, here I can see people disagreeing with me. Having to deal with planeswalkers is sometimes very tiresome and frustrating, therefore hurting the fun of the format. But on the other hand, EDH is a format that is so fun because of the wealth in diversity and getting another 54 legal generals to play with would increase that even more.

Once the meta has adapted to the possibility of running into a planeswalking general, making them legal would've been a good thing for the format, because - let's be honest here - facing a Derevi-Stax list or Scion of the Ur Dragon Hermit Druid deck isn't much fun either but people have learned to accept that (I personally have 0% of a problem with these decks, just to make that clear).

So while some people would cry out and complain, the majority would hopefully see it as an enrichment to the format. And to those who complain I would say: If you don't like Planeswalkers, stuff your deck full of answers and deal with it, that's just how Magic works.

With this I am off for today, I hope you enjoyed the read, have a nice day and...

See y'all 'round!

FTB Infinity S2 E1 - A new Season!

Spot on the Build #2: Blaze Pow(d)er

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen, yet another time!

Ever wondered what would be an easy way to power machines early besides a treefarm producing charcoal to then burn in a Furnace Generator of any sort?
Well, I have just the perfect build for you...

What I really like about this setup is, that it really doesn't require much by way of ressources, is self-sustaining and can be upgraded to be a nice power supply even in later stages of the game. 

Luckily the whole setup is pretty easy to build so this tutorial won't take much of your time either!

The Spawner is a vanilla Spawner from the Nether (transported with a Diamond Dolly), the Dynamos are Reactant Dynamos from Thermal Expansion.

In the pictures below you can see the Pulverizer getting fed Blaze Rods from the Chest and outputting the Powder to the Dynamos in round-robin mode.

The basic concept is pretty simple: In order to use the Reactant Dynamos you need to provide solid reactant aswell as a liquid fuel and since a Grinder outputs both - given the right mobs to kill - they're a perfect combination. I've used something similar in the past, only that I used Gunpowder I got from Creepers as the reactant. What I really like about using Blaze Powder instead are two things:

1. Finding a Blaze Spawner in the Nether is normally not that hard to do and it will provide you with a reliable source of Blaze Rods (which you can then turn into Powder)
2. Killing a Creeper costs as much RF as killing a Blaze but the difference in power output is huge (see chart below) since one Blaze Rod equals multiple Blaze Powders.

Math-wise we've got the following then: Killing 10 Blazes will result in ~5 Blaze Rods vs 10 Creepers dropping ~10 Gunpowder. Funny enough even at the 1:2 conversion you get by simply crafting from Rods to Powder, the Blazefarm would be winning here since 5 Blaze Rods equal 10 Powder equal 6,4 Million RF whereas 10 Gunpowder equal 1.6 Million RF. But by using a Pulverizer you double that output, netting you a whooping 12,8 Million RF minus the cost of killing them and grinding the rods - but still the output is amazing from just killing 10 Blazes!

Sadly there is still a little bottleneck in this design which is Mobessence generation, but since the dynamos take a very long time to burn one piece of Blaze Powder you'll only run into that issue if you try to run more than 12 basic Dynamos (or 6 Dynamos with Tier 2 Augments - 1 2 3 4). And extra Blaze Powder/Rods aren't bad either to be honest...

That said, I am already trying out several ideas to solve this issue in the most effective and fun way. I can offer you a little sneak peak at my creative test-builds:

Maybe I can post some progress on these in the next few days, or I even have a breakthrough and come up with something completely different, yet effective.

And that's basically it! The only important thing to note is that you should make sure to put the Sulfur somewhere that you will get from killing the Blazes and pulverizing the Blaze Rods - or else the system might get clogged up and stop working.

On this note, I hope you liked my second "Spot on the Build" and - as always - have a nice day!

See y'all 'round!