It's has the beginning of perhpas a good deck, but in a meta w/ so much removal it can't hold it's own. I have a version of this deck GUw only it features X4 Shield of the Oversoul, X3
Slippery Bogle, X4 Silhana Ledgewalker, X3 Bant Sureblade, X3 Penumbra Spider, and X4 Tangle Asp (really fun card it can't be interrupted after blocking by Snakeform) it's still a work in progress as are all good ideas.
Actually that was an intentional typo that's a amalgamation of the criticisms of the program that incorporates all the snide names I've seen on the WotC boards. :)
Someone called it the "US Player Rewards Program".
Someone else called it the "Payer Rewards Program".
I like them entwined, as it seems to fit the actual status of the program.
Of course I'm happy to be getting any rewards program out of WotC after all this time. However it is very heavily slanted towards the people who pay directly into WotC's pockets. Not that there's anything wrong with rewarding the people with money to burn. But I call's 'em like I see's 'em! :)
I liked this article simply because it helped show me that I spend too much time trying to 'invent' pauper decks that in reality simply will never work. I'm hoping that I can make myself be as honest with some of my decks as you were with this one of yours. Might save me a lot of time!
To quote you....
"the problem stemmed not only from trying to force a deck, but also from trying to impose my will on a format and run bad cards"
I'm soooooo guilty of this.
I think the problem, if you want to call it that, is that there are plenty of articles by people who have built good decks. That's fine and they are good articles but I tend to forget that not every deck idea ends in a competative deck.
Everything you list here is the same problem that I had with the UW Hindering Light deck people were trying to play.
The creatures were sub-par to Slivers and the cards that were in over Thrill and Temporal Isolation were worse I felt. (Hindering Light/Mana Leak/Smite)
As a player who likes to at least try different formats I have a very simple test before I spend a dime on cards.
Step (1) Read about the format... am I still interested?
Step (2) Design (or net deck) a deck that I feel I'd like to play then roughly figure it's cost. Remember that number.
Step (3) Build any deck legal in the format out of what I have in my colletion then log onto MTGO and start playing. Remember how many games I get and how long I was waiting for each game and how much fun the games were (always remembering I probably have a poor quality deck for the format).
Step (4) Take the cost of the format (from step 2) and the volume,regularity and enjoyment of the games (from step 3) and decide if it's 'worth it'.
Personally, using this method, I'm still having a blast playing Pauper (cheap cards good fun games with little waiting around) I'm still on the fence about classic (Expensive cards but good fun games and not very long to wait for a game) I've dropped K-scope (Expensive mana base and also ages to wait between games if I got one at all).
Which is a long way of saying although I never played Prismatic it would probably never have passed my practicality test for pretty much the reasons you are stating for it's demise.
Hey, even an abiding active disinterest in the game doesn't keep me from absorbing some of it via osmosis when my husband plays, builds decks or writes articles. ;)
I was writing primarily from the perspective of someone who most assuredly is not frightened off by geekery or by fantasy elements, but who still doesn't have any interest in the game. I am very glad I didn't come across as bashing the game or its players, because despite my aforementioned active disinterest in playing (and a little bit of irritation if my husband spends too much time playing MTGO ;)) I don't have any real dislike of Magic as a concept, or its players.
Heaven knows my hobbies are just as geeky, if not geekier. Hobbies, such as D&D and playing tactical video game RPGs. Because unlike Dude, I don't see 'nerdy' or 'geeky' as something to be ashamed of. I got over being ashamed of myself and my hobbies in middle school.
"Wow - get your best card back and kill a creature."
I just felt obligated to point out that you can send the damage to your opponent's dome, which comes up more often for me than killing a creature with it. It's a fantastic game-ender.
I am going to go with Shaterri on this card. I thought it was absolute trash, until someone brought it out of the sideboard against me in match three. I was playing Grixis style control, with about 10 removal spells, he was playing Jund and had a lot of removal. I won the first game, he won the second, and the third game quickly degenerated into a stalemate. I thought I might edge out a victory until he dropped this on an empty board, and pretty soon the game was over. Not the best card, but not absolutely horrible either.
Easily are the unhinged lands. Spendy but beautiful. I still have a foil unh forest that Worth Wollpert gave me for being a guinea pig one day. :)
I should probably get 1x of the non-foils, just to have them. Dang they're pretty.
I just play with the foild basics i own. If i were choosing specifically, I'd exclusively play with kamigawa and ravnica lands, and that really old-school forest with all the little houses in the trees...
I like when articles explain different topics. Really nice job man.
regarding ME3 expectation : i really dont think the meta is ready to host BoB & MW even if i really cant wait to get them online. Bob would give Dreadge a stratospherical accelration (SB = 4Xtormod + 2 relic for each deck) and MW would allow some Triniphere nasty deck to be played... i can imagine how fast or locky would be the affinity decks ... the iconical lands i would see into ME3 could be LofAlexandria (sign me up!), strip mine, tabernacle & maze of ith withou getting a format warp.
I may have been too quick to judge, I already have some awesome lords and I shouldn't be greedy; just seeing the other lords in the set make that Merfolk Sovereign look pretty mediocre. 2 or more will probably make it especially because more lords is the solution to all the hate cards.
Here's my crazy Telemin Performance / Nightmare incursion deck. The point is to remove all creatures from the opponents deck and mill the rest with telemin but when it works it usualy gets to the bottom with Nightmare itself.
For someone who doesn't play that was a very cogent and eloquent break down of why people sometimes fail to get the game. Kudos! I don't agree on all points but most of them are dead on. I have often thought many of the same things and I'm a veteran player (15+ years).
To be fair though, my girlfriend who could care less about most fantasy content (though she indulges me often enough) grasped magic quickly if not skillfully and can play it moderately well even after not playing for long periods of time. She is older and perhaps that helps but I guess what I am saying is that given a good teacher, some intelligence and willingness (a key component) anyone can learn the game despite its seemingly arcane (a magical word no less!) terms and oblique play. I appreciate reading your point of view as an outsider. (If only marginally outside as you do know a lot more than the average person would.) It gives a nice perspective on this wacky brewhaha.
I will only say this: Chess is 600+ years old in its current form and has only recently become socially accepted in the United States as a competitive game. It used to be that only certain kinds of people learned how to play the game. And while it is infinitely less complex than magic it does have many complexities that are not apparent to the casual (uninformed) observer. Watch advanced players play 2-5 minute blitz to see what I mean.
Give Magic a few more decades and it too may receive wider attention and public acknowledgement. But in the meantime we will just have to live with a few narrow minded people spewing garbage. Anyway look at how oddball D&D used to be when I started out playing it in 1979. Now it is a household game you can find at any bookstore chain. Magic has a lot more accessibility now than D&D did after 16 years of history.
To our friend the Dude, I ask, how did you originally get into Magic in the first place? Your only concern seems to be competing at the highest levels for money, but you say yourself that there's not a lot of money in Magic. And you claim that you hate fantasy, yet you play a game entirely based in fantasy (like it or not). It just seems like you should be playing poker or chess or any other number of games that DO have a lot of money-winning potential at the highest levels without any of the "stigma" attached to Magic.
And yet, you play Magic. So what drew you to Magic originally, rather than any other game or sport?
It seems to me that no one originally begins a hobby with the intention of being highly competitive at it. There are naturally competitive people, yes, but usually they try something, find they enjoy it, eventually get good at it and realize they could win fabulous prizes with their skills. I do play competitive Magic from time to time, and enjoy that level of play, but was a casual gamer for many years before that. I started playing because my friend showed me this cool new card he got, Fireball (this was in 1994). And well, any game that lets me hurl a fireball at someone sounds like a fun thing to try. If Fireball were instead "Red + X To Subtract X Points from your Opponent's Total" printed on a piece of cardboard, well, I guarantee you I would not be playing at all. I also played poker competitively for a time, but it was only after playing a weekly $5-buy-in game for a few years in college that I became interested in competing.
The point I am trying to make is that without this "fun" fantasy hook, no one would have ever started playing. The game you claim to love would not exist. Surely a friend got you into the game. But what got them into it originally? Surely you played some purely casual games before you ever set foot into a draft or PTQ? And I would argue that it's these original, purely for fun games that got you interested in Magic. Let me know if I'm wrong.
Chicks LOVE fantasy. Girls are brought up with stories of princes and princesses, evil witches and dragons. Look at the success of the Disney Princesses product line. Lord of the Rings drew huge female crowds. The most popular book series among women these days is about a teenage vampire, for chrissakes. Before that, books like Harry Potter drew at least as many female readers as male. We like fantastic escapism as much as the boys. Girls also love playing dress-up. Go to your average Renaissance Faire. 3/4 of the people in costume are female. Go to a comic or anime convention. An easy majority of the cosplayers are young women. A man in a funny hat is not going to drive women who might otherwise be interested in the hobby away from it.
So if MTG isn't as popular with the fairer sex, you have to look for other reasons. The reason I don't play is because there are thousands of cards, with thousands of different possible combinations of spells and artifacts and creatures and lands that do all sorts of strange things. It's not an easy game to get into at this stage because of how mindnumbingly complex it is. And with every release, it just gets more complex. I don't want to spend the time and effort needed to learn the game only to have to shift my expectations whenever a new set is put out. I also think it's a wee bit of a scam. The combination of collectible cards and actual gameplay is a diabolical money-making machine that serves primarily to provide Wizards with a steady source of income (with frequent releases to give established players even more stuff to buy). It's evil, I tell you. ;) *
And, no offense, but Magic will never be taken as seriously by outsiders as poker and chess. It's an entirely different creature. Yes, it's strategic, but it's also arcane to outsiders. It's easy to learn enough of chess and poker to follow along with it even if you don't play regularly. In Poker, there are only 13 different ranks of cards, of 4 different suits. In Chess, there are only 2 colors of 6 different types of chess piece (pawn, queen, king, knight, rook, bishop). In MTG, you have 5 colors with different properties, lands, creatures, different creature types, tokens, different abilities that the creates can use (such as attacks, or general traits such as flying), artifacts, different powers and affects those artifacts have, spells, the powers and effects those spells have. And each interacts with the others in ways that make no sense at all to an untrained eye. The thing that spells success for a game in the mainstream is the ability to be learned fairly easily, but mastered with only years or decades of dedication and practice. Magic, through its sheer complexity, has a very steep learning curve, and the vast majority of people just will not be willing to expend the time and effort and money to learn.
The money aspect is another one that makes a huge difference. Buy a chess set, or pack of cards, and you're (barring loss or wear and tear) pretty much set for life. There is no continued financial investment to play unless you're at the very highest ranks and need to pay tournament fees. With MTG, you buy packs and sets, all of which are pretty much random in terms of contents. To build the deck you want, you have to either get extremely lucky with what you open, or you have to enter a secondary market in used cards. There is no equivalent to this in chess or poker, or at least not one that is pretty much required to play competitively. Add to it that one company (Wizards of the Coast) has a monopoly on production, whereas practically anyone can publish a chess set or a pack of cards, and the difference becomes even more stark. There are financial implications that MTG players accept in order to play the game, that are not required of casual chess or poker players. Even forgetting the complexity issue, this alone will prevent the game from entering the mainstream to anything approaching the same level as poker or chess.
I think the vast majority of MTG players are sensible enough to realize that competitive MTG will never even begin to become nearly as accepted by the mainstream as competitive chess or poker. I also think the vast majority of MTG players who come to this realization acknowledge that the reason it won't be accepted to the same extent isn't because of the fantasy trappings (after all, Chess is a stylized war between two monarchies), but because as a game despite the strategic aspects it is almost entirely dissimilar from games that have made that leap successfully.
* But seriously, I have nothing against the hobby. My husband plays - he's the man in the silly hat at the head of this article. I'm happy to leave him to it, just as he's happy to leave me to my console Strategy RPGs. ;)
Argh! Evershrike! I knew there was something I was forgetting! I'm going to have to try that some day.I look forward to the article in question, as well. :)
I'd say that was a fair assessment of the site: New players would probably head for the community sites after they've established themselves in the game and want to know more.
I'm offended by your ugly pseudo-hat which is just not on par with AJ's awesome chapeau. To claim solidarity with such a poor attempt at awesome headpieces is an insult to everything that hats stand for.
Yar!
I'm just kidding, but please find an actual cool hat. Also AJ's picture is the greatest on Pure by a wide margin, and anybody claiming otherwise likely has self-confidence issues.
It's has the beginning of perhpas a good deck, but in a meta w/ so much removal it can't hold it's own. I have a version of this deck GUw only it features X4 Shield of the Oversoul, X3
Slippery Bogle, X4 Silhana Ledgewalker, X3 Bant Sureblade, X3 Penumbra Spider, and X4 Tangle Asp (really fun card it can't be interrupted after blocking by Snakeform) it's still a work in progress as are all good ideas.
Actually that was an intentional typo that's a amalgamation of the criticisms of the program that incorporates all the snide names I've seen on the WotC boards. :)
Someone called it the "US Player Rewards Program".
Someone else called it the "Payer Rewards Program".
I like them entwined, as it seems to fit the actual status of the program.
Of course I'm happy to be getting any rewards program out of WotC after all this time. However it is very heavily slanted towards the people who pay directly into WotC's pockets. Not that there's anything wrong with rewarding the people with money to burn. But I call's 'em like I see's 'em! :)
I liked this article simply because it helped show me that I spend too much time trying to 'invent' pauper decks that in reality simply will never work. I'm hoping that I can make myself be as honest with some of my decks as you were with this one of yours. Might save me a lot of time!
To quote you....
"the problem stemmed not only from trying to force a deck, but also from trying to impose my will on a format and run bad cards"
I'm soooooo guilty of this.
I think the problem, if you want to call it that, is that there are plenty of articles by people who have built good decks. That's fine and they are good articles but I tend to forget that not every deck idea ends in a competative deck.
"The MTGO US Payer's Reward System " teehee....
I've been beta'ing on Vista since before it was cool (it *is* cool now, right!?).
What exactly is the issue you're having with vista?
Everything you list here is the same problem that I had with the UW Hindering Light deck people were trying to play.
The creatures were sub-par to Slivers and the cards that were in over Thrill and Temporal Isolation were worse I felt. (Hindering Light/Mana Leak/Smite)
Very nice run down.
Nice article.
As a player who likes to at least try different formats I have a very simple test before I spend a dime on cards.
Step (1) Read about the format... am I still interested?
Step (2) Design (or net deck) a deck that I feel I'd like to play then roughly figure it's cost. Remember that number.
Step (3) Build any deck legal in the format out of what I have in my colletion then log onto MTGO and start playing. Remember how many games I get and how long I was waiting for each game and how much fun the games were (always remembering I probably have a poor quality deck for the format).
Step (4) Take the cost of the format (from step 2) and the volume,regularity and enjoyment of the games (from step 3) and decide if it's 'worth it'.
Personally, using this method, I'm still having a blast playing Pauper (cheap cards good fun games with little waiting around) I'm still on the fence about classic (Expensive cards but good fun games and not very long to wait for a game) I've dropped K-scope (Expensive mana base and also ages to wait between games if I got one at all).
Which is a long way of saying although I never played Prismatic it would probably never have passed my practicality test for pretty much the reasons you are stating for it's demise.
i take it you are not ninja fans then
so with the m10 beta, is it still not compatable with stupid vista? i ask as i have yet to be able to accept the invite to beta due to stupid vista
Pirate hats are all the rage!
I'm going to see if I can track one down this weekend to improve my street cred. Stay tuned!
Hey, even an abiding active disinterest in the game doesn't keep me from absorbing some of it via osmosis when my husband plays, builds decks or writes articles. ;)
I was writing primarily from the perspective of someone who most assuredly is not frightened off by geekery or by fantasy elements, but who still doesn't have any interest in the game. I am very glad I didn't come across as bashing the game or its players, because despite my aforementioned active disinterest in playing (and a little bit of irritation if my husband spends too much time playing MTGO ;)) I don't have any real dislike of Magic as a concept, or its players.
Heaven knows my hobbies are just as geeky, if not geekier. Hobbies, such as D&D and playing tactical video game RPGs. Because unlike Dude, I don't see 'nerdy' or 'geeky' as something to be ashamed of. I got over being ashamed of myself and my hobbies in middle school.
Save that for when he gets a real one.
"Wow - get your best card back and kill a creature."
I just felt obligated to point out that you can send the damage to your opponent's dome, which comes up more often for me than killing a creature with it. It's a fantastic game-ender.
I am going to go with Shaterri on this card. I thought it was absolute trash, until someone brought it out of the sideboard against me in match three. I was playing Grixis style control, with about 10 removal spells, he was playing Jund and had a lot of removal. I won the first game, he won the second, and the third game quickly degenerated into a stalemate. I thought I might edge out a victory until he dropped this on an empty board, and pretty soon the game was over. Not the best card, but not absolutely horrible either.
Easily are the unhinged lands. Spendy but beautiful. I still have a foil unh forest that Worth Wollpert gave me for being a guinea pig one day. :)
I should probably get 1x of the non-foils, just to have them. Dang they're pretty.
I just play with the foild basics i own. If i were choosing specifically, I'd exclusively play with kamigawa and ravnica lands, and that really old-school forest with all the little houses in the trees...
I like when articles explain different topics. Really nice job man.
regarding ME3 expectation : i really dont think the meta is ready to host BoB & MW even if i really cant wait to get them online. Bob would give Dreadge a stratospherical accelration (SB = 4Xtormod + 2 relic for each deck) and MW would allow some Triniphere nasty deck to be played... i can imagine how fast or locky would be the affinity decks ... the iconical lands i would see into ME3 could be LofAlexandria (sign me up!), strip mine, tabernacle & maze of ith withou getting a format warp.
Waiting for the next article :)
great work ruckus, pretty interesting!
I may have been too quick to judge, I already have some awesome lords and I shouldn't be greedy; just seeing the other lords in the set make that Merfolk Sovereign look pretty mediocre. 2 or more will probably make it especially because more lords is the solution to all the hate cards.
Here's my crazy Telemin Performance / Nightmare incursion deck. The point is to remove all creatures from the opponents deck and mill the rest with telemin but when it works it usualy gets to the bottom with Nightmare itself.
Creatures:
4 Farhaven Elf
1 Seedguide Ash
4 Fertilid
Spells:
4 Elsewhere Flask
3 Telemin Performance
3 Jace Beleren
4 Rampant Growth
4 Time Stretch
4 Nightmare Incursion
4 Evacuation
1 Counterbore
Lands:
8 Island
8 Forest
1 Flooded Grove
3 Treetop Village
4 Yavimaya Coast
For someone who doesn't play that was a very cogent and eloquent break down of why people sometimes fail to get the game. Kudos! I don't agree on all points but most of them are dead on. I have often thought many of the same things and I'm a veteran player (15+ years).
To be fair though, my girlfriend who could care less about most fantasy content (though she indulges me often enough) grasped magic quickly if not skillfully and can play it moderately well even after not playing for long periods of time. She is older and perhaps that helps but I guess what I am saying is that given a good teacher, some intelligence and willingness (a key component) anyone can learn the game despite its seemingly arcane (a magical word no less!) terms and oblique play. I appreciate reading your point of view as an outsider. (If only marginally outside as you do know a lot more than the average person would.) It gives a nice perspective on this wacky brewhaha.
I will only say this: Chess is 600+ years old in its current form and has only recently become socially accepted in the United States as a competitive game. It used to be that only certain kinds of people learned how to play the game. And while it is infinitely less complex than magic it does have many complexities that are not apparent to the casual (uninformed) observer. Watch advanced players play 2-5 minute blitz to see what I mean.
Give Magic a few more decades and it too may receive wider attention and public acknowledgement. But in the meantime we will just have to live with a few narrow minded people spewing garbage. Anyway look at how oddball D&D used to be when I started out playing it in 1979. Now it is a household game you can find at any bookstore chain. Magic has a lot more accessibility now than D&D did after 16 years of history.
To our friend the Dude, I ask, how did you originally get into Magic in the first place? Your only concern seems to be competing at the highest levels for money, but you say yourself that there's not a lot of money in Magic. And you claim that you hate fantasy, yet you play a game entirely based in fantasy (like it or not). It just seems like you should be playing poker or chess or any other number of games that DO have a lot of money-winning potential at the highest levels without any of the "stigma" attached to Magic.
And yet, you play Magic. So what drew you to Magic originally, rather than any other game or sport?
It seems to me that no one originally begins a hobby with the intention of being highly competitive at it. There are naturally competitive people, yes, but usually they try something, find they enjoy it, eventually get good at it and realize they could win fabulous prizes with their skills. I do play competitive Magic from time to time, and enjoy that level of play, but was a casual gamer for many years before that. I started playing because my friend showed me this cool new card he got, Fireball (this was in 1994). And well, any game that lets me hurl a fireball at someone sounds like a fun thing to try. If Fireball were instead "Red + X To Subtract X Points from your Opponent's Total" printed on a piece of cardboard, well, I guarantee you I would not be playing at all. I also played poker competitively for a time, but it was only after playing a weekly $5-buy-in game for a few years in college that I became interested in competing.
The point I am trying to make is that without this "fun" fantasy hook, no one would have ever started playing. The game you claim to love would not exist. Surely a friend got you into the game. But what got them into it originally? Surely you played some purely casual games before you ever set foot into a draft or PTQ? And I would argue that it's these original, purely for fun games that got you interested in Magic. Let me know if I'm wrong.
Chicks LOVE fantasy. Girls are brought up with stories of princes and princesses, evil witches and dragons. Look at the success of the Disney Princesses product line. Lord of the Rings drew huge female crowds. The most popular book series among women these days is about a teenage vampire, for chrissakes. Before that, books like Harry Potter drew at least as many female readers as male. We like fantastic escapism as much as the boys. Girls also love playing dress-up. Go to your average Renaissance Faire. 3/4 of the people in costume are female. Go to a comic or anime convention. An easy majority of the cosplayers are young women. A man in a funny hat is not going to drive women who might otherwise be interested in the hobby away from it.
So if MTG isn't as popular with the fairer sex, you have to look for other reasons. The reason I don't play is because there are thousands of cards, with thousands of different possible combinations of spells and artifacts and creatures and lands that do all sorts of strange things. It's not an easy game to get into at this stage because of how mindnumbingly complex it is. And with every release, it just gets more complex. I don't want to spend the time and effort needed to learn the game only to have to shift my expectations whenever a new set is put out. I also think it's a wee bit of a scam. The combination of collectible cards and actual gameplay is a diabolical money-making machine that serves primarily to provide Wizards with a steady source of income (with frequent releases to give established players even more stuff to buy). It's evil, I tell you. ;) *
And, no offense, but Magic will never be taken as seriously by outsiders as poker and chess. It's an entirely different creature. Yes, it's strategic, but it's also arcane to outsiders. It's easy to learn enough of chess and poker to follow along with it even if you don't play regularly. In Poker, there are only 13 different ranks of cards, of 4 different suits. In Chess, there are only 2 colors of 6 different types of chess piece (pawn, queen, king, knight, rook, bishop). In MTG, you have 5 colors with different properties, lands, creatures, different creature types, tokens, different abilities that the creates can use (such as attacks, or general traits such as flying), artifacts, different powers and affects those artifacts have, spells, the powers and effects those spells have. And each interacts with the others in ways that make no sense at all to an untrained eye. The thing that spells success for a game in the mainstream is the ability to be learned fairly easily, but mastered with only years or decades of dedication and practice. Magic, through its sheer complexity, has a very steep learning curve, and the vast majority of people just will not be willing to expend the time and effort and money to learn.
The money aspect is another one that makes a huge difference. Buy a chess set, or pack of cards, and you're (barring loss or wear and tear) pretty much set for life. There is no continued financial investment to play unless you're at the very highest ranks and need to pay tournament fees. With MTG, you buy packs and sets, all of which are pretty much random in terms of contents. To build the deck you want, you have to either get extremely lucky with what you open, or you have to enter a secondary market in used cards. There is no equivalent to this in chess or poker, or at least not one that is pretty much required to play competitively. Add to it that one company (Wizards of the Coast) has a monopoly on production, whereas practically anyone can publish a chess set or a pack of cards, and the difference becomes even more stark. There are financial implications that MTG players accept in order to play the game, that are not required of casual chess or poker players. Even forgetting the complexity issue, this alone will prevent the game from entering the mainstream to anything approaching the same level as poker or chess.
I think the vast majority of MTG players are sensible enough to realize that competitive MTG will never even begin to become nearly as accepted by the mainstream as competitive chess or poker. I also think the vast majority of MTG players who come to this realization acknowledge that the reason it won't be accepted to the same extent isn't because of the fantasy trappings (after all, Chess is a stylized war between two monarchies), but because as a game despite the strategic aspects it is almost entirely dissimilar from games that have made that leap successfully.
* But seriously, I have nothing against the hobby. My husband plays - he's the man in the silly hat at the head of this article. I'm happy to leave him to it, just as he's happy to leave me to my console Strategy RPGs. ;)
Argh! Evershrike! I knew there was something I was forgetting! I'm going to have to try that some day.I look forward to the article in question, as well. :)
I'd say that was a fair assessment of the site: New players would probably head for the community sites after they've established themselves in the game and want to know more.
I'm offended by your ugly pseudo-hat which is just not on par with AJ's awesome chapeau. To claim solidarity with such a poor attempt at awesome headpieces is an insult to everything that hats stand for.
Yar!
I'm just kidding, but please find an actual cool hat. Also AJ's picture is the greatest on Pure by a wide margin, and anybody claiming otherwise likely has self-confidence issues.