Gaming off the Beaten Path

 It's been a long road, but we are finally at the end. We've already seen some powerful commanders, but the top of the list here is a cut above. As most of us have probably seen by now, this set has some incredibly powerful commanders that are going to see a lot of play for a long time. I am going to go into a little more detail about the top five cards or so, but I still want to include a link to the card gallery here.  for reference. Anyway, without further ado, let's close out our rankings. 53) Kimahri, Valiant Guardian In addition to being super flavorful, Kimahri will just about always be the most powerful creature in play, even if just by a little. Thanks to vigilance, he will be able to both attack and use any abilities, which makes him even stronger. It's not a complex or interesting commander, but it's a strong one. 52) Ultimececia, Temporal Threat Do you want to kill your opponents out of nowhere? How about draw a billion cards. Well then step into Ultimec...

 Now here's something I never thought would ever happen.  I have been a fan of Magic: The Gathering for a long time. I've been a fan of Final Fantasy for just as long. Yet I never thought I would ever see a full-on MTG set based on Final Fantasy. When it was first announced, I thought this set was a joke. Honestly, it sounded like something I dreamed up when I was a kid, not an actual product that Wizards of the Coast was actually going to release. But here we are, two weeks away from the release of MTG - Final Fantasy. So now, it's time to rank some of the cards. I've talked a little bit about MTG before, but I think now is as good a time to talk about it again. Hey, I did a ranking for the Street Fighter cards, why not Final Fantasy? Well, I am going to do the same exercise once again. I am going to keep it to my most played format, commander/EDH, and rank all the new legendary creatures/potential commanders. The difference is this time, instead of eight new commander...

  This one has been a long time coming, but I think I'm finally ready. It's finally time to talk about Magic the Gathering: Arena. I started playing, predominately on mobile, during the pandemic and I've always kind of toyed with the idea of reviewing it. It's sort of a video game, sort of not. It's modern and not super obscure and I feel like there is already a lot of content about it already. But I finally decided that I wanted to give my thoughts about it, even if it would be just another reviewer screaming into a void. I play a lot of MTGA and I have a lot of thoughts on it and besides, card gaming is still gaming. And while I am still relatively new to Arena, I am most certainly not new to MTG. I was eight years old when I first saw kids playing Magic in the lunchroom and I knew immediately that I had to get in on that. One of my friends taught me how to play and I started trying to get cards any way I could. Using my allowance, asking for them as gifts, beggin...

  Growing up, a lot of the games we played regularly ended up with nicknames for one reason or the other. It was pretty common to call Goldeneye: 007 just "Goldeneye," but we eventually just started calling it "Bond." Sure, there were other James Bond games out there, but at the time, this was the only one that mattered. PS1 skating titles 2Xtreme and 3Xtreme were "2X" and "3X" respectively.   Vigilante 8 came to be known as "Tomato Juice," get it, because V8? Final Fantasy VII was so essential to us that it was simply "VII," though not too many console series had seventh entries at that point anyway. This week's game, simply called the Pokemon Trading Card game, also had a nickname, one of my good friends came up with it and it stuck like glue: "The addiction game." Yeah, that pretty well covers it. Even after playing it some 20+ years later, I can't put my finger on just what was so enticing about a digi...