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...

One down, two to go. We got the bottom third out of the way and now it's time to look at the middle of the pack. I will say it again; this set has some incredibly strong commanders and even those that we took a look at in part one will see a lot of play. And it's only going to go up from here. A quick reminder, I'm not going to do images or links to every card, because that would take me years. I will, however, include a link to the card gallery here. Well, let's jump right back into this. The next 53 starts with: 107) Black Walz No. 3 Have you ever wanted to run Guttersnipe out of the command zone? Well, now's your chance. Plus, you get to add black and deathtouch for an added bonus. I think this will see a surprising amount of play out of the command zone as it's a reliable redundancy piece in an already popular archetype, even if it isn't inherently powerful on its own. 106) Queen Brahne I think this is going to be surprisingly powerful for a mono-colored...

 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...

Last week, we looked at one of my favorite, and one of the internet's least favorite, video games of all time, Final Fantasy VIII. I'm not going to say that all the criticism of the game is unfounded, but a lot of it is and I want to explore why, or at least why I think that's the case. Be prepared for some nerd rage, because I may get a little more testy than I usually. The hate spewed at this game is often very vitriolic, far more so than any other title I've ever seen, and I may end up paying some of that back in kind. First, let's go back to my post on unfairly hated games . Let's run down the list of common factors and see how many of them FFVIII checks: -It was released unfinished - actually, a little bit, though I don't think it was a major factor in all the hate. The game was released with support for the Pocket PlayStation, with some items and a Chocobo minigame exclusive to the peripheral. The problem here? The Pocket PlayStation was never release...