Predator 2: The Death of a Premise

So, now this is happening.

Anyone getting tanked up to make a moral judgment about this criticism should consider that the auteurs of this harlequin fetus have a job in paradise creating entertainment products to sell at a markup. Their asses are covered, their motivations a mixture of personal creative ambition and company direction, and like any object d’art put forth for our consumption, and to consume our hard-earned dollars, it is the fairest of games. Fairer, indeed, than Magic itself.

It was with the weariness of a weathered pack animal that I slumped upon seeing the M14 Sliver reboot. It is not just that it’s unnecessary, ill-advised, implicitly insulting. It’s that creativity has found no purchase on the dull edifice of this undertaking. It precedes M14 like a corpse floating headlong down the Nile, fly-blown and crocodile-bitten, leaving us to wonder what homogenized horrors may yet come.

Slivers with male and female characteristics? (Can sexualization be far behind? Is the Sarah Kerrigan of Slivers on the horizon? Or is one Glissa enough?)

Sliver generals, ranks within the collective? Slivers in clothing?

A menacing Sliver planeswalker dropping one-liners on token-generation Sorceries?

“You’re about to get a bad case of... the hives.”

The mind reels and rebels.

Where to begin? Perhaps with the admission that this doesn’t matter. A set is no museum exhibit but a collection of mass-produced game pieces, and if the rooks and pawns carry the benzine stink of the industrial process, they will still play readily enough. The art itself is expertly done. In a year, nobody will care. We are just here to get on the record, you and I, that we may one day link back to this combined outcry of voices, having suffered for too lengthy an interval the release of sneering, talking slivers that look like Donkey Kong. Today is our Independence Day.

Aaaaaaaaaaaanyway, look at this piece of shit:

Dollar Menu Dynamite, Part 3

There's no need to choose between paying for lunch or a new power card for your favourite casual deck - expand your horizons somewhat and you can have both! A couple years ago I started a tentative feature called Dollar Menu Dynamite, which offered suggestions for underrated and underplayed cards that can be had for one dollar or less. Well, wouldn't you know it, those fine folks in Seattle just keep on printing cards... and as there are ever more options, that has the side effect of meaning that older cards have more to replace them. Likewise, as new strategies become popular, old cards that happen to synergize with (or fiercely oppose) such strategies are suddenly given a new lease on life. Here, then, I have another ten cards for the budget-minded gamer, all of them easy to acquire, a buck or less, and able to bring plenty of havoc to the gaming table.