As suggested by my opposite and my equal, Hearthstone is still spreading from the site of the infection. We have encountered several cards over the course of the last week or so that are probably due for a quick bake in the Nerf Furnace. Secret Cards in general, I mean literally as a mechanic, make me so mad it almost boils the eyes out of my face.

I’m legitimately obsessed with Hearthstone. I was sick over the weekend and spent the days playing what I would describe as a ridiculous amount of Hearthstone. I’m discovering that what I’m learning now isn’t so much about how to play my deck but how other classes play theirs.

It really, really is! So mosey on over.

There is a specific sort of editorial pose you can absolutely build a career around, the "hyperbolically negative caricature," and I know because I did that myself. I am by no means the only one to have done so. Eventually I came to find it a little pat, no doubt in concert with the hormonal changes that accompany the condition known as Early Onset Coot Disease.

Just like it says on the tin. If you've got a game development talk people simply must hear, drop us a line.

In our last two streams we played the first hour of two different games. I can usually tell within the first hour if it's something I want to keep playing or not. In this case we had two very different experiences.

We will be starting it at 3:00pm PST. You can watch us play right here:

We aren't going to do them all at once, it's not a Norse epic, but we have several comics about Twitter that are currently getting a sear on the grill. I was trying to explain it to Galabirash the Kinslayer, how Twitter is like the red line creeping toward your heart from an open wound, but he'd never heard of that and it severely damaged the metaphor as a tool of illumination. Also, he must take way better care of his cuts.

The new Spider-Man game dropped today with very little fanfare and no real reviews. Usually that means it's garbage but Tycho and I will see for ourselves when we load it up today at 3:00pm PST. You can watch us play right here:

I backed that fucker back in the day, so I was pleased that one of Garbvaark's hypertrawls of the App Store brought us into belated synchronicity. Generally speaking, what happens in Deep Space stays in Deep Space. It's been fun watching him manage that "unique social environment."

They may not technically be "hard-light" but they can be interacted with. There are many times in the show when Jem is touched either by people or objects and the Hologram is not effected. It's clear that the Hologram is more than simply an illusion created with light. The hologram has substance, it is solid. Hence my description.

The holograms Synergy produces are not tangible (unlike those in Red Dwarf, let's say) and cannot thus be referred to as "hard light." They're virtually indistinguishable from reality, even close up, but they're absolutely made from light. I don't really want to be this person but I am totally this person.

So, when I got back into Magic: The Gathering, I suggested that new players should consider Draft style play for a couple reasons. The main bit is that it tamps down the entire set into something conceptually manageable while whetting your appetite for greater complexity. The corollary is that you won't be exposed to the pro-level, netdecked sawtooth edge of the relentlessly optimized metagame. There's a place for that, and you might like it, but pretty much everyone can play this way and have fun.

I'm still having fun playing ranked games in Hearthstone. I managed to hit rank 15 before falling back down to 17 last night. I feel like I'll probably bounce around at this level for a while and I'm okay with that. The games I'm playing are great and I feel like I'm being matched up with people around my skill level. I'm actually using a deck I built myself which I think helps a lot. I tried some of the net-decks I found online but it's sort of like being given the keys to a formula one car and having no idea how to drive it. I'm sure they are great decks but if I don't understand the card combos and dependencies built into it then it's not going to do me any good. I've had much better luck constructing my own deck and making changes as I discover new cards or get my own ideas about combos. I'm playing a Druid deck right now since that's what I always played in WOW and I'm really digging it.

You might have seen an earlier version of the comic that referred to Hunters instead of Warlocks; we call all creature focused decks of any kind Zoos, a holdover from other CCGs, but apparently it's a Warlock phenomenon in Hearthstone.

There’s a really big article over on the Escapist this morning about Thornwatch. I sat down with Jonathan on Sunday after he got a chance to play the game and we talked for about an hour I think. The resulting article is a really good look at the current state of the game and some insights into the process of building it.