Moving Pictures

The Devia Venatus Youtube Channel is Live!
We have a couple of videos up already, and will post more each week as we play.
Hope you guys enjoy it. :-D

http://www.youtube.com/DeviaVenatus

Life During Wartime

Just want to post to let everyone know that we are alive, and have not forgotten about the blog. The War Store shipping was fantastic, I got the models just 3 days after ordering them. Pretty damn good for 7 bucks for a 5 pound package!
I have since glued the Koralon and Viridian armies together, and we have played a few games. I fell in love with the rules set all over again when I realized how easy it was to remember everything. My friends really seem to like the game as well, and we will be painting the armies up once we find a suitable place to prime them. It's been anywhere from -5 to 20 F here in Ohio, so we can't exactly go outside, or even leave a window open to ventilate. If anyone hase any ideas for us, we'd love to hear them! Comments kids!
I took some pics of the action from our first game on my sexy new LG Dare, but I have yet to load the program I need to get them off of it, and onto my computer.
We talked to the local gaming shop, and should be set up to start running demos as soon as we have tabletop quality paint on!
More updates soon!

A New Beginning

Well, just moments ago I ordered all the supplies I will need to begin playing and Demoing Urban War. The War Store had a few 300 Point Force Sets left, even though they are no longer produced. I was able to get the Koralon 300 point set for only 25 Dollars! Thats an insane deal, especially considering that the Koralon set in particular contained most off the faction's strongest units like Phazons, Hydra, and Broodmasters. Urban Mammoth does still produce smaller Strike Forces that are a good base for an army, containing the neccesary basic units as well as a couple of specialized units. With these I was able to assemble enough units to create 300-400 point armies for both the Viridians and Syntha. Because of the great prices on War Store and the fact that there is a flat $6 shipping price for UPS Ground no matter the size, I was also able to grab a couple of boxes of urban mammoths platform terrain. All of this came in at under $200, which I think is a very reasonable price for 3 large armies in a mini game, considering that there are some games you could spend 300 for a single army without even getting the extensive rules books necessary.
Speaking of which, Urban Mammoth does offer hard bound copies of thier rules, which I will probably purchase later on when I have the money for another order, but for now we are forunate that UM offers all rules as a PDF download on thier website for just a couple of dollars. We'll use these for now, printing a coule of copies off of the laser printer at Aaron's job at the university. (Gotta get that tuitions' worth out of 'em)
I'm excited to have the armies on the way, and see things actually begin to move forward. I'll be contacting the local gaming store on tuesday and arranging for a time in the weekly schedule for Urban War Demo time and eventually Open Play or even a league. Whatever day the shipment comes we'll most likely glue the units up and play unpainted out of sheer excitement! Expect our first battle report the next day.

On another note, I am rather excited about the fact that somewhere between 12-20 people stopped in to read the blog. Most of these were most likely from the UM forum, so thanks a ton you guys! :-D
In the next week or so I will be friending up with the other Gaming blogs on Blogger which should help get us plugged into the community. In the meantime, we'd like to hear from those of you who are reading. Whether through comments or email we'd love to hear what you think of the content so far, and what you hope to or would like to see. Plus it'd just be nice to know who's stoping by before we get a traffic counter up. So speak up everyone!

Enter: Stage Left

First off, allow me to assuage a potential fear. I won't be writing any Great Wall of China length walls of text on this blog anytime soon. I am the other half of the duo. My name is Joey, and I'm a gamer. *Hi Joey*. I'm 18, and have been some form of gaming for over half my life. Also, my contributions will for the most part, be very different than Josh's. I'm 2 hours away from him, so I won't be present at many of events until Summer Break. Also, I've never done much mini-gaming, so this should be a new experience for me. Well, aside from a short lived infatuation with Hero-Clix (that was abruptly ended due to my color blindness).

I'll be covering a few angles for this blog. First and foremost, I'll be the person to make fun of for not understanding basic tenets of mini-gaming. All of the jeering about how we don't know anything should be directed towards me and me alone. I'll also write about what makes a game rewarding and fun.

And finally, dumb information about my life to encourage sympathy:

- Went to JSS Worlds for Magic, and quit because of how far the game has slid.
- I like all kinds of strategy. Military, Sports, Politics, just any kind.
- I'm a trivia god. Been on multiple game shows, and have recieved standing ovations in an auditorium for my trivia performance.
- I yearn for pretense. The only coffee places I like are also bookstores.
- Modest Mouse is the objectively the best band.
- If Emo Phillips had gone to Yale and studied History, he would be my history professor. Yes, it is as great as it sounds.

Things to Come

Hey there!
Well, assuming that anyone is still interested in reading this after that painfully long History post I'd like to talk a bit about what is to come. When Joey and I first talked about putting up the blog, we knew vaguely what it was we would be writing about and doing here. I fear that because of our intuitive understanding of each other's intentions we sort of forgot to mention in the introduction what they were, leaving any potential readers with only the knowledge that this would have something to do with games and Ohio. So I'd like to outline a few of the basic kinds of articles and recurring features you can look forward to from us here at Devia.
One feature that I know will be featured prominently is Weekly Battle Reports. Once the playgroup is up and running with regular minis games, I will take detailed photos of at least one featured battle each week, and write an article about the tactics, events, and outcomes of that game. I'd even like to try doing a brief fast paced recreation video of the fight each week, and uploading it to a Devia Venatus Youtube Channel. Hope that sounds like fun to you too! :-D
We will also most definitely feature regular articles on a wide variety of topics. Some articles I can be pretty sure will be written sooner or later are:
1. What makes a game balanced.
2. Skill vs Chance
3. Why Mark Rosewater hates competitive Magic, and what it means for the game.
4. Reviews of different rules systems as we learn them. As well as expansions for games as they become available.
5. Special Event overviews. (Origins, Gen Con, Tournaments...ect)
6. Inevitable Game Theory Arguments.
7. Satire...count on it.
8. Community Involvement Projects. Because I don't just want readers, I want people willing to interact and join in the fun of creation and discussion.
9. Discussion of House Rules, and our group's preferences in game functions.
10. The story of that one time Joey and I nearly broke the fuck out of a Magic format and gained national coverage.
11. Low APR. Cheap Penis Growth. Meet for Sex NOW. Cheap RXRXRX!!!
12. Much, much more if you order in the next 10 minutes.

We'll also feature random blog posts of course about the things that happen within the playgroup as it develops. This could mean you all get to laugh at me while I post my miserable progress at learning to paint my figures, or laughing at us all when we post "we've been playing the CC rules of this game wrong for 3 weeks!".

I'd also like to add that along with my friend Aaron I will definitely be doing a lot of "prettying up" of this blog. Blogger is a great tool, and I love Google to death for making little projects like this possible for $0. However it looks very, very generic and ugly to have things like the bland layouts and intrusive search bar on this page. I promise in a couple weeks this page will look much nicer. Looking at the monstrous History posts my first priority if definitely to add "expand/collapse post" toggles. :-/

As we here at Devia think of other things, they will be added. We will also be very open to your suggestions. What the readers want to hear about is very interesting to me, so we'll be on the lookout for requests or reactions to features. I hope this all sounds like things you'd like to come along for, and I thank you for reading. :-)

A Brief History of Time Part 2

Ok, I'll try to be a but more succinct with the second half of this. ^_^'.

Around the time I became seriously invested in playing high skill Magic was when our local store closed down. While I still feel a bit of remorse for losing that store, I can't say I can see it going down any other way. The store owner was incompetent and the physical space was ill suited to fit the events. However poor a facility it seems in retrospect though, it will always remain the starting point for long friendships, relevant marker in the time line of my life, and home to many great memories.
This didn't stop me from continuing with Magic though. Magic online came out shortly after, and I quickly became enthralled with it. It allowed an astounding amount of play and testing for someone who was lucky to get in a few games a week in a place like Ohio. Magic Online also lead me to my eventual passion of Limited. (For non Magic nerd out there, Limited is where instead of bringing a deck you built beforehand, you construct a deck out of sealed booster packs on the spot of the tourney.)
Over time I consumed more and more information about the metagame, and got a better and better understanding of what made great players and deck designers. More than once Joey and I tried to form an 8 man Team to test Magic with and have a go at breaking into Regional Level Magic. We came close a couple times, but the will was never there from a full group, and it never carried past a few haphazard meets and practices. Finally in mid 2007, I lost the will to play altogether. The developers of Magic were changing fundamental things about it, and never for the better. Skill was being increasingly devalued in the game, and I lost interest.
There had been another Trading Card Game I had loved called VS System. It was a game using Marvel and DC characters that I felt fixed many of the inherent design flaws of Magic. The problem was that it fixed them to well. It was a Gruelingly skill intensive game, which was great for my tastes. However it was significantly less desirable a trait when trying to create a tournament friendly game. Single turns could take several minutes because every decision you made could break you and put you out of the game on the spot. Single games took so long that best of three matches became impossible, and Upper Deck instituted a single game match policy. Other mistakes were made too, like the premature creation of New and Old formats, severely devaluing once highly expensive cards, and leading to banned lists ridiculously long for a young game.VS System didn't survive long after, and I found myself out of card games forever. (Even poker! Aneurysm Inducing Poker.)
There was an overlap though between the end of my TCG career and the beginning of my Minis interest. Shortly after the local store had closed I had been introduced to Mechwarrior. While I was intrigued by the general feel of having physical units that moved and fought, I was put off by the rules severely. I definitely like the idea of a Minis game, but MechWarrior would not be mine. A short time later I was drawn into a few games of WarMachine, Warhammer, Void, and Urban War. I began to realize how much I liked these games, and Urban War in particular stuck with me.I dove headlong into the world of Urban Mammoth, buying a couple of armies, making shitloads of terrain, and becoming just short of a rules and fluff expert in just a few short weeks. That summer our group went to Origins as a registered GameGroup and demo'd Urban War for 4 days straight.
Soon after however the gaming community in my area fell apart completely, or if they were coherent somewhere I was not aware of it, as I had moved to a nearby city for college. I wouldn't play a game that wasn't called Call of Duty 4 for nearly 2 years.
This puts us at the present. A couple of weeks ago while talking to a friend we were discussing the need for gaming and tactics in our lives. We toyed with different ideas, and finally we settled on a game to try out. (It's a sort of bastard hybrid of Halo Actioncix and Urban War. I'll explain in another post.) I jumped at the chance since we will be moving into a new apartment together soon, so should have time to game together. Urban War rules books have been ordered, and armies are to follow soon. A metric shit-ton of the now dead HaloClix was also picked up on the cheap.
A new gaming store has emerged in our area (which I moved back to and now commute to college as I have a spiffy newish car) and it is FAR more stable than the old one. In the next month or so I will be reaching out to that store, joining them in their favorite games, and hopefully introducing them to my favorites. (Urban War specifically, as it is just now trying to get a foothold in the US)
I'm also looking into a few other games as possible future interests once we have a solid playgroup established. Infinity seems to have a passable rules set, but more importantly has the most fan-fucking-tastic models I've ever seen. (You may notice I heavily favor sci-fi and skirmish games to other periods and levels. More on why in a future post.)
So that's where everything stands. If you choose to read our blog and follow along you'll be there at the start of our new beginning. I hope you will, and thanks for reading.

-Josh

A Brief History of Time Part 1

Hello again everyone. My name is Josh, and I'll be posting under the name Obso1337. Along with Joey (whom you'll meet soon) I am the co-founder of Devia Venatus. I thought a good way to start this out would be to give you all a short recap of my gaming history so that you have an idea of where I am coming from, and what my frame of reference is.(Edit: It ended up not being very short at all ^_^' )

I was born under unusual circumstances...oops, wait...never mind.

I am rather young, just 21. So as you can imagine my gaming history is not nearly so long or storied as many readers, who may have years of gaming under their belts. I began my first real experience in gaming at around 14 or 15 playing Magic:The Gathering with friends. We barely understood the rules, and played with whatever terrible cards we could buy for a couple bucks from a local stores. Strategic concepts were so completely beyond us we were mostly content to create decks with "totally cool themes" like a deck full of Tree related cards, or packed with as many giant "Wurms" as we could. This time was perhaps less about the game itself and more about a reason to hang out with a couple friends and sneak our first six packs.

As I continued to play into high school I began to develop a love for deckmaking. I began to love analyzing a deck's strengths and weaknesses, exploring its possibilities and pushing its boundaries from one extreme to another. The act of creation felt powerful, as all do. I began to take delight in the thought of my strategic planning and tactical foresight overcoming my opponents'. The long hours in a week spent gearing my decks up for battle against my friends felt almost as good when my planning came to fruition and I was ready for my opponent's every move. Even losing held the exciting promise of knowing I could do better, could push my mind further to squeeze yet more versatility or efficiency out of my decks. This begins the theme of games serving as an outlet for me to "prove my superiority" by outsmarting my opponent. To some extent this is true to everyone, but I admit it was exceedingly so for myself. It all had to do with classic boring intellect issues that came from teachers telling me I was very smart and whatnot, but me absolutely not caring, and not wanting to use it for anything that will necessarily get me any money. I'll not go into it, as it's all dime store psychology and mostly me being an elitist asshole.

Now, I know how all that sounded. A little obsessive. And it was, to some extent. I won't deny that when I get into something it tends to be very all or nothing. I have an intense need to understand and fully comprehend things, not just know about them. If I'm getting into football I don't want to blindly follow a team and root for them, I want to know in detail their roster into third string, their emerging prospects and developing players, the strength of the league they play in, and a history of the couching staff. This effect was compounded by the fact that in high school I basically had absolutely no social life at all. I had about 3 friends, and all time outside school was spent on Magic or online poker. I was rather unhealthy mentally and physically.

I don't want to give the impression that you're just going to be reading about a borderline autistic fat kid though. (If it isn't to late) I'm in a better place now, promise. :-P

Moving on, around my junior and senior year of high school I began to get involved with a more serious Magic community in a local game shop. We played Friday Night Magic, ran Limited events, and had the occasional tournament for prizes. This is when I was introduced to the "Metagame" of Magic, or the constantly flowing popularity and power struggle of the most powerful decks in major tournaments in high level Magic that eventually filtered down to the local scenes by way of the Intrawebs. I was immediately drawn to this, as it proved a clearly definable, yet constantly changing power structure that was just begging to be thwarted. (There will most definitely be a later post about various conversations Joey and I have had about Rules, Systems, and beating and abusing them, and what makes us love it so much)

In this Metagame environment I came to love Innovation. Before I had been stumbling in the dark looking for a nearly non-existent foe in my loose playgroup. Here, I had a clear adversary, and a limited set of tools with which to overcome it. I began to specialize in "rogue deck" making. My goal was always to find combinations and tools that had been overlooked by the majority of players, surprise them with an effective tactic they were ill-equipped to deal with, and ride the advantage to victory. Later on as I became more aware of the incredible level of efficiency already instilled in the "Netdecks", the most popular and powerful decks of the day, I began to realize that the chances of finding a truly revolutionary concept were rather slim. Instead I began to focus on the Micro aspects of Metagame tweaking and optimization. I would labor not over entire deck concepts, but just 2 or 3 card choices in a single deck archetype. My search for innovation became focused on how unconventional bold card choices in an archetype could change the power and balance dynamics of a metagame. It was the ultimate exercise in fine tuning, and I daresay I was good at it.

As this has begun to run on far longer than I thought it would, I have elected to cut it in half. I'll end here for now, and post the second half as another entry. Thanks for reading, and I hope it was at least somewhat interesting.