#the bonehoard

[almostlookedhuman]

[infirmux]

that one is not significant in the slightest i do not know why i remember it. what is that regular guard dialogue where they are like "it sounded like... some kind of sound..."

[hyliandude]

[neloangelo]

Thief: The Dark Project

Down in the Bonehoard

[drakeanddice]

Previously:

>ACTION TRIGGER NOT MET. DUNGEON MOVE ACTIVATED.

You are overwhelmed at the buffet of options laid out before you on the PANICKER’S GUIDE table of contents like so many succulent tapas. Each offers a saucy sneak peak at what kind of terrible things might lurk ahead. Each tempting morsel promises to sate your desperate need for information. But you just don’t know where to start.

The bacon-wrapped dates? The stuffed olives? The crispy cod balls?

Paralyzed with indecision, you snap the book closed. Reading’s for nerds, anyway…probably. You jam the GUIDE back into your BACKPACK and sling it over your shoulder. You cast your eyes around the CHUTE ROOM, consider the exits.

EXITS:

UP the STONE CHUTE

SOUTH through TUNNEL

You figure it’s too much to hope that this whole thing can be fixed by climbing up that CHUTE. Would sort of be anticlimactic at this point anyway. Who’d go to all of the trouble of dragging you from your bed, pitching you down the chute, and banishing you to the LANDS BELOW? Not to mention putting together the KIT? Writing the GUIDE? So really?

UP the STONE CHUTE

SOUTH through TUNNEL

The only creature you’ve met so far went that way. Granted, it was a weird garbage monster that called you things like “Meat” and “Chewstick” and “Snackpack.” But it didn’t attack you, and while you didn’t exactly exchange names and numbers, it used its words rather than its fangs. That’s not nothing.

What are you going to do? Stay here with the weird phosphorescent MUSHROOMS?

The MUSHROOMS have gone out.

>GO SOUTH It is VERY dark.

You make special friends with the left hand wall, first with your nose and then with your hand. Keeping one hand on the wall and the other sweeping the expanse of air ahead of you, you grope forward a step at a time.

You proceed this way for thirty nerve wracking minutes. You hate it here. You still don’t remember any TRIBUNAL, but you fantasize about crawling your way back to the surface if only to so you have the opportunity to medal in Creative Profanity in their general direction.

That’s when the lights come up.

You are in THE BONEHOARD.

Oh, this’ll be good.

The light flares blue and cold from the four wrought iron TORCHES held clenched in the fists at the ends of skeletal arms. Each arm is composed of the artfully-arranged and carefully-modified bones of at least a dozen humans. The buttresses and arches above are similarly fashioned from the metabolically impaired. In fact, aside from the heavy DOUBLE DOORS to the South, the freshly swept floor, and the STATUE of the weeping lady in the FOUNTAIN at the center of this room, it’s just bones all the way down. There are piles of bones here, fussily sorted by size and type. Someone or something devoted a lot of time to this endeavor.

It smells not unpleasantly of petrichor. Cart tracks lead to the EAST. The GUIDE vibrates quietly in the bottom of your pack.

EXITS:

SOUTH through DOUBLE DOORS

EAST through the SPLINTERED ARCH

WEST into the CHAPEL

NORTH into CHUTE ROOM

>

[vorthosjay]

Hi Jay,

Do you know what makes Bonehoard Dracosaur a dragon? It looks identical to all the other pterosaurs, there's no indication of fire breathing in the art, and the tokens it makes aren't baby dino-dragons, they're just regular raptors.

Thanks!

More flippant answer: It's probably cause it's part dinosaur.

Less flippant answer: I don't know, the alternate art is more 'dragon-y', it probably has to do with the hoard of treasure concepting. Maybe the artist skewed a bit too 'dino' and bit less 'dragon'.

If you look at the other flying dinosaurs, the wings are different. Also it's dimorphodon-shaped, with a bigger head.

[inventors-fair]

Secondary Effect: Modal Flavor Runners-Up ~

Our runners-up for last week are @bergdg, @feyd-rautha-apologist, and @piccadilly-blue!

@bergdg — Clearance Sale

I would never have thought about this kind of flavor, but having both of these options on this kind of card is oddly wholesome? Or should I say, wholesale! Ha. ... But I really like this card, actually. Having these go-wide effects are oddly decent in Limited in the right environment, and having the impulse effect on top of them makes this a great uncommon indeed. I think that it's probably okay at uncommon to make it attacking creatures, and I think the question of what kind of push you can do to make the pump slightly more powerful is...negligible. Which is good! I think that Trumpet Blast vs. Burn Bright effects is super niche, so that's the nitpicky portion of me wanting to make an excellent card perfect.

And the second effect mirrors the flavor pretty excellently as well! I think you can simplify the wording, but I think that it brings up the question of what exactly you want this effect to do. I'm not sure right now if you want nonland cards to cost {1} less, OR if they only cost less if both cards exiled this way were nonland cards. If it's the former, you can say "Spells you cast this way cost {1} less to cast." after the second sentence. If it's the latter, you can say "Those spells cost {1} less to cast if two or more nonland cards were exiled this way." I...think? Maybe the "if" should come first, like Bonehoard Dracosaur. That said, I'd also get rid of the second line of FT, and then...yeah! Pretty darn perfect for the sides of the sale that you described: mad rushes and hot deals. Great work.

@feyd-rautha-apologist — The First Empire

I honestly didn't think that something like this could work. Looking at this, the more that I read, the more I'm enjoying it, and the more that I can't help but feel that this would be too much for a premier product but would be excellent for a supplemental product. Possibly, anyway. The mechanics of myth and truth are interesting here. If I follow the myth, then if someone takes the monarchy it's kinda representative of the kingdom being lost forever. If I follow the truth, the empire doesn't have the same permanence as the myth, but the temporary gains may still be impactful. Isn't that just plain cool?

It's still a lot of text, honestly, and I don't know if there would be a cycle of these things, but I imagine there could be a deciding factor between myth and truth that makes a world of these cards quite flavorful and interesting at the same time. What do choices matter when everything is destroyed to dust in the end? Choices matter because one has an effect that lasts forever and one does not. Like, the enduring myth is a fantastic way of going about these two options, and I love that. Monarch and its related abilities, having been a frustration in constructed sixty-card formats before, is probably not coming to standard anytime soon. I want to still highlight this card as an excellent design exercise and a neat boardwipe to boot.

@piccadilly-blue — Time Gentlemen, Please!

You know, as a translation of real-world action and gameplay mood, this one is a lighthearted play that I feel works oddly well. (For those unaware, the name is essentially "Last call" for bartending purposes.) Either everyone vacates, or everyone goes for another round. That's really the gist of it! Mechanically, this card's quite the upper end of control pieces. If this was printed in a premier set, hell, I'd even start investing in control again. Extra turns allow for big finishers like Teferi to lock the game down, but on the aggro receiving end you get to wipe everything away. Boom goes the readiness for Sphinx's Rev (RIP).

And then we get to this notion of comparable MTG in-world mechanics. The mood is so lighthearted, and the effects would be almost ironic compared to what they usually depict. "Yeah, there are two cards in my deck that wipe the board. One depicts the descent of a corrupted god annihilating the innocent—and one's about a bartender kicking folks out 'cause the night's over." And that's, like, not out of the ordinary for the game. Sometimes Naturalize removes the horrors of the Eldrazi, and sometimes it's a broken piece of pottery. Effects like these are a little more grandiose, of course, and I think it's my own preconceived notions of what massive effects 'have to' look like that's the stumbling block. Maybe we're not going to see bar-themed references in the game anytime soon, but as for levity? I'm not too opposed, oddly enough.

And finishing soon, double-prommy. @abelzumi

[dollpiles]

Chippy paints such good spindly arms and limbs. probably one of my favorite artists for eldrazi

(Gomazoa, Consume the Meek, Harmless Assault, Bonehoard, Gitaxian Probe, Spellskite, Order of Yawgmoth, Curtain of Light, Greel's Caress)

[gragam]

my thief mission ranking inpo

great: lord baffords manor, break from cragscleft prison, down in the bonehoard, the sword, the lost city, song of the caverns

ok: assassins, the haunted cathedral, strange bedfellows

conflicted: the mage towers, undercover, return to the cathedral

shit: thieves guild, escape

[ritasanderson]

aren't you supposed to be in the Bonehoard

[mowu-moment]

Mob Rule: Realmbreaker, the Invasion Tree

My name is Mowu, and if there's one thing I hate as much as I hate rules, it's cards. What do you mean someone can play a card and mess with my stuff? We can't let them have any of those, and this hole in the sky that opened up behind me seems to agree. Welcome back to Mob Rule, a blogpost/article series about Rule Zero commanders, a unique(ly bad) deck tech around them, and what legendary creatures to substitute for them if the lawmages get too much on our backs.

Turning of the Handle

Since we've yet to have a colorless Praetor, there are three parts to Realmbreaker we get to focus on: mill, lands, and abilities. Mill is fairly straighforward: put cards in the graveyard. Colorless affords few great options, but enough good ones: Sands of Delirium, Whetstone, and Keening Stone all capitalize on our oodles of mana, while Ghoulcaller's Bell, Altar of the Brood, and Codex Shredder come down early to help our commander get rolling.

Spinning of the Grave

Mill goes hand in hand with graveyard synergies, and similarly has a few good pickings for colorless. A sampling of reanimation with Grimoire of the Dead and Portal to Phyrexia, a taste of big creatures with Bonehoard and Unlicensed Hearse, and a few funnier things like Myr Welder and Dermotaxi. While Realmbreaker takes its share of the lands, these cards pick up the creatures and artifacts that get milled in the process, so nothing is wasted.

Reaping of the Sown

Lands are harder to find additional synergy with, the only standout cards being Blackblade Reforged and Seer's Sundial. However, there are replacements for Realmbreaker should our tree be chopped down: Canoptek Scarab Swarm bombs a graveyard in exchange for a board full of tokens, Mirran Safehouse (ironic, I know) gives us the much of same potential outright taking the lands does, and worst comes to worst, we can twiddle our own thumbs with a Crucible of Worlds (along with a good package of sac-lands).

Spreading of the Tree

The greatest thing about ability copying, like the new Abstruse Archaic, is that it not only applies to our commander, but anything that might come attached to the realms we break (except mana abilities, but things like Inventor's Fair or Maze of Ith are still welcome). We also run some untappers like Voltaic Servant and Manifold Key to spread our infection a few more times each turn.

Staying of the Hand

We're a mill deck, so combat is nowhere near a focus, but we still need a solid package of creatures for the Vehicles and Equipment that we need for the strategy. To make some use of them, we're either taking creature-based removal, like Bladegriff Prototype and Steel Hellkite, or anything that can slow the board down, like Silent Arbiter and Rug of Smothering. If one had the budget, they could opt for a graveyard shuffler like Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, as a failsafe if they mill themselves too much, but we won't do that today.

Replacing of the Commander

This time around, there are very few options for proper commanders as a whole, much less ones that can do anything for the strategy. There are two self-shufflers we could choose, but they won't do much from the command zone. If you want to make a point to your playgroup, I'd go for Ulamog, the Ceaseless Hunger, as his exile ability resembles mill if you squint, and can make decking an opponent a viable strategy. If they're scared, Hope of Ghirapur works as a board-staller as well as a good body to hold Equipment (even if there's only four).

The full decklist can be found at https://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/mob-rule-first-i-break-your-realms/ .

[belphagirl]

@bonehoarder

so i'm in this backyard chickens group on reddit and someone just discovered their hen is transitioning and everyone is stoked

anyway in case you didn't know chickens will sometimes spontaneously f2m and it's pretty cool

[horademagic]

Aglomerado de Ossos/ Bonehoard

Artefato - Equipamento 

Custo de mana: 4 incolores e/ou de quaisquer cores

Equipar com 2 manas

Por que ela é interessante? Esse equipamento tem arma viva, quando ele entra em campo você cria uma ficha de criatura 0/0 de cor preta do tipo Germe e já anexa ele nessa criatura gratuitamente. A criatura equipada com ele terá +x/+x sendo X o número de cartas de criatura em TODOS os cemitérios, então os cemitérios dos seus oponentes também somarão na conta.

Preço da carta: em torno de 0,20 até 10,00

Disponível em Português

"Essa carta tem algumas edições disponíveis, o preço pode variar a depender da edição que escolher adquirir"

Link: https://www.ligamagic.com.br/?view=cards/card&card=Bonehoard&aux=Aglomerado%20de%20Ossos

Até a próxima postagem, Ulli e Thiago

[drakeanddice]

Previously

>hide behind ALTAR

Discretion being the better part of valor, you dive behind the stony expanse of the chapel’s deserted altar. The Panicker’s GUIDE riffles perilously in your hand as you slide into place, hunkering down as the disembodied voice carries on as if it hasn’t heard, seen, or otherwise paid you the slightest bit of notice.

“…to remember and celebrate the life and death of the WIZARD.”

At the sound of the obvious capital letters, the ALTAR behind your back gives a desultory shake, as if the downstairs neighbor were angrily poking the stony surface with the broom of universal disapproval.

“They were with us but a short time,” drones on the whisper-rasp of the voice that you can only, for some reason, refer to internally as the PARSON, “but in that short time, their presence profoundly affected each and every one of us in its own way…”

Okay, you’ve wandered into a wizard funeral held by ghosts. Good. Our day is on an upward trajectory, isn’t it?

>Open GUIDE to The Dead Ward section.

Yes. More information needed. You look down at the GUIDE spread across your lap where you hunker behind the trembling altar and flip pages.

You’re the sort to read the instruction booklet from the new game on the car ride home, I’ll bet. And forewarned is armed. Learn by doing? No, silly. Learn by learning. Fewer mistakes that way, and in a place called the Dead Ward, how survivable might a mistake really be?

Ah, here we are.

Map of the Lands Below

Being a liſting of regionſ and pointſ of intereſt which compriſe the Realmſ of Shadow.

And then slightly below, and looking more than a little lonesome and perhaps a bit nervous along the broad swath of empty pages which make up the section:

The Dead Ward

The catacombs of the Eternal City were constructed as an offering to the City’s departed. An interconnected series of vaults and tombs and causeways echoing the architecture of the city above, the Dead Ward was once fussily maintained as the abode of the city’s honored and notable after they had shuffled off the mortal coil. Over time, the second city grew both too expensive and too expansive to maintain as the population of the dead rapidly grew to eclipse the living. Eventually the civic societies dedicated to its upkeep gave way to secret societies dedicated to its protection, and finally to long silence as even the secrets were forgotten. But like most forgotten populations, the Dead have learned to do for themselves. While the City above regards the Ward as a handy dump, the restless dead and their hangers on take a morbid sort of pride in the necropolitan life they continue to lead in the shadow beneath, perhaps the true Eternal City.

Walk soft, respect your elders, and ask aid with empty hands at your own peril.

BORDERS: ???

You are in the CHAPEL, hunkered behind the QUIVERING ALTAR. The PARSON is here, delivering a memorial service for The WIZARD. A hopeless amount of GHOSTLY MOURNERS are here, seated dolefully in the PEWS facing the ALTAR. There is a CANDLE here, flickering feebly.

EXITS:

EAST to the BONEHOARD (best of luck)

>

[the-bonehoard]

Wyvern CCG

So my second article. Here we go! I know I said my next article would be about Ophidian’s gameplay, but in trying to learn to play I found I actually didn’t know anyone who liked card games enough to try their best to learn this one... Wyvern though. I have things to say about Wyvern.

Wyvern was a CCG initially released in 1995, designed by Mike Fitzgerald and published by US Games Systems Inc. Now I think its safe to say Mike Fitzgerald isn’t exactly a household name in the gaming community, but surprisingly he did work on other games after Wyvern. Most notably a couple games for WOTC and Dragon Hunt (more on that shortly). He also helped design the starter decks for the early Pokemon TCG, which when I found out about I was genuinely in awe a little bit. 

Allow me this small tangent, but this is someone who had a very small impact on all of our childhoods even if it was in an extremely minor way. A starter deck can really impact how you respond to a TCG, so this was obviously a really interesting job for someone to have and how he decided what cards to put in them is something I’d love to find out, or just generally how these things are decided and who actually designs these things.

Anyway, back to the article. US Games Systems Inc were largely a tarot and playing card publisher, and also a publisher of Wizard Trump cards (I’m guessing in the vein of Top Trumps, but I couldn’t tell you exactly how the game plays). And they still are. Wyvern didn’t put them under the same way other TCGs/CCGs buried their publishers. But again, more on that later.

So Wyvern. It was a game about dragons and dragon slayers, with a unique gameplay style I quite enjoyed (more on that in my gameplay article), with art that ranges from “Legitimately good” to “Comically Bad”, which is odd considering all the cards I’ve checked from the Limited Edition were illustrated by the same artist. It also has the coolest card back I’ve ever seen on a trading card. It has a real fantasy tome vibe, with a gold that really pops in person. There’s a reason I made it the icon for this blog. It would probably fit in well among CCGs today if it lasted. Alas, it did not.

Wyvern lasted two years (Ah the two year curse... Check out Kohdok’s Seven deadly Sins of TCGs for more on that), with five total releases; the Premiere Limited Edition, the limited edition, Phoenix, Chameleon and Kingdom. Limited edition largely consisted of Premiere edition reprints and a few added cards, while Phoenix and Chameleon both added 90 new cards each. Kingdom was similar to the limited edition, in that it was reprints from previous sets, but this set also errata’d several cards and fixed certain errors on others.

While I wasn’t able to find any information on Chameleon’s cancellation, my best guess it ended for the same reason so many card games are cancelled, it didn’t make a lot of money. And it didn’t make money because it wasn’t popular. While I do enjoy the game, the current score on BGG is 5.2, which is pretty bad even for a CCG. Besides that, you can generally get boxes or starter decks of Wyvern on ebay for ridiculously cheap prices. I got my box for £30. Thirty. Pounds. That’s almost the same price of buying each individual booster from when it was originally available, and that’s not accounting for inflation. If that’s not a sign that this game wasn’t popular I don’t know what is. 

On a side note, Limited Edition does seem to be the most widely available and from what I can tell Chameleon and Kingdom seem to be a lot harder to track down. I wouldn’t be able to tell you why, but I can tell you that the Premiere edition is almost impossible to track down due to a printing error resulting in a lot of Magic the Gathering cards being printed on Wyvern backs in the premiere edition, resulting in them being extremely rare collectors items now.

So what happened after the game? Well there was one more Wyvern adjacent release. Dragon Hunt.

Dragon Hunt, from what I am able to tell, was a set deck game using Wyvern cards and the Wyvern ruleset, but simplified and more streamlined. The BoardGameGeek rating for this game is a 5.7 so maybe it was slightly better received at the time, but I can guarantee this isn’t an item you need to track down if you can find regular Wyvern product any easier.

So that was Wyvern. Sorry for the odd structure of this one. I might take another pass at the story of Wyvern one day, but for now, that’s the story of a card game that maybe didn’t stand a chance in the flooded CCG market of the 90s, especially with its wide range in art quality and less eye-catching product design.

I’ll see you soon with my gameplay review. 

Until next time friends,

Kay, Keeper of the Bonehoard

[evasthesis]

i actually think the environmental storytelling that came along with the omenpath storyline is super refreshing, especially in WOE. troyan's card has some really interesting characterization that portrays vedalken in a way more nuanced light than i've seen before, and i don't think that could've been done in a similarly compelling way by keeping them on ravnica. the addition of satyrs to eldraine is also super compelling to me as a juxtaposition of mythologies confined to a single story, and i like the flavortext of tanglespan lookout conveying how quickly they're adapting to such a new environment. i even like the fact that bonehoard dracosaur implies entirely new creatures as a direct result of the omenpaths (there were previously no dragons on ixalan, as the flavortext for the ixl dragonskull summit tells us). kellan's less compelling, but a massive shift to the cultures of the multiverse while still keeping each plane's identities is one of the most refreshing story beats mtg has had in a long while.

It's been (almost) one year since Mom. One year since the desparking and the omenpaths. And i have to say.... i'm just as unhappy about it as i was back then.

Omenpaths so far have been used or for Kellan's travel (in which he dosen't act different from a planeswalker) and for the villian mash-up of thunder junction.

Desparking meant throwing away the core cast of characters you built for the last 10+ years. What has come to replace them? Nothing. Kellan settling down after less than a year of introducing him removes any chances of him being the start of something new.

All in all i feel like you broke something that was special about the IP (planeswalkers) and all the work you did in getting players attached to them. For slightly different planeswalkers and a set that feels like an online game battlepass.

I'm not one for undoing the consequences of events, because they take away from the stakes of the future ones. But if this is what we get in exchange for the characters we spent time with for all these years.... i'd be happy to have an event set be a "second sundering" to MAT "spellplague".

How do others feel about this?