This is the Sun Titan. A massive red giant who will create a headache for your opponant.

I’ve been taking a break from conventional computer games recently and hammering the hell out of Magic the Gathering. In particular the latest core set.

At one stage the core set consisted of 100% reprinted cards and was released every other year. As a result it was a great introduction to the excellent card game that is Magic the Gathering, but it wasn’t off as much use to seasoned players, many of whom would already own the cards.

Wizards changed this with the release of Magic 2010, as it was the first core set to feature 50% of new cards that players had never seen before. While this was initially met with howls of scepticism – after all Magic is already a relatively expensive hobby and a near own brand new set wasn’t going to make the wallet stretch any further – key cards like Vampire Nocturnus and Baneslayer Angel soon ensured that many collectors bought into it.

So now we come to the latest release and we’re delighted to say that it’s the best core set for some time. This is due to several important factors. Firstly it’s excellent fun to draft. There are some great bombs in the form of big creatures and plenty of removal, ensuring that games rarely drag on and can be full of momentum shift between the two players. Another nice touch is how the 5 core colours continue to be perfectly tweaked and represented. Blue now has some excellent counterspells, red has been bolstered by some strong new burn (direct damage) while green has plenty of nice new meaty creatures to attack with. Black gets a great new discard spell, and while it loses Vampire Nocturnus, it does receive Captivating Vampire, which can begin stealing creatures if the conditions are right. White keeps Baneslayer Angel, arguably one of the best cards ever in print, and also gets the wonderful Serra Ascendant, which has finally made life gain decks actually viable.

By far the best addition to the set however is the gigantic new titans; huge powerful giants that completely swing the game when they come into play. Each titan costs six mana to cost and is a 6/6 creature. If this wasn’t enough they all have specific abilities related to their colours and a further ability that activates whenever they enter play or attack. Primeval Titan for example has trample and can fetch two lands a turn from your library, while Grave Titan has death touch and let’s you put two 2/2 zombies into play.

As a result these powerful mythic rares are becoming extremely desirable on the second hand market, with sales of the green Primeval Titan already reaching £40 for a single card.

With Scars of Mirrirdon due out very, very soon there’s never been a better time to investigate the world’s very best collectible card game. For more information head to www.magicthegathering.com

I met up with a friend that I rarely see over the weekend. He’s a graphic designer, lives in London, and is always emailing me interesting stuff he finds on the web.

The reason for us catching up was that it was our friend’s 30^th birthday, and to celebrate he had this genius idea of going to a theme park on Saturday. Suffice to say, with every school in the country closed, it was a little like being at the world’s most screechy music festival. 

Queuing for the best part of 8 hours, we found ourselves standing around talking complete rubbish most of the time (which is what happens when you’ve been standing for so long gravity has sucked all the blood away from your brain), but some interesting discussion did come from our mostly nonsensical queue babble. The highlight of which was my designer mate masterfully killing almost a whole ten minutes by showing us a couple of cool things on his iPhone.

The first thing was some hilarious new retro-style Old Spice commercials, which are brilliant but have absolutely nuttin to do with retro games (but you can watch them here if you’re curious), and the second was a cool mock comic book cover, seen below, by artist deankotz over at deviantART, which depicts a cool comicbook/videogame crossover happening between DC’s Dark Knight and Nintendo’s famous ape. 

Being a big Batman and Donkey Kong fan, not only do I now have some snazzy new wallpaper for my desktop, but I also have an impressive pair of powerful armpit mountains thanks to those Old Spice ads causing me to switch deodorant. Cheers queuing!