The YouTubes, You, and Me Too!

WOW! I've had a pretty active run on YouTube the past few days. It's like I've hit a creative spark over the holidays here.  I've been announcing these over Twitter for the most part, but lemme break it down for you (and catalog it for me) over here on my blog.

~~

Wizard101 Let's Play!

I've started up a new walk through of Wizard101 with Morgrim from the Art of the Warlord. I'm playing as a Balance wizard named Tarlac and she's playing as an Ice wizard named Brecken, and together we are the champions of THE BEETLE!

Episode 1 -- The Beetle Chronicles

Episode 2 -- Saving Alexandria

If you don't have time for the full, unedited walkthrough (interruptions from dogs, children, and all), be sure to catch the highlights on The Art of Warlord's channel.

Episode 1 Highlights

Episode 2 Highlights

The hope is that we make it all the way through the game -- that's a lot of work -- wish us luck!

~~

Top Ten Favorite Death Spells

I just wanted to do a fun YouTube in commentator style and talk about my favorite Death spells. :) Hope you enjoy it.

~~

Y U SO MEAN?!

HAHA! I was over on Twitter and decided to take a song request.  Gracebear19 put it out there that I should do a Beiber song since the last "big hit" was about Selena.  After all the recording was done, Uber Wife said, you know you should have at least had one part where you showed the Selena statue with the words "Y U So Mean" over it.

DANG IT!!!  If I could rewind time, I'd do that for sure.

Here's the full lyrics

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh

When you block friend requests

And say your friends list is full

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you call us all noobs

And stitch that wig to your hat

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

You watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh ohh

Why you so mean?

30 seconds just to discard

Why you so mean?

You're so indecisive what I'm saying

Trying to find the feint, Reshuffle cards

Don't know if you're crappy or good player

Don't want the group to end

Where do I start

First you wanna go quest then train Sprite

Wanna Commons all day, have a Darkmoor night

First your up then you're down and doing Cyrus dry clean

Ohh I really want to know...

Why you so mean

Ohh ohh ohh

When you steal a wooden chest

Because my rental mount was slow

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you want me to tank

But you catch the agro

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

Watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh ohh

Why you so mean?

30 seconds just to discard

Why you so mean?

I see you casting Satyr just as I’m fleeing

Trying to tower shield but I can't win

You wanna find a boy but you keep begging

You trade me treasure cards, but won't accept

First you wanna go quest then train Sprite

Wanna Commons all day, have a Darkmoor night

First your up then you're down and doing Cyrus dry clean

Ohh I really want to know...

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh

When you block friend requests

And say your friends list is full

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you don't want me to blade

But you break all of my traps

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

You watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

~~

If the creative spark continues, you should be seeing even more YouTube from me! Hit that subscribe button on my channel if you'd like to see more.

Thanks for your time!

Happy Dueling

Salad Club (and last month's KI Live)

We noticed a couple months agos that #JuliafromKI ate salads every day for lunch. There was some gentle coworker ribbing at the time, and whenever we'd bring in a salad for lunch, it was always in tribute to #JuliafromKI.  There was even once a lengthy discussion of salad costs and expiration dates on pre-packaged salads . . . are they to be trusted? You know, stupid stuff like that.

Yesterday, I came in to a photoshopped surprise from Leala, and it demanded the full parody treatment. SALAD CLUB!

~~

I also wanted to leave our last KI Live recording here since it's been forever since I blogged, and I haven't put it up yet.

It's always a great time, and we loved hanging out with the community.  We'll see you at the next one!

Happy Dueling 

The *KingsIsle* Office

Hope you enjoyed your April Fool's everyone!

I'm just going to leave this here:



We had a lot of fun watching your reactions to the Wonky Donkey mount (which was hilarious by the way--thanks for all the punchlines and for sharing all your pictures and laughs with us).

Ahem! So if I could paint the picture of how this video idea was born, it would simply be me and Leala sitting at our desks, shooting the breeze about the upcoming April Fool's Day event with Wonky when Leala asked (and encouraged), "What should we do? We should do something!" That's always a dangerous question . . .

Before you know it, Leala was writing up a script, and I was donning a robe and black fingernail polish. LOL!

We shot the entire video in a couple hours at the end of work one day with a few willing and accidental victims. (Not to mention Leala's time sculpting the perfect stapler in Jello mold. She's amazing.) After that, our hard working video editing genius, Damon Brown, did his entire production magic over the course of a couple days--then it was just a matter of adding credits and anxiously sitting on the video until today.

Have I told you how much I love working with hardworking creative people? The KingsIsle Team dreamed up a really awesome mount this year (I should mention Karl Holbert was the real inventive genius behind the Wonkey Donkey, not Retired Malistaire!), and our Community and Social Media team simply tried to help us step up to the plate.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did making it for you! Good times.

Happy Dueling!

KI LIve -- March 26, 2015

Hey all!  I had a great time on KI Live with Leala and #JuliafromKI.  Here's the video if by some crazy chance you haven't seen it yet:



We had a chance to answer some great questions, play through Baddle of the Bands, Talk Test Realm, Chat with Matthew F, and even encourage the wizards to play through a little bit of Pirate101.

Hope you all were able to join us!

Happy Dueling!

A few selfish links and some explanations

Heya all! I know it may seem like I'm quite quiet here lately on my blog, and . . . ok, it doesn't "seem" that way . . . it "is" that way, but that's mostly because I've been actively blogging and talking other places. One of those places is the KingsIsle Blog.

Now, most people in the Wizard101 and Pirate101 communities are totally aware of this blog and follow it, and, while I'm sure no one would mind, I'd rather not reblog these posts over on TFN -- but I would like to link to them just so I have them cataloged here for myself. (Yup, I guess sometimes a blog is just for purely selfish reasons like that. LOL.)

Pirate101 Tips – Understanding Talents
Spotlight on Community Leaders 1
Spotlight on Community Leaders 2
Pirate101 Tips – Picking Your Perfect Pirate
Girl Power in Pirate101!
KingsIsle take a trip to the Library

You can also find a lot of tips and writing from me on the Pirate101 Newsletter.

. . . and of course the Update Notes page.

(I'm actually writing another blog post for the KingsIsle blog at the moment that talks about the amount of work that goes into these creations.)

I do wish I had more time to blog just for me and my readers, and I wish I had more inspiration about blogging in general for the Friendly Necromancer at the moment. Rest assured I am very much still playing Pirate101 and enjoying my time there! In addition, I'm playing a few other games . . . I fired up Guild Wars 2 the other day, and Uber Wife and I are playing a lot of DCUO. I've also played some Free Realms, Dragon's Prophet, and a bunch of other games as well, including things like Pikmin 3 and Mario Bros for the Wii U.

I don't know . . . Would you all be interested in hearing about these other games? I've done a couple of other (non-Wizard101) things too like these YouTube videos:





I do feel bad for letting this blog sit for a month without any updates, but to be honest, it can sometimes be difficult to talk about Pirate101 and Wizard101 on my free time in addition to the 9 hours or more a day I spend at the KingsIsle offices thinking and talking about these same games.

I'll keep thinking about how I can participate in the Wizard101 community again, but I really hope you understand where I'm coming from as well.

Talk!

Comment.

Let me know what you think!

Happy dueling!

Ryan's Make a Wish Visit to KingsIsle

I wanted to make sure to catalog this video here on this blog because . . . well . . . at the end of the day, this is what it's all about.



You get to shortly see Ryan and me playing before lunch at the 5:00 minute mark. hehe. It was my honor to get to play a few rounds of Pirate101 with Ryan. We're both Witchdoctors! :) At the same time we were playing together, his brother and sister were hanging out in the same room while and we were all talking about the game with Blind Mew. Ryan's older brother plays the game with him and his sister had never played the game. She had a lot of questions, and who knows, maybe she'll pick up the game too! Ryan was playing in one of our conference rooms that has a HUGE TV mounted on the wall. (I seriously love playing Pirate101 on that screen--the game looks great on it).

At the 11:15 mark, Ryan and I go through the Internal servers and look around a bit. We mostly looked at the new player housing the week before it was released. :)

At the 12:13 mark we unveil his poster and Ryan's Yum-n-Ade stand while I drive the computer. Something that's not seen in this video is the amazing work behind the scenes that had to happen to tie Ryan's vocals to the stand and get it working in a stable build of the game in time for our big reveal of the Yum-n-Ade stand to Ryan. Kudos KingsIsle team from me!

Ryan and his family are great people, and it was my honor to meet them. It was a very special day that I will mark among the finest during my employment with KingsIsle. For the full story, please check out the KingsIsle blog.

Happy Dueling

Ratbeard . . . He puts his foot down!

Bad Pedro Pace crashed his way through Monquista yesterday and every time Ratbeard would critical, I would hear something like this.



YEAH! RATTY GOT SOME SOUL! And he's all about putting his foot down . . . especially with that funky Acacia Carnivosa. :)

So anyway, it'll be just a short stop off in Valencia soon for Bad Pedro, and then I'll be joining the rest of you for a cool 25 levels or so in Cool Ranch. ;) (except for that whole Port Regal business of course)

Happy dueling

nvm . . . Dragonspyre, Yer Gearz Don't Matta None

Last weekend I had a pretty humiliating string of defeats against Malistaire with Angus. This weekend? *wipes hands clean* Here's your video proof:



This was Angus's winning deck against Malistaire:

Doesn't seem like much, does it? It's not. It made for a long drawn out hour and 20 minute long fight. (Much different than playing Kyle, my son's storm wizzie, in a full group where the whole thing wraps up in a few rounds LOL)

Here was the basic strategy I had to pull off to win against Malistaire with Angus:

1- The first thing that needed to happen was a lucky two strikes of Insane Bolt treasure cards to take care of two of Malistaire's minions. Why not three Friendly? Hey, it's hard enough getting two lucky strikes of Insane Bolt out in a row as it is! I probably could have pushed my luck and swapped out one of the minion cards for an Insane Bolt card, but knowing the way the Damage flies out of Malistaire, I kind of figured I'd need an extra minion card. And at 2,000 gold a piece, Insane Bolt cards could have made me run into a monetary wall pretty fast.

2- The next thing that NEEDED to happen was to get my storm minion up and taunting, then do my best to dance a line between protecting the minion and taking out Malistaire's final minion. As you can see from the video it was a difficult dance, and though I took out Malistaire's buddy, he also took out mine. Good thing I had a back up minion card, eh? SMARTZ!!1!

3- Treasure card of Darkwind was definitely the most economical way to get a boost to my damage for the entire fight. What you don't see from this video is . . . the failed attempt against Malistaire that happened right before where I made a lame decision to use Supercharge instead of Darkwind and a regular Stormblade and RAN OUT OF MANA! I definitely had to play more economically than say someone sporting 400 mana. Yup.

4- Shield, shield, shield, and shield some more. I cannot say how important it was to cast every single shield in my deck before Reshuffle. The easiest way to play these was to cast all of the 80% Death Shields on myself and all of the 70% death shields from Life School's Legend Shield card on my minion.

5- One more fizzle and a bad roll on the damage output of Triton, and I would have been toast. It was incredibly close and intense, and I liked that. :) It made the victory all the finer. I think Uber Wife was pretty done with me as I screamed at the top of my lungs a few times, NO I FIZZLED! or TAUNT ALREADY! or GET ME SOME CHICKEN! Ok, I never yelled get me some chicken.

So, there you have it. The big long drawn out story of Angus that started out in December of 2010 has finally (sort of) come to a conclusion. Quoting that original post, "He hopes to see you in Celestia . . . with nothing but the robe on his back, hopefully, soloing the majority of the way--no outside help from other characters or anything." For me that's mission accomplished, he's in Celestia.

I HIGHLY doubt Angus will survive too long in Celestia . . . the whole world is one giant gear check with crit gear and enemies beginning fights with a slew of power pips . . . and not to mention the cheating bosses, but HEY, how about those cheating bosses? Although I really was just aiming to beat Dragonspyre, my plan has always been to test out the limits of Moon Magic and Star Magic here since MOST of the Polymorphs have built in statistics like Crit Block and resistance and the Auras are helpful, but I guess time will tell!

Happy Dueling!

Hammer Time!

And that's how we do it in The Spiral:



BOOM!

:)

Happy dueling!

Necromancers . . . (Katy Perry California Gurls Parody)

Heh!

This song was a hit last night on Ravenwood Radio, and the requests we got for a separate version of this song was overwhelming . . . so . . . I put a quick text only version up on YouTube for you to check out. Once I get some time I'll do a full video of that if you guys would like me to (I'm so freaking busy lately you have no idea LOL). This is the best I can do for the time being. :)



Necromancers (California Gurls parody)
~~~~~~~~~~~

Greetings necros, let's take a journey

I know a place
Where the spells come up from below
dark, side at night
Lord Nightshade and his scarecrow

Castin' ghoul and wraith
Playin' underneath the grave stones
The boys stack their decks
Tryin to cast a few pirate bones (at us)

You could travel the world
But nothin' comes close to my red ghost
Once you party with us
You'll be leveling up
OH-OHOHOHOH

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent-
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Death On the beach
We don't mind sand in our scarecrows
You freak
At my sheep
Nelson Everhart
On the stereo

You could travel the world
But nothin' comes close to my red ghost
Once you party with us
You'll be leveling up
OH-OHOHOHOH

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent-
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Bailey's Rap

Fire school is what's hot
Listen fool to what I got!
Doin' damage over time as I sing this ryhme
Spammin' smokescreen like it's a crime
Don't clown around with my heckhound
When my pips are maxed, I'll blow you down!
Helephant, Quench, and Pheonix fool
hmph ... Not even ice wizards know this cool!

Friendly.. (Sup Bailey?)
If you want to keep it deadly (yeah?)

Then come and join me
cause I'm representin' Pyromancy!

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot!
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent!
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Happy dueling!

My Housing Teleporter Run

I haven't done just a random video in a while, so this morning I thought I'd show my little portal path I made through all my houses. Check it out! (Full screen in high resolution is best if your stream can handle that.)



My teleporter pathways all have one thing in common, putting a Thomas Lionblood mannequin nearby and usually quick access to something I need . . . like my garden or my crafting station.

This was just for fun though.

That's all.

Happy dueling!

1337

1337 - check the view count in that screenshot! Timing is everything! LOL.

So, yeah, it's just kind of what I do when I'm hanging out with my buddies in Wysteria. I flip the menu chat open and I drop the "Let's meet in Zafaria" bomb . . . shortly followed by "have you seen any acorns?"

Wait, what? OH, I'm just talking about how KingsIsle's follow on commercial was released (remember me talking about it and the first commercial?), and that new commercial should now be making its way across flat screens hooked up to 1337 channels like the Game Show Network and TVLand.

Here it is:



OH WAIT, wrong video! Here we go:



;p

THANKS KINGSISLE! YOU GUYS ROCK!

Happy dueling

Angus Wins by a Hair in Grand Chasm Past

I've been inspired lately by a reader of this blog named Rylee Icehaven. Rylee is a really nice wizard of the spiral who's been taking on the Angus Unicornpants challenge. Rylee says there's a swear jar for this character (you know, a jar where you toss in a dollar every time you accidentally let loose with a swear word) but has made it to Newgate Prison in Marleybone. :) I've been there, done that. Playing an Angus character is tough.

That inspiration coupled with the fact that I've taken enough time off from playing Angus to recover, made me ready for more this morning! BRING ON THE PAIN!

It wasn't too bad actually. I started off with a sidequest involving taking out General Greystone in the Plaza of Conquests. He fell easily enough, and I was feeling pretty good about that win since it was coupled with a Death Cyclops pet! That'll go nicely in the shared bank for Thomas. I think that'd be his second Death Cyclops if I remember right.


Next, I went back to my main quest line and finished out the current and past versions of The Grand Chasm . . . including the grueling march through the security tower to charge the crystal that powers the time machine. Again, not too bad!


The Firetusk fight in Grand Chasm Past was an interesting one, but nothing too terrible other than those hitpoints I had to chew through. That's definitely something about Dragonspyre . . . everybody has enough health to make them dangerous, even Vasek Ashweaver. He's solo, but he still has 7,000 health.

I actually made the mistake of going into this fight at half health, which for Angus is like 500 health. whoops! I recorded the entire fight, but it's really the last few moments you have to catch.


:)

Now it's on to the Necropolis and our old friend Sylvia Drake. :) I'm not really looking forward to the Labyrinth. Gulp.

Happy Dueling!

At long last . . . Grub Guardian

Sometimes KingsIsle just doesn't say a word. You know? It's not very often, mind you, that a press release or a community leader note doesn't show up when something new happens in game, but today was one of those days. I'm sure the announcement will happen in the next few days, but the most I've heard about Grub Guardian up to this point from KingsIsle has been, "It'll be done, when it's done." Well guess what . . . it's done--or at least close to being done. :)

I was casually browsing Twitter when I saw a few tweets about Grub Guardian being "live" from the awesome #twizard people. I immediately went to kifreegames.com and indeed found a Grub Guardian game on the site with a "beta" note by it, but it seemed to be working just fine, and before you know it, I was playing up my pets outside the confines of Wizard101.

I was bummed when I found out it actually wasn't in the game yet, just on KIFreeGames. I was also bummed when I found it wasn't in the appstore for my iPhone. Then again, perhaps kifreegames.com is the perfect place to run a beta like this.

If you're looking for Grub Guardian guides, there's already a dozen threads going over on Wizard101 Central. :)

Basically, Grub Guardian is a Tower Defense Game. You stack up your different types of guardians (each from a different school of magic) and they blast away at the hordes of baddies pouring forth and heading for your pet's food at the end of the trail.

What's extra cool is that your pet actually plays a part in the tower defense and at the end of the game, they gain pet experience and can even be fed pet snacks from your in game inventory (if you decide to play that way instead of for prize codes).


This can in fact lead to leveling your pet (although you don't really get to see what skills they gained . . . you have to log in to do that).


If you do really well at a level of Grub Guardian, you'll end up unlocking new, more difficult levels of play.


It's a ton of fun and can be really challenging. Once you develop a pattern of where to place your spells on the map and which spells to upgrade along the way, I'm sure it will become a lot easier. I expect YouTube videos of the patterns to be forthcoming any moment now. LOL.

Oh ok fine . . . let me be the first . . .



Woot! Oasis level done! Whew, now if I can just keep going. Some of these levels are tough!

Happy Dueling

Friendly vs. Super Hero Squad Online's Paywall II

On my previous post about SHSO I was corrected by Alric Griffintamer when I didn't realize that max heroes added a couple extra points to your Squad level nor did I realize that each hero has a Marvel rating that adds a little to your squad level naturally either.

My math was off.

Because of Alric's response though, I felt ok about leveling my squad up to max. And I did! And it wasn't too bad! And it was fun! But as I got closer to the goal, I started to realize that I still wouldn't make the required 110 Squad level with my squad. I would still be one level off.

So, here I am a little later and my squad level is 109 with all max level squad members, just one point out of reach from my 110 squad level goal. It's pretty awesome though, as you level to max you unlock power emotes, and that third tier of power emotes is pretty awesome. Especially Stealth Armor Iron Man. DANG I LOVE THAT.

Here . . . here's a little video of my squad's power emotes so you can see 'em.



ACHOO!

The real problem here is that I let my 2-year-old play on my account for a while and he spent all my gold in my early days of SHSO on random stuff for my housing. LOL. I learned my lesson and made Diapermancer his own account to play on. What little gold I've been earning, has been finally building up.

So, now I'm just in the process of building gold so I can purchase one of four superheroes. At 350 gold I have the options of purchasing Nova, The Scarlet Witch, Mr. Fantastic, or Valkyrie. I'm thinking of purchasing The Scarlet Witch just because I hardly ever see anyone running around with that character.

I figure I just have to log in and spin the gift wheel at most 7 days in a row. If I'm lucky with the gift wheel, it could be less. Remembering to hop on SHSO and spin the prize wheel daily shouldn't be too bad of a time commitment. The amount of real money I've paid on this game is still $0.00 to this point. Eventually though the the temptation to pay up will become harder and harder to resist when the goal of raising my squad level to 200 appears. Even worse, the ultimate and final quest (so far) is to raise my squad level to 300. *gulp*

I really don't think reaching a 300 squad level would be too hard to do with just a one month subscription. Without paying though? That could take a really long time to do.

If I did decide to go with a one-month subscription, the worst case scenario is that I could maybe end up with a bunch of "Agent-only", silver-purchased unplayable heroes once my subscription expired (if that's how that works). I'm not sure though. The best case scenario is that you get a ton of awesome heroes added to your squad for the small price of $10. Once I hit the next wall, I'll have to decide if that's the way to go or not.

Happy dueling!

Wizard101 Goes to the Movies :)

This Wizard101 vid that came across Twitter yesterday from KingsIsle made me chuckle.


Nothing quite like Merle delivering famous movie lines. LOL. A little strange, but I'm going with it.

For those who may not know the movies these lines come from, here's a quick list in order of appearance:

1- Casablanca
2- Jazz Singer
3- Wizard of Oz
4- Dirty Dancing
5- King Kong
6- Forrest Gump
7- A Few Good Men
8- Dead Poets Society
9- Sherlock Holmes
10- Animal House
11- Jerry McGuire
12- Terminator
13- Scarface
14- The Sixth Sense
15- Frankenstein (woot +Klout!)
16- Titanic
17- Godfather
18- Dirty Harry
19- Sunset Blvd
20- Wizard of Oz (again)
21- Casablanca
22- James Bond
23- Jerry McGuire
24- Gone With the Wind
25- Abbott and Costello
26- Taxi Driver

Happy Dueling!

The Looney Toons / Wizard101 Connection

I had a reader forward me this video a few weeks ago, and I got too busy to post it here, but this afternoon my kids surfed it on the Internet again, and I had to share.

Simply put . . . Daffy Duck and Celestia . . . There is your Looney Toons Wizard101 Connection! LOL! In the words of Daffy Duck, "I think you're going to enjoy this!"



"By the dim light of the dream realm's black sun, the Wizard climbs the frozen waterfall of Voldrini in search of Celestia, the guardian of infinite power.

When suddenly a terrible Garlon appears and attacks with ice!

. . . But the Wizard is undeterred.

The Garlon roars and unleashes the most sinister wind!

. . . But the wizard is undeterred.

The Garlon summons the stones of Prophynia!

. . . But the wizard is undeterred.

Calling upon the powers of the ancient, the wizard conjures a sacred fire and casts his foe into the molten maw of an insatiable Gort. Thanks, Gort.

Ahh, Celestia. I think you're going to enjoy this!"



Happy Dueling!

Tower of the Helephant: Two Floors of Awesome!

The Tower of the Helephant (ToH) is an interesting place. I had my first experience going there just the other day. Good times! (Mostly because I had good company.) In the end, I'd say ToH is "interesting" because I’m not really sure why the floors between the first floor and the top floor even exist. They're totally filler. Sure, there’s a puzzle in the middle, but it’s not really even difficult . . . you just run to the teleporter that has the cheese next to it. That’s cool, no biggie. Even if by some random chance you don't follow the cheese trail and you fail the maze, the resulting fight isn’t too bad. Six floors isn't going to run you out of mana, so those floors are . . . useless.

All you really need to know to beat The Tower of the Helephant is the right cards to play and the right strat, which has all been provided for you over on Wizard101 Central. That guide was super handy! OH yeah, one more thing . . . time . . . lots of time.

Anyway, in case you can’t or don’t want to follow that link, let me break down the needed cards for you.

1- Accuracy treasure cards. These are a dime a dozen now. Easy to get at the bazaar but you probably already have a backpack full of them . . . it’s not really a “needed” card on this fight, but you might as well throw a couple in your sideboard if you have a bunch just hanging out and use them on your damage spells. Better safe than sorry.

2- Quench. This one is needed. Every three rounds, Taurus the minotaur casts a smoke screen in addition to his regular spells. Keep plenty of Quench debuffs on him, and you’ll never have to worry about what happens if you don’t.

But Friendly, you cry with your choir of angelic blog-reader voices, what happens if we don’t keep said minotaur debuffed? Fine! I'll tell ya. :) Every time you fizzle a spell, this cues our good buddy Ervin the Boar to cast a skeletal dragon on the person that fizzled. Oh yeah, speaking of that . . .

3- Keep Strangle and Dissipate debuffs on Ervin . . . also Storm Shield on your healer (or whoever has agro).

But Friendly, why use a lightning debuff and Storm Shields against a Death mob? OH, well, k, once Taurus the minotaur dies, Ervin the boar casts Leviathan every other round. Have fun with that! (I like saying "the minotaur" and "the boar" after their names btw, could ya tell?).

Anyway, the final floor is even more awesome than the first. It involves a pesky Draconian named Lyon. Lyon the Draconian is almost completely resistant to Storm attacks and doesn't allow you to Prism (or trap) him. Sorry Storm wizards, but guess what? It's ok because Storm wizards are super effective against the minions that Lyon summons out at the speed of one per round. The thing is, you don't want to let Lyon summon all three minions or else BAM! You eat a supercharged Blizzard spell each round while he has those three minions on his team. I guess this means these would come in handy:

4- Ice Shields and Melt Debuffs.

But Friendly! BUT FRIENDLY! Earthquakes from minions!! I know I know . . . just do your best. :)

Here's a video I made of our trip in the Tower of the Helephant.



It was pretty great to play with my wife again (and Ms. Mistshard as well). We've been kind of playing separately lately for some reason. I think it has to do something with me getting up early, her getting to bed late, and the kids taking up all the time in between. ;)

If you have any additional tips or just want to say hi, feel free to leave them in the comments below.

**Update** I fixed a couple incorrect things in this post thanks to Cody in the comments. He adds that Melt would be a good idea to have in your arsenel to block Ervin's 95% tower shield and that arming a death wizard with Steal Ward could be a nice trick! **Update**

Happy Dueling!

Angus vs Mavra!

This morning Angus finished up the first big wall of Dragonspyre: Mavra Flamewing.  Here's the YouTube video for the fight. :)



What you don't see in this video are the numerous failed attempts before this successful one.  My deck had to be massaged a few times until I came up with a winning combo.  The first few seconds of the video show what I was eventually packing in my mega awesome starter deck.  ;) In retrospect I should have dumped one of those tempests for another storm shield, but it eventually all worked out (even if it meant an extra reshuffle).

You know what else needed massaging besides my deck?  My patience.  I kept jumping the gun on my cards, and I was doing exactly what shouldn't be doing (messing around with Wild Bolt).  Once I straightened out my deck and got my head in the game, my cards fell in place and I pulled out a win!  The Shatter treasure card, of course, was invaluable.

Thanks for reading and watching!

Happy dueling!

Casting the Red Ghost

For those of you who'd like to see what the Red Ghost spell looks like, here you go!



I'm digging my Red Ghost at Ancient! Kind of a fun pet.

Happy Dueling!