I came to William Gibson in the late 90s, with cyberpunk well-established (even erring on old hat) and cyberspace in vogue to describe the early fumblings of the web. Neuromancer wasn’t on such a cutting edge as it must have been ten years before and didn’t quite connect as it might have done, but I loved the Bridge books and come 2003 there was a new release, Pattern Recognition. The blurb didn’t sound promising; set in the present, no nanotechnology or all-powerful Artificial Intelligences? Something about brands and fashion? Oh dear, no, not my sort of thing at all. A 2007 sequel in the same world, Spook Country, had more overt espionage elements; that was more my sort of thing, and I was sure the last of the series, 2010s Zero History was equally strong.

I hadn’t thought much about Gibson until The Peripheral arrived on Amazon video. It’s incredibly well done, a strong cast hooking you into the story and strong production values to bring the near and not-quite-so-near future to screen convincingly. The book had flown under my radar when it first came out, and after a couple of episodes of the series I debated reading along. I decided to wait, and instead re-read some of his earlier works, building up to the book of The Peripheral after finishing the series. I don’t get as much reading done as I’d really like these days, so going right back to Neuromancer was a bit much; I had half an idea I’d read Pattern Recognition after enjoying its follow-ups (commenters here had recommended it when I posted about Spook Country) but couldn’t remember any details if I had, so that seemed like a good starting point. I’d work back through the Blue Ant books.

It turned out I never had got back to Pattern Recognition. The old memory is getting a bit patchy so I don’t tend to retain much from books I read years ago, but after a chapter or two I’ll get some spark of recollection unless there’s been some sort of serious mind-wipe, and I didn’t recognise any of the patterns in Pattern Recognition. Entirely unsurprisingly I’d done it and myself a terrible disservice dismissing it based on blurb alone, the commenters were right, it’s an excellent book. It’s almost 20 years old now, a longer gap from publication than when I’d first read Neuromancer, but didn’t feel archaic, perhaps as it wasn’t set in the future (“Nothing dates harder and faster and more strangely than the future”, as Neil Gaiman said). Technology has moved on but not unrecognisably so. The protagonist reads message boards from a laptop connected to a mobile rather than social media on a smartphone, but 2003 doesn’t seem so far from 2023.

Moving on to Spook Country the key plot points did come back to me, a bit of a relief that my memory wasn’t entirely faulty, then starting on Zero History… blank again. I never had it read it. It had just been sitting on a shelf. It was probably around the time I switched almost entirely to e-books, having completely run out of space, and at some point assumed I had read it. It was a strong end to the series, tying threads from the first two together. Oddly enough, the current psychodrama not being out of place for a Gibson novel, Twitter makes an appearance; two characters using it for surreptitious communication, their accounts (@gaydolphin1 and @gaydolphin2) actually exist, protected, sitting there since 2010.

So now I’m caught up on the Blue Ant books it’s time to plunge into a world of pandemic, climate disaster, and political instability. And after the news, I’ll start on The Peripheral. Ahhh! And then I got off the bus! And that was just the teachers!!1!

Funny how time and memory work. In my mind my blogging is an Old Thing that pre-dates more widespread social media and Twitter is a New Thing, but it turns out I started Twitting in 2008, the same year we set up KiaSA. Reading a post from 2009 reminded me that things were a little creaky to start with but it didn’t take too long for the blue bird to spread its wings, especially as its natural habitat of the smartphone became nigh-ubiquitous. My early Twitter feed closely mirrored MMO folk from the blogroll but as the world and their proverbial (or indeed literal) dogs (and cats) got into Twitterating so it expanded to a motley collection of comedians, authors, mathematicians, historians, journalists, sportspeople and such.

Things were generally fairly chilled in the early days, there was a novelty in the interactions between disparate folk. Of course it’s not the first time that “the masses” have been able to interact with “celebrities” (see Greg Jenner’s excellent Dead Famous for more on the history of celebrity and fandom, Greg being someone I discovered through Twitter). Internet-wise you might have bumped into Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett on Usenet or Vin Diesel in World of Warcraft but the scale of Twitter went mind-boggling pretty quickly. A hundred followers? Sure, small beer. A thousand? That’s a lot of potential interaction. A hundred thousand? Shortly after my first post grappling with the newfangled thing Ashton Kutcher edged out CNN to be the first to hit a million followers, the signal to noise ratio must be crazy at those volumes. Some folk started scaling down their presence or heading off entirely as it all got a bit exhausting, countless hordes ready to pounce on a wilful misinterpretation of the most innocuous statement, not to mention more orchestrated maliciously motivated campaigns. It’s not something I’ve personally experienced, thank heavens, but you get occasional glimpses in looking at a trending hashtag or replies to more popular Twittites.

I’ve never been a terribly prolific Twitterist of original content. There’s the vague ongoing worry over putting anything too personal online, probably unfounded, but who knows when some disciple of a long-dead game tracks down a mildly sarcastic comment about it from 2011 and launches a blood vendetta? It’s more that I don’t have much to say in a pithy format (hence this being a blog post rather than a thread of Twitterage). For me it’s become more of a combination of rolling news, an aggregator of interesting links (picking up where RSS feeds left off, in some ways), and commentary. The commentary often arrives first which can make for interesting attempts to reconstruct news stories based on reactions and spoofs, like George Smiley divining true Soviet interests by subjects suppressed by a double agent. If Smiley was working with memes of A Man Walking Down The Street With A Woman Labelled ‘Naval Manoeuvres In The Baltic Sea’ But Turning To Look At Another Woman Labelled ‘Hungarian Atomic Research Facilities’.

I don’t think I’m too misty eyed about the evolution from a scrappy assortment of vaguely tech-savvy folk to the corporate behemoth favoured by politicians, I’ve managed to curate a comfortable feed where there’ll always be something interesting or funny to scroll through on a break without too much existential dread (though you can hardly entirely avoid it these days). The effects of the Filter Bubble are always a concern, a good percentage of the people I follow appear to be of broadly similar ideology, but slightly counteracted by the variety of spheres from which they’re drawn so they’re not an entirely homogenous mass.

All in all things seemed to be bimbling along happily enough from my specific perspective, until The Event. The purchase of Twitter by the Unspecified Billionaire. It’s probably excessive caution again, but a brief glance at replies to just about any sort of commentary on the situation turns up the sort of ‘spirited defence’ of the chap that would make K-Pop stans say “steady on, now”, so it’s not entirely outwith the realms of possibility that there are teams crawling obscure blogs desperate to start a civil conversation about that statement. I hadn’t thought a huge amount about identification and verification, there’d been the odd bit of furore over who did and didn’t get a blue tick but it seemed to have settled itself down, until The Event. Oddly enough Terry Pratchett and Bill Gates had talked about the difficulties of “the parity of esteem of information on the Net” in a 1996 interview, I’m not sure if Gates might re-evaluate his prediction that “The whole way that you can check on somebody’s reputation will be so much more sophisticated on the Net than it is in print today” in the wake of the Blue Tick ‘Parody’ Chaos. Further decisions appear to have been made with the consideration and delicacy of a toddler with a chainsaw so heaven knows what the future holds. Perhaps we’re on the verge of a new age of unparalleled enlightenment, but it seems rather more likely to be a coin flip between the whole thing vanishing in an explosion of hubris or slowly falling apart as anyone vaguely competent and insufficiently zealous drifts away.

I’ve started glancing around for alternatives, and set up over on a UK Mastodon instance. It’s got that early days vibe again, for better and worse. The federated nature obviously has its strengths, but already there’ve been some rumblings over moderation policy and interactions with other servers, I don’t envy volunteer admin teams in the slightest. Data protection and security becomes quite the thorny issue. I still don’t have much to post, but I’m trying to make an effort with the odd dog photo at least. These things come and go; Bulletin Boards, Usenet, Slashdot, Livejournal, to pluck a few examples, I’ll see where folks head to and probably drift along myself. I’m partial to a bit of E. J. Thribb, so over to @ToneHannan for the eulogy (though I’ll copy the text here, just in case):

So.
Farewell then
Twitter

You were funny on
Eurovision night

Keith’s mum liked that
blue tick
she bought

At least I think it was
Keith’s mum

If there’s been a theme to my recent gaming it would seem to be cards. Well, cards and stealth. I forgot about stealth; I was going to include it at the start but then it crouched in some bushes for 30 seconds and just popped clean out of my head. Desperadoes 3 was in the same Humble Monthly as the Legendary Edition of Mass Effect, got good reviews, and I like a bit of real time tactics now and again so I fired it up. It’s very stealth-heavy, much more Commandos than Close Combat, and though I enjoy silently crawling around as much as the next chap I usually like to mix it up with a firefight or two. That’s not entirely out of the question, you can always pull out the trusty old six shooters, but limited ammunition and weight of enemy numbers tend to make stealth the preferred option. I’d played through the first few levels, but then like a guard hearing a coin being thrown within earshot I got rather distracted and wandered off to investigate something else: the current headline Humbly Monthly offering, Deathloop.

I was aware of the time loop premise (the title’s a bit of a giveaway) and intrigued at release, but had avoided too much further information to experience the story fresh. It’s proving most interesting so far with elements of other media that’s right up my street, things like STALKER, Memento, Lost, Bioshock, and of course time loop classics such as Source Code, Palm Springs, and Edge of Tomorrow/Live Die Repeat/Saving Private Groundhog. Presumably there’s a dollop of Dishonored in there as well as it’s from the same developers, but for some reason that never clicked with me, I have an hour and a half of play time back in 2013 that I can’t really remember at all (thank heavens for Steam data). The design of Deathloop is very stylish, and while stealth is certainly an option and well catered for through awareness systems, silent weapons/takedowns, the ability to hack cameras and cause disturbances and such, it feels more forgiving if you prefer to let your fists (and machine pistols, shotguns, and grenades) do the talking. A minor irritation is the lack of a mid-level save option; game-wise it certainly makes sense, to allow the looping mechanics to take care of that side of things (a neat reflection of the way Edge of Tomorrow and its source All You Need Is Kill were influenced by the idea of saving and reloading in games to keep trying different things), but not ideal if you get called away. At least it can be paused in single player mode; there’s obviously some sort of PvP possibility in the future, telegraphed on the starting screen, but I haven’t got that far yet, as I managed to get distracted again…

Another current Humble Monthly offering is Monster Train, a roguelike deckbuilder, another genre I have some fondness for. I thought I’d take a quick peak, and have ended up playing it more than anything else recently. Slay the Spire is the obvious comparison: various factions to select from, some specialising in brute force, others magic; a set of basic cards augmented with new drafts and upgrades; merchants; random events. It plays differently enough to be its own thing, though, with a tower-defence-ish twist of assembling your forces over three floors. I’ve really been enjoying mixing the factions to take very different approaches, from having a really solid tank shielding glass-cannon damage dealers to throwing out wave upon wave of disposable minions before reforming them for another attack. Again like Slay the Spire the challenges are equally varied, one battle might be a complete cakewalk where you annihilate the invaders without them laying a finger on your champion, the next suddenly features foes with abilities that nullify your most important tactics. Very well worth a look, if that sounds like your sort of thing.

Also on the cards front I’m still enjoying a few rounds of KARDS most days, I’ve found a deck that really clicks for competitive play with good results, though is by no means invincible; I had one of those days last week where every opponent seemed geared up to counter it, but that’s the luck of the draw. I’ve also got a collection of other decks covering the various nations when daily tasks pop up, less effective but they keep things fun, variety being the spice of Second World War digital card games and all that. I didn’t think I needed another, but then Melmoth mentioned a Marvel CCG had just come out, so I had a look around. I’d seen a couple of headlines about Marvel Snap but assumed it was some kids game; it seems the simple matching game we call ‘Snap‘ in the UK isn’t really a thing in the US (cursory googling suggests similar sounding games go by ‘Slapjack’ or, weirdly, ‘Egyptian Rat Screw’), so it’s not just a case of shouting ‘SNAP!’ when Iron Man turns up twice (Iron Mans? Iron Men? Irons Man?) Probably for the best, that could get messy (“no, not ‘snap’, both cards may be Venom but this one is Mac Gargan and that one is Eddie Brock…”) Anyway, I gave Marvel Snap a quick try and it seemed pretty basic, I was ready to file it as a perfectly adequate but fairly uninspired cash-in. Just this morning, though, somebody retweeted one of the developers talking about how they’d dealt with mulligans, and it was rather interesting. The thread outlines some of the goals: small decks, quick matches, but keeping the variance high (a key reason for not including mulligans, instead making a basic low-coast card with the ability to always feature in a starting hand, thus addressing the underlying complaint of not always being able to do something in your first turn). It made me take another look at the game, and sure enough there is plenty of depth to it. Deck building in a game with a vast card library can be quite a headache; I can certainly throw something together in KARDS but my serious decks all started out from templates, albeit with tweaks here and there. A smaller deck without multiple instances of the same card is quite a refreshing change, if I can find the time I might well add it to the regulars.

With Mass Effect 3 wrapped up, I’m casting around for something to get my teeth into on the gaming front. Maybe not another RPG, ME3 felt a bit of a chore towards the finish. Playing all three games of the Legendary Edition in quick succession might have contributed to the fatigue and the ending is still pretty anticlimactic, a slow trudge before that fateful choice. I fired up Destiny 2 for the first time in a while, I hadn’t played since the Witch Queen expansion and it was quite comforting to slip back into, but didn’t really sink the hooks in. Melmoth pointed out that Titanfall 2 was on sale, and rather good; it’s proving most enjoyable, quite a throwback to be playing a single player FPS campaign for the sake of it rather than to slowly upgrade loot and abilities. I’ve dipped the briefest of toes into PvP, which involved an entirely expected number of deaths and few kills, I’m not sure it’s for me but seems very well done.

Elsewhere SongPop has slipped out of my regular free-to-play rotation after it dropped its cheap monthly subscription option. It has a daily login reward, and a long enough streak of those gives a pretty decent bonus to progression; miss a day, though, and the reward gets reset. As there are, shockingly enough, odd days when I might not have a burning desire to recognise short snippets of music, that sort of thing has booted it from a “maybe now and again” to a firm skip. Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, has seen me splurge an unprecedented sum of cash (£7.99) after it introduced a season pass. Very similar to seasons/battle passes in other games it comes with a bunch of themed quests/goals that give out a currency to buy rewards with, some available to everyone but the best locked behind a paywall. I’d spent very little previously – most of the cash offerings are for stacks of chests of random loot – but for a ten week season with defined rewards it looked like a decent deal. There was a bit of vocal protest on its introduction (“gamers in vocal protest shocker”), including some classic If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next-ing (“this particular pass might look reasonable enough but give them an inch and you’ll have to pay ONE MILLION POUNDS just to LOG IN to the game soon enough”), but things seem to have calmed down a bit now as everyone gets down to grinding through 1.14 x 10^58 enemies.

Maybe I’ll get a bit more reading in; the third book of the Locked Tomb not-a-trilogy-any-more has just come out, so I’m re-reading the first two of the series, and if ever a series warranted re-reading it’s that one. I’d forgotten a fair bit over the past two years (like the whole climax of the first book), but enough has stuck around to make it a little less disorienting and I’m thoroughly looking forward to getting my teeth into the third.

I’ve been poking away slowly at the Legendary version of Mass Effect 3, with one more chunk of DLC to wrap up before heading off to the final confrontation, but heatwaves bringing record temperatures to the UK haven’t been terribly conducive to finding the energy for such herculean efforts as moving a mouse around. Watching television has just about been possible, with a good half hour or more to recover from the exertion of pressing buttons on a remote control before having to do it again (and most streaming services don’t even need that, conveniently playing next episodes automatically).

I’m a bit late to Stranger Things, not being subscribed to Netflix when it first came out, but thought I should give it a go as the world went crazy over series 4, and I can see what the fuss was about now. Over on Amazon The Boys continues to deliver, smoothing off a few rougher edges of the comics but with no shortage of “I can’t believe they still went there” moments, skewering both current politics and blockbuster superhero franchises. Most recently I’ve whipped through The Sandman; it had been quite a significant omission in my comic reading so I came to the series fresh, and have since gone back to the source. It’s beautifully done and feels like a very “comic-y” adaptation, with self-contained episodes and arcs corresponding to issues and volumes of the comics.

One reason ther hefty bingeing, particularly on Netflix, is that the proliferation of streaming services is getting a bit much. I had Disney+ for a year, then let that lapse to switch to Netflix; after finishing The Sandman I’ll cancel Netflix, probably go for Disney+ again in the future for a few series there, maybe another service or let things lapse for a bit, then Netflix again for the final season of Stranger Things and anything else that turned up in the meantime. You slightly miss out on ‘event viewing’ if catching up on series later, but with the market so fragmented it’s not like television is such a common currency of conversation anyway, it’s a bit like waiting for games to come up on sale.

There are some parallels back to the earlier days of MMOGs, when most had a monthly subscription; Netflix has to be World of Warcraft in this scenario, the runaway success prompting everyone to want a slice of the pie, and now we have Disney+, Apple TV, Prime Video and all manner of other offerings, something like the late 2000s when subscription MMOs were everywhere. Actually we may have hit the early 2010s, with the potential subscriber base fairly well saturated and alternative pricing models coming to the fore, though the parallels aren’t exact – no other game managed to really dent the numbers of World of Warcraft but Disney+ has (by some metrics) overtaken Netflix. It’s going to be interesting to see how streaming services adapt, as the prospect of households maintaining large numbers of streaming subscriptions doesn’t seem more likely than players maintaining many game subscriptions. Lower priced subscriptions with added advertising are on their way, could you get to a fully “free to watch” model akin to “free to play”? Five minutes of adverts every five minutes of a programme? Loot crates containing a random drop (0.5% chance of a highly rated film, 75% chance of a random episode from series 27 of some scripted reality nonsense)? Premium content like extra episodes for subscribers?

Podcasts are in that sort of space, tending to be free to listen, often with advertising, and sometimes paid-for options such as bonus content. Generic third party adverts I tend to skip rapidly but I have a strange fondness for the ones voiced by the host(s). It’s particularly fun when the same product is advertised on a number of shows and you can compare and contrast the approaches, seeing how they weave key phrases they’ve obviously been instructed to include verbatim into skits, or playing things pretty straight. The king of the genre has to be Adam Buxton, turning them into mini-dramas, sketches or infuriatingly catchy songs; I’m not sure the approach would quite carry over to a drama series, though…

“I move from dreamer to dreamer, from dream to dream, hunting for what I need. Slipping and sliding and flickering through the dreams; and the dreamer will wake, and wonder why this dream seemed different, and the answer will be… because they slept so well on their new Leesa Mattress! Use the code SANDMAN50 for a discount when ordering yours!”

I wrapped up my first play-through of Cyberpunk 2077, but I wasn’t entirely happy with the ending. There’s a point where you have to decide how to proceed, and I’d avoided reading too much to keep it fresh (and will be vague in this post to avoid major spoilers). One choice was to let Keanu Reeves take over and do things his way, often a perfectly sound course of action in life, but the game had done a fine job in putting me in the shoes of the protagonist; previous missions with Keanu’s Johnny Silverhand to the fore somehow felt a little off, obviously it was still me (the player) in control, but it didn’t quite feel like me (the character), presumably the intent, and a testament to the power of storytelling in the medium. Very quantum, baby.

I was going to bring in some allies I’d made along the way, but it was pointed out that things would get messy and there would be probably be casualties. I was sufficiently worried over my NPC chums that it swayed me to go solo and agree to a corporate plan. After all, who was the real sick man in this so-called society, the rebel who’d nuked a building, or the businessman in his suit and tie? (It’s both of them, Rich.)

In my mind I was just playing along, and at a critical moment would reveal my true intentions and stick it to the corpo-man. The game gave me no reason to be certain it would be possible, there wasn’t a dialogue option of “Very well, I agree to your plan. ASIDE: I do not really agree to it and have my fingers crossed, aaahhhh”, but that was my hope. Turned out I never got the chance, I played it straight and stuck to my in-game word, hence the rather disappointing ending, things fizzling out somewhat, with most of the friends I’d made along the way expressing their dismay at my choice over the phone before the credits rolled. Nobody’s fault but mine, but after 100+ hours of thoroughly enjoying Night City it was a bit of a shame. Regrets? I’ve had a few, but then again that’s what save games are for. At some point I’ll load things up from just before that final decision and give it another shot.

Not just yet, though, I think I need to let things settle for a bit. With Mass Effect Legendary Edition in the Humble monthly bundle it’s Commander Shepard’s time to save the galaxy, again. Can it really be fifteen years since the first game came out? Even with the graphics and gameplay updates it shows its age a little, but it’s still very playable, the trilogy should keep me going a fair while.

There’s also SongPop, proving to be highly diverting with its themed events especially. I did pretty well with film music for the Oscars, less well with the nominees for the Grammys. Best of all was the April Fool event with my perfect playlists – stand up comedians, comedy songs, Weird Al, Monty Python. There were also some fun musical variants like That’s Not My Name, where the answers were what songs could/should have been called (e.g. “Woo Hoo” for Blur’s Song 2), and Anagrammed Artists providing the dual challenge of firstly identifying a song is by the Imagine Dragons, and then discounting Pig Slicers, The AWOL Monk, and Sweaty Ken as possible answers before selecting Raiding Mangoes (the others being Spice Girls, Walk The Moon, and Kanye West; I’m not sure if there’s a Kanye tribute act called Sweaty Ken yet, if not that’s a definite missed opportunity).

A few months back I started playing Wordle, lured in like millions of others by mysterious coloured squares appearing in my Twitter feed. That ability to share the results of a game without spoiling it is really smart, combined with the simple core mechanics and once-per-day limit to stop you binging until sick it’s become the first game that my entire family have all been on board with, pinging results through on the family WhatsApp group of a coffee or lunch break. Variants, knock-offs, and deliberate rip-offs inevitably proliferated like green and yellow algae, and I dabbled with a few; Quordle, guessing four words simultaneously, was an interesting version, mutating into Octordle and Sedecordle for 8 and 16 simultaneous words, and presumably by now someone’s constructed a version where you get 160,000 guesses to try and complete every single five letter word from the dictionary at once, though the replayability might be a bit limited there.

I saw a post about Heardle, an audio version where you guess a song from progressively longer clips (more Name That Tune than Wordle, but still) and thought I’d have a go. I heard a snippet of guitar vaguely reminiscent of Van Morrison’s Wild Night, so I searched for that in the possible answers and hit upon the slight snag. Apparently the songs are taken from popularly streamed artists, and my post-2000 musical knowledge is appallingly shoddy (how amusing and eccentric!); I didn’t even recognise half the artists that popped up, let alone any of their songs. It did tickle a faint memory, though, of a Facebook game called SongPop, which apparently I was playing back in January 2013 when I first fired up War Thunder. Turns out that closed down, but SongPop 2 lives as a standalone application including a Windows version, so I installed that; it even carried progress over from the Facebook version, including matches that had been awaiting my turn for 452 weeks (sorry about that, PopDude 68).

Each match consists of rounds where you have to identify five songs, with players taking it in turns to select the playlist used. Playlists are bought with in-game currency, and where I seem to recall they were pretty limited, there’s now a vast selection of genres, eras and artists – rock, pop, country, blues, reggae, TV and film themes, nursery rhymes, even (to my great delight) Monty Python. When looking for opponents the game pops up two or three suggestions where you seem to have some commonality, but there’s also the option of picking a random opponent, which I’ve used a fair bit. That’s resulted in some good matches with both players having a good shot at the other’s playlists, and some definite mismatches. I generally try and start fairly broad (something like Rock Classics), but if the other player gets specific, so do I. I’m currently in a drawn-out battle of attrition with somebody who picks K-Pop or BTS every time (not a hope), so I retaliate with Monty Python and UK TV Themes. You can finish a match at any point, so I presume they’re just as amused/stubborn as I am about the absurdity of it.

On the face of it there’s not much similarity between guessing songs and a Second World War deck building game, but there are some parallels with the way I’m playing KARDS. As with many card games you can build a fairly generic deck where most cards have some value in most circumstances, or very specific decks built around certain mechanics – discarding cards is usually a bad thing, but some cards kick off a positive effect when discarded, for example. Climbing up ranked play the decks that really employ synergy (or cheap gimmicky decks, if you’re on the receiving end) are more common and can be rather frustrating to encounter; I thought I was in a pretty strong position against one opponent until suddenly he slapped down two cards and played a whole bunch of cheap infantry – one card damaged each of his new units as they were deployed, normally a Bad Thing, until the second card damaged my HQ every time one of his units was destroyed, and that was game over.

The devs seem to do a reasonable job of subtle adjustments when a particular deck is really dominating, and ensuring there are ways to counter particular tactics. Of course sod’s law says that if you gear up with a bunch of cards that are good against hordes of cheap units then you encounter a deck that massively buffs one or two powerful units (on top of the general sod’s law of card games when you have the perfect card in your deck but don’t draw it when you really need it). On the flip side I know that if I adopt a particular deck that’s always easily beaten me, every match I play will be against opponents perfectly tailored to deal with it. Still, I thought I’d give it a bash so had a browse of the user-submitted decks on the main website. A lot of them need a bunch of rare units, so require either incredible luck with random rewards or some real-money investment. One jumped out, though, that mostly used cheap common cards. It’s an ‘aggro’ deck that tries to get a bunch of low-cost units onto the field and buffed before an opponent can deal with them. It’s very much all-or-nothing, if you haven’t won in the first few turns there’s no Plan B, so at least it’s quick either way. It’s been pretty effective, I’ve climbed the furthest I’ve got to in ranked play, but it gets a bit stale doing the same thing every game so I mix things up with unranked matches using various decks that are more interesting to play, if less optimal, and draft games. Maybe if I had to identify military marches from brief snippets while attacking and also guessing five letter military words it would be a one-stop shop for all my gaming needs…