Comic Review: Star Trek / Doctor Who Assimilation²

I've neglected this blog a bit this month. Working full time and writing for the magazine has taken its tole on my attention to the rest of the world. Meaning, I'm still playing catchup to find things that annoy me or interest me to write about. I do have some short stories that I need to clean up and publish still, and I've been working on a novel. Anyways, here is my latest review of the Star Trek / Doctor Who crossover: Assimilation²

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/08/comic-review-star-trek-doctor-who-assimilation%C2%B2/

Review: Magic 2014

I finally got around to playing this enough to review it. If you want to know what I think, head over to Amazing Stories to see.

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/08/review-magic-2014/

I do have something I want to add, though: There are a lot of posers out there who google up the best deck configurations for Magic 2014 — who have no business playing any Duels of the Planeswalkers games, let alone any version of Magic the Gathering. However, it's been an absolute blast completely destroying them while watching them rage quit, very early, in sealed play.

A lot of people think this mode is flawed, and they're wrong. I'm sorry, but half of the game is discovering your favorite cards and forming strategies around them. I'm sure some of you would love to be able to trade with people, but the fact that none of us can makes it fair, forcing players to think a lot harder about the cards they put in their decks. Sure, even before the Internet, players could have read Scribe and copied championship level decks, but you'll never be a real player until you learn how to actually build one. And the auto build feature does not give you the best deck possible. Go ahead and use it; I don't, and these are my deck ratings.

Awesome Sealed Deck Strength in Magic 2014

When Our Heroes are Villains

This is my latest article for Amazing Stories magazine ( http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/07/when-our-heroes-are-villains/ ). It's a little bit of life experience mixed in with comic culture.

The Flooding of High River, Alberta

As one of the new writers for Amazing Stories magazine, I'm generally going to do a lot of my geekier rants and reviews on that site. Although, I'll still be doing it here as well. It just depends on the subject. My first article, however, is one I wrote with solace. My town was flooded. No, other towns in Southern Alberta were flooded; mine was destroyed. And you can read the accounts of what transpired on June 20th, 2013 right here (http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/06/the-flooding-of-high-river/).

The future is currently unknown for me and many others. Even if my house was fine, the town isn't, and the ground underneath us wasn't the most solid formation before the massive flooding; a sinkhole could be forming under my basement as I type this. What happened in High River was catastrophic, and people need to know. But we will get through this because we have the whole province and country behind us.