Coldsnap

First, an obligatory Blogger whine. The fact that I can't post on my blog without logging out of gtalk is very frustrating. The fact that I can't comment on someone else's blog without losing my comment, logging out of gtalk, and then retyping the whole thing is extremely frustrating.

Ok.

Kung fu tonight. I haven't been practicing my weapons (since I've been sick) and it's showing. Need to practice more. This class was a little easier than Friday on a physical level but I'm still sloppy and need to review.

Tomorrow, we pick up the tux. Thursday is the rehearsal. Saturday is the wedding. This is exciting, but it's a little wild how quickly it's coming. I'd better get thinking about that speech.

The rest of this post is about Magic. (I like to throw in these reminders so RJA can know to just skip it, and I'm sure he's not the only one.)

Today, along with a stop off at Bulk Barn to pick up macadamia nuts and dino-sours for the Dutch Nasty, Serdic and I stopped off at the local game store so I could pick up a Coldsnap fat pack. This is a capsule review, for those who may be interested.

A Fat Pack is usually released with each big set (Ninth Edition, Ravnica and Coldsnap all have one), and seems to be oriented towards beginning players. The contents include:

• two card boxes,
• six booster packs,
• a 40-card land pack,
• a spindown life counter,
• dividers for the card boxes,
• and something else, depending on the set.

The 'something else' depends on the set. For Ravnica, and for Coldsnap, it's a 'set guide' and a novel. For the 9th Edition Core Set Fat Pack, it's an oversized novelty card and a player's handbook aimed at beginners.

The local game store sells these things for about thirty bucks. Considering that the six booster packs of cards would run you about $24 most places, that's pretty good.

So how does it hold up?

The card boxes are very impressive. They're covered in a big piece of artwork which is aligned such that the whole thing is wrapped around the tops of each one, but if you put the two of them side by side they show the central 2/3rds of the piece. They're made out of a heavyweight cardboard and reminded me a little of the boxes you get with Trivial Pursuit to hold the cards, but a little thicker and with a nicer texture (not so slick and glossy).

I'm not sure if the card boxes are intended for use transporting decks (as I'm using mine for) or to hold your card collection. They're very small if they're intended for a whole collection (although my collection is somewhat on the large side), but they're big for a deck transportation system (and you really wouldn't need two). You could probably fit eight or nine normal 60-card decks in these things. They'll do fine for what I want them for, at any rate.

The dividers are a plastic-like material of decent thickness, printed with artwork from cards from the set and with tabs at the top that stick up above the height of a normal magic card. They do what they do and they do it quite well.

The spindown life counter looks like a slightly oversized d20. There are three noticeable differences between this counter and a standard twenty sided dice. For one, as I mentioned, it's slightly oversize, and the numbers are big and very legible. Two, it has the Coldsnap expansion symbol instead of the number 20. Third, all the numbers are aligned for your convenience -- and this is a big thing. A normal d20 has numbers scattered randomly across its surface, which is great if you want a random number, but not so great when you're at 15 life and someone pings you for one, and you just want to find 14. The numbers on this dice go in order from the Coldsnap symbol all the way down to 1. Couldn't be easier.

The land pack is a pack of 40 land. Nothing special, except that the land in the Coldsnap fat pack are all snow-covered lands. Since this set has a large number of cards which require or have synergy with snow permanents and snow mana sources, having a good supply of snow covered land on hand can be vital if you want to build workable Ice Age block decks, and my Ice Age era snow covered lands are a) not numerous and b) showing their age. Consequently I was quite happy to have the extra land.

The six packs are six packs. I got a few things I wanted (Haakon, Lovisa Coldeyes, Phyrexian Etchings).

The novel I obviously haven't read yet, but it seems reasonably well constructed.

The remaining extra is a guide to Coldsnap, which is very pretty but not massively useful for me. It contains some background on the set, design notes for a few cards, some fiction which I'll never read, pictures of every card in the set, and a checklist. The magic website has a full visual spoiler and the articles on that site go into much more detail regarding the process of creating each set, but I'd imagine that if you were just starting out this would be very cool, and it is awfully pretty.

Overall, I'd be hard pressed to find anything to complain about with this product. If you're starting out with Magic and need a life counter, card boxes and land, this is a pretty good way to go. If you already have land, but would like a nice life counter and pretty boxes, a Fat Pack is not that much more expensive than the six boosters would be on their own, so why the hell not?

I remember when I had to decorate my card boxes with naked chicks myself. Good thing I'm reasonably good with a pen and marker. Man, kids today have it easy.