Modern Constructed Tournaments!

"This way to the prize vault, guys!"

Well, we've been talking about it for long enough.  Finally, those conspicuously missing Constructed Tournaments are hitting the table this weekend at the Wargate!

You can find the format's rules here, including what sets are legal and what cards are banned.  Every draft we've done so far, or event we've hosted has been legal for Modern, including Shards of Alara block.  There are a few banned cards, so double check the list to make sure your deck doesn't include any of those.

Our Modern Constructed Tournaments will be open to whomever wishes to join with no limit to the number of seats.  Matches will be set at thirty minutes, with the corresponding Match Round.  This means like our drafts, each round will begin at a set time and everyone will follow a single clock.  With five rounds (generally, maybe more or less if we have a huge or pitiful turnout) that means we'll fit nicely into the same time slot we've been running our drafts - about three hours, at 3pm on Sunday.

There will be a small fee to join the tournament, but it is meager.  All proceeds will go directly to the club treasury,  where it will languish for a thousand years - or until we buy a some more wargames accouterments with it!  We wouldn't ask you to fork over your hard earned dough unless we were going to make sure you got something back for it, so the winner and runner-up for these Modern Constructed Tournaments will take home decks for their Modern pool.

These aren't trash decks, or peoples throwaways, or even Starters right out of the box.  These have been carefully built and painstakingly put into protectors, and have a lot more uncommons and rares in general than any deck you could get at a store.  Not only that, but they are brimming with playsets that want a home in your card pool!  I'll be giving away more than twenty of these things this year, so fight hard and get your hands on as much loot as possible!

We'll be running Magic tournaments and drafts the first Sunday of every month now!  Check back each month for what the scuttlebutt is and how you can get involved.  April will be Innistrad Draft, and May is Dark Ascension Draft!  In June we'll be back to Modern Constructed, but then we'll have M13 and Avacyn Restored for later this summer and going into Autumn!

The Iron Kingdoms: Cygnar

The Iron Kingdoms has been riven with warfare for hundreds of years.  Nations have risen and fallen to the might of the sorcerous constructs characteristic of that world, Immoren.  Today I'm going to go over a few of the basic points dealing with one of the "superpowers" of the Warmachine world, the Kingdom of Cygnar.  They call Cygnar the crown jewel of the Iron Kingdoms, and rightly so as it is hands down the center of learning and the arts throughout the known world.  Of all the places one might visit in the entirety of Western Immoren, the Kingdom of Cygnar is almost assuredly the most hospitable and cosmopolitan.

Cygnar is located right in the middle of the Western Immoren coast, and controls many islands in the Wailing Sea.  The Nightmare Empire of Cryx infests the western isles leading into the Sea of a Thousand Souls, and wages a constant war with Cygnar.  The Kingdom of Cygnar shares its southeastern border with the Protectorate of Menoth, and on the north the Kingdom of Ord and the belligerent Empire of Khador are it's neighbors.  The Bloodstone Marches form the wilderness to the east, and it is rumored there are monstrous warriors from a distant land making the Marches their home.  Truly, Cygnar is surrounded on all sides by enemies who would stamp it out if given the chance.

The people of Cygnar are nothing if not courageous, however.  They have cultivated their arts and sciences and are really the only egalitarian and cosmopolitan kingdom in all of Immoren.  King Leto, the current monarch, presides over the kingdom from his fastness at the ancient city of Caspia.  He is supported in his decision making and the rulership of his people by the Cygnaran Royal Assembly.  Despite the constant state of war, advances are being made all the time, and Cygnar is without a doubt the most humanitarian of all the Iron Kingdoms.

Science has made huge leaps in Cygnar to the extent that all of their warmachines and other arms rely on advanced technology.  Rifled cannons, armor penetrating rounds and even huge electric arc generators are the province of the army of Cygnar.  They boast some of the most advanced warjacks in Immoren, and when compared to those of the other Iron Kingdoms the superiority is apparent - most Menite and Mercenary 'jacks are simply the cast off old models of the newer, more advanced models from the Cygnaran Armory.

The Menites might argue that Cygnar is a bed of slithery and vile apostates, but the fact is that Morrow is a more tolerant god than Menoth.  Save the hardliner Creationists, most Cygnarans venerate Morrow as their saviour and protector.  Morrow is a more caring and forgiving god than Menoth, and it's much better as a "state" religion, although official Cygnaran activity is never undertaken as the will of their god but rather all the states' moves are secular in origin.  Taken from almost every standpoint in Immoren, Cygnar stands tall as the mightiest bastion of light, law and good in the entirety of Caen.

This short treatise is meant to bring up some of our folk who have been lingering on the periphery of Warmachine to catch up on some of the background.  With the new Iron Kingdoms RPG hitting the shelves this year, we want to make sure everyone has a cursory knowledge of the goings on in Immoren!  New narratives will be built, more warcasters will join the fight - soon Warmachine will have a huge intertwined campaign continuity here at the Wargate!  Stay tuned for more treatises on the lands of Western Immoren!

Five Sourcebooks to Rule Them All

Last weekend, the new sourcebooks for the Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game were released, and we've been in a frenzy preparing our armies for the next campaign!  As we gear up for battle, we find a few more pledged to the banners of Middle-Earth, and who can blame them?  Never has the time been better to get into this exciting battle game, as it has undergone quite a facelift with the publication of these books.  Not quite an entirely new edition, as the basic rulebook is still the same, these sourcebooks have done something that was absolutely essential to the survival of the line - and I find I have little complaint (miraculously)!

For the longest time, Strategy Battle Game players had to get several sourcebooks to make sure they had all the rules and profiles they needed for their battles.  When we first started a few years ago with GW's Middle-Earth ruleset, many players were confused about how the armies worked.  I'm happy to say - all that has been cleared up!  We won't need a lot of the special White Dwarf profiles to be in our Battles Book (i.e. Lord of the Rings binder), as everything present in the game through all supplements and White Dwarf has been addressed with these sourcebooks!

First, I'll start by answering a few of the common questions.  First, the lists have all been recompiled.  That is, units have been rearranged, and in many cases entire lists have been moved or changed.  Forget Legions of Middle-Earth, that is no longer relevant - except for perhaps a few scenarios not in the new books.  The bow limit is still in effect, but how it is calculated is different, as bows carried by heroes no longer count.

Armies are now organized into "warbands" - that is, a hero and his followers.  Warbands can have up to twelve warriors, so warbands can range from a single hero to thirteen models.  I find that this rule could actually help some players who insist on bringing too many goblins to have a reasonable chance at downing a mighty elf lord without some Might.  This should even things out, meaning both sides should have a lot more heroes than some armies from previous campaigns.

You'll find some of the rules have tweaked here and there.  Some heroes and warriors have new things that apply to them, such as Gildor's strange ability to upgrade Wood Elf Warriors to Noldorin Exiles - strange because Wood Elf Warriors aren't in the same list Gildor is in!  The good news is the allies rules have changed slightly - you can include warbands from any list on your side, Good or Evil!  Dol Guldur might not exist as a list anymore, but I can include Giant Spiders, Castellans of Dol Guldur and Mordor Trolls in an Evil army just by creative use of warbands from different lists.  Oh, don't forget my Spectres and Wild Wargs, please.  I'll just drop those in from the Angmar list...

There is a new set of scenarios present in each book, all the same.  This is one complaint I have, as a lot of space in each of these smallish books is eaten up with the same material.  Yeah, our club has all five, as that's what we needed for our armies.  Each book does have some specific scenarios for each army, and they are pretty interesting.  Scenarios for the Strategy Battle Game are littered all over the entire line, so condensing that for these books could prove pretty harsh for the design team.  Still, I would have liked to have seen a single book of scenarios instead of several pages of the same material, which includes the instructions for building armies according to the warband rules.

Despite that grumble, and the fact that I feel all this could have been contained in one volume (hardcover) for fifty bucks or so - I'm quite happy with the direction the sourcebooks are taking Middle-Earth gaming.  War of the Ring has been the hot topic with GW for the last few years, but we're a desperate holdout - no big battle game for us, we already play Warhammer!  All the neat models that were released for War got rules (eventually) in White Dwarf, but chasing them down proved a hassle and I own every single one since 1997.  Now that everything is recompiled, revamped and made easily accessible to new players, I hope the game itself sees some revitalization this year.

Howl of the Warg begins April 1st!  Our new campaign will take our conflict to even darker locales, as we make the battle for Middle-Earth our own.  Signups for the new campaign will open in the next couple of weeks, so make sure if you're a member of the club to have at least one army in one game for the next campaign season - Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game or Mordheim!  Preferably both, if you're truly a hardened warrior of the 'gate!