Bracelet luck charm

After doing this I think that I can actually do quite a nice little rings^_^.

A new bracelet.

Cat Luck Charm

I have a new cell phone! A smart one^_~ and well that deserves some kind of charm. Well I love cats so it had to be cats! I collected what I could in the house and started working and this came out of it.

Super Dungeon Explore- Wyrmlings and Hatchlings

I tried to make the dragon hatchlings and wyrmlings more interesting. It it not end up exactly the way I wanted. My brush failed on me (I need to buy scissors). The minis are more colorful though and that is good^_^.

Super Dungeon Explore - Kobold Dragon Priests

Almost complete!! (not drybrushed yet...)

Still can't figure our how to take photos of these minis. Anyway this is more or less how they look like.

Super Dungeon Explore - Chests

Here are finished mimics and treasure chests. (some unfinished...)

Test of Metal - Tezzeret, Agent of Bolas?

One of the Planeswalker novels is named Test of Metal and is written by Matthew Stover. It hit the stores on 2010. When I wanted to buy it was already sold out to my surprise as I expected no one would want something like.... a Planeswalker Novel? I did not order the book from anywhere because the book could be anywhere between really bad to passing good and I wasn't sure if it would be worth the money.

I received this book as a present two days ago.

Anyway I started reading yesterday night and finished the book few hours ago. And that's something notable. I don't usually read Magic: The Gathering (or any book) book in one go (unless it is The Thran or Brother's War) and this book made me laugh and entertained me for the rest of the night.

In the book we will find out a bit from Tezzeret's past (could have been more there) and about one particular task Bolas sent him to do. There were other Planeswalkers involved and the reader can read the story from their points of view (Jace and Baltrice). This is quite a nice thing to do, but the author of this book could at least use different language for each planeswalker and create the illusion that they are grown up adults not some teenagers with power.

The story involves quite some time travel which makes things a bit chaotic. I did not really appreciate this much but what else could be used as an explanation?

Anyway the book is quite entertaining and written well enough for you to continue reading it. It is the dialogue that makes the book good. The story itself is good but well...it could have been better.

If you haven't read the previous one (Agents of Artifice) you don't really need to read it before this book. If you have read the book and would expect something similar then DON'T. This book is completely different.

Personal Rating: 3.5
The author could have used better language. I'm sure that both Jace and even the red planeswalker can do better and Tezzeret could be more like Yawgmoth and could use terms that are much more Magic: The Gathering-like or Fantasy-like.

Super Dungeon Explore - Mimic ... um

Ugh...will continue later.

Painting Miniatures - Super Dragon Explore

Ever wondered how an old Japanese (console) RPG could look like in reality? Well you can try it if you buy Super Dungeon Explore. But first you'll need to paint about 50 miniatures and that's my task for the near and more distant future^_^.

If you don't know anything about painting miniatures (that might be the case of many of those who bought Super Dungeon Explore) I'll give some pointers...or well after seeing/reading this post you might have an idea what it means to paint a mini. I'm not an expert or anything, anyone can do it. To be honest I loved to assemble models and paint them since my childhood so I kind of have 'some' experience but I never took this to the next level^_~

In order to get started I needed to visit two local game stores and I bought some stuff. (I usually have store credit at different places in our city and most of the time one store or the other does not have the thing I need). Brushes, glue, primers, anti-shine (matte) sealant, green stuff, exacto knife, paints, washes...

So I bought a new exacto knife or cutter or whatever. I'll call it a cutter. This cutter is something I use everyday now for different tasks. But well if you are going to paint miniatures you'll need it. There are parts that need to be cut into the right shape in order to fit. Also you'll notice some little blobs or whatever (it's called flash actually) that are not part of the model and need to be cut off/out as well. In order to get rid of it one needs something sharp, really sharp. ^_~

Green stuff is well...err.. there are models that even a cutter won't help much with and for those one will need something like this that will fill in 'the holes' and will make a smooth model. This is something one will notice this when trying to assemble the models.

In the case of SDE it's mostly the big models a most of the heroes (for the smaller models it's better to use liquid green stuff).

One also needs some paints to get started. Here's a pic of some I collected with time...

I also bought some primers. Red for the 'evil' minis and grey for the rest. Priming a miniature is an important thing. Good priming is something that will show even after you paint the mini with many (thin) layers (um..coats). The best solution to have a good primer is to spray the paint on the model (before I used to prime with a brush...never going to do that again).

Here is a photo of random two washes I used on my two last minis.

This is a picture of two brushes I primarily use - fine detail and insane detail. It costs quite a lot^^. With that now I can start painting! But there's a lot to do before one can actually start painting.

So yesterday and partly today it was assembly time! I assembled and glued together some Dragon Hatchlings and painted them. (Actually there should be two more somewhere but I couldn't find them...so hopefully I'll find them.)

Here's the result of the first few...I wonder if I should not make them a bit more crazy... (the photo does not show much detail unfortunately. taking photos at 3am is probably not the best time). Going to continue in the paint job after I get some sleep.

Underground Sea Alter

I bought some Underground Seas so I could play legacy. (Playing Legacy won't probably happen due to my situation now though). Two of the cards are heavily played and I was wondering if I could help the cards in some way. Altering a card usually works.

The colors on Underground Sea are too light for my taste though. Flooded Strand has similar kind of colors and I remember that it was a pain. I decided to add contrast and some more color to it...but doing this on Underground Sea? Not sure.

Anyway here's an attempt of how it could possibly look like. My flat mate said that it might be good to paint Jace or Dark Confidant there as well. So I might add that later. (but first I need to prepare a photoshop mockup to see how it would look like in reality and use that as reference.)

Cube

Erm...my life's been really weird lately and I feel really bad and wish my life would just end. Fightning this mood is not really easy and I needed to find something really silly to survive day and night (everyday and night). I started sorting my Magic: The Gathering cards and I'm not nearing the end any soon. With my mood being like it is I'm not probably going to play in any tournament or show up anywhere so I was wondering what to do with my decks and such (in between wondering how I'll earn money so I could pay the rent and buy some food). As for my deck I'll just let them lay where they are. But there is still one format I'd like to play but for that I either need to play online or join another group of players. I'd rather play with those I know and would invite myself.

I'm talking about Cube draft. Drafting last sets is getting worse and worse. Innistrad was awful, Avacyn's Restored was even more limited, I'm not going to talk about core set and Return to Ravnica is fine but I don't like it that much either. But drafting all those powerful cards that sounds like a challenge and a lot of fun (not that drafting with trash cards or RTR would not be fun). I decided to put the online cube together and invite my friends to play.

I did not expect to gather all the cards overnight but I decided to give a try and see how many of those cards I can find in my flat which does not even hold all the cards I own. I printed out the list and started looking for the cards. It took ages to find even half of them!

There's a real mess in my room right now (for several days now). Cards are everywhere but it seems to be worth it. In few days I might actually sort all the cards (by color) and finish the cube.

The next day my room mate helped me a ton with the cube. We sorted the cards by color, type and name and sleeved them in perfect size sleeves. It was quite a difficult task...because getting few hundred perfect sizes out of different cards and putting these in was a nightmare. (not going to buy new ones if I don't need to, I will have to buy more than 800 sleeves of one color anyway...). Meanwhile I was running all over my room looking for remaining cards.

A day later we have 153 cards left to find or get which is much less than I expected. One can clearly see that my favorite color is blue^^. (most of the cards I have are blue. Cards from red are in minority compared to the remaining colors)

That's everything. One more useless post to my blog. But this one took ages and this really annoying activity saved my sanity...well actually it will continue for few more days.

EDIT: By the way it's worth about 5000 USD if you try to get the cheapest price on everything (and here I really mean CHEAP).