A Full Mug of Mead, Bonus #1: Serol Silvertongue

As with any game, it's a popular pastime for fans and players of League of Legends to create their own new mechanics and Champions that would be fun to engage on the Fields of Justice. I am no exception, so occasionally, you'll get a glimpse of my favorite designs. Serol Silvertongue just happens to be the first I've decided to share.

Serol Silvertongue, The Guild Merchant --

A ranged support, Serol utilitizes a unique mechanic that has never been seen before on the battlefield. Instead of mana, energy, ferocity, or any other secondary source of power, Serol's potency comes from the simplest currency possible: gold.

Tip of the Day #7: Nuts and Bolts

I'm a tinkerer, by nature, especially when it comes to building my own constructed lists or refining decks I dredge up from the corners of the internet.  In general, many competitive Magic players are constantly adding and removing cards from builds they find through coverage of professional tournaments.

The thing is, though, this is rarely the best course of action.  I never fully appreciated how well-tuned most winning decklists are until I finally gave up messing with what was working.

The truth is that a deck that takes down a Pro Tour is a honed machine, comprised of dozens of parts, assembled in such a way that it can repeat the task it was designed to do as many times as necessary.  If you imagine a deck like an engine, you'll understand that unscrewing one nut could lead to one hell of a Michael Bay style explosion.

When you are tempted to add just one Grave Titan because it should theoretically be good in the metagame you are expecting, you need to remember that you are taking something else out that had a purpose in the first place.

It can be even more problematic if you were not part of the team that originally built the list, and you swap in Rune Snags for Mana Leaks because of "the late game."  Sure, you might get away with it, and sometimes, your change may even end up being for the better, but more often than not, you just messed up the deck's basic plan.

The tip of the day is to be careful when you are re-wiring the security system of Bill Gates' house, you don't know which wires control the pirate-ninja robot butlers.

YA? Why Not?

The inimitable Ferrett Steinmetz, whose list of credits now includes a prestigious Nebula nomination, posted a link to a rather embarrassing New York Times piece that decried The Hunger Games as puerile trash.  Now, I agree with the columnist that The Hunger Games is worth about as much as a Thallid, but I fundamentally disagree with the contention that YA as a genre should be read only by, well, young adults.

This is a thallid, and no, it isn't worth anything.

Unlike the author of the New York Times piece, I've actually read most of the notable YA series, and the reason that Suzanne Collins' meal-ticket is bad is because it is sloppily written melodrama that has an infinitely superior contemporary work to compare to.

Magic's Hole Cards: 5 Ways to Improve Video Coverage

If you're anything like me, you spent the weekend of Pro Tour: Dark Ascension ravenously devouring the delicious non-stop coverage that made you feel almost as if you were two thousand miles away and not on a beach.  And if you were, you might be wondering, why does this guy think the coverage needs improvement, because it was actually that awesome.

Almost this awesome.

Well, there might be one thing better than watching fantastic video of your favorite players making the wrong blocks that you would never in a million years have made on a twitchy Internet feed.  That would be watching on glorious High Definition delivered straight out of your over-priced 3-D television.

Imagine this, but in your living room.  In three dimensions.

Any more dimensions would be too awesome to comprehend/

And that could happen.  But it won't.  Not yet.  As Patrick Chapin discussed during a recent SCG Open event, Magic won't make it back to ESPN until there is a way for Joe Plumber, Joe Six-Pack, and the seven other people who would have voted for Sarah Palin to quickly get into the game and devise drinking competitions and side-bets.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for how to make a good thing even better.  None of them involve laser beams, unfortunately.

Because you know you wanted it.

Preview Article #1: An Introduction

               Before you continue reading, for the purposes of this introduction (and, indeed, in many ways, in order to appreciate the guiding principle behind this website) it is necessary to walk through a very simple thought experiment.

                Consider that you are thinking of something right now.  Now, consider that (to simplify) 7,000,000,000 other human beings on the planet also just thought something a second ago.  What are the odds that someone thought that exact thing (say, peanut butter-covered Sour Patch Kids).  This is a multiplicity that could stretch infinitely, but, again, we are speaking broadly, so a reasonable estimate is 1 in 7,000,000,000.  This is, of course, not true, because they would have to be in the same situation as you, say, in America.  Now you are at 1 in 300,000,000.  Following that logic, they’d need to be in the same city as you (for our purposes, say, Lafayette, LA).  1 in 100,000.  Continuing, they’d need to be in your house.  1 in 4.  Your room.  1 in 1.  So the odds actually get smaller, until it is almost a certainty that at least one person had the thought that you just had.  Which, since you did just have that thought, someone did.

                If you understand what just happened, the rest of this will make sense.  If not, we are pretty sure that Cracked.com could always do with a few dozen more readers.