Today's deck is one I've spent a little time tuning, and really enjoy playing, it can go off really fast, and it can sustain decently if it gets a slow start. This deck fits in the format that a local store here puts together called "Creature Feature" which is basically Legacy, with the restriction that your deck must be at least 1/3 creatures, and all the creatures must be of the same creature type, and you cannot have any card in the deck that could produce creatures/tokens of a different creature type.

And so I present to you: 

I really like the Stigma Lashers in the deck, as they are a good way to deal with heavy healing decks, the Power of Fires enhance that ability if I’m unable to attack with the Lashers. The Thunderblusts are great for some hasty damage and the persist makes him even cooler, add in the Incandescent Soulstoke's ability to throw in elementals, and he can come in a turn earlier and still stick around because of the persist.

Overall I like the quantity and quality of creature destruction in the deck as it allows me to have an answer for a good chunk of creatures, it plays well, and wins fairly often (pending my own mistakes while playing, which can and have cost me games with this deck before.)

 

Whew! I'm finally done sorting thru all these new cards! Last new box of boosters for a little while at least. Heres what i got

 

Got a lot of stuff, first booster box i've opened and not gotten a single duplicate, quite interesting. Now its time to start building some decks!

As part of the previously mentioned draft, I had picked up a box of Shards of Alara for prizes for that draft. After the prizes packs are handed out, I get the rest of the boosters, and as such I will be showing you all the rares that came from the last 2/3rds of the box.

 I'm super excited to have gotten two planeswalkers, let alone Elspeth! Alas, Shards in general is kind of a let down, there are a few cool cards but the set as a whole just doesn't seem to be up to snuff. Lets hope Conflux fixes that.

I've ordered myself a box of Planar Chaos, and we decided to draft it this weekend, and now i have a ton of new Planar Chaos cards and so now its time to share with you the rares that were pulled from the box.

Turned out to be a very good box of cards, the Damnation I opted to give away for the first place prize in our draft, i'm excited about a lot of the cards in this list, you should be seeing some of them in deck lists soon.

Okay, so I've been busy playing Rock Band 2 lately.

What do I think of RB2 in one word? Awesome

Now for some details...

Characters
RB2 does not import your RB1 characters that you have created, which I think is kind of lame, if you can import the music why can't you import the characters? Especially since there isn't a whole lot of difference in the customization of them. Not that I want all my money and items that I’ve unlocked but the name/hometown and all that start up stuff, it’s all the same why not import them? Aside from that I love the new feature that a character isn't tied to a specific instrument now I can play the drums sing or strum it up without having to re-create myself! Big plus!

Tour Mode
I love that the tour is no longer locked down to multiplayer. You can create a band of one person and still play a tour, and have your friends jump in whenever they are around. Big bonus again! The downside to this is: they removed the single player straight thru the track list mode, which made it easy to unlock every song and know when you've unlocked it all. I still keep randomly unlocking songs in RB2 and I have no idea if I’m even close to the end!

Import RB1 Music
I haven’t done this yet, but it’s a great idea, and I plan to soon. I'm just sad that Enter Sandman won't make it across the journey.

Downloaded Music
All of my previously downloaded music shows up immediately, no work needed - that’s a great feature, good job on this one Harmonix!

New Songs
New songs are always a good thing, there's a ton in here, and I’d argue that on the whole the track list is much better in RB2 than it was in RB1.

I love the new things in RB2 although I wouldn't say it’s quite enough to justify the '2' they could have put a little more into it I think, it’s more of an expansion. The price is great if you think in terms of tracks to dollars. You are getting way more music that $60 would buy you in the music store.