Go Forward: Japan, Trains and Stuff

As you may or may not know, I write regularly for AnimeChicago, of which I am a team member and general contributor. Because of that, there is no new article on this site this week. I encourage you to head over to AnimeChicago.com and check out my latest article. It's about trains, Japan, and the CTA. I tried to be humorous with it, pointing out some gripes I have with the CTA, that I think many people share. And while Japan is not a wonderland that some believe it to be, their train system is as good as you could imagine. Anyway, here's the link:

Click this thing for trains and stuff.

Special thanks to Jamie and Gabe for making this article possible.

Behind the Build - Omnath, Locus of Mana

In Behind the Build, I breakdown the design of one of my commander decks, usually one with a unique spin. This time, I review my Omnath, Locus of Mana deck.

Magic: The Gathering head designer Mark Rosewater is known for saying “restrictions breed creativity”, and although some people might have issues with the face of the Magic creative department, it is difficult to disagree with that sentiment. I personally have taken that as one of my few mantras. It’s surprising how useful it is, even beyond the scope of the game. Creativity usually only sparks once we are given a set of conditions. Otherwise, we often spin our wheels or simply get lost in all the possibilities. But when those options are narrowed down, that’s when we start to excel.

Decision fatigue happens when you are given near unlimited options. Think of a menu at a restaurant and imagine it with multiple pages, all kinds of dishes, side dishes and extras. It can be quite daunting to choose a tasty meal, and typically we end up selecting stuff we are familiar with, even though new and exciting options are right in front of our faces. Now, imagine you’re at a food truck where you have at most four or five different options. Pretty easy to pick from that menu, right? Well, restrictions help narrow down your possible options and can lead you to trying something different. Go back to the restaurant menu example, and imagine setting a restriction like “The dish can only start with the letter M” or “the dish must not have tomatoes in it.” Well, that can lead you to things you might never have tasted before, especially if you pick the latter at an Italian restaurant.

So what does this have to do with the Commander deck I’m discussing today? Building a Commander deck is itself a daunting process, especially from scratch. The format has a massive card pool, spanning over 20 years of design. Narrowing that down to 99 and a commander is not an easy feat. So we often find ourselves resorting to online guides, primers and other sources to do much of the thinking for us. And that’s perfectly fine, many people enjoy the gameplay more and will happily trade the pride of crafting a unique deck for consistency and proven results, alongside a community of similar minds constantly improving on the build. However, every once in awhile, you may want to expand outside the confines of net decks.

That’s where this deck design came from. To get the creative juices flowing, I set a restriction on myself. I wanted to hobble a Magic color of its best card type, and build from there. For this experiment, I chose green. Green’s best card type is creature, I don’t think there is much debate to that. With bomb cards like Craterhoof Behemoth and Avenger of Zendikar, games can end quite quickly on resolution of these green monsters, and ones like it. Furthermore, many of green’s most powerful non-creature spells deal with creatures in some way, and many of them care about creature cards like Green Sun’s Zenith, Survival of the Fittest or Tooth and Nail. So not only was I limiting my options for game winners, I was limiting powerful options all around.

Yet, with this simple but harsh restriction, the design flourished. When I first fired up MTG’s official card search website, Gatherer, I was astounded by the creative choices I had once I made sure the search would not spit back anything with the type “Creature”. Let me take you through the key cards that makes the deck I dubbed “Mono-Green Spells” tick.

Omnath, Locus of Mana

Omnath is well known in the Commander community for being one of the most popular mono-green legendaries. EDHRec has it listed as #1 on their deck list count, beating out Ezuri, Renegade Leader and Titania, Protector of Argoth. However, most of the Omnath decks you will see contain many of green’s premier creatures. In fact, the deck usually ticks because of these creatures, floating mana through turns to cast a big beasty is very much a central deck strategy. EDHRec lists the average Omnath deck as containing 29 creatures. Well, I don’t have the luxury to do part of that. I do however, have a backup strategy that these decks use, which is to just win with commander damage.

Berserk & Rancor

These are the primary commander damage win cards in the deck, allowing you to smash right through an enemy’s defences while Omnath stays huge. It’s fairly easy to catch a player on their back foot and hit them for a ton. Berserk is a very important card as it can double as a surprise for other commanders swinging in and as a removal spell of sorts, just make sure that the creature isn’t attacking you.

Overrun, Overwhelming Stampede & Triumph of the Hordes

You can use these to buff Omnath to victory, but most of the time one of these three are probably helping you win with the deck’s secondary strategy, which is tokens. Overwhelming Stampede is an all-star in my opinion, in any green commander deck, as it gives you a way to push through a stalled board state and can help you take out multiple players on one turn. Now, I understand the hate for Triumph in that people find infect to be a cheap win, and I would agree, it’s just that Wizards has not given us a comparable non-creature spell on par with Overrun and Stampede, but if they ever do, this will be out of the deck. This deck wants as many effects like this as it can get.

Arachnogenesis

There are a plethora of token spells in the deck, but I wanted to point out this monster specifically. Having instant-speed cards in the deck is very important, since you can float the mana you generate each turn with Omnath and not have to worry about using it should Omnath get killed. Obviously, for this card, that’s not always going to be the case, but having this as a backup plan in case some opponent-caused nonsense comes your way is always nice to have.

Doubling Season, Parallel Lives & Second Harvest

Of course, to accompany all the token cards are the token enablers. I don’t think I need to speak on the raw power that Doubling Season and Parallel Lives provides, given that much has been said about them in the past. I do want to mention Second Harvest as an up and coming card in this deck, which can act similarly to Arachnogenesis in many situations.

Earthcraft & Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx

Every Omnath deck is hungry for large sums of green mana, and these cards provide just that. Earthcraft is downright busted and a decent, though still pricey itself, budget option for Gaea’s Cradle, which is a card that will permanently be on the wishlist for this deck. Nykthos is also a good Cradle replacement and is quickly becoming a card I throw in every mono-colored deck I play. The benefit of the amount of mana it can produce for such a small investment is insane. I recommend this card for everyone out there to try.

Hurricane & Squall Line

With all that mana, these two cards can also help close out the game for any player unfortunate enough to be below your life total. I have cast this for upwards of 30 mana. These also help deal with one of green’s major weaknesses, which is flying creatures.

Mirri's Guile & Sylvan Library

Card draw and card selection is scarce in green, but there are still some great options, like the two listed above. Sylvan Library is a format staple and similarly on par with Phyrexian Arena. Guile, on the other hand acts as a Sensei’s Divining Top substitute, helping you shape your draws for maximum power. Couple these with cards like Shamanic Revelation and Soul's Majesty, and green has a card draw package that makes red and white cry.

Song of the Dryads & Utopia Vow

Removal is another place where green can falter. It can fight other creatures well enough and has not problem dealing with artifacts and enchantments, but having a catchall like Song is great. Bonus points for using song on a permanent, then playing a Vesuva to get a copy of the original permanent you just slapped the Song on. Another fantastic card in this deck for “removal” is Vow of Wildness. While it doesn’t get rid of the beast on the board, it makes it work for you and not against you. Additionally, you can slide it on Omnath should the need to win by commander damage arise.

Ezuri's Predation & The Great Aurora

Who says green can’t have board wipes? Wizards has been kind enough to print two fantastic big mana spells to help clear the board. With the token subtheme the deck operates under, the value of both of these cards goes through the roof. Having tokens out with Aurora usually makes your board better than theirs and with the token doublers in the deck, Predation can get out of hand quick.

Mouth of Ronom, Scrying Sheets & Snow-Covered Forest

One last package I want to mention is the snow land package, which is something I would recommend in any mono-colored deck. Scrying Sheets can give you extra card draw each turn, and Mouth is a small investment on the ability to have an extra creature removal spell in your deck.

So there you have it, the key cards for this unique restriction-based deck. Of course, what deck tech article would be complete without a full deck list? Here is the glory of Mono-Green Spells:

Quick Sketch - From Thumbnail to Ink

I've been drawing for as long as I can remember. I started as most people did with random doodles and incomprehensible scribbles, then moved on to cars being my main focus as a kid. I wanted to be a car designer when I was young. However, after watching Dragonball Z as a preteen, my focus shifted into character design. I took art classes all four years in high school, but had to give up that route once I moved on to college, but I never stopped drawing. I apologize for the completely non-professional work displayed below, but I want to create a record of where I currently am with my skills (or lack thereof).

Recently, I completed a shift to a fully digital realm, utilizing my Surface Book and the program Clip Studio Paint to do designs digitally from start to finish. I find that this encourages me to keep at art since my sketchpad is unlimited by size and my toolbox is much larger.

I start my design by doing a simple gesture drawing to get the pose and proportions correct. My trick here is to work with a full size canvas, but to zoom the canvas out far enough to match a normal thumbnail size.

Thumbnail Gesture

After that, I zoom back in to the full size of the paper and create a new layer to build the proper musculature over the thumbnail. I use a blue pencil to make future layers show through. I will also adjust the opacity of the previous layer to help with discerning the new lines. Make sure to lock the lower layers so that any erasing doesn't ruin the lower layers.

Adding Depth

From there, I switch to a red pencil to sketch in the character details on a new layer. It's okay if it is rough at this point since this will be used for the ink layer.

Putting some "character" on it.

I added another layer to sketch over a coat from the previous layer, then left both visible for the ink layer.

Here is the final ink layer. I'm still getting used to inking this way. My old process was to use a vector program to do some inking, but decided that a raster program is much faster for my needs. You will notice some bleeds and too thick lines, but I hope to have this hammered out soon.

It's not perfect, but it's a start.

Anyway, thanks for reading this. I hope to do future sketches with even better looking designs, but I'm still shaking some rust off.

Food Truck Primer - Donermen

Welcome to Food Truck Primer, a series of articles where I give a rundown of different Chicago-based food trucks.

I love food trucks. Instead of being restricted to the “safe” lunch places that comes with working downtown, food trucks allow for dining experiences that you can’t find in the types of restaurants that can afford the exorbitant rent in downtown Chicago. You can eat great food at a reasonable price and still be able to share in a collaborative community. It’s small business and local flair, much like one of my other big hobbies, craft beer.

Actually, craft beer is how I found out about the first food truck I am writing about, Donermen. It was through 3 Floyds Brewing social media that I was introduced. And if you know anything about craft beer and the reputation that 3 Floyds has within the community, you could understand my excitement in trying this food truck.

Donermen’s primary focus is German street food, with a focus on food made by Turkish immigrants. Their menu consists of two main dishes: Doner kebab and curry wurst. Doner kebab is spit-roasted chicken with wonderful spices while curry wurst is German sausage smothered in a tomato-curry spice sauce.

Donermen’s doner kebab comes prepared in a few ways, but I recommend the Doner Box, which is the aforementioned chicken, served on a bed of fries, salad and veggies, along with tzatziki and hot sauce. It’s a wonderful mix of colors, spice and textures.

Donermen's fantastic Doner Box

Their curry wurst is equally fantastic. The handmade sausage blends perfectly with the sweet and spicy tomato-curry sauce, while the side of fries offers a bit of crunchiness. They have brought this dish to Christkindlmarket the past two years and blows away the competition.

Tasty, tasty curry wurst.

If you’re not feeling meat for lunch, their druid wurst, which is similar to their curry wurst except the sausage is 100% vegetarian, is a fantastic selection. I find myself switching between the two often when I’m not going for the Doner Box. The truck also recently added poutine that is very good in and of itself.

Beyond the fantastic food, Donermen also has, in my opinion, the best looking food truck. It’s hard to miss their truck wherever it is, with gorgeous mural on one side and D&D references on the other.

I love that art.

You can find Donermen throughout the downtown area of Chicago on the weekdays for lunch and at various bars and breweries on nights and weekends. They also cater, if you ever need great food for a party.

So if you see this beautiful blue and red truck out on the road, please give it a try. You will not be disappointed.