/'wɪdʒ.ɪt/

My wife and I have started collecting the new Digimon Card Game. I'm aiming for a cube-style playset - 4 of each Common, 2 of each Uncommon, and 1 of each Rare/Super Rare/Secret Rare. With the a second booster box we have incoming we might actually get most of the way to 4 copies of the Uncommons, too, but I haven't found a good singles source yet so filling out the rares to that degree would be rough, and I have no idea where the top end of card values will settle.

The game's rules read real well, sorta like a cross between Magic and Pokemon without resource cards. Much better-designed than other Digimon card games I've played. We haven't had an opportunity yet to test gameplay - juggling boys saps your time - but I anticipate enjoying it.

I'm trying to feel out how Limited would feel for this game; it doesn't seem to be designed for it, so the format may not be great, but it's worth a shot. Currently this is what I'm thinking;

• 30 or 35-card deck, plus a standard Digi-Egg deck.
• Pack structure could either emulate true packs, or conform to a more Magic-like setup. I need to open a pack for the former, but for the latter I'm thinking 10 commons, 3 or 4 uncommons, 1 rare/super rare/secret rare, and perhaps a dedicated Digi-Egg slot.
• If I'm doing Magic-like packs, we'd could do 3-pack draft, 6-pack Winston, or 6-pack sealed. If they're 12-card true packs, we'd need 4 packs for draft and 8 for Winston, though Sealed might be able to get away with staying on 6. Might up it to 7 or 8 to improve card quality though.

Today I may swing by the game shop and pick up some boosters to give Winston a run with the wife, see if we can get that working well. Gotta run a few games with the precons first so we both have a solid base though.

One of the cards - which we don't actually have yet - is Diaboromon, the villain from the Digimon Movie. The card makes little copies of itself, using rules for tokens that are almost identical to Magic's. As far as I can tell there isn't an official Diaboromon token yet, though digging online it looks like there's supposed to be a graphic for it at least. Anyways, I found that someone already put together a Magic Set Editor template, so I did some quick modifications to it and whipped up this yesterday;

Managed to track down the full Iron Gods AP in physical format. This - along with some pocket editions I picked up - will make playing my solo games a little easier.

Got me some flat tension tools and some clear acrylic locks. They're not really good for practice but I hope they'll help me get a feel for pin depth and what security pins are like. I have a set of proper progressive locks that are for actual practice.

As promised, ten of the twelve pins. Got the Paradwyn one incoming too, just need to find Bograth.

I used to collect a game called Magi-Nation; nearly had a full playset of the cards, plus a bunch of peripheral collectibles to boot. I sold it off around six or seven years ago, but I've regretted it since.

There's a pretty active community on Discord, so I've started looking into collecting again. I have to be a lot more conservative than I might otherwise typically be, what with the twins inbound, but it won't hurt to put my ear to the ground.

I've got a couple of leads on near-complete sets, but going that route would be prohibitively expensive right now. I might start setting aside a little money every month as a collector's fund. Hell, that might be a good idea anyways, to rein in my spending a bit in general.

Another option is to print the cards instead of collecting them. I'm going to have to do this for Traitor's Reach since it never went to print, but I'm not so sure for the official stuff. On the one hand, printed would probably be cheaper, and it'd be easier to get most promos this way. The downsides are that that's not really collecting, the prints may turn out poorly, and it might be hard to track down non-card items without going in for card lots too.

Speaking of non-card items, I did purchase 10 of the 12 enamel pins. I'll be glad to have those.

I think that for now, the tack that I'll take will be to focus on the non-card collectibles until I have enough saved that I could get the cards printed if I wanted, and then make a determination on how to proceed.

More Dinotopia, this time First Flight. I'm coming to terms with the series' lack of continuity, but seriously. Why would the T-Rexes guard Ogthar's treasure after the way he's been treating them in this book? And Hohepa, the Saurian Knight trainer from the Blake Terrapin story, is described as being ethnically Maori despite the book being set thousands of years before that'd have been a distinct culture.

As I said before, it's not bad per se but it is distracting.

I've begun reading the second Dinotopia book. It comes with a few more questions - Crabbe has apparently become a salvager and no longer works Volcaneum, for example, and submarines are evidently more common than the first book had seemed to indicate. Did Arthur make the one he escaped with, find and repair it, or what?

Dinotopia is large, but between the extended longevity of folks on the island and all the kids shown, I wonder about the birth rate. Not to mention all the megafauna!

I'm also not as big a fan of how the story is delivered. The first book was done as a journal, but this is just light prose. It comes of more stilted as a result I think, and abandons the conceit that Gurney found the journals.

I suspect I'll find out more specifically as the story proceeds, but there's a picture of a "beacon sunstone". These look like the signal quartz from the first book. Why then were folks so surprised to find a sunstone? Maybe power sunstones are unknown now, but surely the beacon sort aren't.

I came across a copy of Dinotopia in a resale shop, so I decided to buy it and do some rereading. I loved that book as a kid, to the point that the copy I had - buried in a box at my grandmother's - has separated from its spine.

The story in the book is secondary to the beautiful art, but there are a few things about it that keep popping my suspension of disbelief. Little tiny things too - Bix can speak Hittite, but the writing system is an unmodified modern Latin script? Only one person at the Hatchery could barely speak an archaic dialect of English, but the text throughout the book is modern English in the form of dinosaur foot-script? I suppose the text shown in pictures might just coincidentally feature loanwords from English, but the Code of Dinotopia is too complex for that to carry.

I wonder what the accent of a dinosaur like Bix would be like. She's beaked, so certainly labial sounds must be difficult. Unless we're to believe dinosaurs of that sort might have parrot-like throats. That sounds plausible at least. (I later looked at a Dinotopia wiki and this does seem to be the canonical explanation; Arthur referred to her as a "hog-parrot" several times so that's not too surprising.)

The dinosaurs have modern binomial names, despite the fact that the modern system would have been invented only about a hundred years prior to the setting of the books, with literal thousands of years for the dinotopian culture to have developed their own? The Denisons calling them modern names would have made some sense, for Dinosaurs known in the 1860s at least, but Quetzalcoatlus would still be an anachronism by a good 100 years! Plus the bit about Quetzalcoatlus not understanding human or saurian languages because they're technically not dinosaurs is weird. Being unable to speak them, sure, I'd buy that, but not even learn them?

I also wonder about Dolphins - the setting as-is indicates they're sophonts, but despite that they never contacted humans outside Dinotopia? Or what about the Trilobite monuments - those died out millions of years before dinosaurs. Dinotopia must have been isolated - but "permeable" - for much, much longer than I thought the books end up indicating.

Gurney isn't a linguist or a paleontologist, and as I said the books are mostly a vehicle for cool dinosaur art. The books are great! These are little bits of sand that get into the gears for me though. I end up thinking about this stuff in parallel to the story. It's fun as a little puzzle to try to justify, I guess, if mildly distracting.

I learned how to play Koi Koi this weekend so I got a hanafuda deck. It's a very fun game, but the cards are thick cardboard - I'm still getting the hang of shuffling them!

Just hit a 500-day streak with Klingon on Duolingo. {Hoch jaj jIDub! latlh vaghvatlh jajmey jIHaDjaj!}