Where to find every Pokemon in X and Y

completely forgot about this, it was on Kotaku a while back. the link takes you to a downloadable version.

MAP

mtg Pack Rat Deck

One thing that's been annoying me about Theros so far is the complete lack of love for rodents, while the possibility of a Minotaur and Gorgon tribal decks is awesome the new block signals the end of the last. All in all I have lost eight cards (Ravenous Rats x4 and Prey upon x4), now the prey upon's can be replaced but it's the four extra furry bodies that i'm going to miss.

Rat cards can easily be slipped into any block really, as they can be found pretty much everywhere. as it stands the majority of my rat deck comes from the Return to Ravnica block and of course features everyone's favourite broken card, Pack Rat. With this deck I wanted to be making the most of those tokens and went Black/Green. this gave me access too three populate spells. Oddly a populate Pack Rat deck isn't something that I have seen much of, I favour it as it means not having to rely on discarding cards for more rats.

Lands

Swamp x10
Forest x9
Golgari Guildgate x4

Creatures

Pack Rat x4
Ravenous Rats x4
Drainpipe Vermin x4
Gutter Skulk x4
Ogre Slumlord x4
Sporemound x4

Other Spells

Druids Deliverance x4
Growing Ranks x2
Doom Blade x2
Mending Touch x2
Down/Dirty x1
Prey Upon x4

I usually sit back building rats until I can swing for lethal, or near to it. A quite mean tactic I like to use is swing big, but not quite big enough to kill, leaving myself open then run a Druids Deliverance on the ensuing counter attack, leaving me a win on the next turn. The Ogre Slumlords mix nicely with a few other cards in the deck, firstly the tokens you receive when a non token creature dies really boosts up the Pack Rats power, secondly giving all rats deathtouch makes Drainpipe Vermin terrifying. With this combo you can chump and kill most targets, pay the black and force a discard, then gain two 1/1 Rat Token's.

The Sporemound's are a big of an oddity, the main reason I am running them is to have another chance at getting tokens on the board in case I can't find Pack Rats or Slumlords.

Now a quick word on Token's, your going to need them. Lot's of them. Currently i'm using Rattatta and Patrat Pokemon cards as 1/1 rats and Dirty Wererats as my Pack Rats. The Pokemon cards won't get mixed up with the rest of the deck and the Dirty Wererat is decently vintage and very probably won't be seeing a reprint anytime soon. Some other Pack Rat token ideas I really like are these and these.

Also been playing alot of DOTP 2013 on my 360 after getting it free a while ago. Currently loving the krenko deck, Goblin Piledriver is awesome.

MTG Life counter

I've tried a couple free life counting apps over the last few months and rarely stuck with them for long. A lot of them just don't feel quite right or lack a easy UI. Then there are the amount of options that you can consider, how many players do you want it to support? Do you want poison counters?

A quick search for a MTG life in the app store shows 62 results, quite a lot to shift through, so I thought I would share with you one of my current favourites, MTG Life and Score (available on the app store for free).

Yes I named my opponent Loser, yes i'm Ten

Now while this app is not as complex as some, you can only show two players and it only keeps track of life. It is by far the nicest looking life counter I think I have ever seen. While being able to name players is a nice touch, its a shame that it doesn't remember names between sessions. 

It has the standard plus/minus 1 as well as the always welcome plus/minus 5, this makes it easy to add life totals although I did notice with play that it sometimes won't register button touches leaving you sometimes searching for the 'sweet spot' on the screen.

But I mean come on, it's just so pretty and nice. If your looking for an iOS life tracking app on your phone this is one of the best. 

Redakai Gold Pack Unboxing

Up for today's consideration is these super ultra rare redakai gold pack.
These bad boys are £96.00 at RRP but I managed to pick one up for £9.60 at this shop, yeah that is 90% off, it's obscene how cheap these cards are going for at the minute.

The sealed box, note the 90% off sticker.

Here we can see the full box in all its glory, its quite small and compact but feels reassuringly heavy. In the box you get 24 booster packs, each containing six cards. Totaling 144 for the whole box, two cards of each pack is a rare with a chance of being super rare (silver and gold respectively). I did quite well out of mine but it is worth mentioning that my friend also bought a box and only drew four or five Golds. In relation to the game, Gold cards are pretty mean, so if your serious about getting a competitive deck its worth picking up one of these and a few kairu tins (these will be covered in a unboxing in the next week or so). Pretty much all my current deck is Silver rarity upwards.

The box folded out for display

In a way it's a shame that this is now a discontinued game, the cards are pretty cool and the stacking mechanic is innovative and works very well. A few things don't work so well, such as the 'Metacharge' mechanic, while with some attacks it's pretty self explanatory on some cards it fails to make any sense. The other problem that arises from it being discontinued is the lack of future expansions, right now we only have the original release and the Metacharge release, meaning I have a good chance of owning all the cards in circulation, thrice over.

However I suppose on the other hand its good that this system is now dead as its really easy to now pick up and play. I'll leave you with a nice bit of geek porn,

Look at all the shiny booster packs, that's 48 rares right there..

Bootleg Toys #2 Super Robots

Picked this up from the same place I got fake starscream. Not too sure who he's meant to be.
Again the card is in decent condition and uses actual artwork and fonts. The model itself looks ok, I haven't opened him to look however.

Bootleg Toys #1 Super Robots

Picked this up from a mega bargain store last week, now I don't condone fake copies of toys but this little guy was so cool I couldn't leave him there.

 

As you can see quality isn't awesome, but hey it was a pound. The backing card is cheap but looks pretty, also pretty sure they are ripping off original artwork, the font is super close to the official too.

The toy itself it okay, the bend at the base of the nose cone sticks a little when attempting to transform so theres a real worry that it could snap on day. I will be picking up a few more of these, I think theres six in total. When I post a new one i'll take a good snap of the back of the card so you can see the variations.

Oh and I think this is meant to be Starscream? Not sure tho, i'm not too huge on transformers.

How to get free MS points method #2

Welcome to the second part of my guide on getting free MS points, to use this it requires an iPhone app called AppTrailers which is available free from the app store.

The premise of this app is simple, you watch trailers on your phone and you get points for doing so. These can be anywhere between 3 and 25 points. You also have a chance at winning a free scratch card daily which usually (if you win) pays between 20-30 points.

Now while you do need to collect a lot of points for it to be useful, 9000 for 800 MS points, it does payout 50 cents per 500 points via Paypal. By far the biggest problem however is the fact that it is American thus resulting in all the prizes being dollars, quite a hassle for Europe users. However I use this app mainly for PlayStation network credit and downloading games to my PSP. 

A neat way to get around this is to simply have a American account, it's easy to google an address to enter and then you can take it from there. The downside to this is that over here when you top up your get £10 and games are £3.99, With $10 and $5.99 games its a little annoying to say the least.

While it may seem like it takes forever to earn points with this app, I can easily rack up the points quite quickly just leaving it going while i'm doing something else. Without really trying its pretty easy to earn 500+ a day.