The Jux Entente

Release day in League of Legends is always a pain in the ass. When you get a large number of anonymous internet fucktards together who all want to do exactly one thing, and only one out of a five person team can do it at a time, what you end up with is troll city. Last night was special in that, in addition to the normal new champion craptacular events, I also played like complete garbage, which turned the entire night into a extravaganza of me feeling terrible about myself and hating half my team at the same time.

So here’s what I learned.

Game 1
Game 1 our Cassiopeia didn’t bother to connect for awhile, so I had to take my teleport/flash Shyvana mid. Against Kassadin. I played so poorly in this game there’s not even anything to learn from it.

Game 2
I took Morgana mid against a Malzahar. Now, normally, my Morgana is pretty badass, but I made a strategic mistake in this game that I don’t think I’ll ever repeat again, and our jungler made a rather large mistake that cost me dearly…but also because I played a bit poorly.

My mistake? Trying to keep up in a pushing battle with a Malzahar. Under most normal circumstances Morgana pushes her lane like a mofo, Malzahar not only does that, he does it using less mana. So while I managed to keep Malz below half health the entire time, I was running out of mana and he wasn’t, and he was always right up against my tower.

Now, many months ago, I used to get frustrated with junglers that never left the jungle and never ganked. Now I’ve learned to survive in more difficult lanes and I generally accept that the jungler can’t be everywhere at once, although I may disagree with where they are at any given point. What our jungler Skarner did, though was just stupid. He was queued with his friend in top lane, so what he did was…keep ganking top lane. When I asked him, hey, could we get some pressure elsewhere, his response was the rather unhelpful “I’m shutting down top lane. Deal.”

There are quite a few problems with this. First, the entire point of the jungler is to stop people in lanes from doing stupid shit. Malzahar could push my turret as hard as he wanted, because he knew that Skarner wasn’t there. The enemy team knew where Skarner was at all points, and if they didn’t, they knew he was only ganking top, so mid and bottom just didn’t have to give a fuck. Meanwhile, their jungle Warwick had far fewer kills than our Skarner, but he made me and bottom play safe, because he wasn’t just chilling in a lane. Essentially, they had a jungler, and we had a duo top that just happened to be farming jungle creeps. Very frustrating.

What I should have done was realize that he was never going to capitalize on the fact that Malz was taking random shots of turret aggro just to push the shit out of me and that I was on my own. What I actually did was keep going “Hey, look, easiest gank in the history of ganking! Malz no flash!” All that happened was that I stuck around my turret too long and got dived for my troubles.

Game 3
I actually think I did reasonably well this game. I’ve been practicing my AD carry and my Corki was able to shut down a Graves in lane. The problem was that I was on life-tilt from the previous two games so instead of pushing to go to a lane where I’m good (mid or top) I let our Kennen and Talon take them. Kennen went 0-7 and Talon 0-4. By the time the laning phase ended, bottom lane was the only one that had done reasonably well, and their Nocturne was 4-0-4.

Sometimes I start to feel like I’m getting good at LoL…and sometimes I have nights like this one. There was only one thing to do.

Game 4
Play a game of Dominion where Peter and Kenny carried and I ran around going I LIEK DRAGGGGOOOONZ. And we won it, obviously.

Social networking is the death of blogging.

Always remember children, Magic is a skill game.

So this is the deck I piloted through the New Phyrexia pre-release in Huntsville this weekend:

Seems Fair

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Creatures (11) Alpha Tyrranax Bellowing Tanglewurm Blind Zealot Chancellor of the Dross Geth, Lord of the Vault Iron Myr Pestilent Souleater Phyrexian Metamorph Phyrexian Swarmlord Tangle Angler Wall of Tanglecord Spells (9) Beast Within Dismember Enslave Glissas Scorn Grasp of Darkness Grim Affliction Leeching Bite Parasitic Implant Slice in Twain Artifacts (2) Nim Deathmantle Tumble Magnet Lands (18) 9 Forest 9 Swamp

The other rare that I opened was Asceticism, which means that it was on-color and just not worth using. The only cards I sided in all day were Corrosive Gale and Darksteel Sentinel. The Sentinel match was the only one where I lost a game: the guy had the new black Wrath of God and Wurmcoil Engine, which explains why he came in well enough I think.

Best crushings of the day include having my opponent cast Galvanic Blast, Grasp of Darkness, and use Barrage Ogre to kill my Chancellor, which I responded to by paying 4 to my Nim Deathmantle. Me forgetting was his only hope, although it did Fog for a turn.

Or against Scott, where I had out Geth, Enslaved his copy of the Chancellor, and then Geth’d back Myr Battlesphere to fight for me, after slicing it in twain.

It was a good day. And then the almost-box of product that I won (32 packs) that we split between us had 8 mythics in it. Seems good.

I’m posting this here so that I can NEVER FORGET:

(4:33:35 PM) Peter Rosconi: Holyyyyyy shit
(4:33:43 PM) Peter Rosconi: C# parralelism is the shit
(4:34:31 PM) Graeme Hefner: Explain
(4:34:43 PM) Peter Rosconi: List actions = new List();
actions.Add(() => LoadIdentificationTexts());
actions.Add(() => LoadAssociations());
actions.AsParallel().ForAll(a => a.Invoke());
(4:34:57 PM) Graeme Hefner: …wait, seriously, it just runs them all?
(4:35:00 PM) Graeme Hefner: In parallel?
(4:35:03 PM) Peter Rosconi: Yup
(4:35:09 PM) Graeme Hefner: That is the most badass goddamn thing I have ever seen.

So upgraded to Cyanogenmod 7, and my minimalism urges are kicking in hardcore for once. I got rid of the two extra homescreens I don’t use since ADW launcher makes it so easy to add them back to where I want them and I killed all of my widgets, leaving me with three homescreens that only have four icons on them. And I’m still on the white/black thing. Who knows how long this will last?

Probably until I upgrade to a Sense phone soon. My poor Droid.

BW Minimalism! I think I need to change the titlebar colors next...

Gingerbread is pretty sweet, by the way.