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I know I said in one of my previous columns this summer that I have been trying to get back into card collecting, especially Pokemon.
That hasn't exactly gone to plan; it's still incredibly difficult to find places outside of game stores that carry products that you can purchase at a price that makes the trip worthwhile.
So my desire to collect has been taking a back seat while some of my friends and I have been getting back into playing the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game again.
There's just one problem with that -- Konami has made their own game unplayable and unenjoyable. It's simply not fun anymore in the way it's currently formatted.
And don't even get us started on how there are about five current "meta" archetypes that everyone plays on "Master Duel" and in the TCG.
Our biggest topic of discussion has centered on ways to simply make the game more fun, and last more than a turn or two.
Trying to limit special summons of monsters, which are currently unrestricted all formats, doesn't really seem to work as it can hinder how most modern decks play, and takes some of the fun out of playing with older cards where it didn't matter if special summons were limited or not because the very ability to special summon in the earlier days of the game were limited to a handful of times a game.
In the modern game, players will special summon several times just setting up a single combo play.
My friends and I have taken to adjusting the deck requirements in order to alleviate some of this.
Firstly, all of our decks have to be 60 cards, compared to the usual 40 that most people run in a competitive environment. Second, all cards are limited, meaning you can only run a single copy of any card in your deck. We've even opened this up to cards that Konami has forbidden from tournament play, seeing as how most of us do not run many of the cards on it already, but it's nice to have our old friend Pot of Greed showing up for a plus two to your hand.
Speaking of hands, we also tweaked some of the mechanics to make things more interesting with four of us playing at once. 10,000 life points and 10 cards in your starting hand vs. the standard 8,000 and five cards.
When you combine that with a 60-card deck of singles, it can make for some fun games that can drag on for quite a while. We've tossed around adopting a rule similar to the anime where monsters summoned from the extra deck (fusions, synchros, XYZs and Links) can't attack the turn they're played. But as of now we're still messing around with what we have to see if we can just enjoy ourselves a little bit.
A GTA V reunion
I got absurdly excited when I heard that Sci-Fi Valley Con this fall is going to be the site of a Grand Theft Auto V voice actors reunion.
Ned Luke (Michael De Santa), Shawn "Solo" Fonteno (Franklin Clinton), Steven Ogg (Trevor Philips) and Slink Johnson (Lamar Davis) are all scheduled to be at the Blair County Convention Center during the Oct. 17-19 convention.
GTA V is one of my favorite games, period. A perfect sandbox game where you can do just about anything you want within reason. But I had the most fun listening to the voice actors' random quips as I'm driving around Los Santos. I don't know this far out if I'll be able to get out there when the time comes (it is in the middle of football season, after all), but anyone who enjoys this game as much as I do should try and make it a point to get there and see them if you can.
Mirror digital content coordinator and copy editor Dan Isenberg can be reached at disenberg@altoonamirror.com or on X @TheseDanTweets.