I’ve been playing Hearthstone again lately. I picked it up earlier this month after a nine year hiatus — I last played the game back in 2015. It’s still just as good as it ever was. Plenty of fun mechanics and an engaging rank system that keeps you coming back for more.

During my previous stint playing Hearthstone, Mech Mage was my deck of choice. And now that I’ve returned, I have another minion-based Mage deck to pilot — Elemental Mage.

It’s a deck filled with Elemental minions, most of which offer benefits for playing an Elemental on the previous turn or for multiple turns in a row. And the deck is relatively inexpensive to craft — costing far less Arcane Dust than other top decks in the metagame.

There are a good number of bread-and-butter cards that you need in the deck for synergistic reasons — Fire Fly, Flame Geyser, and Shale Spider, for example. But there are a handful of cards that give the deck enough power to compete with the more expensive options in the format:

• Aqua Archivist — a 2/2 for (2) that makes the next Elemental you play cost (2) less. It can be used for incredibly powerful starts or played at the end of your turn as a way to get higher cost Elementals in play early.
• Lamplighter — it was recently nerfed by Blizzard, but it still remains as one of the most powerful things you can do in the deck. It gives you the reach the deck needs to go over the top when the board is more developed.
• Overflow Surger — it makes an army of Elementals in a single card. It can often win you the game on its own, but can be paired with Flame Revenant or Saloon Brewmaster to make even more powerful plays.
• Tainted Remnant — it can help you clean up the board when played into a bunch of minions, it can go to the face when your opponent has nothing in play, and it attacks for a lot.
• Unchained Gladiator — over half of the deck is inexpensive minions. It’s pretty easy to empty your hand and Unchained Gladiator can help you refuel in the mid to late game.

So far I’ve been able to reach diamond level one with the deck, but it has a high enough win percentage, that it’s just a matter of time before I reach legend.

Some of the more impressive plays I’ve made with the deck:

• Dealt 25 damage with a couple of Lamplighters in a single turn to get the win against a bunch of taunt minions.
• Played Incindius to shuffle five Eruptions into my deck and bounced it with Saloon Brewmaster, so that I can play it again the following turn for an additional five Eruptions. I then setup another turn to draw a handful of cards off of Unchained Gladiator, which included three Eruptions to clear their board and attack for the win.

If you enjoy card games, but haven’t played Hearthstone yet, I’d highly recommend picking it up and giving this deck a try. I’ve been having an absolute bast with it.

For anyone interested you can find the full list and deck code here.

Coming September 19 with over a hundred games for $4.99. And you can share the subscription with up to five family members. That’s a great price. As long as the games are good, I can’t imagine this not being a hit.

I’m sure I’ll give the service a try, at least during the one month trial, but I’m not sure if this is something I’ll keep long-term. I already have a pretty big backlog of games on Switch that I haven’t played yet. And I haven’t seen anything on the service that’s more compelling than what I have on Switch — Super Mario Odyssey, Celeste, and more.

➝ Source: apple.com

I believe the protagonist is voiced by Rich Sommer, the actor behind one of my favorite characters on Mad Men and who is now the host of his own podcast, CARDBOARD! I don’t play too many video games these days — currently on Hearthstone and Alto’s Adventure — but Firewatch is the kind of game I could get in to.

Mallory Day, writing on the Sega Blog:

At SEGA we are committed to making fun, high-quality mobile games and it is with our fans’ best playing experience in mind that we announce the removal of a number of games from our back catalogue. It is important for us to ensure that all of our fans, regardless of platform or operating system, have a great playing experience and after evaluating our complete list of titles, we have determined that a number of them no longer meet our standards.

They will be removing these titles from app stores over the next few weeks, but there’s no word on what specific games will be affected by this.

I think its wise for them to get rid of some of their older, lower quality titles from app stores. For many of these games, they aren’t likely to recoup the costs necessary to update them for the latest version of iOS. But, they also don’t want any negative backlash from customers paying $2.99 for a game that doesn’t fill the entire screen on their brand new iPhone.

I can imagine some of these games returning in the future, though. Maybe they’ll release some sort of remastered collection that includes titles from the early days of the App Store with enhanced graphics and new levels.

(Via 9 to 5 Mac.)

Nintendo is releasing a Mario Bros. level creator game. There was no release date or pricing announcement, but whenever it hits shelves I’m sure it’s going to sell a lot of consoles.

The developers of Threes speak on all of the recent rip-offs of their iOS game. I can’t imagine how it would feel to work for over a year on an iOS game, only for it to be cloned en masse and for some of those clones to be more popular than the original.

Brilliant puzzle game that’s easy to learn and difficult to master. I’ve been playing it for a few weeks and it’s my go to game when I have a few minutes to play.

I’d also suggest you read Ben Kuchera’s piece on Polygon about the development of Threes and why it took its developers more than a year to finish it.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing various editions of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. One of the key reasons that Tony Hawk games were so good is because they figured out the proper control scheme. If they manage to figure out a good way to control a skateboard on a touchscreen device this game will be very successful.