Sealed deck play is a blast. Case in point, the screenshots I uploaded. We play using slightly modified rules -- for instance, we may generate more packs than there are players, we can wildcard in any skill for a player's primary profession, and both teams get a copy of the same pool of skills -- so if there's one copy of a skill, both teams can use that skill once each. But, enough about that. I'm not sure if you'll enjoy the screenshots as much as I did, but I loved the match. Our build was a stroke of genius on Ruricu's (Faux Foe) part.

And for those of you who care (both of you), I'm still updating that waste of time blog post on Random Arenas. I will be doing one after I make this post.

For the past couple of weeks or so, I've been swearing up and down that D'Alessio Arena appears five times as often as the other arenas. Random indeed. So, I decided to actually prove my theory. Every time I would spawn in a map, I would put a tally mark next to whichever map it so happened to be. I'm going to edit this post every so often with up-to-date findings on this. I might be geeking out over nothing*, but hey.

Last update: 8/11/08 11:25 AM CDT
Amnoon Arena: 14
Ascalon Arena: 15
Brawler's Pit: 20
Churranu Island Arena: 10
D'Alessio Arena: 81
Fort Koga: 13
Heroes' Crypt: 19
Petrified Arena: 21
Seabed Arena: 18
Shiverpeak Arena: 14
Shing Jea Arena: 12
Sunspear Arena: 16
The Crag: 13
Total: 266

I probably don't need to prove my point further. (also lol it hasn't been CST for months)

(*: Of course I'm geeking out over nothing, I'm complaining over how the random number generator picks the map rotation.)

There's a lot of awesome things that I'm just not capturing, like getting 38 wins in TA yesterday. Finally losing to [rawr] was amusing, though. Their build had the same basic concept as ours, but worked so much better -- a good Shock Axe Warrior and SA Assassin will usually beat a pair of RaO Rangers.

Speaking of unused Xfire features, hello anyone who's actually bothering to read this.