Champions Win Some and Lose Some

Daily Ramble 220: Champions Win Some and Lose Some

Today’s ramble takes me to Smite, my Angels woes, and back to Marvel Unlimited. I actually have put together a little win streak in SMITE and I’m very pleased with myself for it. At the same time, my Angels still can’t seem to figure out how to win at home…3 losses in a row to the Yankees really sucks. Finally, I really enjoyed the first issue of Champions and think these teenage heroes could have some interesting stories to tell.

Finally some Wins

One thing I’ve noticed about SMITE is that their main ranked game mode – Conquest – seems to take a long time. Most games last over 45 minutes and I’ve had a few that’ve taken over an hour. This is good and bad since it really seems like, at least at my level of play, either team has a chance to win. Opposed to League of Legends, a team can have a Phoenix downed and still keep playing until they win. It’s not as detrimental to the team to have an open lane. Along with that, the Fire Giant doesn’t seem as game changing as the Baron. And so many champs seem balanced to have tons of HP at endgame so it becomes very difficult to actually kill someone. It seems like things might be better with with fewer hit points in the game. But then maybe I’m just playing the game wrong.

In any case, I’ve played well enough to go on a kinda small win streak. I think my frustration with endgame hit points stems from the gods I play since Sol and Kukulkan don’t really build up many HP. They seem to need a lot of help at the endgame to take people down. I guess I haven’t figured out how to build these guys to scale damage into the endgame yet. I’ve tried building for magic penetration but it doesn’t seem to change the fact that I need to hit them so many times that they easily wipe out my meager HP pool. I’ll have to do some research if I’m gonna make these win streaks last longer. As it is, 4 wins in a row was fun.

Sweep

Well, it would be nice if I could say the Angels swept the Yankees at home but my team can’t seem to buy a win in front of the home crowd. Although they played much better as a team, out hit the Yankees, and struck them out more, they could not put these hits together. 3 in a row to the Yanks and the team really needs to figure out what’s wrong at home.

Fortunately they have the day off today and they have the lowly Orioles coming into town on Tuesday. Perhaps facing an opponent who’s only won 7 games all season and are 3–10 on the road will help my team figure out how to win at home. It’s really becoming a joke for a team that’s been playing so well on the road.

The team will have to do it without Ohtani on the mound since he sprained his ankle running to first base the other day and will be passed up for his next start. I suppose that’s a drawback for a two-way player, they can get injured in many ways…blisters, sprained ankles…etc.

There wasn’t much of a standout in this game though Tyler Skaggs did shut down the potent Yankee offense, holding them to 2 runs with 8 strike outs, but I think I’ll look to the batters for my Player of the Game. Since he’s inching ever so closer to 3000 hits, I’ll give Albert Pujols the award today. Hopefully he’ll break out and nab the final 4 hits to get there against Baltimore in the next couple of games so the home crowd can have something to be happy about.

First Look at Champions #1

By Mark Waid and Humberto Ramos. Published by Marvel Comics, 2016.
The comic is a neat group up of some of the most hip teenage hero’s Marvel has: Miles Morales as Spider-Man, Nova, and Ms. Marvel. They’ve become disillusioned with The Avengers and decide to make a team of their own. They enlist Amadeus Cho, the new Hulk, and Viv Vision and it seems like it could be a real neat set of heroes.

They take on a human trafficker and he doesn’t stand a chance. The 5 Champions work well together and when they find out the bad guy actually killed someone the Hulk is tempted to deal out justice right there, but Ms. Marvel wants them to enforce justice without using unjust force. This looks to be a comic that goes back to the old days of superheroes where they would turn the bad guys over to the authorities and weren’t into pounding the bad guys after they were defeated.

The first issue is a lot of fun and it looks like the team is gonna expand in future issues. The art is really well done and I like the battle scenes as well as the various recruitment depictions.

While I don’t know much about these current teenage heroes, I’m looking forward to learning more in this series as well as some of their individual books. With that all said, I’ll rate this an A-.