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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5596491" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Magazine Annual 1996part 8/8Dragon dice: Mixed Race Armies? Well, this is interesting. Once again it is proved hybridisation is the path to maximum twinkitude! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Although you do still have to maintain some level of compatibility. It seems some of the best choices have one element in common, but the two races bring other things to the table as well. Still, they don't seem too keen on you combining a bit of everything, for reasons I'm not sure of. Would that be even more powerful, or would it actually result in a weaker army overall? Once again, I do somewhat regret not knowing any more about this game than I've read in the magazine. Deckbuilding Revisited: You know, we haven't actually seen any Spellfire articles over the last year, as Dragon Dice seems to have replaced it in the affections of the writers. What's up with that? Short attention spans, I guess. And this is already a return to basic deckbuilding advice. Can't they take a break from something for any amount of time without assuming people have forgotten about it and need to start from the bottom again? So yeah, this tells you that you can't expect to win by just throwing money at hundreds of booster packs, and then putting the most powerful cards you find into your deck. Synergy is the name of the game, and all types of cards are needed to win. Picking stuff from the same world can make you predictable, but does often have real combo advantages. And never forget to have enough realms to give you a chance of winning quickly. Another article that seems sensible, but not groundbreaking in the slightest. You could do stuff like this all day, should you be so inclined. But sensible is not exciting. Zzzzzz. An 8 page spread of artwork recycled from recent products finishes this off. Not that it's bad at all, as they've obviously picked what they think is the best of the year, but it once again smells of padding because they don't have enough material, not making the most efficient use of the space they have available. This definitely seems to have been designed to attract the interest of more casual buyers, who wouldn't normally pick up issues regularly. With it's heavy emphasis on settings, familiar topics, and noncontroversial crunch that's easily incorporated into existing games, it wants to take people who've already bought a little, and get them diversifying so they buy a greater proportion of TSR's stuff. So I'm left feeling that this really isn't aimed at me, and this is rather less satisfying as a whole product than the regular issues. Even the number of external adverts is vastly reduced, which also contributes to making the whole thing feel much more like a house organ. It also feels like they don't really have the ideas to fill all this extra space, and are resorting to self-promotional padding a lot. Really, it brings the end of the year down. I hope next year's annual has a better idea what it wants to do with itself.</blockquote>

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