…Shoving Chocobos in a Box. (A Brief Walkthrough for Warkwârk)

Universes Beyond has been a plague upon Magic: the Gathering. Like everyone else, I’m not a big fan of it, except for the ones I like. In 2025 there was no finer pool of hypocrisy for me to stew in than the release of the Final Fantasy set for Magic. These were two things that came into being at the perfect time in the 90s for me to be of age for my brain to really latch onto. While my time in Magic started in Ice Age, I didn’t really start caring until the Tempest Block. Final Fantasy III (the US version) and Final Fantasy VII scratched the same sort of itch around the same time. For years I and various friends would muse about how great it would be for Final Fantasy to make its way into Magic, to the point of my friend Chase and I printing out cards for various FF characters using screenshots from Kingdom Hearts. I had meticulously recreated the card frames in Photoshop and printed on the best materials we could get hold of in those early 00s. In retrospect they were pretty janky.

Suffice to say, Magic and Final Fantasy were things I liked when I was 14, and therefore they are the coolest things ever and you can’t change my mind. So when it actually happened for real, I knew I was going to hemorrhage quite a bit of money. I put together maybe too many commander decks and a cube containing every single card with every single variant art (ignoring whether what I got hold of was foil or not). I’ve gotten some use out of the cube, happily, but when playing with my kids, one thing became clear: There just weren’t enough chocobos in the draft format. So I set out to fix that.

A famous variant of Magic is Forgetful Fish, or Dandân, which is a pretty great encapsulation of Magic, especially the color blue. I decided this would be a good way to approach a chocobo-based format, proxying up a set of Chocobos, Chocobo related cards, and filling it in with whatever else from the Final Fantasy set seemed to fit. The result is Warkwârk, an 80-card, 2-player shared deck format that features excessive interaction and lots of feathers.

Warkwârk features all of the Red/Green cards that have anything to do with chocobos. The goal here is to make a deck that usually plays fast, but plays fair. Birds can appear quickly and be solved just as fast, until one player inevitably snowballs, but overextending is risky, as a well timed Fire Magic or Nibelheim aflame can turn the whole game around. A small number of trample sources enable you to force some damage through on a gummed up board, and the choice to block or not can turn everything around. Most games are fast, while some are grindy slug fests.

The 3rd game with my kids ended with just 5 cards left in the deck. I lost.

Chocobos generally have 2 toughness, so they generally aren’t particularly tough vs. most of the removal in the deck. Thunder can deal with most things for just 1 mana, with the option of going higher for more mana. Brute Force/Giant Growth played at the right time can make for some surprising defensive and offensive moves, especially when paired with a well times Nibelheim Aflame. The 8 Chocobo Kicks in the deck ensure a steady flow of answers and land drops for your birds’ landfall triggers.

Overall Warkwârk is a very different deck from Dandân, though it tries to keep some of the spirit of a very back-and-forth game that can go very quickly or end up drawing through the whole deck when both players manage to draw enough answers for each other’s birds. I’ve had a lot of fun with this so far. Hopefully some others out there will find it entertaining enough. There’s also a sideboard of potential swaps if something proves to be consistently problematic. You can also lean harder into top deck manipulation or add even more ridiculous answers. Bartz and Boko were initially in the default deck, but in my games I found it to be entirely too devastating whenever it hit the table.

It wouldn’t be enough to just make the deck and throw it in a generic box, of course, so I drafted up a card box to hold all of it, and an insert to hold an extra set in case I wanted to try a 3-4 player variant. For my personal proxy set, I use old frames for all of the lands, and skin a few of them to be on theme. If you want to print your own, you can find my images here.

Here’s the deck list (though you should really just check out the deck here):

Creatures
2 Sazh’s Chocobo	A huge threat if allowed to get out of control.
2 Summon: Fat Chocobo	Two birds in one.
10 Traveling Chocobo	Landfall doubler, potential “card draw.”

Sorceries
2 Call the Mountain Chocobo	Grab a land and make a bird. Flashback to do it again.
2 Choco-Comet	Blow something (or someone) up and make a bird.
8 Chocobo Kick	Kick something, possible land drop enabler.
2 Gysahl Greens	Make a bird. Flashback to do it again.
2 Nibelheim Aflame	Probably sweeps up the whole board. Flashback gets you some cards.
4 Rite of Flame	Temporary mana ramp.

Instants
2 Big Score	Card draw an temporary mana ramp.
2 Brute Force	Buff for offense or defense.
2 Fire Magic	Generally a board sweeper.
2 Giant Growth	Buff for offense or defense.
2 Natural Selection	Top deck manipulation.
2 Thunder Magic	Targeted removal.

Enchantments
2 Sidequest: Raise a Chocobo	Make a bird. Make another bird (with a better landfall trigger) if somehow your other birds stick around.

Lands
2 Chocobo Camp	A land that makes birds! Also buffs your
4 Commercial District	Surveil (top deck manipulation)
2 Game Trail	It’s a land!
4 Gruul Turf	Landfall enabler.
2 Mosswort Bridge	Possible discount, if your board gets big enough.
4 Racers’ Ring	Late game card draw.
2 Rootbound Crag	It’s a land!
4 Sheltered Thicket	Cycling (Probably late game card draw.)
2 Skarrg, the Rage Pits	Trample enabler, possible defensive utility.
2 Stomping Ground	It’s a land!
4 Temple of Abandon	Scry land (top deck manipulation)

For the Parents of Children Who Will Inevitably Enjoy the Super Mario Bros. Movie

It’s okay. I get it. It’s Mario and Luigi on the big screen, but, like, it actually looks like Mario and Luigi in a movie! I took my kids. We bought the popcorn. We found our seats among the ocean of other parents and children. My kids got their first dose of “why are there so many trailers?!” Then, the movie started. I kept my hands and feet inside the vehicle at all times. In a flash, it ended and my kids seemed pretty happy with it. I had the good sense to just smile and nod in agreement.

(Expect some spoilers below, probably.)

Actual screenshot from the 1993 classic *Super Blade Runner Bros.*

The Super Mario Bros. Movie was destined for success just by virtue of doing anything that looked even remotely like the video game. I don’t want to talk much about the 1993 movie here. It belongs in a very different conversation about cult movies that has thankfully little to do with this newest adaptation. The one thing I will say is, looking at the reviews for this movie, any movie reviewer that decided to make some deluded hipster stance that this new offering somehow validates that the old one is “better” or any other nonsense saying they got it right the first time would do us all a favor to locate the nearest window and throw their keyboard out of it.

I went to this movie seeing the initial Rotten Tomato reviews. Low critic score, high audience score. This naturally makes one go into a movie with an attitude of “well these pretentious critics don’t know what they’re talking about. This movie is probably fine.” The reality is sadly closer to “these pretentious critics don’t know what they’re talking about and the movie isn’t really all that good for reasons the critics didn’t really hit on.” At least, that’s the sense I got from the original reviews I read. In any case, this doesn’t feel “rotten” but also doesn’t feel like a universal crowd-pleaser.

Your kids will enjoy it. They probably already have, based on the absurd box office returns. You’ll probably enjoy it well enough. You’ll probably get it on streaming in a few months, watch it again, and it’ll eventually fall into obscurity until the inevitable sequel. This isn’t a Pixar, make-you-cry-within-ten-minutes-as-payment-for-the-next-eighty-minutes-of-fun-and-drama movie. This is a roller coaster full of bright colors and “things you know” from the video games filling every frame of the animation. Lots of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nods to generations of old Nintendo games. The movie moves from set piece to set piece at breakneck pace. “No time for a movie, we have to get to the next scene!” Additionally, there’s a bunch of nonsensical old pop music selections in the soundtrack that I guess Illumination thinks are being put there for the adults in the crowd, but my experience with each one of them was just JackieChanMakesTheFace.jpg.

Music from and Inspired by the Motion Picture

A-Ha’s “Take On Me” is… out of place at best? I mean, the music video did feature some motorcycles in a comic book… and maybe Mario is supposed to be getting ready to “take on” Donkey Kong? But that’s not set up until the next scene so… I don’t know. The movie ends with Electric Light Orchestra’s “Mr. Blue Sky” which seems too much of a meta choice due to Chris Pratt being involved in this movie. I imagine most of the adults in the room were thinking “oh I guess because he was also in Guardians of the Galaxy? Wasn’t this the beginning of volume 2? Why is this happening in this movie?”

Even in 1992 you got the sense Peach could probably take care of herself.

The plot is 30 years of Mario put into a blender and then hurled onto a canvas for you to feast your eyes upon. Bowser wants to marry Peach. This is something that got fully popularized in Super Mario Odyssey, but suspicions that this was the case were essentially confirmed way back in 1992 when a monthly comic installment to Nintendo Power started getting published. There were a few Mario-related comics done by someone calling themselves “Charlie Nozawa” (apparently actually Tamakichi Sakura) that I remember fondly and likely had a lot to do with Bowser’s and, oddly enough, Wario’s interpretations over time.

TerminalMontage’s “Speedrunner Mario” may have provided inspiration for the movie’s pacing

This movie is in such a hurry to do… everything that there’s not enough time for this revelation to be an amusing surprise. It’s just what it is. Bowser isn’t given time to really seem like a threat to anyone after the first scene, after which he more and more becomes his own comic relief.

Another thing that stood out to me was that even the legitimately cute moments were cut to 12 to 24 frames. Mario briefly appears as Cat Mario and even more briefly can be seen in this form “making biscuits” on top of Donkey Kong, but its on screen so shockingly briefly that I have to wonder why they bothered with it. Was it part of a slightly larger gag that got cut for time? Did the producers make the editors listen to the sound track on post “Hurry Up” double time while they were editing?

The Mario Bros. can handle anything as long as they’re together, which the movie isn’t interested in letting happen. There’s no emotional ~~Weege~~ wedge between them that splits them apart so they can reconcile later to get the job done. Happenstance pulls them apart for most of the film and happenstance eventually brings them together so they can touch a magic star together and invincibly destroy Bowser’s army using the power of… that magic star that I guess Bowser didn’t want to use himself. There’s an utter lack of satisfaction if you’re looking for characters fighting through their own shortcomings in order to win the day. While the movie does manage to set up an (albeit flimsy) reasoning that Mario’s short stature is something he struggles with, the movie’s open acceptance of game mechanics essentially points him right at a way to circumvent it, rather than overcome it.

That’s maybe the most disappointing thing. There’s a huge feeling of “there was an attempt” when story boarding this. It very much feels like the end sequence was a first draft that got accepted too quickly. From a gamer perspective, there’s no Mario vs. Bowser fight that feels more dramatic than going in at full power, then getting clipped back down to 1×1 tiny Mario, only to eke out a victory as regular, not-at-all-super Mario. Normal Mario making it through impossible situations are the type of things that make grown adults choke on their own hearts. I’d much rather have seen an ending of the movie play out the same, with each hero getting knocked down to their normal selves and forced to triumph in spite of it. The movie doesn’t seem to see it that way, however, and the brothers are cheered on by their onlookers for successfully touching the right power up at the proper moment in order to remove all tension from the film.

None of that is really important. It looks really pretty. Your kids are going to enjoy it. This isn’t high art and it sadly didn’t need to be. The disappointment comes from knowing that this could have been something more than it was and it would have been just as successful, but when something is this much of a sure-fire winner, it’s far too easy to take that Rainbow Road of least resistance. You understand that, but your kids probably won’t for a few years, at least. Let them figure that out on their own. Remember when you went to see “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II” or “Batman and Robin” in theaters? Remember that feeling of looking back and thinking “well that sure was a movie, but something doesn’t seem quite right”? I’m not saying this new Mario movie is worse than either of those, but the experience on repeat viewings is likely to be similar. This movie is so shiny it’s almost too perfect as an introduction to dissecting film. At least, once they’re ready for that sort of thing.

Prance Trance Restitution

Turns out playing Dance Dance Revolution for 90 minutes a day for nine days straight when you’re 39 is a good way to lose weight and just absolutely ruin your knees.

It’s been awhile since I’ve played a purposeful amount of DDR. After my last vacation, the tremendous amount of eating and drinking that took place forced my hand (or rather my feet) to get back into it, and I’ve gone further off the deep end than possibly ever before. Though I don’t tend to get into the more intense steps (my general level cap is 7, which might be 10 to 14 now, since apparently the scales were extended some years ago long after I stopped playing console versions), though I prefer 5s and 6s, since they’re still a reasonable amount of movement and you feel kinda like you’re actually dancing to either the lyrics or the beat, but without being so intense that every single blip, noise, and syllable needs to be its own 1/64th beat step.

Of course, I’m not really playing DDR proper. While I’m glad to see Konami is still producing new versions from time to time, I’m too much of a curmudgeon for most of the new music. I mean, look how they massacred my boy. (For some context, this is the original, and seems to widely be considered far superior.) Once PCs became powerful enough to deal with running it, Stepmania became the client of choice. While Project Outfox appears to be the functional successor, it seems to hate my cruddy soft USB pads (that are holding up unusually well) so I’m still comfortably using Stepmania 5. The real beauty of Stepmania is being able to create a whole new simfile (a file containing the step order and timing for a stage) from scratch, or to tweak/fix other files where something wasn’t set quite right. This has let me put some unexpected tracks in the list to entice my kids to give it a go, the oldest of whom only just last week finally passed his first song on Beginner.

The real trouble with gathering the exact tracks you want is, when there’s a version of something floating around the terrifying aether of the Internet, it might be A) not very well constructed or B) haphazardly chopped down to half-duration because of the old quarter-munching philosophy of making short tracks so players get through them faster. Personally if it’s a song I like I’d much rather the whole track be there, so for some songs you’ve got to take the steps already produced and figure out where to move them around and/or copy them to make the whole track work once you’ve replaced the media files. Another fun bit is needing to download a gigabyte or more to get a song pack that might only have a single song you’re looking for. This is less of an issue with modern bandwidth, but still feels a bit silly. Sometimes this is nice, however, as frequently this results in some additional inclusions for songs I wouldn’t have looked for otherwise. Indeed, the list below has quite a few tracks I probably wouldn’t bother with if I were just wanting something to listen to, but if the steps feel good for the beat then in the list it goes.

It’s also worth mentioning that most of the search engines for simfiles are sort of terrible, so I tend to find out about newer files via YouTube videos of people who record themselves playing the game at three angles for ones of viewers. Maybe there’s Discord channels out there that are better for this or something, but I haven’t stumbled onto them yet.

Once I get a few more things tweaked I’ll likely zip this up to share on Zenius as I can’t be the only 40-ish player who just wants to find a poppy list with some old intense staples mixed in to hop to until my fitness tracker tells me I’ve exhausted an appropriate amount of estimated calories for the day. For the most part it’s a collection of tracks converted from older DDR console games, plus a bunch of things from Ben Speirs, who appears to be a simfile-crafting savant.

In the event you care to peruse, here’s the list at the moment, which has gotten me nine lbs down from my post-vacation weight:

Song	Artist	Source
Abyss	dj TAKA	DDR
Addicted To You (UP-IN-HEAVEN MIX)	Utada Hikaru	The Utada Hikaru Project
Afronova Primeval	8 bit	DDR
Against All Odds (Definitive MIX)	DEJA VU ft. TASMIN	DDR
All Star	Smash Mouth	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
B4U Glorious Style	NAOKI	DDR
Bad Habits	Ed Sheeran	GG Basics
Bad Romance	Lady Gaga	DDR
Bangarang	Skrillex	SPEIRMIX 2
Better Off Alone	Alice Deejay	Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015
Bills	Lunchmoney Lewis	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Blame It On The Pop	DJ Earworm	GTKashi
BREⱯK DOWN!	Be For U	DDR
Break Free	Arianna Grande ft. Zedd	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Break My Heart	Dua Lipa	GG Basics
BRILLIANT 2U	NAOKI	DDR
Cake By The Ocean	DNCE	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Call Me Maybe	Carly Rae Jepsen	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Can’t Feel My Face	The Weeknd	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Can’t Hold Us (ft. Ray Dalton)	Macklemore & Ryan Lewis	Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015
Can’t Stop The Feeling!	Justing Timberlake	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
CANDY♥	Kosaka Yuri	DDR
Cheap Thrills	Sia	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Cheap Thrills (ft. Sean Paul)	Sia	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Classic	MKTO	500’s Simfiles
Cold Heart	Elton John & Dua Lipa	Floor Filler
Counting Stars	One Republic	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Days Go By (Solstice Remix)	Dirty Vegas	DDRei-TournaMix-04
DIVE (more deep & deeper style)	Be For U	DDR
Domino	Jessie J	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
DROP THE BOMB (System S.F. Mix)	Scotty D.	DDR
DYNAMITE RAVE (Down Bird SOTA Mix)	NAOKI	DDR
DYNAMITE RAVE (Long ver.)	NAOKI	DDR
Get Lucky	Daft Punk ft. Pharrell Williams	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Good Feeling	Flo Rida	SPEIRMIX 2
Goot Time	Owl City ft. Carly Rae Jepsen	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Goodbye Happiness	Utada Hikaru	The Utaka Hikaru Project/GTKashi Fix
Happy	Pharrell Williams	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Hold My Hand	Jess Glynne	Z-I-v Summer Contest 2015
Hot n Cold	Katy Perry	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
I Cry	Flo Rida	500’s Simfiles
Immortals	Fall Out Boy	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Levitating	Dua Lipa	GG Basics
LOOK AT US (Daddy DJ Remix)	SARINA PARIS	DDR
Look To The Sky (True Color Mix)	System SF ft. Anna	DDR
Makes Me Wonder	Maroon 5	500’s Simfiles
Max 300	Ω	DDR
MOONLIGHT SHADOW (New Vocal Versian)	MISSING HEART	DDR
MoveYourFeet!	JunionSenior	DDRei-TournaMix-04
Movin’ on without you	Utada Hikaru	The Utada Hikaru Project
NEVER ENDING STORY	DJ-AC-DC	DDR
ORDINARY WORLD	AURORA ft. NAIMEE COLEMAN	DDR
PARTY 4U -holy nite mix-	CRANKY	DDRei-TournaMix-05/GTKashi Fix
Raise Your Glass	P!nk	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Rather Be	Clean Bandit ft. Jess Glynne	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Run Away With Me	Carly Rae Jepsen	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Safe and Sound	Capital Cities	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Shut Up and Dance	Walk The Moon	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Something Just Like This	The Chainsmokers & Coldplay	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Stars in the Sky	Kid Cudi	GTKashi
Stomp to my beat	JS16	DDR
Stonger (What Doesn’t Kill You)	Kelly Clarkson	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Sugar	Maroon 5	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
The Greatest	Sia ft. Kendrik Lamar	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Tik Tok	Ke$ha	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
traveling	Utada Hikaru	The Utada Hikaru Project
Treasure	Bruno Mars	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Uptown Funk!	Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars	SPEIRMIX GALAXY
Wait & See -Risk-	Utada Hikaru	The Utada Hikaru Project/GTKashi Fix

Needless Rambling about Kingdom Hearts

Chase and I sat down a few weekends ago and recorded ourselves complaining about Kingdom Hearts 3. This went on far longer than expected, and even edited down ended up being about 3 hours of discussion split in to two parts.

So why not listen to all that excitement?

Part 1 can be found here. It’s been a fascinating journey, given that neither of us had tried podcasting in years, and probably hadn’t touched sound editing software in over a decade.

Part 1 is mostly us trying to get through talking about the journey to the end of the game, which was full of… well, things happened. If you didn’t watch the movies, don’t worry, Sora doesn’t know what’s going on either, and in the end you learn that it’s totally fine.

Streamlined Ani-Mayhem Rules Cards

Ani-Mayhem was a game that existed because of the MTG boom in the mid 90’s. Everyone wanted in on that cardboard cash. Pioneer, who had gotten into the business of licensing Japanese animation for the US, decided to slap everything they had the rights to into a game. This included some things probably dozens of people had watched, but also had a lot of what we would consider classic anime. Dragon Ball Z, in particular, is one addition that they tossed in as a last ditch effort for traction. They had just gotten the rights for some distributions of DBZ (thought I don’t believe for long), but while the DBZ set proved to be fairly popular, they ended up discontinuing the game. It probably didn’t help that the overall card power in the DBZ set was so much higher than the first two sets. A new DBZ card came came out the next year, and while it had horrible production value it was far more popular.

Ani-Mayhem was a mess, but for some reason I found it endearing, and ended up collecting most of the cards, including all but I think two of the promo cards. Once the game was discontinued I remember picking up some set one booster boxes for $15 each, which was certainly a good way to pad out the collection.

The rules changed with each set, though rarely being much better than the previous version. The rule book was like the old MTG rule books, but without all the flavor. Sixty pages of rules and examples for the complicated tracking of everything ever and all the options you had in any given situation. It was very much like they were trying to translate a video game RPG into a card game, but with the D&D annoyances of party splitting and characters actually getting killed.

Last year I took a look at all the cards I still had and decided to make probably-functional theme decks for each of the anime that were in the game, except for Ah My Goddess, which only had like three cards in the game. DBZ got two decks, one for the A-Team and one for the B-Team. Ten decks in all, with 67 cards total per deck (down from the DBZ minimum deck size rule of 99). So now I was left with the problem of boiling the rules down so that I could maybe someday get someone to play it.

So I’ve done just that, and got them compressed down to four standard card-size blocks of rules. I purposefully ignore a lot of the rules for options (like running away from combat and such) for the purpose of streamlining them. I’ve made a few decisions on keywords and such to make things make a bit more sense. Reducing deck locations from 7 to 5 also helps ensure that multiplayer games won’t take forever. The last time I played a multiplayer game was sometime between 2002 and 2004, and it took us 3 hours to finally, as a group, concede defeat to the disasters.

So I’ve finally managed to sit down long enough to do this, fiddling with phrasing and font sizes to make everything as short and compact as possible. I’ve made the assumption that most of the icons in the game don’t need explaining, and anything I’ve missed can be figured out on the fly. Here’s what I’ve managed to put together. In the really strange event that you’re one of the ones of people on the Internet who still look for things relating to Ani-Mayhem, you’re welcome to use these yourself.