Anyway, I really wanted to bust out Riptide Replicator on some poor scrub, just so I could have fun naming creature types. I couldn't decide what I wanted to make. I'd thought of Hippies, because it's funny to think about a bunch of drugged out, long

When I got to the tournament, though, I found out that you couldn't just make up any creature type. You had to name one that actually existed in Magic. So no hippies, Republicans, or whoremongers. (Some friends and I came up with a whole set of Mongers during Masques block, and whoremonger just seemed like a natural fit. After all, anybody can play the ability if they've got the mana, but sometimes you won't like what you get left with). Luckily Wizards was cool enough to have a whole list of stuff you could name. I spent a long time before the tournament started memorizing the whole list, which was probably not such a good use of my time but was lots more fun than listening to the morons around me talk about how they hoped they busted open some broken rares so they could make some ratings points. It's a pre-release, you fucking tools, so have a little fun.

The list of creatures was pretty long, and most of the choices were boring. Zombie, goblin, wizard, beast, yadda-yadda (and that's a creature type, not my way of saying "etc"), etc. But some of the choices were fucking hilarious. For example, pig. I have no fucking idea when Wizards printed a pig card, but the very idea of accusing my opponent of being a pig-fucker every time he killed off one of my pig tokens had me giggling. Also available was maiden, which for those of you who haven't taken European History (the college major for people who want to be waiters forever) means a virgin. Pretty apt, sending out an army of virgins to kill off an opponent who is 95 percent of the time himself a virgin. There's plenty of other gems in there as well. Wood, for example, which is close enough to woody to leave no end to the amusing things you can say. There's both worm and wurm, which would be great for confusing your opponent if you had two Replicators, or a Replicator and an Imagecrafter or something. You've also got fox, so that every time you use the Replicator you can sing the song "Foxy Lady", which would sure as hell annoy me into punching you right in the nuts, and I'm pretty sure that's at least a game loss.

You can have other fun with creature types, too. Here's a little game I like to play with Imagecrafter. Every turn, for no apparent reason, use it to change a creature's type. Every time you do, write down the type you choose. The goal is to spell things out with the first letter of the creature type. So, for example, you might choose creature types of Yeti, Octopus, Undead, Sliver, Unicorn, Cockatrice, Kavu, Ant, Taskmaster, Maggot, Albatross, Goblin, Imp, and Cat. If your opponent notices what you're doing you can deny everything, then turn his stuff into a Force, Uncle-Istvan, Cheetah, Kobold, Yeti, Ogre, and Unicorn. With any luck your opponent will get so fucking mad at you he won't even notice you're not playing anything other than Imagecrafters, Mistforms, and Riptide Replicators.