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Unstable II: The Battle for Her Mind

Satan hates to see believers fully surrendered to the Lord. The devil knows from past experience that when a Christian is fully surrendered, God works even more miracles in the lives of His people. Jesus has never compromised even one time.

The same cannot be said about us. Our challenge as sinful human beings is to say "no" to sin and "yes" to righteous living. And it's not like this challenge only confronts us once or twice a week. The temptations for compromise are going on around us all the time. The Spirit-led Christian is not giving into compromise. Instead, he or she is focused, filled, and flowing in the living water of the Holy Spirit. It is a wonderful way to go through life. It provides peace, power and purpose. Sin, on the other hand, increases the desire to give into temptation again and again.

You never get enough. And so you end up double-minded, at least until you repent and "come clean" before the Lord and His cross. There is no peace for the believer who is going against his conscience and against the Word of God. You feel out of control. You feel pulled in the direction of your obsession, rather than gently led down the flowing river of God's grace and peace. Most of us who have known the Lord for awhile have come to experience the vast difference between the peace of God and the turmoil of our sinful desires.

They truly are in conflict with each other. At that moment, we will be immediately ushered into heaven. In Limited, you may play with whatever combination of Contraptions you open or draft. You're not required to play them all and you can play duplicates. In Constructed, you must play a minimum of fifteen Contraptions and you may only have one of each. I know there are many questions you have about how Contraptions work. Now that I've explained what Contraptions are, I want to move on to talk about how they got designed. Before I do that, though, I have one last Contraption-related preview card to show you.

It's a sorcery called Midlife Upgrade. Hopefully cards like Kindly Cognician and Midlife Upgrade demonstrate how you might be able to build a Contraption-themed deck.

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When last we left our story, I was intrigued by the idea that silver-bordered design space might allow me to capture the essence of Contraptions. Let me walk through some of my problems when I tried to solve Contraptions in black-border Magic. Steamflogger Boss was made as a joke card; when we fleshed it out originally, we weren't trying to create something we planned on following up on. Contraptions were defined as an artifact subtype and Steamflogger Boss implied that there were creatures of the subtype Rigger that could assemble Contraptions. Note that Riggers did the assembling and not the player.

Probably the biggest limitation though was the word Contraption itself. According to my dictionary, a contraption is "a piece of equipment or machinery that is unusual or strange. My mind kept going to Rube Goldberg machines. That meant that I needed to have multiple artifacts that came together in some way. I experimented with energy, but the connection between the artifacts felt tangential. I tried making artifacts with the subtype Contraption that had the option of adding counters to other Contraptions instead of being cast, but it resulted in always having just one card on the battlefield with a lot of counters; it just didn't feel like a machine.

I played around with the link mechanic based on things like S. Link would be the inspiration for another mechanic in Unstable , but I'll talk about that next week. I messed around in meld space where you had different pieces and you needed to play them in conjunction with one another, but the gameplay was frustrating. In about a five-year span, I experimented with some different mechanical executions.

They mostly fell into two camps. Either they had a glimmer of hope in that they captured some of what the idea of assembling Contraptions wanted but they didn't work in the current rules, or they worked within the rules and just felt like kind of blah. Yeah, assembling a Contraption could mean tutor go into your library and get or impulse search the top N cards of your library for an artifact with the subtype Contraption, but that wasn't delivering on the crazy promise of Steamflogger Boss.

If I was going to capture the essence of Contraptions, I felt like I had to be trying something amazing and not just playing it safe. So, when the idea came up in the Unstable meeting that maybe Contraptions could be a silver-border thing, I was excited to explore what that might mean. Interestingly, my brain went to fighting robots.

For this part of the story, we have to go back to the year I had recently discovered Magic and was blown away by the concept of a trading card game. My game designer brain was intrigued by the idea of what other trading card game designs there were. What I was most interested in was finding an execution that was as far away from Magic as possible to see what other nooks and crannies the new game genre allowed.

The idea I latched onto was cards that cared about where they existed in relation to other cards, something Magic didn't touch upon. The idea was that you would start with a single card in play and that you would attach new cards to that initial card, but some elements of the card would dictate how and where things could connect. The theme I ended up with was robots, where the first card represented the core of the robot. Different cores would represent different systems. Then each core allowed you to add components to them—arms, legs, weapons, elements for movement, defenses, etc.

As the game progressed, you would be building a robot that would be made up of a series of cards connected together. At some point in the game, the different robots would start fighting with one another. Because they were made up of parts, robots could get damaged and lose certain functionality without losing the whole robot. I called the game Qubit this was a few years before the quantum computing term was coined because I had come up with a cute backstory for the game.

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The game took place in the future, where humans had taken to space. They had discovered a safe, efficient energy resource called a Qubit. The creation of Qubits thus was very important, which meant there was a lot of motivation to figure out how to make Qubits quicker. To help solve this problem, a rich woman started a yearly competition anyone could enter. The goal was to be the first person to have your machine to make 50 Qubits.

In the early years of the competition, people would haul out their Qubit-making machines and rush to be the first to get to Then one year, someone figured out that as the goal of the competition was to be the first to make 50 Qubits, they could win by simply destroying all the other machines first and then make Qubits at their leisure. Fast-forward 20 years and the competition had turned into a giant robot battle. The point of the game was to make 50 Qubits, but really it was a reason to fight with robots.

The game was won when you made your 50 Qubits or all the other robots were destroyed. Qubit is where my brain went when silver-border Magic was made available for Contraptions. I wanted you to assemble a Contraption by putting together different pieces. That was exactly what Qubit did.

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The earliest version of Contraptions started with a card representing the hub similar to what the back of the Contraption deck looks like. Therefore do not fear; you are of more value than many sparrows. We have no idea what the future holds. If it brings hard times, God can be there for us. If it brings easy times, we will still need God to fill that inner void we have and to give our lives meaning. When all is said and done, what matters most?

What really matters is that we are not separated from God. Do we know God? Does he know us? Have we shut him out of our lives? Or have we let him in? Through knowing him, he produces in us a changing perspective and gives us hope. Through being in a relationship with him, we can have peace in the midst of all circumstances.

Unstable - The Battle for Her Mind - Part 2

Why must God be central to our lives? Because there is no real peace or hope apart from knowing him. He is God and we are not. He does not depend on us, but we must depend upon him. He created us to need his presence in our lives. We can try to make life work without him, but it will be futile.

God wants us to seek him. He wants us to know him and to have him involved in our lives. But there is a problem: The Bible describes it this way: That's what the Bible calls "sin. Heather, quoted earlier, says concerning sin: The world lay at my feet then, waiting to be revolutionized. I attended political meetings, took classes on racism and social justice, and immersed myself at the community service center. I believed in the power within me to make a significant difference in the world. I tutored underprivileged elementary school kids; I ran the day camp at a homeless shelter; I collected leftover food to feed the hungry.

Yet, the more I tried to change the world, the more frustrated I became. I confronted bureaucracy, apathy, and I began to think that maybe human nature needed a basic overhaul. Changing times and improved technology don't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Peace of Mind in an Unstable World

Because our basic problem as human beings is that we've distanced ourselves from God. Our greatest problems are not physical, but spiritual. God knows this, so he provided a solution for our separation from him. He made a way for us to find our way back to him The Bible says that, "God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. He died, was buried, then rose from the dead. Because of his sacrificial death, we can come into a relationship with God -- "To all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

It's really rather simple: God wants to be in perfect relationship with us -- so he made that relationship possible through Jesus. It's then up to us to seek God and ask him into our lives. Most people do this through prayer. Prayer means talking honestly with God. Right now you can reach out to God by telling him something like this in sincerity: I haven't allowed you into my life thus far, but I want to change that.

I want to take advantage of your solution for my separation from you. I am relying on Jesus' death on my behalf so that I can be forgiven and be made right with you. I want you to be involved in my life from this day forward. Have you sincerely asked God into your life?

Is Peace of Mind Possible?

Only you and he know for sure. If you have, you have a lot to look forward to. God promises to make your present life one of greater satisfaction because of your relationship with him. Melissa had this to say about God: I only knew that my father no longer came home.

One day I went to visit my grandmother and I told her that I didn't understand why my father would hurt me and then disappear. She hugged me and told me that there was someone who would never leave me, and that someone was Jesus. She quoted Hebrews No matter what happens in the world around you, there is peace of mind knowing that God can be there for you.