I can attest to how much life this book can generate. I had the honor of facing Dijirati where he played this book. So much life...
I think pushing 70. It was really impressive.

    Fortunately for me, I was playing a book that was one of his bad matchups.  An air wizard. My GA started piling up weaks on the all of the NVs. And the spell that really saved me was the awesome meta of renewing spring. This spell is so strong, yet very underrated, so undervalued by folks and so few use it. I was able to both heal and ditch the taints slowly. Note, I specifically added RS because of taint. Because taints stack, one could find themselves severly weakened on max life that they can get killed so much easier. And RS allows you to attain multiple heals potentially taking the place of several minor heals in your book, with the benefit of removing ANY one condition. It is not a spell once in play, so using it cannot be nullified. MMM, life giving water. In fact I credit RS specifically with saving me on multiple occasions allowing me to get past a fury of pain in order to bounce back. For instance against a burn heavy warlock. Able to heal up some, and ditch burns. Note that also saves spell book points, AND actions to do both at the same time and not have to cast a geyser/minor heal to do that. One of my favorite spells. Awesome.

so charmyna, you morphed the grizzly build into saving spell book points and adding in more arcane creatures and the spawn point. it seemed to me that while the grizzly is certainly awesome and powerful, it just costs too much to play it out of school. that is just my opinion though. i am a huge fan of the archer over the hydra becuase it is so useful for wimping out opponent creatures and beater mage builds. it is really fun to weakend the blood reapers and avengers until they are basically useless and then ignored for the remainder of the game.

hey ne indiana folks, how about scheduling something for next saturday 9/28 or two weeks after that? i will try to head up your way, and maybe bring a person or two if they are able to make it. perhaps a friday night into saturday and leave later on sat or early sunday?

   Hey Shadow! I did not know you were close to Indiana. We all need to get together at some point on a friday-sat. I am out of town for work at the moment but would like to come up north or meet others here in town somewhere. Once I get a new house, it will be set up for gaming. Then folks could stay over if they want. That would be awesome. I will try to check in with you all sometime after I get back in town or next week.

for tourney play, sitting in corner with the forge was the play against the agressive players. it helped to mitigate early damage. of course the forge will generally take two hits or more to go down. sometimes three or four. just that if you go after it and can take it out, you can disrupt the turtle build up who may be very dependent on that strategy. they would then need future actions to get that precious equipment into play instead of whatever they would have done otherwise. why dissolve armor if you can help prevent the deployment in advance?

Thanks again to the AW staff and volunteers who put on the event for us all.

also, the battle forge is very susceptable to being destroyed very quickly. forcehammer can one shot it. i personally like using geyser against it. the hydro +3 makes it even more vulnerable. during the qualify rounds i lost my forge due to a one shot kill from a forcehammer. i got one cast out of it.

my air wizard at gen con only ran one creature, the gorgon archer.  and i did not run out of spells, just ran out of time.