37 Saun 718
DORDOR.
It stood for Doranomancy: Origins of Revolution and Doran's Ordeal Remastered. It was a game created when the twin Dorans rose and fell in tandem on that one fateful day. When the Hero Doran took Xiur’s essence to become an immortal and the Nameless Doran fell in lonely Ne’hear, the contrasting energies of ascension and descension formed a rift in Emea that would consume all of Idalos - unless someone diverted all that energy away. The Immortals, for the first time in centuries, banded together and discovered that the intense etheric energy could only be contained within a series of trading cards designed to appeal to the demographic of 13 - 19 arc old teenagers.
Aeva raised her hammer, Faldrun fueled the cards with the anger borne of booster packs with no secret rares, Chrien infused the cards with inexplicable reality-defying luck that could be triggered through narrative contrivance, Mastes inflicted his greatest addictions, and Treid just lay there because, well, Audrae wasn’t giving him back that heart anytime soon. Raliath sulked, Syroa introduced unnecessary fanservice into the card designs in an unconscious and ultimately failed bid to keep them in a niche market, and Lissiria did marketing. Each immortal gave a piece of themselves to DORDOR, and spread the energies in the form of booster packs all over Idalos. They landed in caves, abandoned castles, secret lairs, heavily defended fortifications and sometimes even in inexplicable places like hobby shops. It became popular. Very popular.
Too popular.
It replaced the universal nel system Charmandast had spent so many years implementing. Thriving, nay surviving, became synonymous with your skill in DORDOR - Entire guilds revolved around finding the rarest cards, the Rynmerian university re-pooled their resources into uncovering the secrets of DORDOR, and tournaments were held in place of bloodsports, only even more violently shouty.
And Fiona was very good at this particular form of violence.
For the last seven years since the day the cards fell from the sky, Fiona had dedicated every waking moment of her life to DORDOR, when a booster pack from the heavens crashed into the side of the hill near her orphanage. She descended into the crater, lured in by voices that said “Metagame awaits…” and “deck synergy…”. At the very centre, she found her future waiting for her.
She opened it.
Five cards; Three common, two rare, one secret rare; a Jersey Krome card that would one day become a centrepiece of all competitive meta Rynmere decks… right before the introduction of the Rynmere: Usurpers expansion that fell from the heavens introduced Velaine Krome - Poverty Unbound that made old Jersey obsolete. Still, she cherished Jersey. She kept him in a box inside her apartment because no matter what happened, no matter how much power creep afflicted the game, he would always be her first-
Not the point.
Point is: she was good at this game.
Point is: She had been the Etzori regional champion for three years straight, and made it to the Idalosian top 5 twice.
Point is: Like Jersey Krome, she had her own meta usurper, and his name was Mathias Moreno.
Point is: she built herself an entire career, decks that could beat any opponent, from that one falling booster pack she found all those years back, and she wasn’t going to let anyone take her throne as the Queen of DORDOR.
As opposed to her opponent...
No one knew much about Mathias Moreno,or as they called him in hushed whispers: the Mad Man. It was an ironic moniker; mostly because he managed to crush his opponents without making a single expression, not unlike a statue or a man who didn’t make expressions with his face.
Some speculated he was a champion of one of the immortals, sent to humble those who thought they knew the ways of DORDOR and the best exploits and tactics of the metagame. Others whispered that the was, in fact, the spirit of the Unknown Doran returned, filled with a cold, icy vengeance to be extracted upon all of Idalos.
The truth was… he was just a bored kid who liked to win.
He’d found his first booster in a pawn shop with a price of four hundred souls. He’d summarily sacrificed all three hundred and ninety-nine before offering his own up as well. When he’d finally met the payment, the pack was his.
Curious, he’d opened it. Opened the singular most powerful booster pack Idalos had ever seen.
It was a limited edition promotional pack, “Goodbye Pirates, Hello Closed Ecosystem”, so limited, in fact, there had only been a total of three packs distributed. One had been cast deep into Emea, guarded by the Gatekeepers. One had been discovered by a passing Mer, but literally no one took them seriously and the Mer was forced to just eat the cards he found because no one wanted to play with him.
And one had found its way into a pawn shop. A pawn shop Mathias had discovered and, like any good pay to player, bought immediately - or as immediately as he could gather all those souls.
Within the pack were five commons, three rares, one secret rare, and one card that was in a class all of its own, entirely unique… legendary: Jasper.
With that single card alone, Mathias decimated all who foolishly stood against him. The water ferret never failed to pull through from him, and though he amassed an incredible collection of cards that ranged from The Reverse Pirate Rynata to the The Man Who Sexually Violated His Pet Turtle, Jasper never once left his deck.
Throughout his entire life, Mathias had been empty, missing the spark of life that so many people had. For some, DORDOR was a hobby. Others treated it like a job. Tyere were even people foolish enough to think it was a game. For Mathais? It was his life. It became everything. When he wasn’t playing DORDOR, he was thinking about DORDOR, wishing he was playing DORDOR.
Metas shifted and changed, but Mathais barreled through them, Jasper at his side.
And, finally, the day had come.
He was to face the Queen of DORDOR, Fiona Zippomaria O’Conner herself.
And he was going to win.
He was going to win, because where he had been empty before, he now held the most powerful asset known to any sentient race: being a lucky bastard with a whale card.
But back to our Fionas:
She hated that the trait they attributed to her success was her unpredictability.
Over the course of five professional years in the league, Fiona had gone through over 20 different decks types. She had started with a Rynmere control deck, built around Krome/Endor synergy that gave her a reputation of a slow grinder that could win only if you let her get past the 10th turn - until she busted out a Etzori Black Guard aggro deck during her now infamous semi-finals duels with Robin Stark and his Defiance deck.
She destroyed him.
Destroyed him so bad that rumour has it that he ran off in shame to Quacia to teach children how to play in low-tier regional mini-tournaments.
Pathetic but, again, not the point.
Since then, she swapped out a deck every 2 or 3 games, switching back and forth between different play and hair styles; long outward curls for her Yaralon swarm deck, a side fishtail braid for her Chrien mill deck, a centred-parted-do with a braided crown for her Anak control deck, a stacked and inverted smart bob for her Coven gimmick deck, and now a pixie cut for her-
Well, her little secret for now.
But to attribute her success to her unpredictability was a veiled way of saying she couldn’t win head-on, that her skill with DORDOR was secondary to her ability to obscure, to find new cards. It annoyed her so much that fans often overlooked the booster pack hunting pains of the Game, and simply looked past all her grueling hard work to make a dig against her.
In a lot of ways, she hated DORDOR. She hated how much the game took away from her free time, she hated how famous she had become, she hated how little she saw of her little brother, now reclassified as a mental retard due to his inability to play DORDOR at anything other than a rudimentary level, and she hated that booster packs were getting harder and more dangerous to find.
She hated that she had to continue for so many reasons.
And now she was going to redirect all that hate into the boy that she was going to crush into the dirt.
A boy that had, since the beginning of his career, played a Heroes deck with a Jasper as its centrepiece. A boy that, she had heard some fans say, was ‘better’ than her because he kept to a theme. What arbitrary nonsense. By what standards were these judged? Fuck them all.
It didn’t matter what they thought. She’d show them they were wrong, like she always did. She’d show them the “Mad Man” was just another whale to be Moby Dicked.
DORDOR.
It stood for Doranomancy: Origins of Revolution and Doran's Ordeal Remastered. It was a game created when the twin Dorans rose and fell in tandem on that one fateful day. When the Hero Doran took Xiur’s essence to become an immortal and the Nameless Doran fell in lonely Ne’hear, the contrasting energies of ascension and descension formed a rift in Emea that would consume all of Idalos - unless someone diverted all that energy away. The Immortals, for the first time in centuries, banded together and discovered that the intense etheric energy could only be contained within a series of trading cards designed to appeal to the demographic of 13 - 19 arc old teenagers.
Aeva raised her hammer, Faldrun fueled the cards with the anger borne of booster packs with no secret rares, Chrien infused the cards with inexplicable reality-defying luck that could be triggered through narrative contrivance, Mastes inflicted his greatest addictions, and Treid just lay there because, well, Audrae wasn’t giving him back that heart anytime soon. Raliath sulked, Syroa introduced unnecessary fanservice into the card designs in an unconscious and ultimately failed bid to keep them in a niche market, and Lissiria did marketing. Each immortal gave a piece of themselves to DORDOR, and spread the energies in the form of booster packs all over Idalos. They landed in caves, abandoned castles, secret lairs, heavily defended fortifications and sometimes even in inexplicable places like hobby shops. It became popular. Very popular.
Too popular.
It replaced the universal nel system Charmandast had spent so many years implementing. Thriving, nay surviving, became synonymous with your skill in DORDOR - Entire guilds revolved around finding the rarest cards, the Rynmerian university re-pooled their resources into uncovering the secrets of DORDOR, and tournaments were held in place of bloodsports, only even more violently shouty.
And Fiona was very good at this particular form of violence.
For the last seven years since the day the cards fell from the sky, Fiona had dedicated every waking moment of her life to DORDOR, when a booster pack from the heavens crashed into the side of the hill near her orphanage. She descended into the crater, lured in by voices that said “Metagame awaits…” and “deck synergy…”. At the very centre, she found her future waiting for her.
She opened it.
Five cards; Three common, two rare, one secret rare; a Jersey Krome card that would one day become a centrepiece of all competitive meta Rynmere decks… right before the introduction of the Rynmere: Usurpers expansion that fell from the heavens introduced Velaine Krome - Poverty Unbound that made old Jersey obsolete. Still, she cherished Jersey. She kept him in a box inside her apartment because no matter what happened, no matter how much power creep afflicted the game, he would always be her first-
Not the point.
Point is: she was good at this game.
Point is: She had been the Etzori regional champion for three years straight, and made it to the Idalosian top 5 twice.
Point is: Like Jersey Krome, she had her own meta usurper, and his name was Mathias Moreno.
Point is: she built herself an entire career, decks that could beat any opponent, from that one falling booster pack she found all those years back, and she wasn’t going to let anyone take her throne as the Queen of DORDOR.
As opposed to her opponent...
No one knew much about Mathias Moreno,or as they called him in hushed whispers: the Mad Man. It was an ironic moniker; mostly because he managed to crush his opponents without making a single expression, not unlike a statue or a man who didn’t make expressions with his face.
Some speculated he was a champion of one of the immortals, sent to humble those who thought they knew the ways of DORDOR and the best exploits and tactics of the metagame. Others whispered that the was, in fact, the spirit of the Unknown Doran returned, filled with a cold, icy vengeance to be extracted upon all of Idalos.
The truth was… he was just a bored kid who liked to win.
He’d found his first booster in a pawn shop with a price of four hundred souls. He’d summarily sacrificed all three hundred and ninety-nine before offering his own up as well. When he’d finally met the payment, the pack was his.
Curious, he’d opened it. Opened the singular most powerful booster pack Idalos had ever seen.
It was a limited edition promotional pack, “Goodbye Pirates, Hello Closed Ecosystem”, so limited, in fact, there had only been a total of three packs distributed. One had been cast deep into Emea, guarded by the Gatekeepers. One had been discovered by a passing Mer, but literally no one took them seriously and the Mer was forced to just eat the cards he found because no one wanted to play with him.
And one had found its way into a pawn shop. A pawn shop Mathias had discovered and, like any good pay to player, bought immediately - or as immediately as he could gather all those souls.
Within the pack were five commons, three rares, one secret rare, and one card that was in a class all of its own, entirely unique… legendary: Jasper.
With that single card alone, Mathias decimated all who foolishly stood against him. The water ferret never failed to pull through from him, and though he amassed an incredible collection of cards that ranged from The Reverse Pirate Rynata to the The Man Who Sexually Violated His Pet Turtle, Jasper never once left his deck.
Throughout his entire life, Mathias had been empty, missing the spark of life that so many people had. For some, DORDOR was a hobby. Others treated it like a job. Tyere were even people foolish enough to think it was a game. For Mathais? It was his life. It became everything. When he wasn’t playing DORDOR, he was thinking about DORDOR, wishing he was playing DORDOR.
Metas shifted and changed, but Mathais barreled through them, Jasper at his side.
And, finally, the day had come.
He was to face the Queen of DORDOR, Fiona Zippomaria O’Conner herself.
And he was going to win.
He was going to win, because where he had been empty before, he now held the most powerful asset known to any sentient race: being a lucky bastard with a whale card.
But back to our Fionas:
She hated that the trait they attributed to her success was her unpredictability.
Over the course of five professional years in the league, Fiona had gone through over 20 different decks types. She had started with a Rynmere control deck, built around Krome/Endor synergy that gave her a reputation of a slow grinder that could win only if you let her get past the 10th turn - until she busted out a Etzori Black Guard aggro deck during her now infamous semi-finals duels with Robin Stark and his Defiance deck.
She destroyed him.
Destroyed him so bad that rumour has it that he ran off in shame to Quacia to teach children how to play in low-tier regional mini-tournaments.
Pathetic but, again, not the point.
Since then, she swapped out a deck every 2 or 3 games, switching back and forth between different play and hair styles; long outward curls for her Yaralon swarm deck, a side fishtail braid for her Chrien mill deck, a centred-parted-do with a braided crown for her Anak control deck, a stacked and inverted smart bob for her Coven gimmick deck, and now a pixie cut for her-
Well, her little secret for now.
But to attribute her success to her unpredictability was a veiled way of saying she couldn’t win head-on, that her skill with DORDOR was secondary to her ability to obscure, to find new cards. It annoyed her so much that fans often overlooked the booster pack hunting pains of the Game, and simply looked past all her grueling hard work to make a dig against her.
In a lot of ways, she hated DORDOR. She hated how much the game took away from her free time, she hated how famous she had become, she hated how little she saw of her little brother, now reclassified as a mental retard due to his inability to play DORDOR at anything other than a rudimentary level, and she hated that booster packs were getting harder and more dangerous to find.
She hated that she had to continue for so many reasons.
And now she was going to redirect all that hate into the boy that she was going to crush into the dirt.
A boy that had, since the beginning of his career, played a Heroes deck with a Jasper as its centrepiece. A boy that, she had heard some fans say, was ‘better’ than her because he kept to a theme. What arbitrary nonsense. By what standards were these judged? Fuck them all.
It didn’t matter what they thought. She’d show them they were wrong, like she always did. She’d show them the “Mad Man” was just another whale to be Moby Dicked.
