u/Miller_teach

When I have the Common Myna copy the power on the Crested Oropendola, can I copy just the "draw a food token" ability? For example I have a bird that can be tucked but I don't want to tuck it so I only wish to draw the food item. I guess the root question is, I know that you can choose to not activate the power of a bird, but can you activate part of it? Sorry just started with Wingspan so I want to make sure I'm understanding correctly. (Coming with a marvel champions and magic the gathering foundation). Thanks so much, my wife and I are loving the game.

My buddy and I live hours apart and play a MC match virtually (with our physical cards) a couple of days a week. I just wanted to share our setup in case anyone is in the same situation and is finding it difficult.

Camera Setup: Nothing special here…We each just have webcams set up pointed at our playmats. I will try to add another picture but my ipad is only letting me upload 1 to reddit while typing this post. I have a cheap table attachment for my webcam I bought off of amazon that works well for me.

Video Site: We use a website called Spelltable. This site is free; owned by wizards of the coast and is designed to play Magic virtually so it has a lot of features. People often use this web app because it can scan Magic cards when you click on them, so this obviously doesn’t work with MC cards, but there are still a lot of benefits, such as life tracking, camera view changes, nice UI, microphone, and easily share a join link. You can even use a phone or tablet as a camera if you don’t have a webcam.

Communication: We will often just call each other or use discord to voice chat while playing, but I know plenty of people that use the built in spelltable features.

Hero and Scenarios Setup: We both have many of the same heroes and scenario sets which typically makes things easier. We will talk about which scenario we want to do and then we get the game set up:

• One of us will basically control the game. For example, I will make the encounter deck on my end, make sure I shuffle the obligation card for his hero into it from my collection.
• Next whoever is in charge of the encounter deck will also put the villain and main schemes in play. To continue the example I basically just have everything set up on my end on my playmat so my friend can see it on the video. (villain, main scheme, etc.)
• My friend will also set up the villain/schemes on his playmat just so he can follow along. It’s nice when you have the same sets because my friend can quickly grab cards that are word heavy or that he wants to have on his mat engaged with them. (You could also use Hall of Heroes of course, but we like being able to use the cards).
• Again, one person is controlling the villain board, so last night while we were playing, I flipped his encounter card and it was “Goblin Thrall.” I placed it a little off my screen to show it was engaged with him, and he took his Goblin Thrall copy that he has and just put it on his playmat.
• We use dice to track the schemes in play because it is easy to see over webcam, but one of us will use the digital life tracker in spelltable to keep track of the villain HP.
• On a separate tab we often have Hall of Heroes pulled up. Last night when we were playing I had Doctor Strange cards opened on Hall of Heroes because that is the hero my friend was using.

Obstacles: Obviously this isn’t perfect, and I know there are some ways to play this game digitally but we really like using the physical cards instead of digital copies. These are some of the problem areas we run into:

• We want to play heroes that the other person doesn’t have a copy of. Example: I don’t have Doctor Strange. So I can’t really shuffle the Doctor Strange obligation card in the encounter deck. In this case I will typically throw in another hero’s obligation card and if that card comes into play we know what it represents. Sometimes I will print off copies of the obligation and nemesis cards if I know my friend is going to be using a hero regularly.
• Playmats can get full. I think when I was using Ms. Marvel and had all my upgrades and supports out, while also controlling the villain/encounter deck, the playmat was pretty busy. Not much to do about that we just try to keep it organized.

I know none of this is rocket science, but hopefully it may help some that are looking for ways to play with others, or even to help grow the community with virtual games.