PastorPalooza

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

It seems like I was just writing to you a moment ago. Probably because I was. Funny how that works. This week we overcame technical difficulties to pump out another 2 hour show. So first things first, Eternals. This was our jumping off place this week, and right out of the gate we had a healthy disagreement. David is of the opinion that the movie was a 6/10, and that it was difficult to connect to the characters because of the amount of characters versus their screen time. I, on the other hand, felt that it was one of the MCU’s best outings, and I absolutely loved the film. I felt that the characters it was most important to connect to were relatable, and I feel like it stood on its own but also set up a fun direction for the future. Now, that is mostly all I will say about the film, because we do not want to spoil the movie for people, but suffice to say that I am eager to return to the topic once we can talk about it more openly because I feel it has a gold mine of content to explore.

However, we did continue a theological conversation that was influenced by the idea of the Eternals in general, that being the idea of predestination versus free will, an idea which the very nature of beings who exists for thousands of years and for a specific purpose brings up. Honestly I was reluctant to engage this conversation again because it is a conversation that has been a large topic of discussion for me for over a decade now, and I am frankly tired of having the conversation. More specifically, I am tired of having the conversation used as a weapon against me. It has unfortunately become this litmus test that lets churches determine insiders vs outsiders and I am not here for that business. David and I had a healthy discussion about it informed by our watching of the film and I think if you are interested in theological discussion you will enjoy it.

In our regular news section we got to once again discuss the news/non-news of Spider-man: No Way Home. The official poster does indeed exist and we did indeed get to see it and now we know for sure… that Spider-man is in it. In all seriousness, we got confirmation of Green Goblin, as well as pseudoconfirmation (we think) of Electro and Sandman. We may get a trailer for this movie in the next week or two, or we may just go into this movie only knowing what we know now. All I can say is, I haven’t been this stoked for a movie in a long time. Bring on Spider-man.

In MCOC land we have the release of Variant 8, Deadpoolooza which will see your mercenaries and Deadpool family take center stage. Also, I can confirm from a short amount of testing earlier today, the special node for Paywall pool is pretty epic. I was taking down variant fights with my 1 star, so if you are lucky enough to have a higher star version you should have a pretty good time in this variant. In crystal news, I finally pulled Guardian, Sasquatch is still hiding in the woods somewhere from me, and OG Matt Murdock finally stumbled on to my roster. The netflix costume is cool and all, but there is just something special about that classic red suit Daredevil look. Man I love me some Daredevil.

We love you, we are happy to be on this journey with you.

Until next time true believers,

Pastor Coco

Check out the episode here:

We Are Venom… Just Kidding

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Better late than never is a phrase I’m having to lean on far too often these days, but nonetheless it is where we are at this stage in life. Recovery has been harder than I ever imagined it would be, so sometimes editing and writing doesn’t happen as quickly as I would like. The big news for us this week was the Morbius trailer dropping. I have been super stoked about this movie and after seeing this trailer, my hopes are even higher than they have been. Jared Leto looks to have nailed this part and I can’t wait to see what else comes out of this movie.

We also covered some of the new releases that are on their way from both Marvel and DC comics. There is a little something for everyone with some alternate universe style stuff coming out with Wastelanders Hawkeye and Dark Knights of Steel. However I think what I am most excited about is the new DC imprint from Joe Hill. For those that don’t know, Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son and he is most definitely a chip off the ole block. In fact, I sometimes feel that I enjoy his writing even more than his father’s, which is of course extremely high praise.

Unfortunately our episode was cut short this week due to some technical difficulties, but we will of course live to record another day. In fact, as I am writing this the next episode is already live, so I will be coming at you shortly with the episode 8 blog.

See you soon True Believers

Pastor Coco

Check out the episode here:

It’s Spooky Season

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Sorry for the delay but I have been wrapped up in work stuff and then I made the mistake of starting Midnight Mass before finishing the blog and I had to finish it before I could make it back to the blog.

This week’s episode we had our first guest join the podcast! Now I know that there was speculation swirling about who would be the chosen first guest. Would it be the semi-retired Seatin? Would it be everyone’s favorite baldy Brian Grant. Would it be CEO LEVEL GUEST LAGACY!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? Twitter was a flutter (see what I did there?) but the guest was my dear friend Kelly Dolittle. Now Kelly may not be known the MCOC community, but as I said on the pod, Kelly is largely responsible for the existence of this podcast and blog. I first met Kelly at Truett Seminary where he cheerfully berated me for wearing an Iron Man t-shirt to school. We have been friends ever since, bonding over a mutual love of comics and horror films. Thus Kelly was the perfect guest for our spooky season episode. Kelly joined us and after giving us a rundown of his most hated and most loved characters (affectionately known as the Kill Kelly crew and the anti-kill Kelly crew), Kelly gave us a few comics to check out in order to ring in the spooky season. Click the titles below for links to these comics.

Kelly’s first recommendation was Hack/Slash, which is an homage to slasher movies and the final girl trope. The second comic is Rachel Rising, which begins with a girl named Rachel digging herself out of her own grave. It was created by Abstract Studio which is owned and operated by Texas’ own Terry Moore, who both writes and illustrates all of his own comics. The third series which Kelly recommended is no surprise for fans of comics. Hellboy has captured the attention of comic fans for a long time and has been adapted to film on two different occasions, with both Ron Perlman and David Harbour bringing the character to life. The next series is titled Ice Cream Man, which sounds like it is right up the alley of those who grew up watching Tales from the Crypt. The next entry on the list is titled Something is Killing the Children. Something is kidnapping and killing the children of Archer’s Peak, will the mysterious stranger who arrives in town put an end to the terror? To placate me, Kelly also recommended a Marvel book call The Supernaturals. I will also recommend highly the first Marvel Zombies book.

We then moved into a really good conversation about writers and artists and whether or not they are properly compensated for their works. This talk included covering the history of Image Comics, the pseudo-monopoly owned by DC and Marvel, and lots of other neat anecdotes about the comic industry. I encourage you to check out the episode to get the full conversation. We then moved on to our weekly MCOC chatter. This included a discussion of whether or not David and I were going to pull 6* featured crystals after receiving our alliance war season rewards (spoiler alert: we both did. Details on our pulls will be in next week’s episode). We’ve gotten exciting news this week that not only are Sersi and Ikaris the Eternals champions that were teased by Kabam, but since recording it has been confirmed that the in-game models are based on Gemma Chan and Richard Madden who will be starring in the Eternals film! It’s been a while since we have gotten film versions in the game so I was excited to see this news. There are also a set of quality of life updates coming including smaller champion photos (no more covered nodes!), ability to skip sp3 animations, and an improved fight stat screen. The new update should be available November 1 as well as the new motion comic featuring Gemma Chan and Richard Madden!

Before I go, quick update: Atro the Analyzer is awake and on the mend. He still has a long road ahead so keep him in your thoughts or prayers if that is your thing and maybe shoot him a tweet or dm and let him know you are cheering him.

As always, remember True Believers, we love you and we are here for you,

Until next time,

Pastor Coco

Check out the podcast here:

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Brought to you by the Letter E

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Wow, is this week one heck of a roller coaster. This week is by far our longest episode but don’t let that scare you away. We began the week by talking about all of the absolutely delicious info that was dropped at DC Fandome over the weekend. We dig into the trailers for The Batman, Peacemaker TV series, the Gotham Knights and Suicide Squad video games and the behind the scenes look at Black Adam starring The Rock. We had a fairly lengthy convo about The Batman trailer that covers some pretty interesting ground so make sure to check it out.

From there we moved onto the Marvel world and started by addressing the news that some films are shifting release dates. Due to the interconnected nature of these films, the problem honestly could have been one film but all of them needed to shift. It doesn’t seem to be anything we really need to worry about and if the worst thing that happens to us as fans next year is we only get three MCU movies instead of four then I think we can consider ourselves very lucky. We also addressed the news that Hawkeye is premiering with a double episode and that Hit Monkey is coming to Hulu.

To me the most exciting news to come out of the Marvel camp this past week was the news that Marvel Comics are coming to the Penguin Classics line! As someone who has spent years being told that he needed to grow up and stop reading comics and playing video games, it is so phenomenal to see this very large book publishing company recognize the value of preserving these comic stories for future generations. The initial release will see collected volumes for Spider-man, Captain America, and Black Panther. They will be available in both softcover and hardcover, and the hardcovers have these really sweet gold foil covers. They will be available Summer 2022 and you can order them here.

But that wasn’t all, we also had plenty of MCOC chatter to get to, the biggest news being the announcement of the new AQ season which comes with new new new. First off, Kabam has been hard at work creating a new AQ map. That’s right, there is now a map 8! It comes with lots of fancy new toys and cross fight abilities and things to make the map conquerable. If you are interested in all the gory details of map 8 that we didn’t get into on the podcast, you can check out the forum post here. What we did go over is the brand new global buffs for this season; Science and Spider-verse champion! These are very similar to the ones we have had for mutant characters for a while now. I haven’t always taken advantage of them on purpose but they sure are nice when I do take a mutant in to AQ. I’m excited to try out some characters I don’t normally use in AQ with these new buffs. And just like the Cyclops fury buff before it, it is looking like we are going to get a fury buff for OG Spider-man.

We finished up as usual by talking about some of our recent crystal pulls and rank ups. We even took some time to talk about how our war season is going and the ups and downs of running alliance war. All in all I think this was great conversation and I hope that you all enjoy listening to it. We are hoping to have something special for next since it is the week before Halloween so stay tuned for more info.

Until next time True Believers,

Pastor Coco

All episodes of the podcast are available here.

Don’t forget there is also a Youtube version.

Make sure and vote in the MCOC Wishlist tournament that will be running now through American Thanksgiving.

Too Much Time and Too Little to do (Strike That; Reverse It)

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Alright, right off the bat before I go any further, I want to provide the info for the gofundme for Atro the Analyzer aka Andrew Noltemeyer. He is one of the OG content creators for MCOC and he is recovering from a horrible accident where he was struck by a car. Here is the link to the gofundme
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-andrew-noltemeyer-recover-from-his-accident?utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer

If you have any spare money right now, please consider sending it to Andrew over supporting us. We would of course appreciate your financial support but Andrew needs it much more than this podcast does right now.

So back to our regularly scheduled programming, I want to apologize for not having an episode or blog last week. David and I just could not find a time that fit both of our schedules with both of us going on vacation last week. But we are back this week and hopefully we can put content out every week moving forward.

We began this week with an unexpected conversation about ministry life and time management. This is definitely not our normal conversation topics on the podcast but I think it was a good conversation about life in general. You know we live in a society that is so busy all the time. I have so many friends and family that anytime I ask them how they are doing, their answer is always busy, I’m so busy. And I wonder sometimes if we are busy just for busy sake or if we are truly doing what we are supposed to be doing. I don’t know whether my wife would agree or not, but I think that one of the most important things I have brought to our marriage is my willingness to say no to things.

Especially in the ministry world, I think far too many people have placed far too much value on being available to people to the point where they think that no is a four letter word. In reality, there can be something so holy about saying no. We were not created to work ourselves to death every single day and say yes to every opportunity that comes along. In Genesis there was invoked a day of rest for a reason. It is not something to be lightly ignored.

When we moved to our weekly nerdy talk and MCOC talk we had some great discussions about the new things coming to the contest, the October events, and about David and I’s insane crystal luck over the last 2-3 weeks. Make sure and tune into the podcast for the full details of all of these conversations.

Until next time True Believers…

Pastor Coco

Check out the podcast here:

If You got the Poison We got the Anti-Venom

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Martin Li. That’s his name. Martin Li. On this week’s recording I struggled in futility to remember the real name of Marvel’s Mr. Negative who inadvertently created Anti-Venom. Oh well, it happens sometimes.

This week’s episode we started off by addressing the new trailers that Netflix dropped this week for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman and the live-action version of beloved anime Cowboy Bebop. I am personally stoked for the Sandman show as I have always enjoyed Gaiman’s writing. The Sandman series and its spinoffs have won a whopping 26 Eisner awards so the praise it receives is well deserved. While both of us have never really watched Cowboy Bebop, we understand the hype that fans must be feeling for that show as well.

We also touched briefly on the recent news of copyright lawsuits involving several Marvel characters such as Spider-man, Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and others. While at first this can sound like a scary proposition, especially on the cusp of full on Phase 4 MCU action, most likely these lawsuits will go the same way as the recent Superman lawsuit; Marvel will retain the rights but the creators and/or their families will be compensated for their creations, which we both agreed is exactly what should happen.

We also gave a rundown of our most recent rank ups and crystal pulls in MCOC. I recently ranked up my 6* Kingpin, while David is making plans to rank up his 6* Immortal Hulk. We both agreed that Immortal Hulk is slept on by a lot of people and think that in the future he will slowly gain more followers. Plus, his animations are, as the kids say (I think they still say this) straight fire. I then detailed how my crystal pulls (with the exception of Air Walker…ugh) have been off the charts. In the past month I have pulled and duped 5* Kitty Pryde, and pulled 5* Nightcrawler and OG Black Widow and 6* Emma Frost from the Marauder Cavalier crystals. I also today pulled a 6* Ultron, who from what I hear is actually solid post buff.

We then gave some discussion time to the ending of Seatin’s tier list. Seatin is one of the OG content creators for this community, and love him or hate him if you play this game you have probably seen his tier list at least once…even if it was just to make nasty comments on his Youtube. Seatin we wish you well in your new ventures and we hope that you will still play the game at least occasionally. Cheers mate.

The discussion then turned to Knull and Anti-Venom, who have recently been confirmed for the Contest. David brought up a wonderful parallel from Ecclesiastes about how God has set eternity in our hearts and how we are longing for something greater. Obviously with Knull being the proclaimed god of the Symbiotes he epitomizes this idea of something greater, thought he is of course a villain. Overall I think that this conversation is some of the best stuff we have done in our short time doing this so I encourage you tune in for this conversation, even if you are not a believer or want nothing to do with pastory stuff, I hope you’ll still give it a listen as I think it was a great conversation.

We tried to be a little more free flowing with our conversation this week and I honestly think it is the best episode to date. Especially our conversation about tv theme songs and the greatness of John Williams. By the way, the video we mentioned is linked below, I encourage you to check it out. Of course, I guess you the listeners will be the ultimate judge of if this was the best episode. But as always, remember that regardless of our differences, David and I love you, and we are here for you. If you need to talk, need to vent, need someone to listen. reach out to us.

Until next we meet….

Pastor Coco

Listen to this week’s episode here:

X-Men: The Animated Series- Greatest Theme Ever?

Episode 2: Harried by Parry (and Dex)

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Welcome back! Yes, I assume that you enjoyed last week and are back because I’ve apparently today decided to be an optimist. Life is funny like that, you can change on a whim.

This week’s episode we dove into some recent announcements from the world of Marvel Comics. First up on the docket was the announcement of the Wastelanders series which is a set of stories set in the world created by Mark Millar in the Old Man Logan comic. If you have not yet read Old Man Logan, I again as I did on the podcast encourage you to go read it. It is a fascinating read and a really cool universe. It should come as no surprise to those who know me and those who have started to get to know me after last week’s episode that the Old Man Hawkeye story is the one I am most excited about; not only is it about Old Man Hawkeye, but it is about him training with the Stick of that universe, who happens to be our old pal Matt Murdock aka Daredevil.

The second event that was recently announced is called Devil’s Reign, and it involves Kingpin, the mayor, assembling a new Thunderbolts team with the intent of eliminating the super heroes from his city. The team is composed of the likes of Taskmaster, Typhoid Mary, and even Kraven the Hunter! Given my love for the Thunderbolts in general and my even greater love for some of the announced members of this rendition of the Thunderbolts, I am super stoked for this series. It is being written by Chip Zdarsky and Marco Checchetto, whose run on Daredevil was nominated for an Eisner award. I haven’t personally read any of their work, but the signs point to this being a fun read and I look forward to trying to pick it up.

The last event we touch on was the new Avengers Forever by Jason Aaron. Aaron has received many high regards for his work on Thor and its related series, so I look forward to seeing what he does with Avengers Forever, which is set to be a full on multiverse based story about the Avengers. If there is one thing I love, it is messing with the timeline stories and alternate universe characters. Yes, that’s two things, just roll with it.

After that, we moved into addressing some of the trailers we missed in week 1: Eternals and Venom: Let There Be Carnage. We are both cautiously optimistic about the Eternals film, but a little less cautious following this trailer. Venom however, has us both very excited as it looks to build upon the fun nature of the first film.

We then moved into a short discussion about the newly announced video games from the Sony direct, namely Spider-man 2 and Wolverine, both by Insomniac Games. As I stated on the podcast, the first Spider-man game is the literal reason that I own a PS4, so the coming of the sequel has me super excited. The fact that Venom has been announced as the main antagonist makes it even better. However, the announcement that the same company is developing a Wolverine game is even more exciting. Even the Wolverine games based on horrible properties (here’s looking at you X-men Origins: Wolverine) have produced games that were at least somewhat fun. In my opinion, Spider-man is one of the best action games ever made, so that same studio tackling one of my favorite X-men has me super stoked.

From there we moved to our weekly MCOC discussion. We talked about pulls and what content we have been working on. After that we moved to discussing the continuing saga of the parry and dex issues that have been plaguing the game recently. After recording, Kabam actually released an update about the issues and I would like to share some info about that here. So it turns out that the issue actually has to do with a bug fix that was done to the Unity engine, which is the gameplay engine that handles the input to the screen for the game. Once Unity fixed their issue, it basically messed up the timing in MCOC. The good news is that Kabam is building a brand new input system for the game! The bad news is that it won’t be available until 2022… Sad face. However, Kabam also stated that the recent lagging and some of the other input issues are actually a separate issue and that one fix for that is coming in October’s major update, and a second fix will be arriving in November’s update. I’ll provide a link to the full explanation (which includes a really cool thing that Kabam created to test things which I’ll let you read about) down below.

Next we announced our first nerd battle. We are going to decide the greatest nerdy tv/movie theme song of all time. Nominate your choice in the comments of this blog post or in the replies of the episode 2 tweet and next week on the episode David and I will debate the top 4 choices. Then we will have a fan poll to determine the ultimate nerdy tv/movie theme song.

We wrapped up the show as we plan to do every week with a simple prayer. As I said last week, even if you don’t agree with everything we say, know that we have a genuine love for each and every one of you. Yes you, anyone who listens to the podcast or reads this blog. We love you.

Until next time,

Pastor Coco

Check out the podcast here

Read Kabam’s update on the parry and dex issue here

Ep1: There was an idea…

Posted on by pastorsassemble

Hello True Believers!

Yes, I ripped off Stan Lee’s catchphrase (one of them). If we are going to do a podcast based largely on the empire that Stan built, it seems appropriate to me.

I (Cory) have always wanted to do a podcast, but never took the final step. A few weeks ago, I was a guest on our friend Zac Rossi’s podcast (MCOC and Me, link provided below) and shortly after that, David reached out to me and told me that if I ever started a podcast he would be interested in joining me. Without thinking anything through, I told him “let’s do it.”

We started by sharing a little about ourselves, as not everybody knows who these two random pastors are. David is from Kentucky and I am from Texas, but we have found much common ground in our interactions with each other. But the thing which united us in the first place and the thing which we will spend quite a bit of time talking about as we move forward is Marvel Contest of Champions mobile game. We will probably spend quite a bit of time talking about the game, but we certainly don’t want to limit our conversations to that because we want everyone to have something they can enjoy from our podcast, not just the MCOC community.

We then moved into a discussion about movie trailers, focusing mostly on Spider-man: No Way Home and Matrix Resurrections. However, when the discussion shifted to the Disney+ Hawkeye series, we attempted to answer the most important question of our age: Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?

We ended our first foray by saying a simple prayer. We know that you may not be a believer in Jesus Christ. We know some of you may have even been hurt by the church in the past, or think that it is all a bunch of bologna. We aren’t going to beat you over the head with a bible, but the reality of our lives is that our faith informs how we interact with the all of the geeky things that we love. Also know, that we share those things with you out of a genuine love for you. Yes you, anyone who reads these words or listens to our podcast. You are loved and we care for you.

Until next week…

Check out the full podcast here: https://anchor.fm/pastorsassemble

MCOC and Me Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mcoc-me/id1532164459