Alright so I figured this was a good chance to test everything I've learned so far, and a couple of things that I had experimented with on the side.

I kept things pretty angular, to keep with the low poly look.  I'm looking to try my hand at some Unity projects, and I have a particular fondness for the low poly Playstation-ish look that a lot of games are using lately, so this is something I've been very interested in.

I made the spires to add a sort of surreal aspect to the location, sort of suggesting an otherworldly origin for the thing.  I used a surface scattering effect to put the blocky whatsits all over them, I'm not sure what to call those, but they sure do the job.  The spikes around the gemstone were done the same way.

The stand was made by jamming a cube into another cube to carve a hole in it.  I think that's the "boolean" modifier?

I came up with all of the textures and such myself this time (though I mostly copied the ground texture from the result of following along with the class).

I went with the ghosting glare since it sort of has that "this is an important pbject" look found in some games, with sort of awkward particle effects coming off of the thing.

The hardest part was bending the staff into that shape.

Lastly, here's the render made after following through the class example: