How about Rivaz of the Claw ? Losing the double strike dragons and Jarad's Orders sucks, but you get ramp and recursion in the command zone. Exiling is a huge bummer when your gameplan is centered on mass recursion but it's not something you're forced to use, though I'm sure it will be handy in a pi...

If dragons are their thing, Miirym, Sentinel Wyrm seems obvious. Run the solid midrangey dragons that become ridiculous when duplicated, and of course the usual suspects . Otherwise I've always been fascinated by Rivaz of the Claw since Rakdos Dragon Reanimator was something I played back in the day...

duducrash wrote: ↑

1 day ago

Nadu, Winged Wisdom

I fundamentally disagree with this model of community, where the property owner can kick nerds out of anything the nerds have built in the name of growth, and the nerds are toxic if they even dare complain. This place is built on rented land. No one owns it. You can't complain about them not respec...

Do you think that the examples I gave weren't real, or that those instances of toxicity were good, actually, because the weird uncharismatic nerds were on the receiving end. You said it's understandable to be annoyed at rude tourists in a community, so it would seem we agree here. Anecdotes aren't ...

In this case, it is a valid fear. I don't think it's a valid fear at all. Quite the opposite, actually. To be clear, if someone feels fear, they're entitled to that feeling, but you then have to stop and look at whether that fear is actually reflective of something in the external world that is act...

But it's a bad instinct. The idea of a "real fan" is dumb. Like something exactly as much as you feel inclined to, and let others do the same. I have complex thoughts on this one, but I'll only say this: It's okay to dislike tourists in your hobby, but keep in mind, you're only renting, y...

Gatekeeping can run awry, so can any social technology, but if socially awkward, intensely focused outsiders are going to have any community at all, they need to be able to have places their bullies can't join. So it's okay for them to bully people as adults because they were bullied in high school...

Hermes_ wrote: ↑

6 days ago

Why are we as nerds so pretentious/snobbish about almost everything?

High openness, low agreeableness, moderate to high neuroticism.

What's what? Another conversation about art-as-commodity?

I had a realization a few years ago that Star Wars just plain old sucks. Out of the nine mainline movies, only two are excellent. Everything else is either passable or worse. It's full of great ideas and wildly inconsistent execution. It's also plagued by clumsy fan service and a general sense of a...

As far as meta-narratives go, seeing two directors fight over the direction of a film series has some serious comedic potential. Given that the canon of post-80s Star Wars is already trash, I think Disney should keep alternating between Johnson and Abrams just to see how absurd they can get. Episod...

I'm 100% on board with that in theory. I love Rian Johnson and if you had told me he was going to make a gritty, deconstructed Star Wars movie about the nature of heroism and the bonds forged during conflict I would've been the first in line at the theater. Instead it got sandwiched into what was su...

Honestly I didn't hate 8, though there was some cringe and it did feel like things were going a bit off the rails. But 9 was really the one that told me that Disney Star Wars wasn't going to come with any guarantee of quality. MST3K levels of bad. 8 informed me there was no plan, no coherent vision...

Sigh. Okay, I'll build Thrasios, Triton Hero and Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools . Commanders: 1 Tevesh Szat, Doom of Fools 1 Thrasios, Triton Hero Lands: 42 1 Academy Ruins 1 Bala Ged Recovery 1 Bloodstained Mire 1 Bojuka Bog 1 Boseiju, Who Endures 1 Breeding Pool 1 Command Tower 1 Dreamroot Cascade 1 F...

DirkGently wrote: ↑

1 week ago

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apparently maintaining the throne which keeps the emperor alive requires the sacrifice of 1000 people per day for some reason.

Y'know Ilharg, the Raze-Boar has a peculiar synergy with herigast where if you emerge him he goes 3rd from the top then you draw him, wonder if that could be exploited somehow :D you could have a sequence where you Ilharg, cheat something in, then emerge ilharg and then emerge the other creature in...

Apologies for being unclear, just meant buying time to allow you to find your combo finish/win condition. No worries, just wanting to establish common understanding. I think the list looks strong overall with what you're intending. I do think Life from the Loam plus cycling lands would fit very wel...

Your frame of reference is very very off here is the main issue. You call The Mandalorian "shockingly mid". But compared to what? Other good TV shows like Shogun? Yeah, it's way way waaaaaay waaaaaaaaaaay worse than those. Look at it from a purely Star Wars context. My frame of reference ...

I like the tasigur build. Academy ruins stone lock should induce scoopage by most players if it's backed up with anything. The two cmc ramp spells I'd quibble with and suggest the new cultivate (flare something) and almost anything else. I believe in card advantage ramp in control though. I think i...

Underlined for emphasis: This is one of my issues with hard control decks. Putting the last player in a no-win situation, but not having a timely way to actually finish the game. At that point the control player is simply banking on the opponent's desire to actually play magic and not sit around an...

Open question: how many games does everyone play in where everyone dies in one turn? Obviously there are Hoof blowouts and combos, but my experience has been that by and large people drop one at time. The expectation that a control deck is going to have to fend off three decks at once in order to wi...

How are your opponents beating up on each other if you're hampering them constantly? I'm not. I'm hampering their ability to meaningfully disrupt my gameplan, not each other's. This is another reason why wrathing every turn isn't great, and why spot removal is underrated. Why are they not targeting...

At the time that The Deck was active Serra Angel was a haymaker. It was the finisher. All haymakers are finishers, but not all finishers are haymakers. Also, The Deck was active for... ~10ish years, in some form or another, I think? It's been a while but The Deck became Keeper which then splintered...

There have been plenty of constructed control decks built around the idea of having a haymaker you drop with protection and then just protect it as you ride it to victory. That's literally the definition of The Deck: " The Deck is a control deck created by Brian Weissman.[1] Fundamentally, it ...